July 23



ISRAEL:

Anne Frank for pre-schoolers

By Yael Dar

"Anne Frank" by Josephine Poole. Illustrations: Angela Barrett.
Translation from the English: Rimona Di-Nur. Published by Keter and Ilmor,
29 pp. NIS 55



This book, "Anne Frank," which is being published in Hebrew a short time
after its publication in Great Britain, is geared to those who are not yet
independent readers - children in kindergarten and in the lower grades.
The name of the book and a superficial perusal make it clear that it is
not a diary at all. The famous opening words, "Dear Kitty," which
accompany the pages of the original diary, and in a sense turn us into
uninvited readers from a different era, are absent from it; the text is a
sequential story told in the third person in clear and simple language.
The realistic drawings by the outstanding illustrator Angela Barrett, in
which brown and gray are the dominant colors, look almost like old
photographs from Anne's life, and make the book seem like a documentary.

And in fact, the book assumes two documentary tasks: one, to record, for
the young children, the life of a person who serves in Western culture as
one of the most familiar icons of Holocaust victims; and the other, to
expose them for the first time, by means of her story, to facts from the
Holocaust period.

The decision to write a sequential story that is generously illustrated,
rather than the fragmented diary, is of course part of the rationale of an
adaptation for an audience of young readers who do not yet read and write
well. For the same reason, since it is known that children of that age
tend to identify with characters of their own age, the point of time at
which the story begins was changed to a period long before the writing of
the diary.

The first half of the book presents Anne from the time of her birth, in
June 1929, and during the first years of her life, before the war, and
shows the readers a high-spirited and mischievous girl with whom it is
easy to identify. According to the story, Anne and Margot studied in
different schools, and as pupils were very different from one another.
Unlike her studious and diligent sister, Anne was the class
mischief-maker. She liked to joke around and to make faces, and she amused
not only her friends, but her teachers, too.

The plot follows Anne's growing up in the shadow of Hitler's rise to power
and the outbreak of World War II, and in the middle of the book it begins
the story of life in the hideout in Amsterdam and the writing of the
diary. The story ends in August 1944, when the hideout was discovered and
the family was arrested. Out of consideration for the young target
audience, for the very same reasons the book's creators chose to begin the
story even before the writing of the diary, they decided against expanding
the boundaries of the book beyond it.

In order to protect the young readers, the book does not describe how the
family was sent to Auschwitz, and how Anne was sent to Bergen Belsen,
where she died of typhus a short time before the liberation. This
information has been added in a laconic style and in small print in the
"time line" at the end of the book, for the benefit of older readers. In
the book itself, Anne's death is mentioned only indirectly. It explains
that Otto Frank was the only one of the group who returned to Amsterdam
after the war, and he had nothing left in the world. But Miep remembered
the diary. She found it, handed it to Otto Frank and told him it was from
his daughter Anne. The book ends: "Anne was only a girl, and her short
life came to an end. But her story had just begun."

The question of when to begin to tell children about the Holocaust, and
what to tell young children, concerns all Western countries, and the
choices made by the various countries differ from one another. The
Holocaust story told to children by the two British artists is a cautious
one, which barely touches on the extermination. This story differs from
the way children in Israel were told about the Holocaust for almost five
decades. Until about 10 years ago, it was almost impossible to find
Holocaust stories for young children. The assumption was that exposing
kindergarten children to information about the Holocaust was liable to
arouse fears, and to be damaging.

The first telling of the Holocaust story was therefore left to the
schools, and it was usually told in connection with the events of
Holocaust Martyrs and Remembrance Day. It was a difficult story, which
described ghettos, starvation, orphans, murder, concentration camps and
extermination camps. Usually, the stories were accompanied by stories of
individual heroism, and by a "reinforcing" nationalist message such as
"from Holocaust to rebirth."

It may be that this is why Anne Frank's diary, in which the extermination
is not mentioned, and which contains no Zionist lessons, was translated
into Hebrew only in 1953, about six years after it was published in
Holland, and about three years after it was translated into German.
Apparently that is also the reason why since then, the book has not
assumed a central place in the discourse about the Holocaust, as it did in
other countries, and has been adopted here mainly as literature for
adolescents.

