Jan. 11




USA//MASSACHUSETTS:

Millbury man denies he helped kill Jews


An 89-year-old retired Millbury factory worker tried to save his
citizenship yesterday by testifying he never killed Jews in the Warsaw
ghetto in 1943, despite a Nazi roster showing his deployment.
A native of Lithuania who became a German prisoner of war, Vladas
Zajanckauskas told a federal judge in Boston that he only worked in the
canteen of a Nazi training camp in Poland during Hitler's ``Final
Solution.''

Zajanckauskas' testimony directly contradicts an April 17, 1943,
Trawniki training camp roster showing his name among 351 guards deployed
to conduct house-to-house searches during the ``liquidation'' of Jews in
the Warsaw ghetto.

His attorneys Thomas J. Butters and Robert L. Sheketoff call the roster
unreliable and uncorroborated by any other evidence. ``Not a single
person (has) placed Zajanckauskas in Warsaw in April and/or May 1943,''
Butters said.

The Department of Justice's Nazi hunters claim Zajanckauskas lied on
immigration forms about his service at Trawniki and never should have been
admitted to the United States when he emigrated from Austria in 1950. He
became a naturalized citizen in Worcester in 1956.

Zajanckauskas admits he never told immigration officials about his
Trawniki service for fear it would slow up his immigration but says he
never did anything at the camp but run the bar.

In court documents, DOJ attorney Jeffrey L. Menkin said Zajanckauskas
was a trainer of other prospective non-commissioned officers when he was
sent into Warsaw. He claims the Nazis promoted Zajanckauskas after the
ghetto campaign and decorated him for bravery in 1944 for his service in
an SS unit known as Battalion Streibel.

Zajanckauskas' wife, daughter and three adult grandchildren sat with
him yesterday during the first day of a three-day bench trial before U.S.
District Court Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton. ``We're here today as a family
to support my grandfather,'' Denise Ronayne said. She called his testimony
``historical truths that will put this allegation to rest.''

(source: Boston Herald)





USA//NEW JERSEY:

NJ accuses Holocaust lawyer of misusing money from two clients


A lawyer who helped win billions of dollars for thousands of Holocaust
victims has been accused by an attorney ethics panel of misusing money
from two of those clients.

Edward Fagan, who gained worldwide attention for his role in litigation
against Swiss banks and German corporations, could face sanctions up to
disbarment if the charges are upheld.

"He stabbed me right in the back," said Gizella Weisshaus, 75, who
survived the Auschwitz death camp. "I supported him. He used me. He used
my money."

Efforts to reach Fagan for comment were unsuccessful. Several newspapers
reported they could not contact him by phone or at his home on Monday.
Fagan on Tuesday was no longer reachable at numbers he has used in the
past. He has until February to respond to the charges brought by the New
Jersey Office of Attorney Ethics.

The ethics office, part of the state Supreme Court, charged last month
that Fagan misused $400,000 from Estelle Sapir and Weisshaus, of Brooklyn,
N.Y., the initial plaintiff in the 1996 Swiss bank case. It became a
class-action case and was settled in 1998 for $1.25 billion.

Fagan later was among lawyers who won billions from German corporations.
He has since sued seeking money for suffering under South African
apartheid and American slavery.

The attorney ethics office accused Fagan of draining Weisshaus' trust
account, then seeking to replace the money with funds from the settlement
he had won for Sapir. The complaint also charged that he wrote checks to
cash on Sapir's account and transferred the money to business accounts.

(source: Newsday)




USA//WASH. DC:

The Tainted Science of Nazi Atrocities


The welcoming image could not be more inspiring. Or more creepy. It is a
"glass man" standing in an alcove, his red veins lining his transparent
shell, his multicolored organs neatly stacked in his abdomen, his arms
raised aloft like his gaze, reaching toward the heavens, glorying in the
display of his inner self.

He was constructed in 1935 by the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden for an
exhibition about genetic health that traveled to the United States. One of
his clones was given to the Buffalo Museum of Science. But about 50 years
later, with some belated embarrassment, the museum sent back the glass
man, queasy over the company he once kept and the ideals he once
represented. He even appears in a 1935 photo in Dresden, gazed at by
admiring Nazi officials.

