Dec. 15



GERMANY:

Germany's Memorial to Jews Completed


A crane hoisted the last of thousands of charcoal-colored
slabs into place at Germany's national Holocaust memorial Wednesday to
commemorate the 6 million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis.

The event signaled a symbolic end to a 15-year battle over the building of
the project -- which has been tangled in debates about financing, artistic
vision and Nazi-era guilt.

But backers of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe said Wednesday
they expected differences over its meaning to continue even once it is
finished.

``The argument presumably goes on,'' Parliament President Wolfgang Thierse
said, standing in front of the 2,711 stark concrete slabs stretching over
a plot of land the size of two football fields. ``The fight hasn't damaged
the memorial,'' he said.

The entire monument still requires more work -- including the paving of
paths and finishing of an information center -- before it is officially
opened by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on May 10, 2005.

In March, Berlin Jewish groups demanded that architect Peter Eisenman, who
is himself Jewish, resign from the project, claiming he told an
anti-Semitic joke.

``I've learned that jokes in one country aren't jokes in another
country,'' Eisenman said from the podium Wednesday.

Last year, it was disclosed that the memorial stones have an anti-graffiti
coating manufactured by Degussa AG, which co-owned the maker of poison gas
for the Nazis.

There also have been years of arguments about the design, financing and
politics of the project.

``I thought at many moments we would never build this,'' Eisenman said.
``I'm very thankful this has come to a conclusion, or that it's starting
another phase, let's say.''

A crane dropped the last of the slabs -- which range from less than a foot
to 15 feet tall -- into the final space, where it would later be cemented
into place.

Eisenman has said the undulating rows of closely spaced slabs set slightly
below street level were designed to evoke the feeling of being trapped
that Jews felt when they were sent to Nazi death camps.

The uneven field of concrete blocks sits in an area heavy with German
history. Near where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler died in his underground
bunker in 1945, the area was also part of the Berlin Wall's no man's land
during the Cold War. The glass-domed Reichstag parliament building and
newly refurbished Brandenburg Gate draw visitors to the neighborhood, and
the new U.S. Embassy is being built across the street.

With the work nearly completed, Jewish leaders have begun to worry that
the monument in what was the heart of the Nazi capital may draw extremists
looking to make headlines.

Interior Minister Otto Schily and Jewish leader Paul Spiegel said in
comments published Wednesday that they believed there should be a ban on
demonstrations near the monument once it has opened.

``It is worth wishing that Nazi marches around the memorial be prevented.
A demonstration ban could make this legally secure,'' Spiegel told the
Leipziger Volkszeitung daily.


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


Germans tend Holocaust survivors

Franz Feibel spent five years in Buchenwald concentration camp, helplessly
watching the ashes of Jewish prisoners spew out of the crematorium
smokestack. Today, aged 93 and in a nursing home, he is cared for by
Oliver Raag, a German geriatric nurse whose grandfather transported
disabled Jews and other Germans to a gas chamber. Raag is one of more than
100 Germans doing volunteer work in Israel at any given time to atone for
the deeds of their parents and grandparents.

"The more I learned about that period in German history, the more I wanted
to come here to show that there are other Germans who are not like the
Nazis," said Raag, 30.

The relationship between the Germans and the elderly Israelis is often
ambivalent. Some of the survivors still can't bear to hear German spoken,
while others say their idealistic young caregivers are a comfort.

The ties between Israel and Germany are also complex. Germany is one of
Israel's most vocal defenders in the European Union and a leading trade
partner. Since the 1950s, Germany has paid some $80 billion (euro60
billion) in reparations to Holocaust survivors worldwide, including some
250,000 living in Israel today. Some younger Israelis dreaming of settling
in Europe are urging parents and grandparents to reclaim their German
citizenship, while some older ones still refuse to visit Germany or buy
its products. Tom Segev, an Israeli historian, said the Nazi genocide of
some 6 million Jews will shape the German-Israeli relationship for years
to come.

(source for both: Associated Press)





HUNGARY:

No Deal Near in Holocaust Survivors' Suit


Hungarian Jews, in a case against the U.S., are seeking compensation for
property seized by the Nazis and recovered by the U.S. Army.

Facing a critical court hearing Monday, Justice Department attorneys and
lawyers representing Hungarian survivors who have filed the only Holocaust
reparations suit against the U.S. government are far from reaching a
settlement, parties close to the negotiations said.

The survivors sued in U.S. district court in Miami in May 2001. They are
seeking compensation for property seized by the Nazis in 1944 and
recovered by the U.S. Army a year later but never returned to the original
owners.

