Feb. 18



POLAND/IRAN:

Poland will not let Iran "research" Holocaust


Poland's Foreign Minister Stefan Meller on Friday ruled out allowing any
Iranian researchers to examine the scale of the Holocaust committed by the
German Nazis on Polish soil during World War Two.

Meller's remarks came after repeated denials of the Jewish Holocaust by
Iranian officials and their suggestions that more research is needed to
establish the truth about what happened to European Jews.

"Under no circumstances we should allow something like that to take place
in Poland," Meller told Polish news agency PAP. "It goes beyond all
imaginable norms to question, even discuss or negotiate the issue."

Polish daily Rzeczpospolita reported on Friday that Iran wants to send
researchers to Poland to examine the scale of the Nazi crimes during the
war.

Some 6 million Jews perished in the Holocaust, with an estimated 1.1
million killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz- Birkenau, a death camp set up
in German-occupied Poland.

Last week Iran's ambassador to Lisbon, who in the past served as a
diplomat in Poland, said in an interview on Portuguese radio that
according to his calculations based on a visit to the camp, now a museum,
it would have taken the Nazis 15 years to burn the corpses of 6 million
people.

(source: Reuters)




GERMANY:

Dresdner Bank sought close ties to Nazi regime-study


Dresdner Bank, one of Germany's top financial institutions, cooperated
closely with the Nazi regime and knew at an early stage about the
Holocaust, according to a study it commissioned and published on Friday.

Dresdner, now owned by giant insurer Allianz, made a determined effort to
become the most important creditor of Germany's SS military force, Harald
Wixforth, co-author of the 2,400 page study, told a news conference.

The bank had particularly profited from the Nazi conquest of countries in
the east and had hoped to take a leading role in a German empire in
Europe, the study showed.

Dresdner Bank, now based in Frankfurt, is the latest German corporation or
organisation to take a critical look at its Nazi associations. The Foreign
Ministry and German Football Association have also launched critical
probes of their past.

The bank's responsibility could not be limited to a couple of board
members and devoted Nazis who rose up the hierarchy, the study showed. The
entire board was implicated in a complicity much closer and wider than
previously recognised.

"The special historical responsibility of Dresdner Bank lies ... in its
complicity in the core ideology of National Socialist politics," said the
study's publisher Klaus-Dietmar Henke.

Dresdner was aware of the crimes committed by the Nazis at concentration
camps through its close contacts with the SS. It was also a large
shareholder in Huta Hoch- und Tiefbau AG, a construction firm that built
crematoria at Auschwitz.

"WE ACCEPT THE TRUTH"

Dresdner Bank board member Wulf Meier spoke at the news conference of the
study's painful and depressing results.

"Everyone at Dresdner Bank must come to terms with and find out about the
past," Meier said. "We accept this as the truth, even if it hurts."

Dresdner Bank chief Herbert Walter acknowledged in a statement that the
bank had taken a long time coming to terms with its Nazi past, he added.

"Inhumanity has small beginnings. I know that that is a daily warning to
us," he said.

The study is the work of a historical commission set up by the bank that
has studied Dresdner's history since 1997.

Author Henke said the bank had in part responded to public pressure and
was aware that trying to forget the past could do more harm than good to
its business.

He urged other banks to follow Dresdner's example, particularly Germany's
saving banks, many of whom, he said, had been closely bound to the Nazi
regime.

West Germany, and after 1990 reunited Germany, paid over 100 billion marks
to Nazi victims under a 1953 compensation law.

In 2000, Germany set up a 10 billion mark (about $4.5 billion) Holocaust
fund to recompense slaves and forced labourers. The government and German
business each paid half.

Swiss banks agreed in 1998 to pay more than $1.25 billion in compensation
to families of Holocaust victims. Historians argue Switzerland cloaked
itself in neutrality to justify business as usual with Nazi Germany and
its allies.

(source: Reuters)

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

DRESDNER BANK AND THE THIRD REICH

Hitler's Willing Bankers


Like many German firms, Dresdner Bank hoped after World War II its
unsavory activities during the Third Reich would be forgotten. But an
unparalleled company-sponsored research effort shows Germany's second
largest bank supported the Nazi regime much more actively than had been
previously thought.