The decision to translate the present book into Hebrew shortly after its
publication in Great Britain reflects a new trend that we have seen in
Israel in recent years, of beginning to tell young children about the
Holocaust even before they reach school age. More and more Holocaust books
for young children have been published here recently, and it is enough to
mention three issued by major publishers: "Keeping the Promise: A Torah's
Journey," by Tami Lehman-Wilzig (Sifriyat Hapoalim, 2004), "Hamegira
Hashlishit Shel Saba" (Grandpa's Third Drawer) by Judy Tal-Kopelman
(Yedioth Ahronoth, Sifrei Hemed, 2002), and "Hasippur Shel Nili" (Nili's
Story), by Arela Sharfian (Sifriat Hapoalim, 1998).

This new trend, which includes the decision to translate "Anne Frank," in
effect expropriates the first telling of the Holocaust story from the
institutional arena and transfers it to the private arena of parents who
tell their children a story from a book. This weakens the nationalist
message that accompanied the official Holocaust story in the schools, and
replaces it with new emphases.



A new and updated version of Dr. Yael Dar's book, "Mapa Guide to
Children's Books" was published by Mapa (Hebrew)

(source: Ha'Aretz)






USA//ILLINOIS:

Nazi salute draws Illinois court charges:-


In Waukegan, an Illinois man has been charged with disorderly conduct for
giving a Nazi salute during the court appearance of a man charged with a
hate crime.

Richard Mayers, 33, is being held on $20,000 bail in Lake County, Ill.,
after being charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct, the Chicago
Tribune reported. Mayers may also be charged with contempt of court.

Authorities claim Mayers, charged last week with destroying
Holocaust-related tapes from a library, called to a man being arraigned
for an attack on two girls. Mayers then gave the Nazi salute and repeated
it before he was arrested.

As he was being led away, he directed a racial slur at a 12-year-old black
girl on a tour at the court, an official told the Tribune.

An attorney appointed for Mayers said the man's actions were protected by
the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The man Mayers called to was Pat Langballe, 29, who authorities said
attacked two girls June 16 after the girls said they were lesbians.
Langballe pleaded not guilty.

(source: United Press International)

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

USA//WISCONSIN:

Case of Ex-Nazi Living In U.S. Comes to a Head


In Racine, Wis., 2 government lawyers knocked at the door of a brick,
ranch-style house here two years ago and, getting no answer, wandered
around back. There they found an old man sitting alone on a patio chair.
He wore a cap to shield himself from the afternoon sun. He noticed that
one of the lawyers was pregnant, and he cleaned off another chair. Sit
down, he said.

Josias Kumpf had been living in the United States for nearly half a
century. He had been an American citizen for 40 years. He had married,
raised five children and worked for 35 years stuffing sausage at a factory
in Chicago. Retired and a widower, his health failing, he was living at
his daughter's home in Racine.

His visitors were prosecutors from the Justice Department. They had come
to inquire about his immigration status. There was a more urgent matter
too, but before they could get to it, they recalled, Kumpf, 80, laughed
out loud. He knew why they were there. Without prompting, he snapped them
a ``Sieg Heil'' salute. They talked for more than an hour, and Kumpf
signed a four-page, 17-point, handwritten sworn statement that the lawyers
drafted right there on the patio.

Yes, he had been a ``soldier for Hitler.'' Yes, he had served in the
feared Nazi SS corps and stood sentry over Jewish prisoners as an SS
Death's Head guard in concentration camps in Poland.

But, he added, ``I have nothing to hide. I don't do nothing to nobody. My
fingers are clean.''

In May, Kumpf became the 100th former Nazi successfully prosecuted by the
Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations. A federal judge in
Milwaukee ordered his citizenship revoked and, should his appeals fail,
Kumpf will be deported.

The Justice unit was formed in 1979 to identify, hunt down and remove
former Nazis who came into the United States after World War II. With a
staff of lawyers and historians, the office found Kumpf after matching
newfound Axis records and SS muster rolls with U.S. immigration documents.

In all such cases, federal officials are racing the clock. Just as
America's WWII veterans are dying, so are those who fought on the other
side. And so too are the concentration camp survivors who might be able to
identify their persecutors.

