Jan. 7


GERMANY:

Berlin Jews demand $27m. in Holocaust property


Berlin's Jewish community is threatening to sue the Claims Conference over
some $27 million in property values.

Community president Albert Meyer said Monday that the Conference for
Material Claims Against Germany, the successor organization to unclaimed
Jewish property in the former East Germany, should give profits from
unclaimed properties in Berlin to the city's financially strapped Jewish
community.

The board of the Jewish community must make the final decision on whether
to sue, according to a report in the Berliner Zeitung daily newspaper.

Meyer had no further comment on the matter. But a member of the community
assembly, Julius Schoeps, told JTA, "Sure it would be a good idea to get
the money, but I don't know whether it's possible."

"At the moment, the Jewish community needs the money," added Schoeps, head
of the Moses Mendelssohn Center, a Jewish Studies institute at the
University of Potsdam.

Gideon Taylor, the Claims Conference's executive vice president, said the
conference and other international organizations for over 50 years have
been the successor to the property of those dissolved Jewish communities
under Allied and German restitution laws.

The Claims Conference indeed returned several communal properties to the
Jewish community in the early 1990s, after the reunification of East and
West Germany.

But those long-neglected buildings need renovation work that the community
cannot afford, Meyer said.

For some time, Meyer has pressed the Claims Conference to release funds to
the Berlin Jewish community, which he said is the legal owner, as the East
Berlin community was never dissolved.

(source: Jerusalem Post)

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

Hitler film grabs top German prize


"Downfall," a controversial depiction of Adolf Hitler's final days, has
won the Bavarian Film Prize's audience award, one of Germany's top film
honours.

The epic drama has been a major box office success in Germany, taking in
about 30 million euros (21 million pounds), but many critics have
condemned "Downfall" for giving the Nazi leader a too-human face.

The audience award was chosen by viewers of Bayerische film magazine Kino
Kino, listeners of radio station Bayern 3 and readers of regional
newspaper the Abendzeitung.

The film's director, Oliver Hirschbiegel, will receive the award January
14 at a gala ceremony in Munich, coincidentally the birth place of the
Nazi Party.

"Downfall" is Germany's official submission for foreign-language Oscar
consideration. Newmarket is releasing the film in the United States, with
a February 18 bow in New York and February 25 in Los Angeles.

(source: Reuters)



USA//NEW YORK:

Documentary Comments on Nazi Ideology


"Hitler's Hit Parade" is hardly a trip down memory lane. This
film's juxtaposition of romantic songs and wartime brutalities can cause
viewers to squirm or turn away in horror.

The disturbing collage of Third Reich musicals, newsreels, home movies,
cartoons and commercials, including rare segments in color, shows how the
Nazis relied on escapist entertainment to promote their murderous ideology
and bolster the veneer of normalcy during the nightmare of Adolf Hitler's
reign.

The 75-minute production, co-directed by Oliver Axer and Susanne Benze,
opened Wednesday for a two-week run in New York - the U.S. premiere after
limited screenings in Germany. It's a provocative study of seductive
propaganda techniques, a partial explanation of the riddle of mass German
support for Hitler.

Portraying themselves as protectors of German traditions and historic
continuity, the Nazis promised law and order and national respect at a
time of economic despair when Hitler came to power in 1933. Lighthearted
entertainment was allowed to flourish to distract Germans from harsh
realities of totalitarianism.

Sentimental songs churned out by Germany's light-music industry were
crammed with code words like "fate" and "homeland" that served as
psychological tools to enforce mass conformity.

Allusions to discipline and obedience were reflected in seemingly
innocuous popular tunes with titles like "Don't Ask How, Don't Ask Where,"
"Don't Let It Bother You" and "Everything in Life Will Pass."

"I know a miracle will happen some day and a thousand fairy tales will
come true," Zarah Leander, a wartime diva, croons in one segment, hinting
at "wonder weapons" rumored to be in Hitler's arsenal to beat back the
allies.

"Entertainment rather than propaganda proved to be the most effective
support for the regime," Moshe Zimmermann wrote in his Sueddeutsche
Zeitung newspaper review of the film. "One could whistle `Eternal Spring,'
take pleasure in Heinz Ruehmann's amusing films, sing along with the pop
tune `The World Isn't Collapsing' as bombs fell, and the world seemed
intact."

"Hitler's Hit Parade" (in German with English subtitles) plays out without
a spoken commentary, instead using Nazi catch phrases to preface segments
on idealized Third Reich society. Lyrics from 20 popular songs serve as
ironic commentaries on the sinister policies propelling German industrial
expansion for the coming war, mass physical fitness, higher birth rates,
anti-Semitism, military training and adulation of Hitler.

The film shows "how dangerously tempting and engaging the general mood of
an era can be," according to co-director Axer. It serves as a warning to
"recognize the true, hidden meanings before believing" in the brave new
world promised in Nazi rhetoric.

Interspersed with sugary ballads and sentimental love songs are films of
blond girl gymnasts, German cars on the new autobahns, humming factories,
a physician encouraging a couple to have babies, Hitler at his alpine
retreat and waving to crowds at mass demonstrations and Hitler Youth in
military training.

The scenes become increasingly militant. In a sequence about "Our Women,"
a home movie shows a German woman and a Slavic man being paraded through a
village to have their heads shaved in public for an illegal relationship
banned by Nazi racial laws.

Accompanied by a love song, "A Star Fell from Heaven," the documentary
shows anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews, and newsreels of ghettos with
people wearing Star of David insignias on their coats.

With the advertising slogan, "Millions Ride German Rail" promoting travel
for pleasure, cattle cars filled with humans are shown en route to
Auschwitz, and "Take commuter rail to the country" shows doomed Jewish
inmates at another concentration camp.

To the strains of "When the Lights Shine Again," Germans are shown filing
into bunkers to escape bombings. The scene abruptly switches to color
newsreels of bombed out cities and smoking piles of corpses.

"Wake Up, Germany," a Nazi brownshirt slogan, serves as the chapter
heading for films showing the liberation of death camps and skeletal
survivors, a shrunken head and another head preserved in a jar from Nazi
medical experiments.

In the closing scene, a little boy with a U.S. Army insignia pinned on his
shirt, smiles through tears at his rescue from a death camp.

(source: Associated Press)