Oct. 24



GERMANY:

Germany plans Holocaust museum at firm that made crematoriums


A factory in Germany, where the crematoriums for Auschwitz and other Nazi
concentration camps were built, is to be turned into a Holocaust museum,
the city of Erfurt said Saturday.

It will provide a permanent home for an exhibition that began earlier this
year at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The "Technicians of the Final Solution" exhibition describes how an
ordinary German engineering company, which did not go out of business
until 1994, built the crematoriums.

Apparently it was fully aware that the SS forces of the Nazi Party were
killing people in hundreds of thousands at Auschwitz.

The company, Topf und Soehne of Erfurt, also provided a ventilation system
for the Auschwitz gas chambers. Topf was mainly a builder of brewery
plants with crematoriums as a sideline.

The city of Erfurt, capital of Thuringia state, is in negotiations to buy
the former Topf office building to house the exhibition later, municipal
culture chief Karl-Heinz Kindervater said.

The exhibition, which includes company records, photographs, writings of
concentration camp inmates and remnants of the crematoriums, is to open
Sunday in Erfurt's civic museum.

Topf did not have to take orders from the SS. It pursued the business and
took the initiative in "improving" the devices, said the head of the
Buchenwald concentration camp memorial, Volkhard Knigge. The engineers
were not rabid Nazis but ordinary Germans.

Work for the SS accounted for only 2 per cent of Topf's overall sales and
could have been dropped without imperilling the company.

Germany's existing museums to the Holocaust include the documentation
centre at the Holocaust monument in Berlin and memorials at many of the
concentration camps where inmates died of disease and privation.

Auschwitz, in modern-day Poland, received inmates from other concentration
camps to be killed by poison gas.

(source: Ha'Aretz)




USA//CALIFORNIA:

Spielberg Holocaust foundation joins California university


Steven Spielberg's voluminous archive documenting the lives of Holocaust
survivors has merged with the University of Southern California.

The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation officially became
part of USC's College of Letters, Arts and Sciences on Thursday after
years of negotiations.

USC promises to preserve and propagate the archive, which includes 52,000
videotaped life histories, all of them digitized. The university will fund
the $5 million (-4.2 million) annual budget.

"I've been the lightning rod of this foundation since its inception, and
there is a prejudice against figureheads in Hollywood," said Spielberg, a
USC trustee. As part of a university, "the Shoah Foundation will be taken
much
more seriously throughout the world."

Spielberg started the Shoah foundation on the set of the 1993 movie
"Schindler's List," which told the story of Czech businessman Oskar
Schindler, who exploited Jewish labor during World War II but also saved
more than 1,000 lives during the Holocaust. Shoah is Hebrew for "calamity."

The archive is viewable on computer systems at universities including USC,
Rice, Yale and the University of Michigan. Portions also are available to
museums, research institutions and schools worldwide.

(source: Associated Press)


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No place for Nazis in medicine


A Nazi war criminal's contribution to medicine is being slowly written out
of the medical record.

Until a few decades ago, "Reiter's syndrome" was the term used to describe
the painful disorder in which a patient simultaneously suffers the
infection-triggered symptoms of arthritis, conjunctivitis and urethritis.

The syndrome was named after Hans Reiter, the German doctor who identified
it in 1916. Reiter later became an enthusiastic Nazi. He ran Hitler's
Reich Health Office, and during the second world war designed typhoid
inoculation experiments that killed more than 250 people at the Buchenwald
concentration camp. He was also implicated in enforced sterilisations and
euthanasia.

Appalled at the association of the syndrome's name with such crimes, a
group of doctors decided in 1977 to begin a campaign for their colleagues
to abandon the term, and name the syndrome "reactive arthritis" instead.

Now an analysis of online medical journals shows their efforts are paying
off. David Lu and Kenneth Katz at the University of Pennsylvania School of
Medicine examined 539 papers published on the subject between 1998 and
2003. In 1998, 57 per cent of them used the term Reiter's syndrome. By
2003, the figure had fallen to just 34 per cent. "This shows a clear trend
away from unqualified use of the Reiter eponym," the pair report in
Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology (vol 53, p 720). They
predict the term will one day be of only historical interest.

(source: New Scientist)