VATICAN CITY:

Hitler 'ordered pope kidnapped'
But leading German general refused to obey order, newspaper says


Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler gave one of his generals a direct order to
kidnap Pope Pius XII during World War II but the officer did not obey,
Italy's leading Roman Catholic newspaper reported.

Avvenire, which is owned by the Italian Conference of Roman Catholic
bishops, said new details of the plot had emerged in documents presented
to the Vatican in favor of putting the controversial wartime Pontiff on
the road to sainthood.

Elements of alleged plots to abduct the pope during Germany's occupation
of Italy have already emerged in the past from some historians, but
Avvenire's full-page report said its details were new.

Avvenire said Hitler feared the pope would be an obstacle to his plans for
global domination and because the dictator wanted to eventually abolish
Christianity and impose National Socialism as a sort of new global
religion.

The newspaper said a plot that was code named Operation Rabat had
originally been planned for 1943 but was not carried out that year for
unspecified reasons.

It said that in 1944, shortly before the Germans retreated from Rome, SS
General Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff, a senior occupation officer in Italy,
had been ordered by Hitler to kidnap the pope.

According to the newspaper, Wolff returned to Rome from his meeting with
Hitler in Germany and arranged for a secret meeting with the pope. Wolff
went to the Vatican in civilian clothes at night with the help of a
priest.

The newspaper said Wolff told the pope of Hitler's orders and assured him
he had no intention of carrying them out himself, but warned the pontiff
to be careful "because the situation (in Rome) was confused and full of
risks."

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had already fallen and set up a
German-backed puppet regime in northern Italy. The German occupation of
Rome was in its dying days. Allied forces were advancing on the capital,
which they liberated on June 5, 1944.

As a test of Wolff's good faith, Pope Pius asked for him to free two
Italian resistance leaders who had been condemned to death. Wolff arranged
for them to be released, the paper said.
Road to sainthood

Avvenire said the details of the plot are in testimony Wolff gave before
he died in Germany to Church officials accumulating evidence to back
efforts to have Pius eventually made a saint.

But the reports of Hitler's contempt for Pius have contrasted with other
versions by historians and authors who have depicted Pius as being
pro-German and have accused him of intentionally turning a blind eye to
the Holocaust.

The Vatican's procedures to put Pius on the road to sainthood have not
been slowed or shelved despite concerns from Jews, and they will enter a
new phase in March when Vatican historians will begin discussing many
volumes of documentation.

The Vatican maintains that Pius did not speak out more strongly because he
feared it would worsen the fate of Catholics and Jews, and that he worked
behind the scenes to save Jews.

Pius's pontificate has been one of the trickiest problems in post-war
Catholic-Jewish relations.

(source: Reuters)



USA//ILLINOIS:

Holocaust museum boosts fundraising


The Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois is stepping up its museum
fundraising efforts.

Officials have raised $11 million and collected dozens of artifacts for a
46,000-square-foot building on Golf Road in Skokie that will cost about
$35 million.

"It's still a relatively quiet phase of the process," said Richard
Hirschhaut, the project director for the museum. "We're hoping that in the
first six months of the year we'll reach our halfway point of $17.5
million mark."

The group has raised most of its funding from grants and individual
contributions without making a public appeal.

The agency will start sending out letters and holding fundraising events
to keep money flowing into the project, Hirschhaut said.

There has been a steady stream of donations, both money and artifacts,
Hirschhaut said.

Officials hope to break ground this fall, Hirschhaut said.

(source: Chicago Tribune)




FRANCE:

France remembers Auschwitz liberation


With Yiddish folk music and memories of suffering,hundreds of French
Holocaust survivors marked the 60thanniversary of the liberation of the
Auschwitz death camp.

The ceremony, the first in a series of French events planned for the
anniversary, came ahead of the official commemoration at Auschwitz in
Poland on January 27.

Veterans Minister Hamlaoui Mekachera and former Cabinet minister Simone
Veil, herself an Auschwitz survivor, addressed the crowd at Paris City
Hall.

Many survivors brought their children and grandchildren.

Mekachera told of his visit to Auschwitz days earlier.

"Seeing you today here before me, I can't hide the emotion that I feel,"
he said.

"To all of you, I want to say very simply and without emphasis how much
your lives make an impression on me, and how much they make an impression
on our compatriots."

Andre Rogerie, who was deported to Auschwitz because of his activities
with the French Resistance, spoke of the difficulty of putting the
experience into words.

"How do you explain the cold, the hunger, the beatings, the suffering,
the cries, the screams, the barking, the fear, the fatigue, the
filth, the odours, the overcrowding, the duration, the misery, the
sickness, the torture, the horror, the hangings, the gas chambers, the
deaths?" asked Rogerie, who became a general in the French military after
the war.

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe pledged to make 2005 a year of remembrance.

"We need your testimony," he said.

In one of many events planned in Paris, city hall helped conceive an
exhibit featuring 60 Holocaust survivors who consented to tell their
stories on film. Exhibit-goers will watch the interviews at their own pace
on DVDs.

On January 27, a renovated Holocaust Memorial will open in Paris,
showcasing a simple stone wall engraved with the names of the 76,000
French Jews deported during World War II. Only 2,500 of them survived.

Veil, who also served as president of the European parliament, worked on
the project.

"For survivors, the real memory is in Auschwitz," she told Le Journal du
Dimanche.

But the memorial will help families realise "that their names won't be
forgotten."

(source: Sydney Morning Herald)




SWEDEN:

Remembering Raoul Wallenberg


Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who rescued thousands of Jews from
certain death at the hands of the Nazis, is arguably the most widely known
and honored of the Righteous Among the Nations.

As first secretary of the Swedish Embassy in Budapest, where he took up
his duties in July 1944, Wallenberg issued safe passes and false papers to
Jews and rented 32 houses in which Jews took shelter under the protection
of the Swedish flag.

On January 17, 1945, soldiers of the Red Army entered Budapest and among
the prisoners they took, were Wallenberg and his Jewish driver Wilmos
Langfelder.

For decades, the Swedish authorities, and, mostly Jewish, Wallenberg
Associations around the world have tried to discover Wallenberg's fate
but to no avail.

In recent years, the Russians claimed that he died of a heart attack in
Lubianka Prison in Moscow in 1947.

However there is contradictory information that Wallenberg, who was 33 at
the time of his arrest, was seen alive many years later.

The findings of the Joint Swedish-Russian Committee that investigated his
disappearance for more than a decade were published in 2001, but there was
no absolute proof to determine whether he was dead or alive.

In 2005, there will be major commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi death camps and
the 60th anniversary of the allied victory over the Nazis.

Raoul Wallenberg Associations will mark another 60th anniversary - the 60th
anniversary of his arrest. Among these groups is the Beersheba Raoul
Wallenberg Association that will pay tribute to his courage and integrity
at a symposium and exhibition at Beit Yad Lebanim Beersheba, on Monday,
January 17 at 5 p.m.

The event is organized in conjunction with the Rabb Center for Holocaust
and Redemption Studies at Ben Gurion University.

Participants will include Swedish Ambassador Robert Rydberg, Dr. Mordechai
Paldiel who heads Yad Vashem's department that honors the Righteous Among
the Nations and former Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau who was a child
Holocaust survivor.

In addition to being honored as Righteous Among the Nations, Wallenberg
was awarded honorary citizenship of the State of Israel in January 1986.

(source: Jerusalem Post)