Sept. 5



USA//IOWA:

Des Moines starts Holocaust educational program


Des Moines is the second U-S city to start a Holocaust educational
program in schools and the public library.

The program includes 52-thousand videotaped testimonies from Holocaust
survivors, liberators and other witnesses -- including 17 Iowans.

Movie director Steven Spielberg's group -- the Survivors of the Shoah
Visual History Foundation -- was the driving force behind the project. The
group collected interviews in 56 countries and 32 languages.

The project took more than eight years to put together.

The testimonies are available at the Des Moines Public Library and all
middle and high schools will get information from the foundation.

Jackson Mississippi was the first city in the U-S to get the program.

(source: WHO TV News)

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USA//CALIFORNIA:

Rustic Canyon Ruin May Be a Former Nazi Compound----Behind a rusted
wrought-iron gate, far below hillside mansions, sit traces of a colony
that thrived in seclusion in the 1930s and '40s.


Southern California has been the cradle to many odd cults, credos, utopias
and dystopias. Among the most mysterious are the ruins of a Rustic Canyon
enclave once known as Murphy Ranch.

The mansions of Hollywood elite - Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Cosby, Steven
Spielberg - sit in splendor atop the ridges of the canyon in the Santa
Monica Mountains. But far below, on its secluded and woodsy floor, stand
the
eerily burned-out and graffiti-scarred remains of concrete and steel
structures, underground tunnels and stairways leading from the top of the
canyon to the bottom.

Wrapped in canyon lore, the remnants are believed by one local historian to
be those of a small, short-lived colony of Nazis. Although no one can say
with certainty who lived there or what they did, Randy Young, a former
commercial photographer turned book publisher, said his research indicates
that it could have been home to up to 40 local Nazis from about 1933 to
1945.

"It's extremely difficult to connect all the dots; too many have been
erased," said Young, who has studied local history. He learned about the
ranch while growing up in Rustic Canyon. His mother, Betty Lou Young,
included the Nazi theory in her 1975 book on the history of the canyon.

Young continued his mother's research into the enclave, relying heavily on
decades of oral histories, architectural plans, documents and letters to
come to his conclusion that it was a Nazi colony. The strongest links, he
said, come from the oral histories of canyon residents who told him that
armed guards patrolled the canyon dressed in the uniform worn by Silver
Shirts, a paramilitary group modeled after Hitler's brownshirts.

Also, Young interviewed the now-deceased John Vincent, a UCLA music
professor who negotiated the sale of the property in 1948 and told him it
had been a commune for Nazi sympathizers.

Yet most details about the colony's origins are untraceable, and parts of
the story have taken on characteristics of a legend.

Currently the floor of upper Rustic Canyon is a popular hiking parkland
owned by the city of Los Angeles. Backing up against Topanga State Park,
over the years it has been home to a Boy Scout camp and an artists'
colony.

Behind the locked and rusted wrought-iron entrance gates and flagstone wall
stand the traces of a small community that had the capacity to grow its own
food, generate its own electricity and dam its own water to cut itself off
from the rest of California.

A debris-filled concrete water tank, twice as big as a typical swimming
pool, was used to store water from a creek that runs through the canyon. A
dirt roadway from the entrance leads down the canyon to the charred and
twisted steel remains of a garage and workshop with second-story living
quarters. A power station with foot-thick walls shared space with a bomb
shelter. Up and down the length of the canyon rise eight crumbling, narrow
stairways of at least 500 steps each.

According to Los Angeles County records, a Jessie M. Murphy purchased the
50-acre parcel in Rustic Canyon in 1933. That's how the place came to be
known as Murphy Ranch.

Young suspects that Murphy was a front name used by the Nazi group to buy
the property. There are no other records of Murphy, nor does the name
surface in stories passed along by old-time canyon residents, Young said.

A man known through oral histories only as "Herr Schmidt" supposedly ruled
the place and claimed to possess metaphysical powers. He purportedly used
the ranch to introduce his Nazi-inspired political philosophy.

Gloria Ricci Lothrop, a Cal State Northridge emeritus professor of
California history, who is familiar with Young's book and the theory that
the canyon was a onetime Nazi colony, said the idea was not farfetched:
"Given the degree of activity among Nazi sympathizers in Southern
California, such an enterprise would not be so surprising."

For example, she said, one group was called Friends of the New Germany.
Another was a local chapter of the Silver Shirts. The group operated in 22
states, numbering between 15,000 and 50,000 members, with Southland
chapters in Baldwin Park, Huntington Park, Inglewood, Long Beach and Los
Angeles.