Justice Department lawyers have maintained that the suit should be thrown
out for two primary reasons: The statute of limitations had run out years
before the suit was filed, and the government was entitled to immunity.

In August 2002, however, U.S. District Judge Patricia A. Seitz said that
the plaintiffs were entitled to have the statute of limitations waived,
and that the government's immunity argument was only partially valid.

Seitz has been urging the two sides to settle the case. She ordered
mediation this year, and Fred F. Fielding, a prominent Washington lawyer,
was selected as mediator.

Fielding, who worked in the White House during the Nixon and Reagan
administrations and served on the Sept. 11 commission, said recently: "The
only thing I can tell you is that we're still at the table. There is a
potentially defining moment coming up." He was referring to Monday's
hearing on the government's motion to dismiss the case.

A lawyer who has been involved in the negotiations said: "Based on where
we are today, it is unlikely that there will be a settlement by next week,
because the sides are too far apart." The lawyer, who spoke on condition
of anonymity, said the sides were divided on two key issues the amount of
a settlement and what the government would say about its responsibility
for events that occurred in 1945.

Rabbi Israel Singer, chairman of the World Jewish Congress, said he had
participated in a mediation session on Dec. 6 in Washington. He said the
session had "begun to bring the parties to an understanding of the other
side's position." However, he added, the two sides were nowhere near
agreement on a settlement "sufficient to even address the symbolic nature"
of a payment he expected the government eventually to make.

The Justice Department attorneys, Singer said, "have to understand that
there are Holocaust survivors in this group who have thrice been harmed
once by the Nazis, once by the Communists and once by the U.S."

Members of Congress who have been urging the Bush administration to settle
the case have expressed anger and frustration about a lack of progress.

"The response of the Bush administration thus far has been disgraceful,"
said Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.). "It is incomprehensible why the Bush
administration has not followed the same rules and guidelines that we have
correctly demanded of other countries and companies" in Holocaust-related
litigation, he said. "It's a stain on America."

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said that if the case was not
resolved promptly, members of the Senate ought to question White House
Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales about it next month in hearings on his
nomination for attorney general "a post that can and should play a direct
role in resolving an issue affecting thousands of aging survivors who are
sadly dying as their case continues to languish."

On Friday, a dozen members of Congress sent a letter to Gonzales urging
him to get the case resolved "quickly and fairly." The group took
particular umbrage at the Justice Department.

Led by Rep. Anthony D. Weiner (D-N.Y.), the lawmakers emphasized that the
department, in its attempts to get the case dismissed, had "attacked the
survivors themselves for lacking 'due diligence' in failing to bring the
case before 2001, though the facts of the mishandling [of stolen goods]
were only publicly revealed by a commission in 1999."

The Justice Department declined to comment.

White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said that Gonzales would reserve any
comments on the issue until his confirmation hearing.

Although most of the lawmakers pressing the issue are Democrats, some
Republicans have joined in. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida has urged
several key members of the administration including Karl Rove, the
president's chief political advisor to settle the case.

"We've asked the world to provide restitution to survivors," she said
recently. "Now it is our turn."

The case stems from the Nazis' seizure of more than $200 million in gold,
jewelry, Oriental rugs, fabrics and artwork among them paintings by Durer
and Rembrandt.

The spoils were loaded on dozens of rail cars which came to be known as
the Gold Train bound for Germany. However, the train was abandoned by the
Nazis in Austria and recovered by the U.S. Army. Most of the treasures
vanished, according to a report issued by the Presidential Advisory
Commission on Holocaust Assets in the U.S. in 1999.

The plaintiffs assert that the U.S. knew or could have discovered the
provenance of much of the booty and had acted illegally by failing to
return the goods to the rightful owners, particularly since the Army had
inventories prepared by the Nazis.

The plaintiffs are seeking a full accounting from the government and as
much as $10,000 in damages each. It has been estimated that there could be
30,000 beneficiaries.

Reports released by the commission in 1999 and 2000 stated that the chief
U.S. military official in western Austria at the end of World War II had
requisitioned a hoard of the goods from a U.S. military warehouse in
Salzburg, Austria including enough china and silverware for 45 people, a
dozen silver candlesticks, 30 sets of table linens, carpets and furs.

The special U.S. commission report called the Gold Train affair "an
example of an egregious failure of the United States to follow its own
policy regarding restitution of Holocaust victims' property."

The Justice Department has countered that because some Hungarian Jews knew
as early as 1947 that the U.S. Army had taken possession of the Gold
Train, the six-year statute of limitations for filing such a case expired
no later than 1953.

