Nov. 14


USA//FLORIDA:

Holocaust Memorial looks to past, and future

The Holocaust Memorial, which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year,
has become 'holy ground' for survivors, says one of those who helped get
the monument built.

Two decades ago, a group of civic activists dedicated to honoring the
memory of those killed in the Holocaust gathered their will and resources
to build a memorial to that human tragedy.

The result: a $2.5 million monument in Miami Beach, with a 42-foot high
bronze fist stretching towards the sky. At the heart of the stone
promenade that surrounds it, 5,000 names of Holocaust victims were
engraved in black granite.

Today, that memorial looks both to the past and the future, serving both:
first, by becoming an homage to the area's thousands of Holocaust
survivors and the family members they lost; and second, by evolving into
an integral piece of Holocaust education in local schools, which bring
more than 10,000 children a year to visit the site.

''Many of the people who died in the Holocaust had no burial place, and
the memorial is in a sense a cemetery, a repository of their memory,''
said Norman Braman, chairman of the committee that built the memorial,
which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year.

''They had no headstones, and this place is perhaps the only place where
their names appear,'' Braman said. ``For many of the survivors -- the
husbands and wives, the mothers and sons -- it has become holy ground.''

South Florida has the second-highest concentration of survivors in the
country, with numbers that reach 3,800 in Miami-Dade County and 7,500 in
Broward County.

The memorial, now a gathering place for that population, is the site or
sponsor of several commemorative activities each year.

A field trip to the memorial, at the intersection of Meridian Avenue and
Dade Boulevard, has become a near-obligatory part of the local curriculum,
fueled by the 1994 state mandate that requires all school children to
study the Holocaust.

Each week, dozens of students tumble out of buses to view the walls etched
with photos of the Holocaust's suffering millions: naked women facing a
mass grave, emaciated subjects of vile experiments, the tortured eyes of
an imprisoned child.

Each student group is greeted by a Holocaust survivor who acts as
historical witness and guide to what they see.

''It is a wonderful feeling when you tell these children about what
happened and they feel compassionate about it,'' said survivor George
Goldbloom, a member of the memorial's founding committee and the original
organizer of the volunteer survivors.

``Through that, we can perpetuate its memory, and stop another Holocaust
from coming to the world.''

(source: Miami Herald)


*****************************************

Report Assails Harvard's Links with Nazis


Collegial relations between Harvard University and the Nazis in the 1930s
were a "shameful" episode that helped give a favorable picture of the
regime in the United States, according to a report released on Sunday.

"As the Nazi menace steadily increased ... Conant's administration at
Harvard was complicit in increasing the prestige of Nazi regime by seeking
and maintaining friendly and respectful relations with Nazi universities
and officials," the report said.

The findings were presented by Stephen Norwood, professor of History and
Judaic Studies at the University of Oklahoma, from a paper presented at a
Boston conference sponsored by the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust
Studies.

"It is truly shameful that the administrative, alumni and student leaders
of America's most prominent university ...remained indifferent to
Germany's perilous campaign against Jews and indeed on numerous occasions
assisted the Nazis in their efforts to gain acceptance in the West," the
paper said.

Norwood's probe examined the period 1933 to 1937, when America's awareness
of Adolf Hitler's persecution of Jews was growing, but the U.S. government
equivocated as war clouds gathered in Europe.

According to Norwood, Hitler's foreign press secretary, Ernst Hanfstaengl,
was given a warm welcome at his 25th Harvard reunion in 1934. Hanfstaengl
led the Nazi efforts to win over world opinion, and is reported to have
introduced their trademark stiff-armed salute and "Zeig Heil" chant,
basing both on Harvard football cheers, Norwood said.

Hanfstaengl attended a tea at the home of Conant, then Harvard's
president, who went on to become U.S. ambassador to Germany in the 1950s.

Harvard issued a statement denying that Conant had feted the German
official and said the university "did not support the Nazis by holding its
traditional reunion."

"The specter of Nazism rightly inspires horror and revulsion to this day,"
the University said in a statement.

Norwood said Harvard's stance mirrored that of other U.S. universities --
with exceptions like Williams College, which halted academic exchanges
with Nazi universities in 1936 -- but that Harvard's preeminence gave it
special responsibility.