As memories fade, accounts of individual atrocities become murky. So it
may never be known for sure what role Kumpf played on Nov. 3, 1943, at the
Trawniki labor camp in Poland.

This much is known: Jewish prisoners had been forced to dig a network of
trenches and then lie down in them, naked. Guards machine-gunned them, a
hundred at a time, until thousands filled the earth. Nazis blared music
from the camp loudspeakers to drown out the cries all that morning, noon
and night. When it was over, up to 10,000 corpses were set ablaze.

Kumpf says that he cannot be held responsible for what happened that day.
But at least one survivor of Trawniki, Vivian Chakin of Beverly Hills,
Calif., scoffs.

Chakin, like Kumpf, immigrated to this country; she too became a U.S.
citizen and raised a family here. But she lost her parents and her only
brother in the camps. She wants Kumpf gone.

``He had a good life. He had a family,'' said Chakin, 78. ``That's what
all my people never had. That's what my brother never had. So why not let
him feel a little bit of the suffering? Shouldn't he be punished at
last?''

Kumpf and his family will not discuss his past while he is appealing the
deportation order. But his story is documented in depositions, sworn
statements, historical records and other papers that make up the
government's case to remove him.

An ethnic German, Kumpf was born April 7, 1925, in Neu Pasua, Yugoslavia.
He attended the local Lutheran church and, after less than three years in
school, he quit to help his father on their small horse farm. Like most in
the town of 8,000, the Kumpfs were poor.

He grew to be a big man, nearly 6 feet tall with brown eyes and black
hair. They called him ``Schwarze Hund,'' a nickname for a dog. ``Here is a
strong man,'' he told prosecutors last year, patting his chest at the U.S.
attorney's office in downtown Milwaukee while giving a deposition. ``I was
strong once. Strong.''

The German army marched into Neu Pasua in fall 1942. Kumpf was 17 when he
was ordered to report for duty at the local train station.

Any young man not boarding the train, Kumpf said, ``would be put up
against the wall.'' Some tried to run, and they ``were brought back before
the rest of us and shot.''

Valdis O. Lumans, a German historian retained by Kumpf's lawyer, said
Kumpf ``certainly was not one of the enthusiastic ones. He did not
volunteer. They came and took him.''

The army made Kumpf a private and gave him a gray and green SS uniform.
His hat had a skull sewn on it, as did the collar of his shirt. A Nazi
tattoo was etched under his left arm. He was issued firearms and trained
to use a rifle, a machine pistol and a light machine gun.

For 11 months, he served as a tower guard and sentry at several camps in
Germany. Thousands of prisoners arrived by truck or rail. Thousands never
left.

``I watch them, how they go,'' he said. Many went to the crematoriums. ``I
hear they put the people in and that's all,'' Kumpf testified. ``They
don't come out no more, that's what I hear.''

On Oct. 29, 1943, Kumpf and others from his Death's Head battalion boarded
trains bound for Trawniki, site of an abandoned sugar factory, in eastern
Poland. They arrived early on the morning of Nov. 3. The Nazis, pestered
by a series of small uprisings at other camps, were cracking down.

The male Jews at Trawniki already had been forced to dig trenches in a
zig-zag pattern; they were told it would provide them cover in the event
of an air raid. Before dawn, prisoners awoke to the marches and waltzes of
Johann Strauss blaring from the camp speakers.

Stripped naked and prodded with nightsticks and rubber truncheons -- some
were shot for not moving fast enough -- the prisoners were taken to the
trenches, a hundred at a time. Not all went silently. Some of them, as if
trying to drown out the music, cried: ``Shema Israel!'' -- ``Hear! O
Israel!''

When government lawyers deposed Kumpf in Milwaukee, he insisted he was not
a killer. ``I was a good boy before and I'm still a good boy now,'' he
said. ``I don't hurt nobody, and I don't even hurt the flies if they're
behaving.''

But prosecutors were not ready to confront him with Trawniki. From a legal
standpoint, proving he came to America fraudulently would be enough to get
him removed. To get him deported was more important, they said.