The groups considered Southern California, especially Hollywood, paramount
in their campaign against Jews. Propaganda was distributed nationwide from
L.A. In 1934, a congressional subcommittee investigation in L.A. examined
the pro-Nazi movement.

"This place fit the mold perfectly, secluded away from civilization," Young
said.

The man known as Herr Schmidt apparently attracted a wealthy couple to his
colony. The couple lived at Murphy Ranch and bankrolled its construction,
paying millions for architectural plans, buildings and landscaping.

In 1934, architect Welton Becket - who would later design the Capitol
Records building and the Music Center - was hired to design a small stone
house and several outer buildings on the ranch. The name of his supposed
client, Jessie Murphy, appeared on all his drawings, according to Young.

The hillsides were terraced with 3,000 nut, citrus, fruit and olive trees,
and fitted with water pipes, sprinklers and an elaborate greenhouse. A high
barbed-wire fence discouraged intruders.

Young's research led him to Will Rogers' archives, where he found a letter
written by Rogers' attorney demanding that the couple stop building a series
of dams and culverts to divert the creek. No other letters on the topic
appear in the files.

In 1938, a Rustic Canyon resident, novelist Lewis Browne, an English-born
Jew and outspoken critic of the Nazis, found that vandals had smeared a
4-foot white swastika on his door.

Browne said he had received several threatening letters and crank notes
before the swastika appeared.

By 1941, plans were underway for a four-story, 22-bedroom mansion, with five
libraries and several dining rooms, designed by architect Paul Williams.

But the blueprints never made it off the drawing board. "I think it's rather
ironic that they went to a black architect," Young said. Williams was "only
one of a few architects at the time who could design something on that grand
of a scale," he said.

On Dec. 8, 1941, a day after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, law enforcement
officials stormed the compound and made some arrests, according to the oral
histories. But Young could find no other details about the event.

At the time, many German American detainees were taken to makeshift camps
at Terminal Island and La Tuna Canyon in Sun Valley, where they were
interrogated before being sent to out-of-state barracks-like facilities
under military guard, according to a paper written by Lothrop titled
"Southern California and the Rise of the New Germany."

In 1948 the couple sold the place to the Huntington Hartford Foundation,
which combined it with adjacent property and formed an artists' colony.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and scholar Mark Van Doren, artist Andrew
Wyeth and writer Christopher Isherwood lived and worked there.

The city of Los Angeles bought the property in 1973.

Upper Rustic Canyon can be reached by a two-mile hike from Will Rogers State
Park in Pacific Palisades or down Sullivan Fire Road off Casale Road.

(source: Los Angeles Times)





SWITZERLAND:

Swiss banks trying to improve image


Among the many flights of fancy in The DaVinci Code, the one that sticks
in the craw of Swiss bankers concerns the Paris branch of the fictional
Depository Bank of Zurich, where the two lead characters go to open a
safe-deposit box.

"Switzerland's reputation for secrecy in banking had become one of the
country's most lucrative exports," the novel's narrator intones. "Because
deposits were protected from police inspection by privacy laws and were
attached to numbered accounts rather than people's names, thieves could
rest easily knowing their stolen goods were safe and could never be traced
to them."

That's the classic view of Swiss banks: a haven for criminals and
dictators to stash their ill-gotten gains out of reach of authorities. But
these days it's utter hogwash, Swiss bankers and independent analysts say.

Having weathered the 1990s scandals over Nazi gold and Holocaust victims'
accounts, leaders of Switzerland's centuries-old banking industry, which
manages a third of all internationally invested private wealth, these days
find themselves trying to convince a post-9/11 world that Switzerland is
not a sanctuary for funny money, terrorist or otherwise.

"Probably the most pervasive myth is that you can open an account
anonymously," said James Nason, head of international communications for
the Swiss Bankers Association here. "You can't. Under Swiss law, when you
open an account - and that includes numbered accounts - the bank has to
verify your identity and also establish the identity of the beneficial
owner, if you deposit funds on behalf of somebody else."

Part of the problem is that the fictions are based on slivers of reality:
One of the reasons that 338 Swiss banks manage an estimated $2.3 trillion
in wealth is that the Swiss have always placed a premium on banking
secrecy, a policy that is widely believed to abet tax evasion. And it is
possible to have only a number, not a name, listed on your Swiss bank
statements, although your name remains on file at the bank.

But while Swiss banks won't divulge client information to tax collectors -
tax evasion is not a crime in Switzerland - they have long drawn the line
at felonies involving money-laundering, drugs, political corruption, and
terrorism financing. Swiss banks can and do furnish account information to
Swiss prosecutors, on their own or at the request of foreign governments.

