March 11



RUSSIA/POLAND:

Russia says WW2 executions of Poles not genocide


Russian prosecutors who investigated the 1940 execution of nearly 15,000
Polish prisoners of war by Soviet security forces said on Friday the
killings were not genocide.

Poland has long pushed for Moscow to bring to account those responsible
for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, with victims' families and
Polish war crimes prosecutors calling for the killings to be treated as
genocide.

Russian investigators closed the case last year, however, without pressing
any charges.

"The version of genocide was examined, and it is my firm conviction that
there is absolutely no basis to talk about this in judicial terms," Chief
Military Prosecutor Alexander Savenkov told a news conference.

"There is not, and was not, genocide committed against the Polish people
... in this case," Savenkov was quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency as
telling reporters.

Savenkov's comments were likely to irritate already strained relations
between Poland, a newly-assertive member of the European Union, and
Russia, which in its former guise as the Soviet Union dominated Poland for
five decades.

President Vladimir Putin chided Poland for backing Ukraine's recent
"orange revolution", while only this week Poland's Foreign Ministry called
the killing of Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov by Russian
security forces a "crime".

The mass shootings of interned Polish officers followed the 1939 partition
of Poland by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin at the start of World War Two.

Nazi Germany later reneged on the pact, invading the Soviet Union in 1941.
Advancing forces found thousands of bodies in mass graves in the Katyn
forest near Smolensk in western Russia.

Soviet propagandists initially blamed the killings on the Germans,
however, and it was only in 1990 that President Mikhail Gorbachev admitted
the Soviet NKVD secret police had been responsible.

Russian investigations into the case dragged on for over a decade, ending
inconclusively last year and prompting Poland's Institute of National
Remembrance, a war crimes body, to open its own probe in December.

Russia promised to hand over documents related to the case, but dismayed
Poland by saying it would not release classified material. Savenkov said
67 of 183 case files would be given to the Poles soon, while the rest
would remain under wraps.

Savenkov said the final number of victims had been established at 14,540.
No prosecutions will be brought because all of the perpetrators had died,
he said.

(source: Reuters)



GERMANY:

Hitler in the Berlin Bunker: An Eerie, Chilling 'Downfall'


"Downfall" asks three disturbing questions: How human do we want Hitler
to be? How brave do we want the SS to be? And how much compassion have we
for people trapped like rats on a sinking ship when they're all Nazis?

In other words, it tests us on the limits of our humanity, which is why
it is so eerily fascinating.

It chronicles the last few days of the Thousand-Year Reich, a political
entity that lasted 988 fewer years than its creators boasted. The setting,
roughly, is Adolf Hitler's underground bunker in the government district
of Berlin, and those nasty boys 300 yards away with all the tommy guns,
they would be the Russian army.

But the film, nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this
year, is surprisingly non-claustrophobic. Other variants of this material
-- "The Bunker" (1981) with Anthony Hopkins comes to mind, or "Hitler:
The Last Ten Days" (1973) with Alec Guinness -- kept the camera in the
hole with the nutcase with the trembling hand, the little blot of mustache
and the rapidly shrinking career prospects. It's almost always like being
locked in a phone booth with Sean Penn as he explains Method acting.

By contrast, Oliver Hirschbiegel's film is unexpectedly broad in the
canvas it covers. It's close to being a vanished popular form, the epic,
as it indeed tells the story of the downfall of Berlin in April and May of
1945. It flashes all over the dying city dynamically, visiting the
Werewolf Units -- full of 10-year-old boys turned antitank commandos --
as well as hospitals choked with the elderly and the dying, the dangerous
streets where fanatic Nazi vigilantes prowl in search of "deserters" to
hang, and an on-street command post where an SS general tries to rally his
troops for the hopeless fight, while he (and they) decide whether
surrender is a viable option, or only death.

As a historical re-creation, it's meticulous. Only seven other viewers
besides me will note the presence of the proper late-war-issue assault
rifle, called an StG-44, in the hands of the German troops, a weapon that
has appeared in almost no other movies. That bespeaks an attention to
detail on the part of the filmmakers that's almost pedantic, but also
reassuring. One can infer from it the larger reach of accuracy in uniform,
vehicle, military protocol, haircut, even web gear, which is one reason
why from the very first seconds a viewer believes totally in "Downfall."

But there are other reasons. Quite important is Hirschbiegel's style
itself, which is restless and probing. He avoids docudrama cliches like
clattering teletype announcements of time and date, or titles establishing
character. His stock in trade, besides accuracy, is speed. You are simply
there. Then, very quickly, you are somewhere else. It's thoroughly
gripping in the way the scenes mount, the tensions accumulate; and
although the ending is foreordained, it's still somehow dramatically
powerful.