Kumpf's war ended in the fall of 1945, when he was freed from a Russian
prisoner-of-war camp. He had been captured by the advancing Russian army
after leaving Trawniki and being sent to fight along the eastern front. He
later joined his father in Austria, married and, on the advice of a friend
in the Chicago area, decided to make America his home.

Elizabeth B. White, chief historian for the Office of Special
Investigations, said that on March 21, 1956, Kumpf applied for an
immigrant visa to enter the United States. He visited the U.S. consulate
in Salzburg, Austria, and stated on his application that his place of
residence from 1942 to 1945 was ``German Army: Germany, Poland, France.''

During Kumpf's interview, White said, ``he did not disclose his service as
an armed SS Death's Head guard.'' Richard Bloomfield, then the U.S. vice
consul in Austria, told prosecutors the system regrettably was lax.

Although Bloomfield could not specifically recall Kumpf, he processed
countless visa applications. ``I wouldn't ever have anybody admit he was a
guard in a Nazi concentration camp,'' Bloomfield said. ``That's why they
got visas. They lied. But if I knew they had been a guard in a
concentration camp, usually that would be a reason to deny it.''

Prosecutors questioned Kumpf in Milwaukee about his visits to the Austrian
consulate.

``You did not tell them that you were a guard at Trawniki?''

``They don't ask,'' he said.

``You didn't tell them you were in the SS?''

``They didn't ask this either.''

Kumpf received an immigrant visa and, on May 25, 1956, entered the United
States via New York. He settled in Chicago, and went to work at a Vienna
Sausage factory.

Eight years later, he petitioned to become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Again, he listed his past as ``German Army, 1942 to 1945.'' Under oath,
Kumpf told a U.S. immigration examiner in Chicago that he had served only
as a combat soldier. On May 9, 1964, he received a certificate of
naturalization.

For four decades, he told prosecutors, ``I was happy in America.''

When the two lawyers came to his patio in March 2003, they knew Kumpf was
more than just a German infantryman. They knew he was a Death's Head guard
and had arrived at Trawniki just as the first naked prisoners were being
hurried into ditches.

The prosecutors asked him about Trawniki, and he admitted he was there.
But he also said he never told U.S. immigration officials that he had
belonged to the SS. ``I shut up,'' Kumpf told the prosecutors, explaining
it had always been his position to say nothing about Trawniki. Then,
according to Michelle L. Heyer, the pregnant prosecutor to whom Kumpf had
offered a chair, he made a zipping motion across his mouth.

He later would have to answer their questions about Trawniki.

Prosecutors already had reviewed interviews of other SS guards taken by
German authorities in the 1960s, when that country was beginning to
confront its past.

``The whole business was the most gruesome thing I have ever seen in my
life,'' recalled one guard, Martin Diekmann. ``I often saw that, after a
salvo was fired, Jews were only wounded and were buried still more or less
alive together with the corpses of other victims, without the wounded
receiving a so-called coup de grace.''

Diekmann added, ``I myself did not shoot.''

Aleksandr Kurisa, an SS officer from Ukraine, said: ``You could hear the
moans, crying, and screams of those doomed to death. All Jews in Trawniki
were exterminated.''

Kurisa added, ``I did not directly participate.''

Then there were the stories told by survivors.

Estera Rubinstein lay all day long among the dead. In interviews with a
Jewish historical commission soon after the war, she said:

``We were taken to the pits and I only saw SS men standing with machine
pistols and shooting the naked women in the head. The pits were already
full of corpses. Since I did not want to watch them kill me, I hid my face
in my hands and jumped into the depths with the call, `Shema Israel!' ''

She was not hit. But as bodies fell across her, she grew cold. ``I was
pressed between the corpses. ... I wanted to call out a few times, but
couldn't. It was as though I was being strangled.''

An SS guard lifted her head, checking for signs of life. But she was
smeared with blood, and he moved on. She heard others pulled out and
``finished off.'' Amid all that, her ears filled with the waltzes. Then,
when night fell and all was quiet, she said, she crawled over bodies and
fled across the fields. Weeks later, she made it to Warsaw, more than 100
miles away.

