August 2



USA//ILLINOIS:

Feds Press Alleged Nazi Ally


An aging Chicago carpenter should be stripped of his U.S. citizenship
because he was a member of a police unit that helped the Nazis round up
Ukrainian Jews for forced labor and death camps during World War II,
federal attorneys argue.

"He acquiesced in conduct contrary to civilization and decency,"
government attorney Gregory Gordon told U.S. District Judge Samuel
Der-Yeghiayan as a civil trial against Osyp Firishchak began Monday.

Firishchak, 86, came to the United States after World War II, settled in
Chicago and obtained American citizenship. But the Justice Department's
Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations says he lied on his visa
application and broke other rules.

The government says he joined the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and helped in
widespread roundups of Jews who were sent to forced labor camps and death
camps after the Germans occupied Ukraine in 1941.

If Der-Yeghiayan rules against him, Firishchak would be stripped of his
citizenship. The government then likely would seek to deport him.

Defense attorney James Maher III told the judge that Firishchak was never
a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and that there is no proof he
did any of the things the government claims. Maher also said there is
nothing to suggest Firishchak was dishonest on his visa application.

The government's first witness, Holocaust researcher Dieter Pohl,
described what happened to the Jewish population in the city of Lviv at
the hands of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.

"There was constant violence against the Jews," Pohl said.

Firishchak's name surfaced after the fall of the Soviet Union when the
newly independent Ukraine opened its archives to Holocaust researchers.

Government attorneys acknowledged they have only a smattering of direct
evidence that specific acts allegedly were committed by Firishchak. But
they say they can prove he was part of the auxiliary police throughout the
war and that the unit was instrumental in carrying out the Holocaust in
Ukraine.

(source: Associated Press)



USA:

Wartime codebreakers missed clues to Holocaust


Coded Nazi messages intercepted by Britain could have exposed the scope of
the Holocaust years before the liberation of the death camps, but Allied
codebreakers failed to fully understand the information they had,
according to United States government analysis of intelligence from the
era.
In what is being likened to the intelligence failures before the September
11 attacks, German military and police communications from as early as
1941 provided lurid but fragmentary accounts of the massacres and
deportations, and later even statistics on the numbers killed in
concentration camps.

According to the report titled Eavesdropping on Hell, by Robert Hanyok, a
historian with the National Security Agency's centre for cryptologic
history, British and US efforts to sort evidence were hampered by case
backlogs and a shortage of translators, as well as the two allies'
reluctance to share information about German communications.
According to a summary of the report in the New York Times, one of the
most harrowing messages codebreakers overlooked was intercepted on January
11 1943 and detailed the 1,274,166 Jews killed under Operation Reinhard at
four death camps - Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka - during 1942.

The report notes: "The message itself contained only the identifying
letters for the death camps followed by the numerical totals."

The only clue that they were death camps was the reference to Operation
Reinhard, a tribute to the SS general Reinhard Heydrich, who had been
charged with organising the Nazis' plan to eliminate Europe's Jews. But
that was probably "unknown at the time" to the British codebreakers, the
report says.

However, British analysts must have considered the message important,
because it was classified "Most Secret" and marked: "To be kept under lock
and key. Never to be removed from the office."

The report also suggests that anti-semitism may have created an atmosphere
that affected how the intelligence was handled.

"Both President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill were often hampered
in their limited efforts to alleviate some of the suffering by the general
anti-semitic sentiment in both nations," the report says.

"Just how much British signals intelligence analysts, either individually
or as a group, held this attitude is unknown. And how much it affected
their reactions to the intelligence is likewise unknown. But it must be
considered in any discussion about how Comint [communications
intelligence] was received."

One particularly chilling memorandum, written by a British official on
September 11 1941, refers to German massacres in the Soviet Union and
concludes: "The fact that the police are killing all Jews that fall into
their hands should now be sufficiently well appreciated. It is not
therefore proposed to continue reporting these butcheries unless so
requested."

Mr Hanyok attributed the British official's response to "either his
inability to appreciate the implications of the massacres, or his
willingness to ignore what the Nazis were doing".

The one area where the report does absolve the Allied codebreakers from
blame is for not having obtained evidence of the Nazis' genocidal plans
before the war. The author observes: "Allied communications intelligence
discovered nothing of the prewar and early wartime high-level Nazi
planning for the general campaign against Europe's Jews and other groups
...

"Orders to carry out these operations were not communicated in a means
such as radio that could be intercepted by Allied monitoring stations."

Historians quoted by the New York Times were divided on whether the missed
intelligence could have made a difference. Peter Black, a senior historian
at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, told the newspaper: "Even
in the unlikely event that the decipherers and translators had figured out
what this all meant, there was nothing the Allies could have done
militarily."

"If they announced it, would it have saved lives?" asked Aaron Breitbart,
a senior researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. "I
think so, because there would have been greater pressure to bomb Auschwitz
in 1944, at least the rail lines on bridges.

"But saving Jews was not a priority. Jewish leaders were told that the
best way to stop the Holocaust was to defeat Germany."

(source: Guardian)




ENGLAND:

UK 'didn't want' Ukrainian Nazis - The Nazis recruited Ukrainians after
invading the USSR in 1941


British officials were very uneasy about the decision to allow an entire
Ukrainian SS division to settle in the UK in 1947, newly released files
show.

The papers from Britain's National Archives deal with 8,000 Ukrainians who
had been recruited by the Nazis to fight the Soviet Union.

"What little we know of their war record is bad," commented Beryl Hughes,
an official at the UK Home Office.

Police are investigating some of the former SS men for alleged war crimes.

Repatriation fears

The Ukrainians had fought in eastern Europe and surrendered in Austria.
They were being held in British camps in Italy.

When in 1947 the Italian government signed a treaty with the USSR, that
meant the soldiers could be repatriated.

But the UK Foreign Office was anxious to thwart their repatriation,
fearing massacres or rioting if the Ukrainians tried to resist.

Initially the home secretary decided they should not be given refuge in
the UK, the BBC's Sanchia Berg reports.

But a year later he had accepted that they could stay, arguing that they
were good workers and there was a labour shortage in agriculture. It was
also far more difficult now to send them home.

The Home Office has confirmed that police have identified several hundred
members of the SS division who may still be alive and investigations into
possible war crimes are continuing.

The US Justice Department believes some of the veterans may have been
guards at a notorious labour camp and that some may have been involved in
the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The Polish government believes some were involved in a massacre there,
while the Slovak government has questions about wartime atrocities on its
territory.

(source: BBC)