March 12




USA////TEXAS:

LEST ANYONE FORGET

With a mission of noting atrocities and teaching how not to hate,
Holocaust museum in Dallas plans open house at new location


Toward the end of World War II, Martin Donald of Dallas rolled into his
native Germany as a member of the British army, assigned to translating
for investigators of war crimes.

Donald, 84, was 16 when his family sent him to England to avoid Nazi
persecution. He landed in London, but everyone else in his family became a
victim of the Holocaust. Now, 60 years after the liberation of the death
camps, Donald prefers not to discuss his experiences.

"I went to different camps, but to go into that I could write a book, and
too many have already been written," Donald said. "But it's a memory
people should never forget because it could happen anywhere."

Noting the atrocities and teaching how not to hate are the missions of the
Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and Tolerance, founded in
1984 by Donald and about a dozen other Dallas residents who survived the
Holocaust.

It had been housed in the basement of the Jewish Community Center of
Dallas on Northaven Road. But on Sunday, the museum will host an open
house from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at its new downtown site, 211 Record St.

A ribbon-cutting on Thursday was attended by Dallas Mayor Laura Miller and
Donald's daughter, state Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano.

Donald, accompanied at the ceremony by his wife, Ann, noted that the new
site is only a temporary location until a permanent building of about
35,000 square feet can be built two blocks away.

"It's going to be a beautiful, beautiful place," said Donald, a retired
picture-frame maker who came to Dallas in 1952. "Frankly speaking, I'm 84
years old, so I hope I see that yet."

For the final location, the museum bought land just north of the old Texas
School Book Depository, from which Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated
President John F. Kennedy in 1963. That building houses offices for Dallas
County and The Sixth Floor Museum.

Elliott Dlin, director of the Holocaust museum, said the temporary site is
in an excellent location because of its proximity to The Sixth Floor
Museum and other museums scheduled to open in the neighborhood.

They include the Museum of Nature and Science (formerly the Dallas Museum
of Natural History) at Field Street and Woodall Rogers Freeway, and the
Old Red Museum of Dallas County History & Culture on South Houston Street.

Dlin added that the Holocaust museum's temporary site is about 5,000
square feet, up from 3,500 square feet at the Jewish Community Center.

"Interestingly, the owners of the building are a consortium of German
investors, and they have been more than generous in all of the
negotiations," Dlin said. "They've expressed delight in being open to a
Holocaust museum."

The museum's artifacts include a rail car from Belgium that transported
people to the death camps.

There are also armbands embroidered with the Star of David, as well as
many other personal items, like the striped prison jacket once worn by
Paul Schiff, 86, who survived numerous camps.

"I worked for Schindler," he said during Thursday's ceremony, "but
unfortunately for me, I wasn't on the list. Before he made the list, I was
sent to Auschwitz."

Oskar Schindler was a factory owner in Poland during World War II who was
credited with saving the lives of more than 1,000 Jews who worked for him.
He was memorialized in the film Schindler's List, directed by Steven
Spielberg.

Many of the museum's photos are of Nazi atrocities, yet the grim nature of
the exhibits is tempered by the welcoming smiles of Schiff and fellow
survivor Max Glauben, 75, also of Dallas. Both men will offer their
testimonies at Sunday's open house.

Glauben joined the U.S. Army after he was liberated, and he served in the
Korean War. He settled in Dallas, where he became a buyer for Neiman
Marcus. He recalled how, as a boy, he proudly served as a specially
recruited smuggler who sneaked in and out of the Warsaw ghetto, taking
bits of bread, sugar cubes and other dry goods to his family and others.

There's a photo of him peeking over the shoulders of fellow smugglers; the
mischievous grin in that image lasts to this day.

Smuggling, he confirmed, was dangerous -- a perfect activity for a
reckless youth. That exhilaration, however, doesn't hide the reality that
his entire family later died in the camps.

"The ones that perished should never, ever be forgotten," he said,
"because we don't know how many years of culture were lost. We have to
learn how to forgive, but not forget."

IN THE KNOW

If you go

Open house for the Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and
Tolerance is 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday at its new downtown location, 211 N.
Record St., Suite 100.

Admission fees will be waived.

www.dallasholocaustmuseum.org

(source: Fort Worth Star Telegram)




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

`Downfall' gives new life to debate on Hitler, Nazis

Putting Hitler's Germany back on the world's front pages, ``Downfall''
prompts discussion and debate.