As Rubinstein was leaving Trawniki, Chakin, then 14, was arriving.

She remembers seeing the dead bodies overflowing the trenches. A few days
later, she said, a team of male prisoners was ordered to burn the dead.
When they finished, the guards shot them.

Chakin and other female prisoners were ordered to clean the barracks, and
they found a 4-year-old boy named Mark hiding in a pile of old bedding.
Mark's mother and brother had been killed earlier in the war; his father
had been shot to death after helping to burn the bodies. The Germans at
first let the women keep the young boy. For five months they mothered him,
encouraging him to hope. Then the SS took Mark away too.

``Because the children,'' she said, ``they did not keep.''

Chakin, her voice brittle with anger, added: ``So you ask me how I feel I
about him, this Josias Kumpf, and how he got to live to be 80 years old?''

At his deposition in the fifth-floor conference room at the U.S.
attorney's office, Kumpf -- now boxed in, confronted by prosecutors with
SS documents placing him at Trawniki -- maintained that he did not fire,
either. He insisted that he merely served as a perimeter guard, standing a
distance away from the killing trenches.

When he arrived by train that morning, he said, he and other SS guards ate
breakfast. Then they heard the shouts and gunfire. ``All the people were
in the hole. ... I (went) over there too and look. I turn around and I ...
sorry, it's not for me, that's what I told my friends.''

He finished his breakfast, coffee and rye bread with butter. He said he
was ordered to watch. He was told to make sure no one escaped.

``I was watching them shoot some people,'' he said. ``Some people was shot
and not good enough so they was still able to move, you know. That's what
we have to watch so that they don't go no place.''

Then, Kumpf said, ``Everybody was excited because so many dead ones to
see, you know. I was not excited. I feel sorry for the people.''

On May 10, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman in Milwaukee revoked Kumpf's
citizenship. He ruled that Kumpf had misrepresented himself to immigration
authorities. ``American citizenship,'' the judge said, ``is bestowed only
upon those who meet fundamental standards imposed by law.''

The judge further ruled that Kumpf's mere presence at Trawniki meant he
``personally advocated or assisted'' in the massacre, and as a result, was
ineligible for a U.S. visa in the first place.

Kumpf's attorney, Peter Rogers, said he was appealing the ruling before
the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Should his client be forced out,
Rogers said, ``it is murky territory on where he can go. A lot of
countries won't take people with his circumstances. He'd have to find a
country that would take him.''

While he waits, his fate all but out of his hands, Kumpf often has trouble
sleeping, frightened awake by nightmares. For years he had hoped to keep
his secret about Trawniki, and in fact he told prosecutors that he never
even told his wife or children.

But now, he said, it is too late. ``I'm in trouble, more in trouble'' than
ever, he said.

(source: Los Angeles Times)







UNITED KINGDOM:

Reporters Nazi challenge is upheld by information chief

A challenge over the way the Home Office dealt with a request from The
People for details of Nazi war criminals living in the UK has been upheld
by the Information Commissioner.

And the department, which is one of the worst in central government for
complying with FoI requests, has promised to smarten up its act following
the successful appeal.

People reporter David Brown (right)n emailed his FoI request to the Home
Office on 19 January, asking how many Nazi war criminals are living in the
UK.

Brown thought the answer could make a good story to tie in with the 60th
anniversaries of both the liberation of Auschwitz and VE day.

Government departments are required under the Act to provide a response
within 20 days.

But Brown heard nothing until 4 March, when he was informed that the
information would cost more than 600 to retrieve and the Home Office had a
policy of not complying with requests that exceeded this limit unless
there were exceptional circumstances.

Three months later the very information he had asked for was released
separately in a Parliamentary written answer by Home Office minister Andy
Burnham, who revealed that several hundred Nazi war criminals could still
be living in Britain.

Brown decided to appeal the matter to the Information Commissioner's
Office, and this week the ICO ruled that the Home Office should have
replied to him within 20 days.

Brown said he has been told by the Home Office that "procedures are now
being enhanced across the organisation to ensure that statutory guidelines
are met".

He added: "I am glad the Home Office is currently changing its procedures
for dealing with the implementation of the FoI Act because its approach to
my request was slapdash to put it mildly.

