Jan. 19



AUSTRIA:

One of the victims of the Nazi regime's program to kill mentally ill
people was a relative of Adolf Hitler's, two historians said Tuesday.

The woman, identified only as Aloisia V., was 49 when she was gassed Dec.
6, 1940, at an institution in the Hartheim castle near the northern
Austrian city of Linz, historian Timothy Ryback said.

Ryback, an American historian who lives in Salzburg and heads the
Obersalzberg Institute in Berchtesgaden, Germany, said the details
surrounding the woman's death surfaced last week after Obersalzberg
archivist Florian Beierl gained access to her medical file at a Vienna
medical institution where she was treated.

That mental illness flourished in Hitler's extended family is nothing new.
A secret 1944 Gestapo report that has been known for decades described
Aloisia's line of the family as "idiotic progeny," Beierl said.

(source: Chicago Tribune)




ISRAEL:

Israeli state and banks withheld Holocaust assets -- Bank Leumi was found
to be responsible for nearly 95% of the liabilities.


A report released by the Israeli parliament states that the holdings of
European Jews killed in the Holocaust were not returned at their proper
value by Israeli banks to the heirs. Furthermore, the banks did not make a
determined effort to return these holdings.

The parliamentary committee investigating this matter accused the banks of
severe negligence in the handling of the money estimated to be some $200
million held by Israeli banks and the Israeli state.

Criticism was also aimed at the Israeli government who as custodian of the
assets also failed to make a concerted effort to neither maintain the
value of the holdings nor return them to the survivors and heirs.

"What we have discovered, in particular the attitude of the banks, has
filled us with disgust," said the chairwoman of the parliamentary
committee, Colette Avital, a Labor Party legislator. "Neither the state
nor the banks paid enough attention to this problem."

After a four year investigation, the report details that some 9,000 people
or their heirs are entitled to compensation from both the Israeli
government and banks; compensation to the tune of $31.5 million.

The Israeli state was found liable to pay $23 million in frozen accounts
that are under its custodianship while the banks are responsible for $8.5
million.

The members of the committee have called on parliament to approve the
report and pass it through legislation in order to implement the return of
assets to the heirs. The committee also recommended that in case the heirs
cannot be found than the money be used to benefit Holocaust survivors.

Israel's second largest bank, Bank Leumi was found to be responsible for
nearly 95% of the liabilities, with four other financial institutes
holding responsibility for the rest.

Heirs of Holocaust victims have been battling for nearly thirty years to
access the money deposited in banks in Palestine before the break out of
World War Two. However, officials told the heirs "not to bother" - a
treatment which the report says was "typical".

The chairwoman of the committee condemned the banks for negligence,
foot-dragging and deliberately ignoring the heirs of holocaust victims.

But this issue has not been passed lightly by some. Efraim Zuroff, the
Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called the report "a sad
commentary on the inability or unwillingness of Israel to deal with these
issues, while demanding that other countries do so."

Zuroff's comments refer to the pressure exerted by the United States and
Israel on the banks and governments of Switzerland and Austria to disclose
the accounts of those believed to be Holocaust victims and survivors, in
order for the assets to be returned.

(source: Aljazeera.com)




USA----television program

Auschwitz series is revealing
PBS documentary gives a methodical analysis of Holocaust evolution



In the first of the panel discussions that conclude each of the six
episodes of the PBS documentary series, "Auschwitz: Inside the
Nazi State," host Linda Ellerbee asks her guests about "Holocaust
fatigue."

After "Shoah," "Schindler's List" and countless books and documentaries on
the subject, are people worn down by it?

The panelists, Michael Berenbaum, professor of theology at the University
of Judaism, and author Melvin Jules Bukiet, whose parents were Holocaust
survivors, agree it is a grueling topic. Berenbaum believes that the
Holocaust has become the "negative absolute," the standard example of evil
incarnate.

Bukiet agrees that the Holocaust is "endlessly fascinating, because it
does embody the extremes of human behavior," but also "endlessly
exhausting, because it provides no reward whatsoever." He then raises the
central problem presented by a documentary such as "Auschwitz: Inside the
Nazi State": the tendency "to try and impute some lesson to it. I find
that incredibly dangerous. The second you find a lesson, you are moving
one inch toward finding a silver lining."

Whether you tune in to "Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State" (9 p.m.
Wednesday, WTTW-Ch. 11) to learn or in simple recognition of the
gruesomely familiar events, you likely will come away with new knowledge
of one of the most studied episodes in human history. Despite the utter
bleakness of its subject, the series, which provides a methodical analysis
of the evolution of Germany's systematic effort to wipe out European Jews
during World War II, is undeniably absorbing.