He had particularly withering criticism for The Harvard Crimson, the
university newspaper, which suggested that Hanfstaengl receive an honorary
degree and criticized Conant for turning down a Nazi-funded student
exchange.

Harvard's president, Larry Summers, declined an invitation to speak at
Sunday's conference, the Wyman Institute said.

(source: Reuters)



THE CZECH REPUBLIC:

Terezin's poignant legacy


Zdenka Fantlova remembers Terezin as the best of the Nazi hells: a ghetto
with a swing band, a concentration camp with shoe stores and cafes. Here
she wore her own clothes; here her family was still alive.

Called Terezin by the Czechs and Theresienstadt by the Germans, this
fortified town held World War II's most improbable collection of artists,
musicians, scientists and scholars.

When Jews could not go to school, Terezin became their university: 2,430
lectures took place, on such topics as the Jews of Babylon, the theory of
relativity, Alexander the Great and German humor.

''Compared to all the others,'' recalls Lory Cahn, of Philadelphia, ``it
was gold.''

But Terezin was no retirement villa, as the Nazis had promised old and
prominent German Jews, like Cahn's father. For most, Terezin was a
way-station to Adolf Hitler's Final Solution.

More than 150,000 Jews -- first from the Czech lands of Bohemia and
Moravia, and then from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Slovakia,
Denmark and Hungary -- were forced into this 18th-century fortress 37
miles north of Prague.

The Nazis created a Jewish Council of Elders and made them decide who
should ride the cattle cars east, to near-certain death, and who could
stay. ''They had to play God,'' recalls Edgar Krasa, who was a cook here.

Even remaining in Terezin was no guarantee of survival. Many thousands --
such as Otto Loewe, Sen. John Kerry's great-uncle -- died of malnutrition,
disease or despair.

Terezin's cultural life -- first banned, then tolerated -- wound up
starring in the Nazis' efforts to dupe foreign dignitaries and the
International Red Cross as suspicions of mass murder grew. The Nazis
planned to exterminate Europe's 11 million Jews, and Terezin was key to
the deception -- the show camp, the model settlement.

Propaganda movies showing the Jews playing soccer, reading novels, sipping
coffee were shot to demonstrate how well they lived. After being filmed
joking with the commandant, children were sent to their death.

Since the 1989 collapse of communism, Terezin's legacy has spread far
beyond the city's walls. As the survivors' numbers dwindle -- of 37,000,
only 2,000 remain -- and fewer are left to tell their stories, the plays,
music, paintings and literature they created speak for them.

''The Germans knew that we were sentenced to death,'' recalled Fantlova,
82. ``And they thought, `In the meantime, let them play, let them laugh,
let them sing, because soon the smile will be wiped off their faces.'

``Well, they were right, but we didn't know that, and we sort of danced
under the gallows.''

NOOSE TIGHTENS

'CALMNESS IS STRENGTH,' FATHER TOLD DAUGHTER

Zdenka Fantlova's family was eating dinner in the fall of 1941 when the
Gestapo came for her father. His crime: listening to BBC Radio.

Since March 15, 1939, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the noose had
been tightening. Using the Nuremberg racial laws, which restricted
everyday freedoms, the Nazis began to isolate, degrade and annihilate the
Jews of Europe.

Fantlova recalls her father's farewell: 'He looked at us as though he
wanted to imprint us in his memory, and said just these words: `Just stay
calm. Remember, calmness is strength.' ''

A few months later, the family was shipped off to Terezin, a place
Fantlova had never heard of. How would her father find them?

He wouldn't. She never saw him again.

Emperor Joseph II had built the garrison in 1780 to protect the Hapsburgs
from Prussian invasion. In October 1941, the SS gave it a new strategic
role, the first of several that Terezin would have during the war.

With its 13-yard-thick walls, moat and nearby Gestapo prison, the fortress
could contain Jews without many guards. The Nazis could cram 50,000 to
60,000 prisoners at a time into the place -- its several dozen houses,
barracks, stores and factories arranged around a market square -- where
7,000 soldiers and villagers had lived.

Here they could warehouse Czech Jews -- until their deportation to Poland
or the Soviet Union, a culling the Nazis wanted to hide from the world.