In court papers filed in June, the government said the U.S. "bears neither
the legal nor the moral responsibility" for the plundered valuables of the
Hungarian Jews.

Singer said he was saddened by the government's position. The U.S. "fought
against the Nazis and liberated people in concentration camps," Singer
said. But some members of the government "fell short" in returning the
seized possessions that are the subject of the survivors' lawsuit. He said
the government should settle the case and make a formal apology.

"We are a nation strong enough to say 'I'm sorry,' " Singer said.

(source: Los Angeles Times)








GLOBAL:

Nuremberg Trials: The Last Tragedy of the Holocaust


By Ellis Washington, Esq.


In the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1947), Nazi high officials, officers, and
industrialists were tried by an International Military Tribunal for war
crimes and other atrocities committed during World War II that violated
the accepted laws of war. The charges brought against the Nazi defendants
accused them of originating, plotting, and waging aggressive war, using
slave labor, looting occupied countries, and abusing, torturing, and
murdering civilians, prisoners of war, and so-called undesirables. The
people who suffered the most from Hitlers singular genocide against
humanity were of course the Jews who suffered 6 million deathsover half of
all European Jewry at that time!

As early as October 1943, the Allied powers had decided to try major Nazi
officials for war crimes at the conclusion of the war when the American,
British and Soviet foreign ministers met in Moscow. Planning for the
trials began soon after V-J Day (September 2, 1945), and the Tribunal
opened in Nuremberg, Germany on November 20, 1945, before a board of
distinguished judges representing each of the Allied countries. Three of
the highest Nazi officers, Adolph Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Josef
Goebbels, had committed suicide by the time the Nuremberg Trials were
convened, however, Hermann Goering, Joachim Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel,
Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Julius Streicher, Hjalmar Schacht,
Martin Bormann (in absentia), Karl Doenitz, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick,
Hans Fritzsche, Walther Funk, Rudolf Hess, Erich Raeder, Alfred Rosenberg,
Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin von Neurath,
Franz von Papen, and Baldur von Schirach, were tried one by one for
individually specified crimes.

James Popple, in his work, The Right to Protection from Retroactive
Criminal Law, noted that a total of 177 Germans and Austrians were
indicted. [1] Of the twenty-four Nazi defendants, twenty-one were
convicted; of these, nine were sentenced to prison terms (most were freed
within seven years) and the remaining twelve were sentenced to hang.
Popple further states: Thirteen separate trials of war criminals were held
in Nuremberg between 1945 and 1947. These trials were presided over by
judges from all four major victorious allied powers: America, Britain,
France and the Soviet Union. A total of 177 Germans and Austrians were
indicted. All but 35 were found guilty: 25 were executed, 20 were
sentenced to life imprisonment and 97 were sentenced to shorter prison
terms. [2]

Goering and Bormann both escaped hanging; the former by suicide and the
latter by remaining at large. Robert Ley hanged himself in his cell,
Gustav Krupp was too ill to stand trial, and due to a mix-up with another
defendant Krupps empire was left intact. Three were acquitted: banker
Schacht, Fritzsche (substitute for boss Goebbels), and Franz von Papen
(the Silver Fox). The rest were hanged on October 16, 1946. Also, other
lower level officials were tried, including officers and guards from the
Dachau prison camp and civilians who had murdered American aviators. The
Tokyo Trials (1946-1948) yielded sixteen imprisonments and seven Japanese
leaders were hanged.

The paradox of the Nuremberg Trials is thisfor the millions who died at
the hands of the Nazis, why were only 177 people judged by the Nuremberg
Trials? Regarding Japanese aggression leading to the death of tens of
thousands of Americans at Pearl Harbor and in other battles with Japan,
why were only twenty-three Japanese leaders tried? Why were no Italian
leaders charged? Italy, led by Mussolini, was Germanys most ardent ally
during the war. Perhaps Mussolini being hanged by the mob was considered
adequate punishment, or maybe its the fact that after the war Italy was a
very important anti-communist ally. Why was no mention made in the
Nuremberg Trials of the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact? The seminal question to any
logical, objective observer of the Nuremberg Trials is this: Were the
Nuremberg Trials and Tokyo Trials resplendent examples of justice and the
rule of law over notoriously wicked men, or were the Nuremberg and Tokyo
Trials a colossal sham and a cover up of historical proportions
representing the denigration of the rule of law? In this article, I hold
that in large part the Nuremberg Trials were indeed a monumental sham, an
insult to the millions of Jews who perished in Hitlers ghastly ovens, and
truly the last tragedy of the Holocaust.

