May 1



GERMANY:

Dachau survivors mark liberation


Former inmates and politicians on Sunday remembered the victims of the
Dachau concentration camp in ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of
the camp's liberation.

Roughly 2,500 people attended Sunday's ceremonies commemorating U.S.
soldiers' liberation of the camp, where some 200,000 people were interned
and more than 30,000 died.

Survivors from across Europe, Israel and the United States attended the
ceremonies, calling on future generations to keep alive the memory of what
happened in Dachau at other concentration camps in the Third Reich, even
as survivors slowly pass away.

"Freedom for us lies not in repressing, but in remembering," said Max
Mannheimer, 85, a former head of the International Dachau Committee.
"'Never Forget' should be the unwritten preamble to the (German)
constitution."

The concentration camp, located just outside Munich, was the first erected
by the Nazis shortly after Adolf Hitler rose to power in 1933. It has been
open to the public as a memorial since 1965, and a reorganized visitors
center was opened in 2003.

A new entry to the center through the original camp gate, marked with
"Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free), opened Sunday, ending years of
dispute with Dachau town officials who had balked at building a new access
road the entrance required.

At the ceremony, Bavarian Governor Edmund Stoiber underlined calls to
remember the victims, "so that in Germany there will be no chance for
inhuman ideologies, intolerance and political extremism to take root."

Thousands died in the camp as a result of inhumane conditions and through
torture and quasi-medical experiments.

From a total 206,206 prisoners registered, 31,591 deaths were recorded,
but the actual number who died isn't known.

(source: Associated Press)


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Hitler long gone but legacy haunts Germany ---- There is still a lingering
fascination over history's greatest villain.


You won't find Hitler Street in Germany these days; squares dedicated to
the Nazi leader were also renamed as soon as the Third Reich fell and
Adolf as a first name is now all but extinct.

But 60 years after the Fuehrer killed himself on April 30, 1945, Adolf
Hitler still casts a long shadow. As weary of their past as many young
Germans are, there is still a lingering fascination over history's
greatest villain.

Hitler's face is regularly pasted on Germany's big-selling weekly news
magazines, boosting sales with critical or scholarly articles. The racy
mass-market Bild daily gives its 12 million readers a steady diet of tales
of Hitler and his crimes.

"There is a concentrated focus on that 12-year era of German history that
will never let up," said Heinrich August Winkler, a leading German
historian at Berlin's Humboldt University.

"It was Germany's disaster," he told Reuters. "It will leave a permanent
impression on German history. It's so unique that it will never become
normalized. The responsibility for the Nazis and the Holocaust have become
part of Germany's identity."

Few Germans will mark Saturday's anniversary of Hitler's suicide in his
Berlin bunker. For most it is just a footnote in a season of 60th
anniversaries marking the lead up to the end of World War Two in Europe on
May 8.

Yet Hitler's birthday on April 20 -- a national celebration during the
Third Reich -- is a date even Germans born long after the war have
acquired sensitivity about.

Some years ago, a Germany-England soccer match in Berlin scheduled for
that date was cancelled and last week a new state premier in
Baden-Wuerttemberg abruptly delayed his swearing-in ceremony by one day to
avoid the Hitler connection.

"The Germans and their political leaders live with the ubiquitous memory
of Hitler's barbarism," wrote Der Spiegel columnist Juergen Leinemann
under the headline "A nation in search of itself" in an anniversary issue
of the magazine.

The vast majority of Germans were born after 1945 but have spent their
lives growing up with Hitler's legacy. The horrors of the Nazi past are
studied in depth at all levels of school.

Public broadcaster ZDF has regularly scored high ratings with a series of
television documentaries about Hitler and his helpers in recent years. But
the historian who produced the films rejects any notion Germans are
obsessed by Hitler.

"They're not obsessed but interested," ZDF's award-winning director for
historical films, Guido Knopp, told Reuters.

"The 20th century would have taken a completely different course without
Hitler. He was history's last assassin. Knowledge about Hitler is the best
antidote there is.

"Hitler is the best anti-Hitler therapy available."

Their guilt-inducing past may fatigue many Germans. Yet millions packed
cinemas last year when the first German-made film about Hitler's final
days in his Berlin bunker, "Der Untergang" (Downfall), was released.

The film took some $40 million at the box office in Germany and is set to
become the highest ever grossing German-language film in Britain too, its
distributors said.

But Lutz Erbring, a media professor at Berlin's Free University, said the
focus on Hitler came chiefly from abroad.

He observed Germans were aghast when British newspapers tried to connect
Hitler with German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. Ratzinger
joined the Hitler Youth in 1941, when membership was compulsory for all
14-year-olds.

"The English press is obsessed by Hitler," Erbring said.

"It gets ridiculous at times."

(source: Reuters)





ISRAEL:

Knesset committee to discuss crisis in Holocaust welfare fund


The Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee, headed by MK Colette
Avital (Labor), will hold a special session today to discuss the budgetary
crisis of the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund.

Last month, Haaretz exposed the fact that the fund, which provides
assistance with caregiving and medical care to Holocaust survivors, is at
risk of shutting down.

The fund's directors warned that in September it would be forced to cease
most of its activities, if it does not receive an immediate cashflow.
Because of budget problems the fund is currently unable to foot the bill
for some 12,000 approved requests for glasses, dentures, medications,
dental treatment and other medical needs. The fund provides nine hours of
home care per week to some 9,000 survivors.

MK Hemi Doron (Shinui) yesterday called on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to
transfer immediately monies to allow the fund to continue its activities.
Doron suggested the necessary sums be taken from the department of the
public trustee, which has surplus funds. "We are at the eve of the
Holocaust Memorial Day, when we commemorate the victims, and salute the
survivors. The Jewish state is obligated to provide for the survivors,
whose numbers are decreasing.

"The State of Israel knows how to raise an outcry against European and
other countries for their treatment of Holocaust survivors, while itself
treating survivors with utter callousness. The government must put an end
to this ugly crisis," Doron said.

Most of the fund's budget is provided from the Claims Conference, the
official body responsible for the reparation payments, and Jewish assets
from Germany. This year the conference allocated some $31 million to the
fund, instead of $45 million, as the fund had requested; the state
allocated $1.8 million. To continue its activities until the end of the
year, the fund is in need of an additional $14 million.

The Claims Conference has not yet responded to the fund's request for a
budget increase. The treasury has notified the director general of the
fund, Dubi Arbel, that his request will be examined "within the framework
of the government of Israel's priorities, in its discussion of the 2006
budget."

(source: Ha'aretz)