BEHIND THE GATE

`NOW WE ARE REALLY PRISONERS'

Edgar Krasa, then 21, knew that something didn't square.

If he volunteered for Terezin's setup detail, a Jewish leader in Prague
had said, he might save his parents from being transported farther east.

What was ``farther east''?

The workers had six days to prepare the barracks before the first 1,000
Jews arrived.

''And as we entered,'' Krasa recalls, 'the gate closed. We all knew, `Now
we are really prisoners.' ''

TOUTED AS A SPA

MANY PACKED DINNER JACKETS FOR `HOLIDAY'

To German Jews, the Nazis sold Terezin as a spa.

At a conference on Wannsee Lake outside Berlin, they had announced that
the stronghold would also house elderly, war-decorated and prominent
German and Austrian Jews.

In exchange for signing over their property, they were promised lifelong
care. Some packed dinner jackets and silver for the holiday town in the
hills.

They began arriving in the summer of 1942, and their disillusion was
immediate.

''Where were the clean houses where everyone would have his own
well-furnished room?'' asked Gerty Spies, a Munich woman, in a 1984
memoir. ``Through open doors, we saw people clad in rags lying on the
floor or on wooden frames.''

To make room for the new arrivals, the Czech Gentiles who lived in the
town were moved out. But the overcrowding was suffocating. By year's end,
three out of every 10 German Jews who had arrived that summer were dead.

Inmate Egon Redlich, a Moravian, wrote in his diary: ``Terezin is a
privileged ghetto where more than 100 people die daily.''

CULTURE FLOURISHES

AUDIENCES ATTEND INMATES' CONCERTS

In this purgatory, miraculously, Terezin's cultural life flowered.

In December 1941, a Czech conductor, composer and pianist named Rafael
Schaecter cobbled together a small chorus.

That month, a 22-year-old Czech pianist named Gideon Klein started
composing folk songs for the singers.

So many readings and plays followed that the Jewish elders established
Freizeitgestaltung, a department of leisure-time planning. Soon, the Nazis
insisted on approving each activity.

Terezin's first opera premiered in November 1942: Smetana's The Bartered
Bride. Karel Berman, a star of Prague's National Theater, sang the lead.
Schaecter provided the accompaniment, on a legless piano that prisoners
smuggled into the barracks.

''There's a paradox,'' recalls Krasa, who sang in the chorus. 'It starts
out . . . `Why shouldn't we rejoice?' And to sing it, you know, in the
ghetto. But it did bring the house down.''

Dagmar Lieblova was 13, a radiant, dark-haired girl from central Bohemia:
``It was something special, quite special, which one wouldn't forget. You
could hear things which you have known from the normal life before.''

The audiences grew so quickly that the elders printed weekly programs and
issued tickets for admission. That December, prisoners staged 10
theatrical programs and two concerts and produced their first costumed
play.

The Nazis permitted the prisoners to open a coffeehouse and gave out
musical instruments that earlier had been confiscated. Musicians with cafe
and nightclub experience performed, such as Egon Ledec, of the Czech
Philharmonic. Ledec formed the camp's first string quartet.

The Nazis saw the advantage: If the Jews pacified themselves with
performance, they'd be less likely to rebel.

''You could have prepared a concert or prepared an opera and tomorrow half
the people were gone,'' says Hana Greenfield.

``That was the big lie.''

`KILLING EACH OTHER'

TRUTH ABOUT DEATH CAMPS REACHES INMATES

The postcard came from Auschwitz, in a code that the censors missed. To
Edith Salamon Listman, her cousin's message, scrawled in Hebrew script,
was too awful to contemplate: ''Cain & Abel'' and ``naked''.

''They are killing each other,'' realized Listman, now 86 and living in
Cherry Hill, N.J. ``We are not going to a ghetto.''

Another warning sounded from the east. A former Terezin inmate named
Vitezslav Lederer escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944. According to Czech
historian Miroslav Karny, Lederer sneaked back into Terezin to reveal what
really went on at the death camp.

But that can't be true, protested the elders, who decided not to pass on
Lederer's news.

After the war, Rabbi Leo Baeck, head of the German Jewish community,
explained: ``Living in the expectation of death by gassing would only be
harder.''

