June 21



CANADA:

Volpe moves against Nazi war-crimes suspects, sources say

Immigration Minister Joe Volpe has asked his department to begin building
cases to revoke the citizenship of five men in Canada who are suspected
Nazi war criminals.

Sources told The Globe and Mail yesterday that Mr. Volpe called for the
move soon after he took over as minister late last year.

Among the men is Helmut Oberlander, stripped of his citizenship by the
federal cabinet after a court found that when he emigrated to Canada with
his wife in 1954, he lied about serving as a translator for a Nazi death
squad. A Federal Court ruling restored his citizenship a year ago.

Also included are: Michael Baumgartner, found in 2001 to have been a
Waffen SS member and concentration camp guard; Jacob Fast, who has been
awaiting a decision on his case since the Federal Court ruled in 2003 that
he lied when coming to Canada, but found no evidence of war crimes; and
Vladimir Katriuk, who in 1999 was found to have been a member of a
battalion that fought partisans in Ukraine and who lost an appeal to the
Supreme Court in 2000.

The fifth man is Wasyl Odynsky. Although a judicial ruling in 2001 found
no evidence to link him to Nazi war crimes, a Federal Court judge ruled in
2001 that it is likely that he lied to immigration officers about his
wartime status.

Ottawa abandoned prosecutions of Nazi war-crimes suspects after losing a
Supreme Court case against Imre Finta in 1995. It adopted a policy of
trying to strip alleged war criminals of their citizenship.

(source: Globe and Mail)

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

Canadas efforts on Nazis get poor grade


Canada's efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice have slowed to a
crawl while around the world new investigations have grown by leaps and
bounds, according to a report prepared by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Jerusalem.

In a letter grade handed out to mark countries Nazi-hunting efforts,
Canada's mark for the period April 1, 2004, to March 31, 2005, fell to C
from B in the year before.

"No serious progress appears to have been made," stated Efraim Zuroff,
director of the centre's Israel office and co-ordinator of its research
on Nazi war criminals worldwide.

"There were no new cases and no deportation of people ordered out. [War
crimes prosecutions] seem to be in deep trouble," Zuroff said.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centers fifth annual Status Report on the Worldwide
Investigation and Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals granted the highest
grade, an A, to the United States and singled out Ukraine "as the country
which has done the least in recent years to bring Nazis to justice."

Denmark and Hungary each received a B, while Canada joined Australia,
Poland, Latvia and Germany, among others, with a C.

Overall, the report found "the number of new investigations initiated [in
at least 11 countries] during the past 12 months reached the figure of 659
[an increase of 97 per cent over the previous year] and the number of
cases currently under investigation [in 15 countries] reached at least
1,218 [an increase of almost 30 per cent over the figure for the period
from April 1, 2003-March 31, 2004]."

The report found that during the period under review, legal proceedings
were initiated against six Nazi war criminals in four countries - three in
the United States, one in Hungary, one in Denmark and one in Lithuania. In
the same period, five convictions were obtained, all in the United States.

"Most of those convicted served as armed guards in concentration and death
camps in Poland and Germany," the report stated.

"From Jan. 1, 2001, until March 31, 2005, a total of 32 convictions of
Nazi war criminals were obtained all over the world. Of these convictions,
23 were in the United States."

In that period, Canada registered successful legal actions against only
three suspects, the report continued.

Zuroff said the lack of new prosecutions in Canada is troubling. Despite
the addition of Irwin Cotler - a longstanding advocate for strong measures
against war criminals - to the cabinet as justice minister, "there is no
political will in Canada," Zuroff said.

"I believe that Canada has basically given up. They seem to be going
through the motions and it doesn't seem to be getting anywhere... There is
an increasing feeling that the government is totally oblivious, apathetic on
this issue."

Hungary earned a B for issuing an international arrest warrant seeking the
extradition from Australia of Karoly (Charles) Zentai, who is alleged to
have participated in manhunts, persecution and murder of the Jews of
Budapest in 1944.

Zentai was discovered as part of Operation: Last Chance, a program
initiated by the centre, which offered cash rewards for information
leading to the arrest and conviction of war criminals.

Operation: Last Chance also uncovered Milivoj Asner residing in
Klagenfurt, Austria. Asner served as chief of police in Slavonska Pozega,
Croatia, throughout World War II and allegedly played an active role in
the persecution and deportation to death of hundreds of Jews, Gypsies and
Serbs.

Ukraine, meanwhile, "hasn't done a thing. They don't want to do a thing,"
Zuroff said.

As in the Baltic states, many Ukrainians consider those who collaborated
with the Nazis anti-Communist heroes, he noted.

(source: The Canadian Jewish News)







USA:

Case Marks Another Success For Nazi-Hunters


When a U.S. judge recently revoked the citizenship of a former Nazi
concentration camp guard living in Wisconsin, it marked a milestone.

The case was the 100th successfully prosecuted by the Justice Department's
Office of Special Investigations against ex-Nazis in the United States.

Josias Kumpf, 80, admitted that he served as an armed guard at the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin and at SS labor camps in
France and Poland.

He also acknowledged that he was at Trawniki, Poland, during Operation
Harvest Festival in 1943, in which Nazis gunned down some 7,000 men, women
and children.

