Dec. 15



GERMANY:

Hitler salute greets concentration camp visitors


2 German women have been arrested for giving a Hitler salute and
singing a neo-Nazi song to foreign tourists on their way to Germany's
Sachsenhausen concentration camp museum, prosecutors said Thursday.

"The tour group was joined on a commuter train platform by two women who
marched alongside them, sang the song 'White Aryan resistance' and gave
them the Hitler salute," the prosecutors office in Neuruppin, Germany,
said in a statement.

The 18- and 19-year-old women, who were under the influence of alcohol at
the time, were taken into police custody, the prosecutors said. Germany
has strict laws banning the use of Nazi symbols and expression of Nazi
ideas.

The 36 tourists given the Hitler salute were traveling under the motto
"Concentration Camp Memorial Tour" and came from the United States, New
Zealand, Canada, the Netherlands and Singapore, the statement said.

The incident took place in Brandenburg, a state in the former communist
East, where far right parties get a much larger share of the votes than
they do in the West.

An official at the prosecutors office told Reuters that he was unable to
provide further details about the incident because the investigation was
still at a very preliminary stage.


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

German Holocaust denier to remain in custody


A German court today ordered a prominent Holocaust denier extradited from
Canada to remain in custody while lawyers prepare to resume his trial
after it was suspended last month.

Ernst Zuendel, publisher of works such as ''Did six million really die?''
is facing charges of inciting racial hatred and denying that the Nazis
killed six million Jews.

His trial was suspended last month after the judge dismissed his publicly
appointed defence lawyer when she produced written submissions that
themselves appeared to deny the Holocaust.

The state court in Karlsruhe ruled that a new defence lawyer would need
time to become familiar with the 34 volumes of evidence in the case and
that this would not be possible while the trial was going on.

It said while preparations were under way, Zuendel, who has been in
custody in Germany since March this year after being deported from Canada,
could not be released because of the danger he would flee.

The case comes as Germany and other European countries have reacted with
outrage to comments by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has twice
denied that the Holocaust took place.

Zuendel, a German citizen who has spent much of his life in Canada and
whose name is sometimes spelled Zundel, ran a ''revisionist'' Web site and
distributed a publication called ''Germania Rundbrief'' denying the
Holocaust took place.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and if convicted, Zuendel could
face up to five years in prison.

(source for both: Reuters)





AUSTRIA:

Austria Starts Holocaust Payments Process

Austria on Thursday began the process of compensating Holocaust victims
robbed under the Nazis, mailing notifications to the first survivors
eligible for payments.

The fund created by Austria in 2001 to compensate those stripped of
businesses, property, bank accounts and insurance policies under the Third
Reich mailed letters to 100 of the 19,300 survivors who have applied.

The letters say how much the victims will receive, along with a form they
must sign and return promising not to sue Austria or Austrian companies
that benefited from the taken property, said Hannah Lessing, general
secretary of the General Settlement Fund.

"This is the first step in payment," Lessing told The Associated Press.
"Now the first payments can be made in the next 10 days."

Andreas Kohl, Austria's parliament speaker and chairman of the fund's
board, said he was determined to see the first payments go out before
year's end, and he pledged to devote three hours on Monday to signing
another 1,300 letters.

Earlier this year, the government and Austrian companies pledged to pay
$210 million to endow the fund once all Holocaust litigation against
Austria was resolved.

Vienna was home to a vibrant Jewish community of some 200,000 before World
War II. Today, it numbers about 7,000.

A spokeswoman for the community, Erika Jakubovits, said the group was
"very satisfied" that the first payments would soon be made.

Payments had been delayed because of pending legal action in the United
States. That hurdle was cleared last month when a New York court threw out
sections of a class-action lawsuit targeting Austria.

(source: Associated Press)





USA//NEW YORK:

Judge Awards Freud Descendant $164,885 in Holocaust Case


In a settlement for money stolen by the Nazis from Sigmund Freud's Swiss
bank accounts, a federal judge in Brooklyn yesterday awarded more than
$160,000 to a descendant of the famed psychiatrist.

The award, granted by U.S. District Judge Edward Korman, is part of a
$1.25 billion settlement in a class action filed by Holocaust survivors
against leading Swiss banks for their role in Nazi crimes during World War
II. Freud's grandson, Anton Walter Freud, filed a claim for a portion of
the settlement on the basis that his grandfather, a Jew, was a victim of
Nazi persecution who never received money from accounts that were closed
without his knowledge in 1938.

"This is one of those rare cases where we have hard evidence that the bank
transferred the money to the Nazis instead of the true owner," the lead
settlement counsel, Burt Neuborne, said.