`I CAN PLAY DRUMS'

JAZZ, CLASSICAL MUSICIANS PERFORMED

For a while, Coco Schumann's blue eyes, blond hair, and strong Berlin
accent kept him safe. He was 18, and Jewish on his mother's side, a secret
kept even from friends.

When the Nazis arrested Schumann in March 1943, Jews of mixed parentage
and Jews married to Gentiles were no longer spared from persecution. The
Nazis wanted Berlin Judenfrei -- free of Jews -- by April 20, for Hitler's
birthday.

By Schumann's arrival in spring 1943, Terezin was surreal -- ''one big
world of make-believe for internal and external propaganda,'' he calls it.

When Schumann saw the camp's coffeehouse, he started talking with the
musicians, the Ghetto Swingers. Their drummer had just been sent to
Auschwitz. 'I said, `I can play drums,' '' Schumann recalls. They invited
him to return the next morning.

''Every style was there,'' Schumann recalls.

Karel Ancerl, later a famous conductor, led an orchestra at Terezin. There
were also a string orchestra, chamber groups, a jazz quintet, piano duos,
a liturgical choir and exquisite soloists.

''They were really the next generation of leading figures in classical
music,'' says Mark Ludwig, who runs the Terezin Chamber Music Foundation
in Boston, which ensures that works from the camp still are performed. ``
. . . And they disappear off the face of the Earth.''

RED CROSS VISIT

'POTEMKIN-LIKE VILLAGE' CREATED TO FOOL PUBLIC

Streets were cleaned, houses painted, and store windows filled. Terezin
would be having visitors.

The Allies had been pressing for Red Cross inspections since December
1942, when 12 nations protested the Nazis' treatment of Jews.

In December 1943, the Nazis decided that Terezin could help deceive the
world. ''They created a kind of Potemkin-like village to fool the press,
the International Red Cross,'' says David Marwell, director of New York's
Museum of Jewish Heritage.

The Nazis planned the exact route the visitors would take in June 1944.
Shortly before the Red Cross visit, thousands of inmates who ''looked bad
or were ill were sent directly to the gas chambers of Auschwitz,'' says
Vojtech Blodig, historian at the Terezin Ghetto Museum.

The visitors snapped photographs but asked the inmates nothing. Afterward,
the head of the group, Maurice Rossel, marveled at this ''remarkable''
Jewish town in war-torn Europe. He concluded that Terezin was a final
destination -- not a way station to worse. He reported that inmates were
fed well -- 2,400 calories a day. In reality, they didn't get half that.

PROPAGANDA PICTURES

ACTOR DIRECTED FILM, THEN WAS SENT TO DIE

``Oh, Uncle Rahm, sardines again?''

The children were well-rehearsed, joking with commandant Karl Rahm as the
cameras rolled. Nurses at the children's hospital delivered buttered
bread.

Kurt Moses of Harrisburg, Pa., remembers playing soccer, splashing in a
swimming pool. That was the only bath he took that year at Terezin.

Two films were made. The better-known picture was so obviously a sham that
during Rahm's war-crimes trial in 1947, it was called Hitler's Gift to the
Jews, according to Dutch historian Karel Margry. The real name is no less
cynical: Theresienstadt: A Documentary Film From the Jewish Settlement
Area.

Needing a director, the SS chose inmate Kurt Gerron, a German film star,
who had acted with Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Gerron thought his
cooperation would save him.

But he never saw the final cut. He was sent to Auschwitz in 1944 and was
gassed.

The film, completed by a Czech company in 1945, was shown to a few
visitors to Terezin and to the SS in Prague, Margry says. It got little
distribution.

By then, the extermination of European Jewry could not be denied.

ONE LAST LIE

INMATES TOLD THEY'D ESTABLISH NEW CAMP

Its purpose served, the Nazis began to liquidate Terezin in the fall of
1944.

In one month, transports carried 18,402 prisoners east and sent some of
Europe's most talented artists to their deaths. There was Karel Ancerl and
his entire string orchestra -- the Ghetto Swingers -- Rafael Schaecter,
Viktor Ullmann, Egon Ledec and Gideon Klein.

As they boarded cattle cars for Auschwitz, they were told one last lie:
They'd be establishing a new labor camp.