"Officials initially indicated they could help, then dragged their heels
and finally told me two months later they could not comply because it
would take them too long to dig out the relevant information. The whole
thing was an inconvenience to them and they just wanted it to go away. The
attitude was completely wrong.

"I find it staggering that information about suspected Nazi war criminals
living in Britain was so difficult for the Home Office to find and reveal.

"What was even more galling was that the relevant details finally came out
in a Parliamentary answer and those dealing with my request did not even
have the courtesy to let me know this would be happening.

"In the light of my experience, I would recommend to journalists that if
they are having problems with Government departments then they will
probably have more luck accessing what they want by asking an MP to table
a question in the House than waiting for civil servants to respond under
the FoI Act."

A league table revealed last month that the Home Office was one of the
worst performing Government departments on responding to FoI requests. It
revealed that just 28 per cent of the 619 "resolvable" FoI requests it
received in the first three months of this year were granted in full.

(source: Press Gazette)





GERMANY:

Nazi Jibes a Recipe for Disaster


German politicians know that using words loaded with Nazi ideology or
making comparisons to people or things from the Nazi era will land them in
hot water and possibly end their careers. So why do they keep doing it?

Earlier this month, a prominent member of the governing Social Democrats
(SPD) stirred up a political hornets' nest when he likened a phrase in the
opposition Christian Democrats' (CDU) election platform to a notorious
Nazi slogan. Ludwig Stiegler is known for being outspoken, but his
comparison of the CDU's job creation slogan, "What creates work is good
for society," with the phrase that often appeared above Nazi concentration
camps, "Work sets you free," was a step too far. His Nazi comparison drew
widespread condemnation, and not just from within the CDU.

"Democratic parties should not clash using slogans of far-right parties or
of the Nazis," SPD chairman Franz Mntefering said. "That is not our
language."

They shouldn't, but they so often do. Stiegler's misstep was hardly an
isolated incident. Only weeks before, veteran politician and leader of
Germany's new left-wing party Oskar Lafontaine caused an uproar by using
the Nazi-tainted term "Fremdarbeiter" (foreign workers) in a speech on
unemployment.

Long list

Looking back at German postwar politics, it's not difficult to amass a
whole catalog of Nazi comparisons and gaffes, intentional and otherwise.
In many cases, the incidents had serious consequences for the politician
in question. One of the most frequently cited examples is that of former
Justice Minister Herta Dubler-Gmelin (SPD). During the 2002 campaign, she
compared US President George W. Bush's tactics on Iraq to those of Adolf
Hitler, effectively ending her career.

Knowing just how sensitive and aware Germans are when it comes to talking
about the Nazi past, the long list of similar blunders is bewildering. Why
don't politicians just ban all Nazi references and comparisons from their
vocabulary? Why do they tread such risky terrain?

"There are two main reasons," said Dr. Martin Wengeler, a linguist at
Heinrich Heine University in Dsseldorf and co-author of a book about the
history of controversial terms in the German language.

"The first is to gain attention in politics, especially during election
campaigns, when it happens more frequently. It's a way of hitting out at
political opponents, to defame them. The second reason is that the Nazi
past still plays a role in the political discourse today. Political
rhetoric often involves looking back on the past, using the past to serve
as a warning, perhaps. The Nazi past is a very dramatic way of sharpening
a debate."

Importance of 1968

The president of the central council of Jews in Germany, Paul Spiegel,
once told ZDF television that he attributed the frequency with which Nazi
terms and comparisons pop up in political discourse to the weakening of
taboos around the subject.

"I've come to the conclusion that inhibitions in the communication of
ideas we thought were no longer part of everyday life in Germany are lower
now. People are more prepared now to give voice to hurtful things then
they were in the past," Spiegel said.

But Wengeler said his research tells a different story. In the period
immediately after the war, he said, Nazi comparisons were made and words
used that didn't draw the kind of condemnation they would today. The
turning point, according to Wengele, was the student movement of 1968,
which marked a change in how Germans dealt with the past.

"After 1968, the sensibilities surrounding the Nazi past became much
stronger, and there were certain things that you just couldnt say anymore,
which was a good thing," Wengeler said.