Freud, known as the "father of psychoanalysis," was 82 and stricken by
cancer when he fled Vienna for London in June 1938, three months after the
German annexation of Austria. Although Freud used diplomatic channels to
secure an exit visa, documents cited in the court's decision indicate the
Nazi Gestapo raided his home and publishing house in Austria, and even
targeted him after his arrival in London.

The Germans confiscated Freud's money and publishing house, and he left
Vienna with some personal belongings, books, and papers. Yet, according to
letters he wrote at the time, he still believed he had funds in a Swiss
bank account the Gestapo promised to let him keep. Unbeknownst to Freud,
the account had been closed weeks earlier.

Freud later tried - unsuccessfully - to save his four elderly sisters by
arranging for their move to England. They all died in concentration camps
during the war.

"He was treated like any other Jew was treated by the Nazis," the acting
director of the Freud Museum in London and the editor of his diaries,
Michael Molnar, said of Freud. "He was robbed, he was driven out, and his
family was murdered."

Freud died in September 1939 at age 83. Anton Walter Freud, a chemical
engineer who served in the British army during World War II, died in 2004
while his claim on his grandfather's accounts was being processed. The
news of the award came as a surprise to his son, David Anthony Freud, who
had not heard about the decision when reached by phone in London last
night.

"I was pretty dubious about it, frankly," Mr. Freud, 55, said. "Clearly,
it's a pleasant surprise." The money - $164,885 - will go to Anton Walter
Freud's estate, and his son said it would be divided among his heirs.

There were few records of Freud's Swiss bank accounts, and Judge Korman
said in his ruling that it was unknown how much money they contained when
they were closed. The figure of 216,000 Swiss francs - adjusted for
inflation - was determined according to the average amount of money left
in such accounts at the time, as found by an audit of 350,000 accounts
after the $1.25 billion settlement was reached in 1998.

So far about $765 million has been disbursed from the fund to nearly
366,000 people. Freud's award was one of 23 decisions totaling nearly $3
million announced by Judge Korman yesterday.

(source: New York Sun)




USA//CALIFORNIA:

Through word and deed, biographer fought Nazis

Writer shone light on Goering, participated in espionage efforts


Kurt Singer, an anti-Nazi activist and spy during World War II whose
dozens of books include works on espionage and biographies ranging from
Hitler henchman Hermann Goering to song-and-dance man Danny Kaye, has
died. He was 94.

Singer died Friday in Santa Barbara, Calif., of natural causes, said his
son, Kenneth.

The prolific and eclectic writer, born in Vienna, Austria, grew up in
Berlin, where he became increasingly worried about the rise of Adolf
Hitler and the Nazi regime. With his first wife, Hilde Tradelius, he began
publishing an anti-Nazi underground weekly in 1933.

The Nazis soon put a price on his head, and he fled to Stockholm, Sweden.
Working as a journalist for Swedish and Swiss publications, Singer helped
found a pro-Allies newspaper and a committee to free anti-Nazi leader Carl
von Ossietzky from a concentration camp. With Kurt Grossman, he wrote a
biography of Von Ossietzky that he believed helped win the Nobel Peace
Prize for the humanitarian.

In Sweden and later in the U.S., the writer functioned as a spy, providing
information for the Allies about Russian and Nazi activities in
Scandinavia.

"I was deeply involved in espionage as my contribution to fight and
destroy the Hitler regime," Singer said in a recent autobiography for the
Danish Peace Academy. "I worked with the Swedish secret service, the
British, the American and mostly with the Norwegian secret service of
their government in exile."

When Singer published the biography "Goering: Germany's Most Dangerous
Man," in 1940, Germany demanded that Sweden confiscate all copies and hand
over Singer. Although Sweden originally denied the extradition, it did ban
the book, and Singer made plans to leave for the United States.

In 1943, Singer published "Duel for the Northland: The War of Enemy Agents
in Scandinavia." That book sparked a line of works about the espionage
business. His major books on crime were "My Greatest Crime Story, by
Police Chiefs of the World" and "My Strangest Case, by Police Chiefs of
the World."

In the 1950s, Singer returned to biography, chronicling Kaye, Charles
Laughton, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Schweitzer and President Lyndon B.
Johnson.

With his second wife, Jane Sherrod, to whom he was married from 1955 until
her death in 1985, he wrote juvenile books such as "Spies for Democracy,"
"Great Adventures of the Sea," "Great Adventures in Crime" and "Ghost
Book."

As an editor, Singer frequently delved into the supernatural, working on
such books as "I Can't Sleep at Night: 13 Weird Tales," "Plague of the
Unknown" and "Ghouls and Ghosts."

In 1955 he founded Singer Communications Inc., a syndicated international
news service based in Anaheim, Calif., and served as its president.
Singer, a lecturer on World War II and the history of espionage, donated
his collection of historical works to the Special Collections Archives at
Boston University.

(source: Los Angeles Times)