This Oscar-nominated German film is a re-creation of the final 12
days in Adolf Hitler's life and the collapse of his Nazi regime. It opened
locallyyesterday.

``Downfall'' was a box-office hit in Germany and sold out its first
American openings. And there is no shortage of praise for Bruno Ganz's
definitive portrayal of Hitler as a frail, delusional leader. Given that
Hitler was behind the genocide that instigated a costly and deadly world
war, some critics wonder if ``Downfall'' has made a monster seem
sympathetic.

``Millions of people loved this man. Why?'' Ganz asked. ``It's not
enough to show some idiot, and we have some fun in the audience - that's
not it. So I decided to go for it and make a serious thing.''

Some parts of getting into character were easier than others.

``I knew I looked like him, and I was scared a little bit, for two
seconds or something,'' he said.

But Ganz had to learn Hitler's voice. He was given a seven-minute
tape, secretly recorded in 1942, of a conversationbetween Hitler and a
Finnish diplomat.

``I heard his voice very relaxed, and I heard his speech in a way
I've never heard it before,'' Ganz said.

Ganz also knew Hitler suffered from Parkinson's disease. But what of
the theories that Hitler was gay?

``I think he had a special relationship to his architect Mr. Speer. .
. .It was homoerotic, but they didn't need to even touch each other,''
Ganz said. ``What we know about his sexual relationships to women makes it
probable - but I don't really believe. There's no evidence.''

Ganz, who has been a star in Europe for more than 30 years, is best
known for playing an angel in Wim Wenders' international hit ``Wings of
Desire.''

``I did one Hollywood movie when I was very young, `The Boys from
Brazil,' about Hitler cloning, and I was a scientist.

``And last year I was again one in `The Manchurian Candidate,'' he
said. ``Nazi or scientist?'' He winked, ``That's what's allowed a European
actor in America.''

(source: Boston Herald)


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

'Downfall': The Dark At The End Of The Tunnel, By Kurt Loder
'Downfall' is an exhausting movie it drains your spirit but you can't
look away from it.



Sitting through "Downfall," a German film about the last days of Adolf
Hitler in a fortified bunker beneath the crumbling city of Berlin, is like
spending two and a half hours in Hell's waiting room with a group of
people who clearly need have no doubt about their qualifications for the
fiery pit. The movie is harrowingly claustrophobic, and it's mesmerizing
60 years after the events recounted, we know what is said by eyewitnesses
to have happened, but there's a surreal awfulness in seeing it actually
depicted.

Any cinematic representation of Hitler will always be both problematic and
controversial. All these years later, the German dictator remains
essentially an enigma, and it is widely felt that investing him with human
dimension is fundamentally obscene. Director Olivier Hirschbiegel makes no
pretense of getting inside Hitler's head; and he was wise to cast in the
movie's central role the exceptional Swiss actor Bruno Ganz (probably best
known in this country as the star of Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire"). With
his big, doughy face, and his black hair plastered to his skull, Ganz
recalls any number of vintage images of Hitler, from the deceptively
avuncular lover of dogs and small children to the writhing, spluttering
demagogue of the Nuremberg rallies. It's a performance that operates on
the distanced level of reportage; and Ganz's remarkable control - his
meticulous avoidance of psychological interpretation - is something of a
wonder.

The picture is derived from two books published in Germany in 2002:
"Inside Hitler's Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich," by the
historian Joachim C. Fest, and "Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last
Secretary," by Traudl Junge, the young amanuensis who took down Hitler's
rambling dictation from 1943 to the very end. Junge, who was also the
subject of a notable 2002 documentary called "Blind Spot," is a character
in the movie (she's played by the fresh-faced Alexandra Maria Lara), and
we see the bizarre goings-on in the bunker through her sometimes barely
believing eyes.

It is the spring of 1945, and Hitler has gone down into his bunker
accompanied by a contingent of top officers and SS troops as well as his
longtime girlfriend, the mysteriously oblivious Eva Braun (played here by
Juliane Koehler). Also in faithful attendance is his snakelike propaganda
minister, Joseph Goebbels (Ulrich Matthes); Goebbels' steely wife Magda
(Corinna Harfouch); and their six small children. In addition, Hitler is
briefly visited by the odiously dapper Reich architect Albert Speer, who
has come to bid farewell to his longtime benefactor. (Like the rest of the
actors in the cast, Heino Ferch, who plays Speer, bears an eerie
resemblance to the historical character he portrays.)