The result was a new era of political correctness, which today is
inspiring some politicians -- particularly from the far-right -- to rebel.
A recent high-profile example took place on the 60th anniversary of the
Allied bombing of Dresden, an event many from the far-right in Germany
insisted on referring to as a "bombing holocaust" in an effort to reclaim
a word that people the world over singularly associate with the Nazis'
killing of the Jews.

What's in a word?

After the war, linguists concerned with the "de-Nazification" of the
German language engaged in countless debates about which words ought to be
struck from popular use, and which were still permissible.

"Everyday words such as 'Betreuung,' (to care for) were discussed, because
the Nazis used that word to talk about how prisoners in concentration
camps were treated," Wengeler said. "Most linguists agree that such a word
can be used again. But when there are particular words that have a strong
association with Nazi crimes -- for example, 'entartete Kunst,' which is
how the Nazis described art they banned --then its not okay to use them in
political discourse today."

Many politicians who resort to Nazi-tainted terms or comparisons to make a
point or score one against an opponent defend themselves in the aftermath
by saying the word just slipped out in the heat of the moment. For
Wengeler, that excuse is unacceptable.

"It is part of our national political culture that such things don't just
slip out," he said.

Functioning democracy

Given the history of Nazi gaffes in German postwar politics, it's
reasonable to assume that it's just a matter of time before the next
scandal hits the headlines. But even that certainty has a positive
element, Wengeler said.

"The fact that such a big deal is made when this sort of thing happens is
a sign that a culture of defamation is not encouraged in Germany. Its a
sign of a functioning democratic culture."

(source: Deutsche Welle)



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


Germans Join Nazi Hunt


Leading members of Germany's Jewish community have welcomed a decision by
foreign minister Joschka Fischer to order a warts-and-all examination of
his country's foreign service during the Nazi regime - a painful act of
self-examination opposed by career diplomats.

The inquiry, which will also investigate the practice of employing former
Nazis long after the war was over, is set to cast an unfavourable light
upon many and show the extent of knowledge about, or involvement in, the
Final Solution.

Moshe Zimmerman, an Israeli academic from the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem will be one of five historians serving on the independent
commission tasked to probe the foreign ministry.

But old-school-tie diplomats have resisted past attempts to rake over the
ghosts of the past - one ambassador was sacked earlier this year when he
criticised Fischer for removing obituaries of diplomats from an internal
newsletter if they were Nazi party members.

But the practice of employing one-time Nazis didnt end with the war.
Historians have long quipped, not without substance, that one could find
more former party members in the newly-established German diplomatic
service after World War II than you could in its predecessor during
Hitler's Third Reich.

Now comes a bitter reckoning with the past. Klaus Scharioth,
undersecretary in the foreign ministry, said: "We need to look into the
history of the foreign office under the Nazis in a systematic manner."

A spokesman for the Central Council of Jews in Germany haild the foreign
ministry's research into its Nazi past and the fact that an Israeli
scholar will join the panel. He said: "Anything that sheds light on the
Nazi era is to be welcomed."

Leading Berlin Jewish liberal, Rabbi Walter Rotschild, welcomed the
decision too - but with a caveat. He said: "I am all in favour of
clarification of the past and welcome it. But I would greet with joy a
similar decision in the British foreign ministry. We all know things were
done that have never been fully explained from that time."

The deciding factor for Fischer came when he refused to publish the
obituary of Franz Nsslein, a former Nazi prosecutor in German-occupied
Czechoslovakia where he was involved in numerous death sentences handed
down to the enemies of Nazi Germany. Many of his victims were Jews.

After the war, a court in Prague sentenced him to 20 years in prison for
war crimes, but he was released after serving only seven years and went on
to join the foreign service.

Historians believe the foreign ministry was steeped in the knowledge of,
and in some cases involvement in, the Holocaust. Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Hitler's foreign minister, was hanged for war crimes at Nurmberg while one
of his under-secretaries, Dr Martin Luther, was the agency's
representative at the 1942 Wannsee Conference in Berlin where the plans
for the extermination of the Jews were finalised.

(source: Totall Jewish (UK) )