Zdenka Fantlova found herself sitting across from Schaecter, who for three
years had struggled to give his fellow prisoners music, comfort and hope.
He had saved some sardines and bread. Before the train reached the death
camp, he told Fantlova: ``Put it all together. Here is my spoon. Mix it
all up, and that will be my Last Supper.''

''And so,'' she recalls, ``I gave it to him, mixed it, he ate it with
great relish. And then we got to Auschwitz. He was selected and went to
the gas chamber.''

(source: Miami Herald)










ISRAEL:

ILD still holds millions of shekels in Holocaust victims' property

The properties were bought by European Jews before World War II, and
registered in the name of Israel Land Development.

Israel Land Development Company (Nasdaq:ILDCY; TASE:ILDC) will open its
archives to located land and abandoned buildings in its possession to
check whether they are owned by Holocaust victims. The company has thus
joined public entities that have already consented to external audits
initiated and carried out by the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee for the
Location and Restitution of Assets of Holocaust Victims.
The properties were bought by European Jews before World War II, and
registered in the name of Israel Land Development, then controlled by the
Jewish Agency. These properties were therefore not considered enemy
property at the outbreak of the war, and were not seized by the British
Mandate Custodian of Enemy Property, in contrast to the many bank accounts
owned by Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Preliminary estimates are that Israel Land Development holds land worth
millions of shekels that is actually owned by Holocaust victims. Most of
the land is in the Haifa are Carmel areas. However, most of the land has
apparently already been sold at least once since end of World War II.

(source: Globes Online)




AUSTRIA:

Ceremony honors Gypsy Holocaust victims


About 150 people braved the weather yesterday to participate in a
ceremony honoring the memory of Gypsies killed by the Nazis, state
broadcaster ORF reported.

The southeastern village of Lackenbach, 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of
Vienna, was home to Austria's largest Gypsy camp during World War II. In
October 1941, 2,335 people were imprisoned at the labor camp, which was
designed to hold 200. Thousands of the prisoners were sent to
concentration and death camps.

A memorial marks the site of the camp, and a commemoration ceremony is
held there once a year.

Of the 11,000 Gypsies who lived in Austria before 1938, only between 1,500
and 2,000 survived the Holocaust, parliament speaker Andreas Khol said at
the ceremony. In all, the Nazis are estimated to have killed 500,000
Gypsies.

"We have to constantly remind ourselves of the dimension of the Nazi
crimes, and we may not forget that it was about individual human fates,"
Khol said.

Austria began oppressing Gypsies earlier than such persecution began in
other Nazi-controlled parts of Europe, Khol said. In Burgenland, the
province where Lackenbach is located, Gypsy children were banned from
attending school beginning in May 1938, shortly after Austria had been
annexed by Nazi Germany.

Austria also was late in recognizing the victim status of Gypsies who had
been persecuted by the Nazis, Khol said.

"Austria needed a long time to come to terms with this dark part of our
history," he said. "Austria now has taken its responsibility."

(source: Associated Press





ROMANIA:

Romania confronts its Holocaust past


Romanian President Ion Iliescu's acceptance of a detailed study on
Romania's role in the Holocaust last week is a significant sign that
Romania is confronting its past, Bnai Brith executive director Daniel
Mariaschin said Friday.

Mariaschin, one of 33 members of an international panel headed by
Nobel-prize winner Elie Wiesel that documented Romania's role in the
Holocaust, told The Jerusalem Post that the report is a sign that 60 years
after the Holocaust, Romania is now "looking in the mirror."

Mariaschin said the report is a detailed accounting of what took place in
Romania. The panel of experts from Romania, the United States, Israel,
France and Germany concluded that Romanian authorities were responsible
for the deaths of between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews and more than 11,000
Gypsies.

In addition, another 132,000 Romanian Jews were killed by pro-Nazi
Hungarian authorities who controlled parts of northern Romania during the
war, the report said.

Romania was home to 760,000 Jews before 1940. About 6,000 Jews now live
there.

Mariaschin said that after years of Romanian denial, this report is
"extremely important" for survivors and their families from Romania.

The panel was set up last year after Iliescu made comments downplaying the
Holocaust in Romania.