Guilt by association, perhaps? Not unfair, given that this powerful
exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington,
called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," shows how the Nazis
took a widely respected idea and step by step stripped off its admired
flesh, showing in one horror after another, the awful possibilities latent
within it. That idea was eugenics, which once heralded better living
through genetic intervention. It is an idea that lost all respectability
from its Nazi associations, though not all its relevance, as contemporary
debates about abortion, euthanasia and the genome project make clear.

That is one reason that this exhibition, which will be on display through
Oct. 16, should be a part of every citizen's experience.

Its curator, Susan Bachrach, shaped an imposing collection of objects and
images into a narrative of imposing power: the copy of "On the Origin of
Species" given by Charles Darwin to his cousin Sir Francis Galton, who
coined the term "eugenics" in 1883; a scarred wooden door from an
isolation cell used at the Eichberg Psychiatric Clinic in Eltville,
Germany; calipers and hair color samples used by Dr. Ernst Rdin to specify
physical and racial traits in his genetic research; posters urging Germans
to screen their lovers' families for genetic flaws.

There are instruments of sterilization like those forcibly used on 400,000
men and women in the Nazi era - perhaps 1 percent of the German population
of child-bearing age deemed mentally or physically unfit ("It is better to
sterilize too many rather than too few," was the official doctrine); and a
photograph of blind German children being taught to recognize different
races by running their hands over plaster busts.

And more horribly: samples of the sedatives Luminal and Veronal like those
dispensed by pediatricians to infants at "pediatric wards," in order to
execute 5,000 undesirable children. Then, when it seems as if nothing more
could shock, one walks into a reproduction of the "shower stalls" used at
six facilities in Germany and Austria where the Nazi program for what
Hitler called "mercy deaths" expanded its ambitions.

Using carbon monoxide gas, more than 70,000 adults were poisoned,
including schizophrenic artists, whose drawings and paintings are mounted
here on the walls, under the shower heads. By 1945, 200,000 adults had
been killed in various Nazi "euthanasia" programs.

Ultimately, of course, the techniques perfected on the feebleminded and
deformed were turned against the country's primary "typhus," as one poster
puts it. "Sterilize the Jew," reads a stamp that was pasted on envelopes,
advertising one idea; but that procedure was too time-consuming. So the
medical teams who had helped refine Germany's gene pool were dispatched to
death camps like Sobibor and Treblinka in Poland to execute the Final
Solution.

For all its gargantuan horror, this exhibit makes those millions of deaths
seem an outgrowth of what came before, a more radical extension of
genetics into the netherworld.

Much of this has been little known and little acknowledged, even in
Germany, where in the 1990's, psychiatric institutions were still finding
traces of this unsavory past in files and in jars of preserved specimens,
and where many Nazi eugenicists enjoyed prosperous later careers.

But at the exhibition everything emerges with a kind of tragic restraint,
weighted with carefully outlined detail. There is no resort to clich or
posturing. The opening sections even cause a certain uneasiness, because
they make it clear that before the 1930's, eugenic ideas were commonplace.
Galton had written: "If the twentieth part of the cost and pains were
spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on
the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle what a galaxy of genius
might we not create!"

Such enthusiasm was infectious. The ideas, as the historian Daniel J.
Kevles points out in the exhibition catalogue, "could and did strike root
almost everywhere." "Only healthy seed must be sown," reads a British
eugenics poster from 1930. Swedes worried about the genetic effects of
Finnish blood. British worried about the Irish. In the United States, such
fears helped inspire the restrictive 1924 immigration laws. And in 1927,
in the case Buck v. Bell, eight Supreme Court justices agreed that a
feeble-minded woman should be sterilized; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
Jr. concluded after considering her genetic history: "Three imbecile
generations are enough." By the late 1920's, eugenic sterilization was
practiced in two dozen states, with California accounting for more than
half of the 16,000 operations between 1907 and 1933.

So some ideas and procedures were widely accepted. Moreover, the racial
inquiries undertaken by the Germans were also part of physical
anthropology as it was then practiced. The study of difference and the
tracing of genetic lineage was a legitimate subject of inquiry.

Is the Nazi case different because of degree rather than kind? Was German
medicine and science so dehumanizing that they caused everything to go
awry? Was the element of anti-Semitism decisive, perhaps, leading the
anthropologist Josef Wastl to purchase skulls and death masks of Polish
Jews and steal 220 Jewish skeletons from a Viennese cemetery for further
study?