"If the Swiss attorney general or a judge enters your bank wanting
information in connection with a crime, banking secrecy simply
disappears," Nason said.

That confidentiality was enshrined into law in 1934, when it became a
crime for bankers to disclose client information. At the time, Swiss
bankers say, the law was used to protect Germans, including Jews, from
Gestapo spies. Under the Nazis, holding a foreign bank account was
punishable by death.

But beginning with a domestic scandal in 1977, Switzerland has
progressively tightened its rules, and it now has "know your customer"
regulations that require banks to file reports if an account holder
deposits what seems like an improbable amount of money, given the
customer's financial profile. Swiss banks also are required to monitor
"politically exposed persons," a polite term for government officials from
countries with a history of corruption.

Switzerland has been a leader in efforts to return the proceeds of money
stolen by corrupt dictators, said Charles Intriago, a former U.S. federal
prosecutor who runs the Miami-based Money Laundering Alert newsletter.

"The Swiss have made a lot of progress," he said.

Dirty money still gets through, of course, but the Swiss have gotten
better at rooting it out. In 1999, the Swiss government froze $660 million
in assets linked to the late Nigerian leader Sani Abacha, who had
plundered his country.

After an investigation, Swiss regulators "named and shamed" a dozen banks
that were said to have violated rules, and the Swiss government returned
$550 million to Nigeria. Tens of millions of dollars in Abacha money also
found its way into British banks, none of which were named by British
regulators.

After 9/11, the Swiss stepped up efforts to go after terrorism money. In
2002, then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft went to Switzerland to
praise Swiss cooperation in gathering evidence against dirty-bomb suspect
Jose Padilla, who had stopped in Zurich en route from Pakistan.

These days, it is often Swiss authorities who find themselves stymied by
other countries in the conduct of criminal investigations. Earlier this
year, for example, Swiss prosecutors announced that they could not move
forward with a case against suspected terror financiers from a group
called al Taqwa because, the Swiss said, the Bahamas did not produce
crucial documents in time to meet the statute of limitations.

Even as Swiss banks were stepping up anti-money-laundering efforts, their
image took a drubbing in the 1990s over two issues: revelations that the
Swiss National Bank had accepted deposits of Nazi gold during World War
II, and the disclosure that Swiss banks had turned away the heirs of
Holocaust victims who had deposited money.

In 1998, Swiss banks reached a $1.25 billion settlement in a class-action
lawsuit filed by the families of Holocaust victims. The difficult process
of identifying people with valid claims is ongoing.

In recent years, Swiss banks have found themselves embroiled in another
dustup, this one over taxes. Though not a member of the European Union,
Switzerland has a number of economic agreements with the EU. In 2001, EU
countries agreed to share banking information among member states, to
fight tax evasion. They wanted Switzerland to go along.

No dice, said the Swiss, whose banks traditionally have been havens for
French, Germans and Italians to shield income from those countries' high
tax rates.

"It's your own moral obligation to tell the tax authorities what you owe,"
said Steve Bernard, who directs the Geneva Financial Center Foundation.
"We as bankers will not provide assistance to the authorities."

The Swiss proposed, and the EU finally agreed, that for clients unwilling
to disclose their accounts, Swiss banks would automatically withhold tax
on account interest, beginning at 15 percent and going up to 35 percent.
The process began July 1.

A spokesman for the Association of German Banks likened the agreement to
"a fishnet with big holes."

But Swiss bankers call it a breakthrough.

"This is the first time in history that a government has agreed to levy
taxes on behalf of another government," Bernard said.

(source: Philadelphia Inquirer)





BRITAIN:

British spy files reveal Nazis invented exploding sweets


Luckily, the exploding Smedley's English Red Plums in Heavy Syrup were
intercepted in Turkey before anyone got killed.

But what of the hand grenade disguised as a chocolate bar? Or the
incendiary Vichy pastille sweets?

A secret file from the archives of Britain's spy services released this
week shows ingenious methods, conjured up by Germans during World War Two,
for disguising bombs.

Britain's Security Service began opening its records this year under the
country's new Freedom of Information Act.

Among the files declassified by the National Archive was a
treasure trove of nifty exploding gadgets, labelled "Camouflages for
sabotage equipment used by the German sabotage services."

The drawing of the design for the chocolate bar grenade says it is made
from steel coated with real chocolate, and activated by breaking off a bit
at one end. It doesn't say whether the grenade was ever actually
manufactured or used.

The file also includes photos of the incendiary pastille sweets, and bombs
hidden in anything from oil cans and food tins to a lump of coal.

(source: Reuters)