Writer-producer Laurence Rees uses archival footage, interviews and
dramatic re-creations based on documents discovered since the fall of the
Soviet Union to chronicle the horrific escalation of the planning and
implementation of the mass murder of more than 1 million people at
Auschwitz.

The brief epilogues moderated by Ellerbee give the series its context and
relevance. They address not only the importance of studying the Holocaust,
but also larger subjects such as the origins of genocide.

(source: Los Angeles Times)


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

Inside the Nazi murder factory


There's no shortage of sickening visuals in the opening episode Auschwitz:
Inside The Nazi State.

Even for practiced consumers of Holocaust documentaries, images like the
rare footage of Ukrainian civilians beating a terrified Jew as he begs for
his life are hard to take and impossible to shake.

Middle-schoolers shouldn't watch without an adult.

Writer/producer Laurence Rees set out to explain, in unprecedented detail,
how and why the Nazis built what Rees calls ''the site of the largest mass
murder in the history of the world,'' and how they were able to enlist
millions of ordinary citizens in their genocidal mission.

The series follows the coldly planned growth of Auschwitz from a backwater
penal camp for Polish political prisoners to the vast murder factory where
1.1 million men, women and children were gassed, starved, brutalized and
frozen to death between 1940 and 1945.

Rees tells the story through archival film and reenactments shot in
unsettling tones of washed-out color, computer-generated graphics and
original construction drawings, the diaries of camp commandant Rudolf Hss
and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, survivor and witness testimonies, and
documents unavailable until the Soviet empire fell in 1991.

One of the most jarring moments is an interview with unrepentent SS
veteran Hans Fredrich, now an unassuming old man. Fredrich casually admits
to an offscreen interviewer that he shot naked Jewish women and children
at the edge of a ditch in occupied Poland in 1941.

Q: ``What were you thinking and feeling?''

A: ``Nothing. Aim carefully, so that you hit properly.''

It was this ability to dehumanize their enemies -- Jews, Poles, Red Army
POWs -- that enabled the Nazis to plan the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex like
a processing plant, where the barracks were intentionally crammed far
beyond capacity as a means to thin the population.

Auschwitz was, initially, a symbol of Nazi domination, a place of such
intimidation that the Poles couldn't possibly doubt who was in charge.

A few months after invading Poland in September 1939, Auschwitz opened as
makeshift prison at an old military base, with unspeakable brutality as a
founding principle.

A surviving Polish prisoner talks about hanging in agony from his arms,
which had been tied behind his back, feeling the bones breaking and
tendons snapping.

Auschwitz took off after German industries decided to locate plants in
coal-rich southwestern Poland, happy to pay the Third Reich for an endless
supply of slave labor.

By 1941, faced with millions of Jewish and Russian conquests, Reich
leaders worried that soldiers forced to murder at close range would become
''neurotics and brutes.'' They began experimenting with mass gassings, a
technique pioneered in German mental hospitals.

''Himmler realized he had to find a better way to kill,'' explains
narrator Linda Hunt.

One survivor recalls seeing ''SS men running around with gas masks,''
sealing windows and dropping chemical pellets down roof hatches.

Inside, dying prisoners screamed for 15 to 20 minutes.

Between segments, journalist Linda Ellerbee interviews scholars and
historians about the ethical, political and historical implications of the
Nazi genocide.

After the introductory segment, Surprising Beginnings, Sarah Lawrence
College professor Melvin Jules Bukiet, the son of Holocaust survivors, and
Michael Berenbaum, who oversaw creation of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, discuss the value of Holocaust study so long after World
War II.

Berenbaum acknowledges that ''Holocaust fatigue'' is a real phenomenon.

''There are good reasons to feel that way,'' he says. ``It's bleak,
horrible and a heavy burden [that] shatters the sense of belief in
humanity and the goodness of governments.''

(source: Miami Herald)


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

TV REVIEW | 'AUSCHWITZ'
Another Look at the Nazi Business of Killing



I don't know anything about the Tyrrhenians. I can never remember who
McGeorge Bundy was. I don't understand Mongol rule in China, or King
Philip's War in America.

But I know about Auschwitz. In 10th grade at my public school in New
Hampshire in the 1980's, we watched "Night and Fog," Alain Resnais's 1955
documentary, in conjunction with a series of lectures on the Holocaust. We
saw severed heads and heaps of emaciated corpses. Our teacher, a veteran
of World War II, explained in detail the Nazi hierarchy, the uses of
Zyklon B and the crematories; we went over and over how people who thought
they were going to take showers were led to their death. We returned to
the subject every semester until graduation.