No, it seems that something else took place in Germany in the years after
Hitler consulted Fritz Lenz's 1921 treatise, "Foundations of Human
Genetics and Racial Hygiene" and invoked its ideas in "Mein Kampf."
Eugenics was not incidental to the construction of the Nazi state; it was
at its heart. As one slogan said: "National Socialism is the political
expression of our biological knowledge."

The Nazi state rested on what Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, called
"applied biology." One exhibited brochure creates an analogy between
societies and organisms; Hitler is the brain guiding the state's
biological "regeneration." Its laws were often biological laws (like the
"Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring"), its solutions
biological solutions. By 1942, 10 million registry cards had been
collected documenting the genetic trees of German families. Josef
Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, boasted in 1938: "Our starting
point is not the individual"; the goal is a "healthy people."

There was, of course, some acknowledgment that other things mattered.
There was an urge to justify and an urge to conceal. In one chilling
document, "euthanasia" gassings are rationalized by meticulously
calculating how much food will be saved by the state over the course of a
decade, including 13,492,440 kilograms of meat and sausage.

And however open Nazi doctrines were about their ruthless prosecution of
their biological goals, the "euthanasia" program, given the code name
Operation T-4, was considered so extreme in its killings of non-Jewish
Germans, that it was conducted in secrecy. Gradually, though, there were
slip-ups: two urns of ashes sent to puzzled relatives rather than one; a
woman's brooch found in a man's effects; and the peculiar case of 2,000
people dying of natural causes in 40 days at an asylum that had only 100
beds. The gassings eventually stopped because of public pressure,
whereupon energies were fully turned to more fundamental ambitions of
biological elimination.

In these utilitarian justifications and secret machinations, though, there
may have also been some sense that these acts were violating other kinds
of principles, suggesting that humanity does not live by genes alone. But
such hints are slight. And what, after all, could such ethical principles
be? The exhibition properly resists the temptations that now seem to haunt
all such exhibitions, to create morals, to turn the museum into a
therapeutic agency, to generalize from the particular so pain is turned
into platitude. We are simply given the facts, shown the objects.

As for the ethical principles governing eugenics, in contemporary culture
they still remain curiously unsettled. There may be no other realm in
which the absolute of Nazi evil has come to seem so bendable. The
philosopher Peter Singer, for example, has attained academic
respectability while advocating euthanasia and arguing that the killing of
an infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. And if eugenics
is unambiguously evil, then why do we accept genetic screening of human
fetuses for possible abortion? If racial breeding is so offensive, why is
the prospect of designer genes considered so appealing? If euthanasia
shocks because it was forced, what about if it is welcomed? The ethical
issues are rarely presented as starkly as they were in Nazi Germany. This
exhibition doesn't make the answers any simpler, but that is one of its
virtues.

(source: New York Times)






UNITED NATIONS:

UN General Assembly to mark 60th anniversary of liberation of Nazi camps


The UN General Assembly will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Second World War Nazi concentration camps at a special
session on Jan. 24, Secretary General Kofi Annan announced Tuesday.

Annan said he was pleased that a majority of the 191 UN member states had
agreed to the U.S. request for a meeting of the world body to mark the
liberation. "This will be an important occasion, since the United Nations
was founded as the world was learning the full horror of the camps, and is
dedicated to doing everything in its power to protect human dignity and
prevent any such horror from happening again," UN associate spokesman
Stephane Dujarric said.

Annan called on all countries to give the session their full support, he
said.

In a letter to Annan on Dec. 9, U.S. Ambassador John Danforth requested a
commemorative session on Jan. 24, three days before a similar event in the
former Auschwitz death camp in Poland to mark its liberation by Soviet
troops on Jan. 27, 1945.

Between one million and 1.5 million prisoners - most of them Jews -
perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz.
Overall, six million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

"We believe that it is important that the United Nations, an organization
that rose out of the ashes of World War II and the Holocaust, mark this
occasion in a manner fitting its historical significance," Danforth wrote.

The United Nations was founded on Oct. 24, 1945, and Danforth said a
commemorative session offered "a unique opportunity for us all to remember
and recommit to the founding principles and noble ideals upon which the
United Nations was founded."

(source: Associated Press)