June 22



ITALY:

Italy Nazi massacre 'premeditated'


A Nazi massacre of 560 men, women and children in a Tuscan village in 1944
was premeditated and cannot be excused as officers following orders, Italian
prosecutors told a military court on Wednesday.

Ten former German officers, now all in their 80s, are on trial in the port
of La Spezia over the shootings in Sant'Anna di Stazzema, one of Italy's
worst civilian massacres during World War Two.

"We cannot tolerate just any behavior on the grounds that they were
following orders. Obedience cannot be blind," public prosecutor Marco De
Paolis told the court in his concluding remarks ahead of a verdict
expected later on Wednesday.

"These men were not novices. They had fought on the eastern front...These
were not people, though they were young, who did not know what they were
doing," he told the courtroom packed with victims' children and
grandchildren.

De Paolis has asked for the men, who have not traveled to Italy for the
trial, to be given life imprisonment.

"We cannot accept that Sant'Anna was just something that happened when
things got out of hand. It was a premeditated massacre of civilians," said
lawyer Paolo Trombetti, representing village authorities.

Defense lawyers have argued the former officers were obliged to carry out
orders and were threatened with death, and that the men had believed they
were traveling to the hill town for regular anti-partisan search
operations.

They say the officers' actions were not premeditated or organized. Without
that, the men could at most be found guilty of crimes for which the
statute of limitations has expired.

Massacre ignored

The massacre of villagers in Sant'Anna, in the early hours of August 12,
1944, was one of many civilian shootings that occurred as German troops
retreated to the so-called "Gothic Line" of defense that cut across Italy.

However, they came to light only a decade ago, when a filing cabinet full
of witness statements was found in Rome.

Italy was spurred to reopen investigations into Nazi war crimes in 1996,
when a military court found former SS captain Erich Priebke guilty of
involvement in another 1944 massacre but released him under the statute of
limitations.

Italy's highest court ordered a retrial and he was sentenced to life
imprisonment in 1998 for his role in the slaughter of 335 men and boys at
the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome.

Even if the 10 former officers are sentenced on Wednesday, they are
unlikely to spend the rest of their lives in jail. Germany does not
extradite its own citizens and they are too old to serve prison sentences
in Italy.

However, prosecutors and relatives said the trial itself served to
acknowledge guilt for a massacre ignored for decades.

"The verdict will be relevant," said survivor Enio Mancini, who was six at
the time of the massacre. "But we had asked for two things -- justice, as
far as it is still possible, but also truth. The trial has already helped
us with that."

(source: CNN)



GERMANY:

Comic strip take on Holocaust angers Jews


Jewish leaders in Germany are deeply upset by attempts to use comic strips
to depict the horrors of Auschwitz.

Two new comic books confront young Germans with the most graphic accounts
of their country's Nazi past.

"You think it's just going to be another story," said Andreas Munch, 11,
"and then, pow!"

In the books, German officers are shown screaming at prisoners as they
pile up corpses retrieved from the camp gas chambers.

"All this has to be converted into cinders and ashes by the evening!" says
the speech bubble in a story called Auschwitz by the French artist Pascal
Croci.

A second comic book, Yossel, by US artist Joe Kubert, shows a boy being
electrocuted as he tries to escape beneath the wires of a concentration
camp fence.

No concession is made to the sensibilities of the young readers -- the
dead bodies are portrayed as graphically as if they were the victims of
Batman or some other fictional superhero.

The cartoon versions of the Holocaust, published this week, are intended
to introduce younger Germans to the tragic fate of Jews.

The Holocaust is taught at all German schools and visits to a
concentration camp are compulsory for older children, but pupils complain
that the subject is presented too dryly and too cautiously.

Now Ehapa, a German firm that also publishes Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck,
has translated the French and US works to make the subject more
accessible.

The project has sparked a nervous and sometimes angry response in Germany.

"A comic strip is not the appropriate form," says Ezra Cohn, 64, of the
Jewish community in Dusseldorf. "The subject is too serious to portray in
this way."

Paul Spiegel, 67, chairman of the German Jewish community, said: "We will
have to watch very carefully indeed whether this kind of treatment really
does address the people it is aimed for."

The fear in the Jewish community is that comic books could end up as
collectors' items for far-Right activists.

Crude anti-Semitic comics already circulate in the neo-Nazi underground in
Germany and Italy.

Camp commanders depicted as monsters in the comic strips are often
perversely attractive to teenagers with ultra-nationalist sympathies.

The first attempt to break the Holocaust comic strip taboo, Maus by Art
Spiegelman, tried to get round this problem by drawing Jews as mice, Poles
as pigs and Nazis as cats.

In the US, Spiegelman won a Pulitzer prize, but in Germany, until the
mid-1990s, police were still confiscating posters displaying Spiegelman's
Jewish mouse hero over the Nazi swastika symbol.

Croci's work comes the closest to the conventional comic book form, and as
such has attracted the sharpest criticism. "Can you really show the
savagery of the Holocaust as a comic?" asked the newspaper Bild.