Sara Bloomfield, the director of the US Holocaust Memorial, said that now
the government must inform its citizens about the atrocities.

Mariaschin said he was pleased that the study was reported on in a
straightforward manner in the Romanian press, and that "nothing was held
back."

"If the report is kept a secret, or kept on somebody's shelf, then all
this work is a failure," said Bloomfield. "Romania needs to commit itself
to look at its history, good and bad, to educate its citizens and to
encourage an honest public debate about this history."
Iliescu, at the ceremony where the study was presented in Bucharest on
Thursday, took responsibility in the name of his country for actions taken
by its wartime leaders.

He also pledged to help educate the Romanian public about the findings in
the report "so that such tragedies will never happen again."

Under communism, official history taught that Germans were the sole
perpetrators of the Holocaust, while Romania's pro-Nazi ruler Marshal Ion
Antonescu was considered a war criminal who merely followed Adolf Hitler's
orders.

After communism fell in 1989, Antonescu became a hero to some Romanians
who praise him for having gone to war against the Soviet Union after it
invaded parts of Romania in 1940.

Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana said in a statement Friday that the panel's
report was a gesture of moral reparation to the victims of the Holocaust.

"Romania is not afraid today to look at the darker sides of its history,"
he said, adding that the country is now a democratic country that respects
Western principles and values.

In its report, the panel also urged Romanian authorities to give a book on
the Romanian Holocaust to every Romanian household, introduce Holocaust
studies into the schools' curricula, and hold a national day of mourning
for the victims.

The Romanian government has already set October 9 as a national Memorial
Day for the Holocaust, and held official ceremonies for victims last
month.

"Truth is sometimes very painful," said Radu Ioanid, a member of the panel
and director of the International Archival Programs Division at the US
Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"Romania's integration into NATO and the European Union has helped the
people enormously to understand the values that come with it," he said,
adding that there was still an uphill battle to be carried out against the
intolerance and xenophobia," that is prevalent against Gypsies."

(source: Jerusalem Post)


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Romania Holocaust numbers revised


Half a million Jews were killed in Romania's Holocaust, many more than
previously thought, a special commission set up to shed light on the
country's Nazi past says.

It also recommended Romania, an ally of Adolf Hitler in World War II, face
up to its history by building a memorial to those who died and teaching
children about the Holocaust in school.

The international commission was appointed last year after the government
denied the Holocaust happened in the Balkan country, prompting a
diplomatic row with Israel.

"For us, this was our sacred mission: to honour truth by remembering the
dead," said the commission's chairman and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie
Wiesel. "For them it is too late but not for their children, and ours."

The report said between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews
were killed by Romanian civilian and military authorities in Romania and
territories under its control.

Another 135,000 Romanian Jews living in the then Hungarian-controlled
Transylvania and 5,000 Romanian Jews living outside Romania also died, it
said, and over 25,000 Roma people were deported of whom 11,000 died.

According to previous figures in the Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust some
420,000 people from Romania's pre-war Jewish community of 750,000 died.

Only around 13,000 Jews now live in Romania.

Wartime leader

Directives to degrade and destroy Jews and Jewish institutions came from
wartime leader Ion Antonescu, the report said.

Until two years ago, Antonescu, who was executed in 1946 for allying
Romania with Hitler and sending hundreds of thousands of Jews and gypsies
to death camps, was deemed an anti-communist hero and immortalised in
statues across the country.

But these were demolished when Romania, which is hoping to join the
European Union, passed legislation banning the use of fascist, racist and
xenophobic symbols.

The commission recommended Romania annul war criminal rehabilitations, of
which it said there had been a number of cases in the 15 years since the
overthrow of Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

It also said a national Holocaust memorial and museum should be built in
Bucharest and that the school curriculum and textbooks be changed to
include the Holocaust.

Romanian-born Wiesel, 76, a prolific writer on the Holocaust who has drawn
from his own experiences in Nazi death camps, said he hoped the
commission's report would "take its place in Romania's history".

The commission also included Tuvia Friling, the head of the Israeli
Archives, Holocaust survivors and experts and historians from Israel, the
United States and Europe.