Of course the most important reason is the brilliance of the acting,
which essentially gets at the movie's moral probity. The great
Swiss-German actor Bruno Ganz plays Hitler, and this surely is one of the
most daunting tasks in performance. Both Guinness and Hopkins, for my
money, failed. The problems are enormous: Do you make Hitler camp? He's
become a parody of evil, while at the same time his gestures and
uber-familiar eccentricities -- that little smudge atop his lip, his own
creepy nonchalance with the Sieg Heil salute that all the others snap out
like ceremonial volleys, that baggy double-breasted brown coat he affected
toward the end, the hank of hair hanging over the forehead -- make him
weirdly comic, no matter how ghastly and inappropriate that may be.

Or do you make him a stock movie villain, another kind of cartoon, so
over-the-top in his evil that he's unbelievable?

According to publicity materials, Ganz studied a rare recording of the
conversational Hitler, and found him to be different from that herky-jerky
orator with the floppy hair and the ball-bearing eyes. Modeling his
performance on that recording, Ganz seems to find exactly the right pitch:
His Hitler feels real and human, yet there's nothing particularly
ingratiating or sentimentalized about him. We never forget who he is.
Despite his kindness to secretaries (one point of view is stenographer
Traudl Junge's, a role played by Alexandra Maria Lara; Junge was herself
the subject of an interesting documentary, "Blind Spot," some years ago),
he's a man consumed in anger and at any moment is apt to skew off on a
rant on this or that traitor, to issue a snap-judgment death sentence and
rescind it just as quickly; he's clearly in cloudcuckooland, believing in
phantom armies and stunned when they don't follow his orders. How could
they? They don't exist.

The film never feels, however, like an actor's vanity project built
around a performance as big as all outdoors. So unselfconscious is Ganz
that you have no sense of him wanting or needing the camera's attention,
and it looks everywhere, swiftly interpreting its subsidiary characters.
As Eva Braun, Juliane Koehler is brilliantly shallow. Her devotion is
utter and total, but the girl just wants to jitterbug and can't help
herself. She seems more like a high school cheerleader than the mistress
-- ultimately wife -- of the world's most twisted sociopath.

Probably the best performance is by Corinna Harfouch as the terrifying
Magda Goebbels. A woman of beauty and poise, a social climber of the most
rigid and grotesque sort, she is able to say to her leader as he pins a
little swastika on her lapel amid the shells of the red guns outside, "You
have made me the happiest woman in Germany!" This is a few hours before
she poisons her six children.

That scene is hard to get through. For reasons unclear, Hirschbiegel does
not give us the full-frontal when Hitler and Eva finish themselves off,
nor Magda and her creepy husband, Joseph (played with steely intensity by
Ulrich Matthes), but he stays with the death of the kids through it all,
making us see Magda's resolve overcoming her love, and the craziness under
her icy beauty. It's truly chilling.

Perhaps the most problematic character is an SS doctor, Ernst-Guenter
Schenck (played brilliantly by Christian Berkel). When one sees the
double-runes, the lightning flashes, of the inner party adorning his black
lapel, one's trigger finger begins to twitch. Yet it turns out that Dr.
Schenck is genuinely humane and heroic: He's all over the place, bringing
penicillin to cut-off hospitals, scampering through fire to deliver it,
working 21-hour days in a trauma ward where he gets a crash course in
wound surgery, arguing against the Nazi martyr complex in favor of mercy
for civilians and the wounded.

Equally, the German officers seem exceedingly professional and heroic.
They're all duty guys: no deserters, just hard, practical military men
stuck in a dreadful mess and aware that they are doomed and struggling to
find an ethical -- by their standards -- way of dealing with it.

And so we ask: Should we admire these people? They are genuinely heroic,
caught in a genuinely tragic situation, in the crushing midst of death and
chaos. The movie invites you to despise them, but somehow, you can't. How
much easier if the country had been all Joes and Magdas, all Adolfs and
Evas, clear mutants from normalcy. But alas, and unforgettably, as
"Downfall" makes clear, most of the Nazis were human beings.

Downfall (148 minutes, in German and Russian with subtitles, at
Landmark's E Street and Loews Georgetown) is rated R for extremely graphic
depictions of wounds, some nudity and the disturbing deaths of children.

(source: Washington Post)

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


German Court Rules Neo - Nazi Band Is Criminal Group


Germany's Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that a neo-Nazi rock group that
spread racial hatred was a criminal organization, upholding the first
such judgment in the country against a music band.

The top court also upheld the three year and four month prison sentence
against Landser lead singer Michael Regener.

A Berlin court had ruled in December 2003 that Regener, 39, had formed a
criminal organization, incited racial hatred and spread Nazi propaganda in
a case that set a legal precedent.

Prosecutions have often been brought against individuals under laws
banning Nazi propaganda and promotion of racial hatred, but this was the
first time a collective prosecution of this kind had been brought against
a music group.

Thursday's Supreme Court ruling upheld the lower court's judgment, saying
the group had acted together to produce and distribute right-wing, racist
songs.

``Vietnamese were attacked in the most foul-mouthed manner,'' presiding
judge Klaus Tolksdorf told the court, in reference to one of the band's
songs which incited racist violence.

Two other group members had received suspended sentences of 21 and 22
months
at the trial which lasted six months. They had accepted their convictions,
but Regener appealed his.

Landser is an old German name that means soldier.

(source: Reuters)