Critics of the Nuremberg Trials contend that the trials retroactively
criminalized actions that under German law had been legal, and the
disobedience of such was punishable by death. Vengeance rather than
impartial justice was also a familiar refrain as the critics of the
Nuremberg Trials claimed that the Tribunal had no recognized legal
foundation to try the Nazi defendants. The most noted critic holding this
view was judge Charles Wyzanski, Jr., a noted jurist from Massachusetts.
Wyzanski wrote a series of articles outlining his views on the Nuremberg
Trials that were published in the popular magazine, Atlantic Monthly. [3]

Supporting the legal philosophy used to judge the Nazi defendants in the
Nuremberg trials was Supreme Court Justice, Robert Jackson, whom President
Harry Truman personally chose to be the chief prosecutor of the United
States at the Nuremberg Trials. Jackson argued that such ubiquitous
international treaties as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which was
called a Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National
Policy, Aug. 27, 1928 was signed by sixty-two nations, as well as several
other international treaties, renounced war as a solution for
international disputes, making aggressive warfare a capital offense.[4]
These treaties were ratified by all of the member state nations presumably
to deter war atrocities identical to the diabolical kinds of acts for
which the Nazi defendants were being tried. [5]
The conclusion of World War II in April of 1945 witnessed the Allied
powers of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France
summarily defeat the Axis powers of Hitlers Germany, Hirohitos Japan and
Mussolinis Italy. While the end of World War II signaled the end of the
largest and deadliest World War in the history of mankind, it ushered in
the beginning of another paradox regarding questions of morality and
legality. The problem arose among the Allies about how to punish the
senior Nazi officials and other high ranking officers of the Nazi military
who were now under international jurisdiction. How could these men be
judged for their heinous crimes under international law? How could justice
and the rule of law be effectively applied to Nazi war criminals?

The United Nations, Positive Law & the Nazi Leaders at Nuremberg

The concept of a United Nations was both revolutionary and unique in
international law for two reasons: (1) The size and scope of both the
number of member nations and its ultimate objectives of a singular world
nation with its own World Court, The International Court of Justice is the
judicial arm of the United Nations and regularly reports to the General
Assembly. [6] World Bank, World Currency, and World Military, dwarfed all
previous attempts to form a one world government; (2) the League of
Nations (which later became the United Nations) was purposely formed under
several diabolical philosophies, namely humanism (man is the center of all
things), secularism (there is no God but man and the state), radical
liberalism (freedom without morality or conscience), positive law and
legal positivism (separation of legality and morality), relativism (moral
equivalence of all things, or the idea that no person, place, or thing is
superior to another), egalitarianism (the equality of results rather than
opportunities), and individualism (the severe reduction of restraints to
pleasure). Prior to positive law, natural law was the controlling
philosophy of international law. Natural law was the originating
philosophy of all of American law and its founding documentsthe
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. [7]

In America and Europe, positive law and legal positivism had been growing
steadily, concurrent with the advent of the modern Industrial Age of the
mid-nineteenth century. Consequently, a hundred years later when the
Charter and Tribunal, which were drafted, its framers naturally chose
legal philosophy that separated legality from morality based solely on
legal positivism. In contemporary jurisprudence, Hart, citing John Grays
work regarding legal positivism, divided it into five categories:

(1) the contention that laws are commands of human beings,
(2) the contention that there is no necessary connection between law and
morals or law as it is and ought to be,
(3) the contention that the analysis (or study of the meaning) of legal
concepts is (a) worth pursuing and (b) to be distinguished from historical
inquiries into the causes or origins of laws, from sociological inquiries
into the relation of law and other social phenomena, and from the
criticism or appraisal of law whether in terms of morals, social aims,
functions, or otherwise,
(4) the contention that a legal system is a closed logical system in which
correct legal decisions can be deduced by logical means from predetermined
legal rules without reference to social aims, policies, moral standards,
and
(5) the contention that moral judgments cannot be established or defended,
as statements of facts can, by rational argument, evidence, or proof
(noncognitivism in ethics). [9]

On the other hand, natural law, which presumes an integration of legality
and morality, nothwithstanding, even from a positive law viewpoint, these
excerpts of past international treaties ratified by dozens of nations
prior to World War II, should have put Germany, the German people and the
world on notice regarding the illegality of waging an aggressive war
against another nation, yet Germany and the Axis powers waged a genocidal
war against the world twice in the twentieth century.