Being known as the bank of choice for Heinrich Himmler's SS would be a PR
nightmare for any company. So the long postwar reluctance of top Dresdner
Bank executives to expose the bank's sordid history during the Nazi era is
hardly surprising.

But the degree of Dresdner's complicity in many of the Third Reich's worst
crimes will be shocking to many who read the results of a new seven-year
study presented on Friday. A team of historians sponsored by Dresdner Bank
engaged in intensive research to unearth the full extent of the darkest
chapter of the bank's past. The massive study fills four volumes and
nearly 2,400 pages in what amounts to an unprecedented look at the role of
a financial institution in Nazi Germany.

"This calls it as it is. We accept these truths even when they are painful
ones," said Wulf Meier, a member of the Dresdner Bank board, at a press
conference in Berlin on Friday. He readily admitted the bank had been shy
about delving into the past until public sentiment in the 1990s prodded
several German firms to do so. "After 1945 many people and institutions
avoided questions about their role during NS times."

Most German firms carry a heavy historical burden for what they did during
the Nazi era. Dresdner Bank -- founded in 1872 on the initiative of a
Jewish entrepreneur -- is no exception. Placing capitalist logic before
morality, the bank systematically took part in the Third Reich's
repression of Germany's Jews and the confiscation of Jewish wealth and
assets.

The team of historians, led by Dr. Klaus-Dietmar Henke from Dresden's
Technical University, took an exhaustive approach in compiling the bank's
activities. After seven years of research costing 1.6 million, "Dresdner
Bank in the Third Reich" paints a stark picture of how the firm actively
courted Nazi favor in order to make money and rapidly expand its business.

"There was a deep symbiosis between National Socialism and capitalism,"
said Henke. Several of Dresdner's board members belonged to the Nazi
party, but much of Dresdner's involvement with the party, Henke indicated,
was driven more by business concerns.

Deportation seen as death

As an example of Dresdner's implicit knowledge about the murder of
Germany's Jewish population after their deportation to camps in Nazi
occupied Eastern Europe, the study cites the bank's unwillingness to pay
pension payments for retired Jewish Dresdner employees directly to the
Reich. The Nazis claimed the government should get the pensions to pay for
the deportees' living expenses, but Dresdner officials wanted proof that
the Jews in the camps and ghettos were still alive.

"Around 5 percent of Dresdner's workforce were Jewish -- a much higher
percentage than the general population," said Dr. Dieter Ziegler for the
Ruhr University in Bochum.

The study also shows the bank took part early on in the Third Reich's
policy of confiscating Jewish property and wealth. "It's a myth that the
bank was forced to take part in the 'Aryanizing' of Jewish wealth," said
Ziegler.

But perhaps one of the most damning associations for Dresdner's past
managers is its close ties to Heinrich Himmler's SS. The bank was the most
important private lender for the Nazi organization and played a key role
for its operations in occupied Europe, essentially acting as the bank of
the SS in Poland.

Henke commended Dresdner for allowing his team to take such thorough look
into the company's past and said he hoped it could encourage other firms
to support deeper research into their activities during the Third Reich.

(source: Spiegel)



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


World Cup city candid on Nazi past


The site of Nazi rallies lies close to Nuremberg's World Cup stadium
Ulrich May looks far too young to be the mayor of a city as big as
Nuremberg, yet he offers a confident handshake and ushers us into a room
the size of a concert hall.

"This was the old town hall," he explains. "We had to rebuild it after you
guys bombed it in the War." And then he smiles broadly.

Mr May has decided that Nuremberg needs to be frank - almost painfully
frank - about the worst vagaries of its history.

His was the city where Adolf Hitler convened huge rallies in the 1930s,
where the Hitler Youth and the SS came in their hundreds of thousands,
where the remains of Nazi architecture still loom.

And what is more, you can hardly miss them, even if you do come to
Nuremberg to watch the football.

Because the huge Zeppelin-field, where those rallies were held, stands
almost in the shadow of the stadium where World Cup matches will be
staged.

In order to get to a game, you have to pass by this extraordinary slice of
history.

History lessons

It is unmistakeable, still recognisable from the newsreel shots of Hitler
standing on a balcony and addressing those vast crowds.