(source: TVNZ)




GERMANY:

Ghosts of Nazi past linger as resort opens
The former site of Hitler's plotting includes history in its new life


OBERSALZBERG, GERMANY - "It's not just a peak; it's a treat," the brochure
says, and, to prove point, it shows snowcapped mountain peaks rising over
a pristine Alpine landscape.

You can golf or swim, you can raft in the summer, ski in the winter and
visit the ancient salt mines that gave the place its name Upper Salt
Mountain.

The only flaw here is that the InterContinental Resort Berchtesgaden, an
upscale hotel and spa scheduled to open in the spring, sits on the very
stained plot of ground where Hermann Goering had his rural retreat, just
over a rise from where the Berghof once stood, the luxurious house with
the big picture window where Adolf Hitler contemplated the mists drifting
over the face of the Untersberg and plotted his deeds.

A place of myths

And so, the question in Germany: Is there something unseemly about having
an affluent vacation palace on the very spot where Hitler lived out his
myths about blood and soil and racial regeneration?

"It's too late now, but I still think it's wrong," Josef Duerr, the head
of the parliamentary faction of the Green Party in Bavaria, the state
where Obersalzberg lies, "because Obersalzberg is famous in the world for
being the idyllic place where Hitler tried to rule the world."

In fact, the issue as it has been debated during the past few years is not
so much about building a hotel and spa against the mountain backdrop where
Hitler treated blond children to strawberries and cream. On a nearby
hilltop is the famous Kehlstein, or Eagle's Nest, as the Americans later
called it, built as a birthday gift to Hitler by a grateful Nazi Party in
1939.

Lost history

The issue is more that in the process of transforming Obersalzberg into a
holiday center which it was from the 19th century until the Nazis made it
their private preserve pretty much everything that was left over from the
Third Reich has been razed.

Most controversially, in 2000, the Bavarian authorities tore down the
Platterhof, the old hotel that was turned into a "people's hotel" during
the Nazi years and which became a U.S. recreation center after the war,
when Obersalzberg housed an Army contingent.

Officially, the hotel was torn down because it was old and in bad
condition, but the suspicion remains strong that its demolition was part
of an attempt to obliterate anything that would spoil the atmosphere.

"The Bavarian government has tried to erase the physical memories," Duerr
said, "and if you want the Nazi regime to be useful for our democracy now,
you have to have the physical traces."

The Eagle's Nest

There is now no physical contact with the past left in Obersalzberg
except for the famous Kehlstein, or Eagle's Nest.

It now is a mountaintop restaurant accessible by the same elevator, cut
into the stone, that Hitler used on his rare visits to the place.

The site of Hitler's house, bombed by the Allies in 1945 and cleared away
entirely in 1952, is a patch of second-growth forest.

And yet, it would be wrong to say that the plans for a revived tourist
industry have been allowed to bury the memory of the Nazis.

"The Bavarian finance minister had a two-column model," said Albert A.
Feiber, a historian at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich,
referring to Kurt Faltlhauser, who after the departure of U.S. troops in
the mid-1990s devised an overall plan for the renovation of the area. One
part envisaged by Faltlhauser is the 138-room hotel; the second pillar,
about 200 yards away, is the Obersalzberg Documentation Center, a museum
of the Nazi era created in 1999.


Displays of Nazi horrors
The museum is not huge, but its displays in no way shy away from the
horrors of Nazism. In fact, the Documentation Center has had some
beneficial unforeseen consequences, not least that many Germans who would
otherwise come to this area of the Bavarian Alps only for a holiday now
spend some time getting a vivid reminder of savage plans that were
concocted in part right here.

Gerhard Woehrl, a vacationing policeman from Kassel who was touring the
museum with his wife, said: "I don't approve of a hotel. It's not a good
use of this site. But it's impressive what they have here in the way of
documentation."


Expansion plans
The museum was expected to attract about 30,000 visitors a year, said
Feiber, the historian, who was at the center conducting a tour for
visitors from Munich. But it draws four times that many, which has led to
plans for an expansion to include new displays, seminar rooms and
classrooms.

Moreover, while Obersalzberg was for years something of a magnet for
neo-Nazis, who used to make pilgrimages here on Hitler's birthday, this
phenomenon has diminished since the Documentation Center was built, Feiber
said.

(source: New York Times_