Similarities between previous international treaties cited above and the
legal philosophy of positive law utilized as defenses in the Nuremberg
Trials are startling. First of all, it was the Nuremberg Trials that six
decades ago legitimized on an international stage and televised to the
world the now popular Austinian legal philosophy of the separation of
legality from morality. This is a classical tenet of positive law.
Furthermore, the then newly discovered separability thesis was a
revolutionary invention in the fields of legal philosophy and
constitutional law and later jurisprudence and judicial decision making.
Secondly, it was this sophistic legal defense that the Nazi defense
attorneys relied on most heavily; achieving much success. Surprisingly,
out of the twenty-four major Nazi leaders and 153 lesser Nazi leaders
tried at the Nuremberg Trials, almost thirty percent of all Nazi
defendants were acquitted, and only eighteen percent received the death
penalty. The overwhelming majority of the Nazi defendants received only
token prison sentences. On this point, historian Paul Johnson writes:
[T]he ardour to punish lasted longer but was eventually damped by the
march of history. By the time the I.G. Farben executives were sentenced at
Nuremberg (29 July 1948), the Berlin blockade had started . . . Karl
Krauch, the man who Nazified the firm and personally selected Auschwitz
for the Buna plant, got only six years. Eleven other executives got prison
terms from eight years to eighteen months light enough to please a
chicken-thief, as the prosecutor Josiah DuBois, angrily put it. [10]

That this was not done during the Nuremberg Trial tribunals is truly
beyond the pale, an affront to all Jewish people who have contributed so
much to humanity, as well as an affront to all logic, reason, justice, and
trutheven until this day.



SOURCES


1. James Popple, The Right to Protection from Retroactive Criminal Law, 13
CRIM. L. J. 251, 251-62 (1989) (noting that a total of 177 Germans and
Austrians were indicted).

2. The Judgment at Nuremberg, 6 F.R.D. 69, 1947 Extra LEXIS 1, *432-34.
See also Indictment, 1 I.M.T. 27-92 (providing information regarding the
twenty-four Nazi leaders who were charged on two or more of the four
counts which were under the U.N. Charter and within the jurisdiction of
the U.N. Tribunal).

3. Charles Wyzanski, Jr. Nuremberg: A Fair Trial?, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY,
66-70 (April 1946), reprinted in ADAMS, supra note 2, at 14.

4. Treaty for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy,
Aug. 27, 1928, 46 Stat. 2343, T.S. No. 796, 94 L.N.T.S. 57 [The
Kellogg-Briand Pact].

5. Robert H. Jackson, Opening Address for the United States, Nuremberg
Trials, in David M. Adams, PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEMS IN THE LAW, 10-11
(1992).

6. See generally http://www.ICJ-CIJ.org (discussing among other things,
the role of the court in the United Nations) (last visited Oct. 19, 2003).

7. The World Bank is the financial arm of the United Nations with profiles
that cover the 208 countries (184 World Bank members and twenty-four other
economies with populations of more than 30,000) and eighteen country
groups reported on in the World Development Indicators book. See generally
http://www.worldbank.org (providing information on the World Bank)

8. Regarding the foundational position natural law played as the
controlling philosophy of American Constitutional law as well as all of
its law related institutions from the rulings of local magistrates to the
leading opinion handed down by the United States Supreme Court, Professor
Burnham wrote: The scholars have traced the ideas of the [Founding]
Fathers back not only to Locke, Montesquieu, but Aristotle and Cicero and
Plutarch, Hobbes, Burlamaqui, Milton, Hooker, Bolingbroke, Blackstone,
Burke, Shaftesbury and a score of collateral branches. JAMES BURNHAM,
CONGRESS AND THE AMERICAN TRADITION 24 (1965). The Fathers were the
masters, not the victims, of these inherited ideas, and sometimes it is
the rhetoric more than the ideas that is taken over.

9. H. L. A. HART, CONCEPT OF LAW, 601, n.25 (1960), (citations omitted)
(citing JOHN C. GRAY, THE NATURE AND SOURCES OF THE LAW, 594-626 (1909)).

10. PAUL JOHNSON, MODERN TIMES: THE WORLD FROM THE TWENTIES TO THE
EIGHTIES 422 (1983). See also 6 F.R.D. 69, 1947 Extra LEXIS 1, *191-246

Ellis Washington is a former editor at the University of Michigan Law
Review and law clerk for the Rutherford Institute. He received his J.D.
from John Marshall Law School. He is a freelance writer and lecturer at
Michigan-area schools, universities and law schools. He has written
several books and law review articles including: Beyond the Veil: Essays
in the Dialectical Style of Socrates (Hamilton Books, 2004); The
Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the
Rule of Law (University Press of America, 2002). Currently Mr. Washington
is working on a book about the dubious philosophical presumptions relied
on in the Nuremberg Trials to be published in 2005.

(source: Global Politician)