By April, with Allied bombs raining down from above and Russian ground
forces advancing on the city from all directions, the soldiers in the
bunker realize that the war is lost. Some prepare themselves to commit
suicide (one of them, sitting at dinner with his family, produces two
grenades beneath the table and pulls the pins). Others reel drunkenly
through the narrow corridors, or disport themselves in impromptu orgies.
In the nightmarish, bomb-blasted streets above, the city's defense has
been left to young boys and tired old men, with SS soldiers moving among
them in search of people who'll no longer fight, dragging them from their
homes and either shooting them on the spot or hanging them from lampposts.

Down below, Hitler remains deliriously adamant that his battered army will
soon come to the rescue, that a thousand nonexistent Luftwaffe planes will
fly in to repel the invaders. In a shuffling, crablike crouch, with his
palsied left hand trembling behind his back, alternately brooding and
raving, he curses what he is convinced is a "betrayal" by his generals,
and by the German people, who will be his final victims. Urged to
surrender for the sake of the endangered civilians up above, he dismisses
the possibility out of hand. "In a war like this, there are no civilians,"
he says. "I will not shed one tear for them." Says Goebbels: "We didn't
force the German people. They gave us the mandate."

As the end draws undeniably near, Hitler resolves to end his life with a
pistol in his mouth. Eva Braun rejects that method. "I want to look good
when I die," she tells him. "I'll take poison." In a quietly hideous
scene, Magda Goebbels administers a narcotic drink to her children in
their beds and then quietly makes her way from one to another inserting
cyanide capsules between their teeth and pressing their jaws together; she
gently kisses each of them goodbye after their death spasms subside. On
April 30, Hitler has cyanide administered to his beloved dog and then
retires with Eva Braun to his quarters, where, off-camera, they kill
themselves. In accordance with his wishes, his aides carry the two corpses
outside and set them afire. Traudl escapes through the encircling chaos
into a new Germany of ruin, shame and despair.

"Downfall" is an exhausting movie - it drains your spirit - but you can't
look away from it. At the end, as all the old, unanswerable questions
about the Nazi period come swarming to mind, we see the real Traudl Junge,
a woman in her eighties, looking back upon that time, and upon her
credulous younger self. Like many Germans after the war, she says she was
unaware of the full extent of the Nazis' barbarity, and only came to know
of it in later years. She isn't angling for exoneration, however, and she
rejects one possibly tempting rationalization entirely. "It was no
excuse," she says, "to be young."



(in) ENGLAND:

Stalin's secret Hitler book to be published


A secret biography of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler commissioned by Soviet
dictator Josef Stalin is to be published later this month, the book's
British publisher said today.

The work, Hitler Book, was presented to the Soviet dictator in December
1949, in a limited edition of one, and was put in his personal archive
before being discovered in 2004 by German historian Matthias Uhl.

"A second copy of the biography was made in 1965 and placed in a separate
archive, which was used as corroborating evidence that the first book was
authentic," a spokeswoman for publisher John Murray said.

A statement said the book would be published by Lubbe in Germany in March
with its UK publication due in November.

The biography was based on two years of interrogation in Moscow with two
of Hitler's close associates - his butler Heinz Linge and SS adjutant Otto
Guensche.

The two of them worked for Hitler for 10 years before being captured by
Soviet troops in Hitler's bunker after disposing of the bodies of the Nazi
dictator and Eva Braun.

Advertisement
AdvertisementHitler married his long-time companion Braun shortly before
they both, according to generally accepted accounts, committed suicide on
April 30, 1945.

Stalin commissioned Hitler Book because he wanted to understand the
psychology of Hitler as well as being sure the Nazi dictator was dead, the
publisher said in a statement.

"This is a compelling and powerful document, with an extraordinary
narrative and astonishing detail and insight," said John Murray's
publishing director Gordon Wise.

"Hitler remains an object of eternal fascination, but particularly
remarkable about this book is the invisible but brooding presence of
Stalin, for whom it was created."

In 1983 the German magazine Stern published diaries purported to be
Hitler's. They were later revealed to be forgeries.

(source: Reuters)