Why, with so much history to learn, did we spend so long on the
particulars of Auschwitz and the practices of the Nazis? I couldn't help
thinking that there was something about the Holocaust - or at least about
the Nazis' cold efficiency - that we weren't meant to grieve, but to
admire.

In "Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State," a six-part BBC/KCET co-production
by Laurence Rees that starts tonight on PBS, Melvin Jules Bukiet, a
novelist who is the son of a survivor, says of the Holocaust, "I think we
learn nothing from it."

He goes on, "It is simultaneously endlessly fascinating - because it does
embody extremes of human behavior - but it is also endlessly exhausting,
because it provides no reward whatsoever."

What if the Holocaust is no longer fascinating, but only exhausting?
Though this possibility is raised by Mr. Bukiet at the end of tonight's
installment, PBS apparently did not give it much consideration in putting
together this new series. "Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State" is a glossier
production than the clip jobs on the History Channel - which many still
call the Hitler Channel for its preoccupation with the Nazis - but it has
no more powerful reason for being than they do.

Once again, re-enactors button up their sharp SS uniforms and strut their
fascist style in elaborate re-creations that are performed in German, with
subtitles. Handsome actors play the killers, and scrupulous attention is
given to their grooming. A scene of the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hss
(played by Horst Gnther-Marx), getting a haircut is laboriously staged. An
awestruck voice-over describes the Holocaust as "one of the most infamous
policies in all of history," noting that the Nazis' "industry of death"
was "supremely efficient."

In interviews, former inmates and SS officers alike tell us what we
already know: that Auschwitz was terrifying; that people were murdered
every day; that the people who worked there were anti-Semites who believed
that Jews were opponents of the state.

As Pavel Stenkin, a Russian prisoner of war who spent time at Auschwitz,
puts it: "Death, death, death. Death at night, death in the morning, death
in the afternoon. Death. We lived with death."

Hans Friedrich, a former German soldier of the First Infantry Brigade, is
asked by an interviewer: When you were shooting Jewish men, women and
children, did you have any feelings for the people?

"Nein," says Mr. Friedrich, now white-haired. And he continues, in the
voice of the interpreter, "My hatred toward Jews is too great."

The evolution of Nazi killing techniques - from shooting to adult
euthanasia programs in Germany to the development of the gas chambers at
Auschwitz and Birkenau - is supplied in detail. Each murderous innovator
is duly credited. But why belabor these developments, as if giving
instructions?

The series highlights its own original contributions to the study of
Auschwitz, breaking the news that the camp was included in the genocide
relatively late in its history; it was first used to imprison Polish
political prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war. Architectural plans for
the camp, which were discovered in Russian archives in the 1990's, are
brandished. A computer model of Auschwitz serves as one of the series'
central illustrations.

But only one moment stands out as really unusual. It's a re-creation of a
1941 conference in Berlin at which SS officers, before the invasion of the
Soviet Union, discussed plans for starving its people. All of the dialogue
is reportedly taken from actual meeting minutes. One man argues that the
Russians are accustomed to periods of famine: "Hunger and thrift have been
the lot of Russians for centuries" he says, adding: "Their stomachs are
elastic. Let's have no misplaced pity."

No one, of course, has pity of any kind.

Much of the drama in this superfluous series revolves around the
sang-froid and technological sophistication of the Nazis, and that's bad
enough. But the epilogues to each part - during which experts discuss the
segment's significance - are unconscionably patronizing.

At the end of Part 2, for example, Claudia Koonz, a history professor, and
Edward Kissi, a professor of African studies, enlighten the host, Linda
Ellerbee, about Nazi propaganda. Ms. Koonz explains that, as children,
many Germans were taught to hate Jews.

Contemplating this, Ms. Ellerbee asks, "Is it a good idea for kids today
to question their education?" Does she really have to ask?

'Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State'

PBS, Wednesdays through Feb. 2 at 9 p.m.; check local listings.

Written and produced by Laurence Rees; KCET Hollywood and BBC, producers;
Mary Mazur, series executive producer; Sir Ian Kershaw, script consultant;
David Orenstein, co-producer; Karen Robinson, production executive for
KCED; Megan Callaway, writer/producer (epilogues); Catherine Tatge,
director (epilogues); Linda Hunt, narrator; epilogues' host, Linda
Ellerbee.

(source: virginian Heffernan, New York Times)