Kumpf said he never actively or directly engaged in murder. But Judge Lynn
Adelman of the U.S. District Court of Wisconsin said in his ruling, "In
the present case, the government has demonstrated by clear, unequivocal
and convincing evidence that defendant personally assisted in the
persecution of prisoners."

Kumpf immigrated to the United States from the former Yugoslovia in 1956,
and became a U.S. citizen in 1964.

Adelman said Kumpf's actions violated the Refugee Relief Act of 1953,
which prohibits a person who had "personally advocated or assisted
persecution" from obtaining citizenship.

According to the court, Kumpf guarded a pit full of Jewish prisoners who
were "halfway alive" and "sill convuls[ing]," with instructions to "shoot
to kill" anyone who tried to escape.

"He was part of the mechanism of annihilation," said Eli Rosenbaum, the
OSI's director.

Kumpf's lawyer, Peter Rogers, has said he will appeal the decision.

Since the United States lacks the legal jurisdiction to prosecute Kumpf
for his deeds as a Nazi guard, Rosenbaum said the office intends to work
with other countries to have him tried somewhere in Europe.

OSI was founded in 1979 to investigate those who took part in
Nazi-sponsored persecution before and during World War II and who later
entered the United States illegally or fraudulently.

Rosenbaum said the office's success stems from an assiduous effort to comb
through the records of some 70,000 Europeans who entered the United States
after World War II.

"There is a common misconception that these cases are set off by Nazi
hunters or survivors," Rosenbaum said. Instead, he said, "Nearly all the
cases of the past two decades trace their origins to an aggressive,
proactive approach."

That approach runs counter to traditional criminal investigations, which
usually begin with evidence of a crime and then proceed to determine its
perpetrator.

In contrast, OSI begins its investigations by probing government records
of individuals who may have been in a position to commit crimes, and then
tries to determine if they actually did.

"It's often a needle in a haystack,'' Rosenbaum said.

To facilitate the organization's legwork, OSI employs several professional
historians, who conduct full-time research on former Nazi war criminals.

(source: Jewish Times)






GERMANY:

German-US Row Over Nazi Crime Suspects -- German officials worry the
suspects might join neo-Nazi groups

The German government is reportedly blocking the deportation of Nazi war
crimes suspects from the US back to Germany to be tried and punished.

The German interior ministry has refused to accept the suspects even
though the United States already has stripped them of their citizenship
because of their World War II history and has asked Germany to take them
in, according to a report on German public broadcaster ARD's TV magazine
"Monitor."

Germany's refusal to accept the dozen or so Nazi war crimes suspects means
that justice cannot be fully carried out in their cases as US law doesn't
allow for them to be prosecuted for crimes committed outside the country.
They entered the United States illegally after the World War II --
illegally, because they claimed on their immigration forms that they were
not collaborators with the Nazi regime during the war.

However, it was later shown in US courts that they were indeed involved.

"By and large we're talking about concentration camp guards, we're talking
about collaborators, people who were involved in indigenous police forces,
that kind of thing," said Jonathan Drimmer, the deputy director of the
Office of Special Investigations at the US Department of Justice, who has
been following the cases.

Not enough proof?

Germany, however, refuses to accept them. Asked by "Monitor" reporters for
the reason, German interior ministry officials said the US had not given
enough proof that the suspects were war criminals, despite repeated
requests from Germany.

Deportation in such US court cases requires not criminal, but just civil,
proceedings, with a burden of proof of "clear, convincing, and unequivocal
evidence."

Drimmer said that Germany should accept the deportees, "pursuant to a
written diplomatic promise that had been given in 1954 that people who had
come into the United States illegally, who had misrepresented their Nazi
past to get into the United States, would be taken back by Germany."

Interior ministry officials in Berlin countered that if Germany accepted
the deportees, they would be supported by the German social system and
possibly would involve themselves in the extreme right or anti-Semitic
political activities. The officials also said Germany couldn't accept the
deportees because of concerns about how this might affect the development
of Germany's Jewish community.

Still, according to "Monitor" staffers, there is a separate governmental
office in Germany which wants to go ahead with criminal proceedings
against the suspects -- the Central Office for the Clarification of
National Socialist Crimes, which is specifically responsible for
coordinating prosecution of former Nazis.

(source: Deutsche Welle)







AUSTRIA:

Austria Honours Nazi Hunter Wiesenthal


Austria's president honoured famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal with one
of the country's highest prizes today, recognising his achievements over
decades in tracking criminals from the Second World War.

President Heinz Fischer gave Wiesenthal the country's Golden Decoration of
Merit during a ceremony at the 96-year-old activists home.

"Wiesenthal tracked down some of the greatest Nazi war criminals and
brought them to justice," Fischer said in a statement after the ceremony.

Wiesenthal, who survived incarceration in Nazi prison camps, dedicated his
life to bringing those responsible for the Holocaust to justice.

He is perhaps best known for helping track down one-time SS leader Adolf
Eichmann, who was found in Argentina.

Eichmann was abducted by Israeli agents in 1960, tried and hanged for
crimes committed against the Jews.

(source: The Scotsman)