Croci's argument is that Auschwitz has to be placed in the framework of
current politics and be described in a form that leaves little scope for
the imagination. It is time, he believes, to be direct with the younger
generation.

"Growing up, I was repeatedly told, 'You are too young to understand',"
Croci said.

(source: The Times)




CANADA:

Minister moves to revoke citizenship of war crime suspects


Citizenship and Immigration Minister Joe Volpe announced last week he
would ask the federal cabinet to revoke the citizenship of five Nazi war
crime suspects.

Volpe will ask cabinet to strip the citizenship of Helmut Oberlander,
Vladimir Katriuk, Jacob Fast, Michael Baumgartner and Wasyl Odynsky. Some
of their cases have been languishing in the legal system for up to six
years, ever since Federal Court judges found they had obtained Canadian
citizenship by lying about their participation in the Nazi killing
machinery.

Volpe's announcement came a few days after a parliamentary committee
recommended major changes to Canadas citizenship laws - steps critics
contend would make bringing Nazi war criminals to justice even more
difficult than it already is.

The committee, chaired by Kitchener-Waterloo MP Andrew Telegdi,
recommended that the standard of proof needed to strip a suspect of
citizenship should be raised from a civil proceedings "balance of
probabilities" to a criminal courts "beyond a reasonable doubt."

The committee also urged that the entire citizenship revocation process be
shifted to the courts and that trial judges be given several penalty
options, including revocation, jail or a fine.

Currently, the Federal Court determines whether a suspect obtained
citizenship by fraud, but it's up to the federal cabinet to actually
revoke citizenship.

Volpe reportedly will seek to revoke the citizenship of all five Nazi
collaborators "within weeks."

The governments new-found vigour was applauded by Jewish organizations.

"I'm glad these cases in the pipeline are proceeding," said Ed Morgan,
president of Canadian Jewish Congress. "These cases have been on [the
minister's] plate for some time, and even before that, on his
predecessors'."

"It's high time these cases were addressed," said David Matas, a
spokesperson for B'nai Brith Canada.

Matas said the cases have been tied up thanks to a "one-person crusade to
stop this process" led by Telegdi.

Telegdi, who immigrated to Canada from Hungary as a child, "has bamboozled
people and paralyzed the system," Matas said.

The MP has said Oberlander has done nothing wrong, but the court record
shows Oberlander was an interpreter in a mobile Nazi killing unit.

"They went into a place and said, 'Where are the Jews,' and they'd round
up the Jews and kill them," Matas said.

German Einsatzgruppen units relied on local populations for information to
find Jews. Thats where interpreters came in. "Oberlander was an essential
cog in the machine of death," Matas added.

Telegdi "should approach [the issue] from the perspective of bringing Nazi
war criminals to justice. His approach is from the wrong end of the
telescope," Matas added.

Telegdi, meanwhile, told The CJN that the committee operated on the
assumption that any changes to immigration legislation must comply with
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

"Essentially, what we're saying is that the same rights should apply to a
citizen [in a citizenship case] as to a shoplifter... We feel the loss of
citizenship was equal or much greater in terms of consequences than
shoplifting."

The committee also felt the process should be taken out of the hands of
cabinet, which is subject to political considerations, and handed to the
courts, he added.

Telegdi said that under the current system, no court has pronounced any
suspects to be war criminals, merely that on the balance of probabilities,
they misrepresented facts when they came to Canada.

Meanwhile, the German Canadian Congress (Ontario), the Ukrainian Canadian
Congress and the Canadian Islamic Congress all endorsed the committees
recommendations.

In a statement, the UCC said, "Canada's war crimes program has abused the
citizenship revocation process for political purposes, which has led to
fundamental breaches of individual rights and freedoms and has brought
Canada's justice system into disrepute."

Commenting on the report, Volpe said the current system is fair." Somebody
doesn't just say, 'You've lied, so therefore you've lost.' Everything is
responsible and accountable," the Ottawa Sun quoted him as saying.

Hedy Fry, a member of the parliamentary committee, wrote a dissenting
opinion, saying "revocation is not prosecution of a crime" and the
standard should remain the civil "balance of probabilities" test. She also
rejected penalties other than citizenship revocation in cases of
misrepresentation.

A government source confirmed that Fry's view closely mirrors that of the
minister.

Thornhill MP Susan Kadis called the committee report "a backward step in
many areas."

Echoing Fry's dissenting view, she said the Supreme Court of Canada has
ruled that the balance of probabilities is an appropriate standard in
revocation cases.

"This report is fundamentally flawed and very seriously puts at risk the
whole objective of ensuring that we do not provide a safe haven to those
persons involved or complicit in war crimes, genocide or crimes against
humanity," Kadis stated.

Morgan noted the current system usually works in a suspect's favour. If
the
court rules against them, they can appeal to cabinet, but if the Crown
loses, it has no recourse for appeal.

He said immigrants don't have a right to live in Canada, but are given
permission to do so.

If they defraud the system, that permission can be revoked, he added.

Morgan suggested that any changes to the legislation should only affect
future cases, while cases already in the system should be dealt with under
current rules.

(source: The Canadian Jewish News)