These days, you can wander up and down, even stand on the spot where the
Fuhrer delivered his oratory. It is eerily evocative.

There are many in Nuremberg who would rather like to brush all this under
the carpet and forger their years of notoriety.

But not the mayor.

"We are not being like schoolteachers, but you can't go to the stadium
without looking at the rally ground. It's right there, so you can't ignore
it," he said.

"You have to deal with it. And the best thing to do is to inform, to tell
people what happened."

So there will be signs and displays, written in, among other languages,
English, outlining dates and details, facts and figures.

Visitors will be encouraged to find out more, to go and see the
Documentation Centre where the relics and paperwork of the Nazi era are
kept.

Poignantly, the centre is housed in a towering building that was once the
home of Hitler's indoor rallies.

Harsh laws

But is there a danger of glamorising Hitler?

Well, according to the curator of the documentation centre, Hans-Christian
Taubrich, the whole point of such openness is to remove the veneer of
heroism.

"We want them to know what it was really like," he says. "Some people have
the wrong opinions."

There will, of course, still be elements of the far-right extremists among
England's travelling support - there always is.

Anybody who has travelled abroad with the team will have seen the
occasional person laughingly producing a Hitler salute.

Yet the German laws against such things are harsh. Merely wearing a
T-shirt with a Nazi symbol emblazoned upon it can land a person in prison.

Come the summer, the police may be a little more tolerant of those they
think are simply playing around, yet there remains a strong undercurrent
against anybody who invokes the spirit of Nazism.

The people of Nuremberg, more than most, do not want to forget or deny
their past, but they do not want to glorify it, either.

(source: BBC News)




AUSTRALIA:

Australian linked to WW2 torture


Nazi hunters have found evidence in an archive that an immigrant to
Australia allegedly was involved in torture, rape and killing in World War
II Hungary.

Lajos Polgar is now an 89-year-old pensioner living in Melbourne. He
denies participating in war crimes in 1944 when Hungary was ruled by the
Fascist Arrow Cross regime, The Australian reports.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center found testimony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
memorial, that has been sent to prosecutors in Hungary. The survivors
described being tortured in the basement of the Arrow Cross Party
headquarters.

(source: United Press International)

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

Nazi hunter fears suspect will flee


LEADING Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff fears Ferntree Gully man Lajos Polgar
may vanish as investigations into his alleged war crimes are stepped up.

"It's a concern," Dr Zuroff said. "He might go into hiding."

Mr Polgar, 89, was in the notorious Nazi-linked Arrow Cross party in
Hungary during World War II. This week he admitted to The Age that he was
a "leader" of the party that helped the Nazis transport 80,000 Hungarian
Jews to Auschwitz. Arrow Cross was also feared for the torture and mass
killings of Jews in Hungary in 1944 and 1945. Mr Polgar concedes Arrow
Cross were involved in Holocaust activities but denies any personal
involvement.

He also denies that the party's Budapest headquarters, which he was almost
certainly in charge of, were the site of a torture chamber and dungeon
despite historical proof to the contrary.

Dr Zuroff told a news conference yesterday that new evidence on Mr Polgar
would be handed to the Australian Federal Police next week. "They are
anxious to take a look at the material," he said. Hungary has already
placed Mr Polgar under suspicion of genocide.

Dr Zuroff urged the Australian Government to come down hard. "It's a
matter of whether the Government has the necessary political will to
proceed. In that respect, Hungary has proven its seriousness."

Dr Zuroff said Australia had a poor track record of pursuing war criminals
living here. "But I have spoken to the AFP about methods," he said. "We
have the person, we have the address."

At yesterday's news conference at the Holocaust Centre, in Elsternwick,
Melbourne woman and Holocaust centre tour guide Susanne Nozick, 82, told
of her horrific experiences at the hands of Arrow Cross in Budapest. She
had no direct dealings with Mr Polgar "it was dark, we were being
tortured, we didn't look at their faces" but said she and her mother were
among a group of Hungarian Jews beaten and repeatedly raped at the party's
headquarters in late 1944.

After three days, those still alive were led to the Danube River, which
was partially frozen, and shot. Mrs Nozick miraculously survived, but her
mother did not.

(source: The Age)





PORTUGAL:

Portuguese cartoonist to take part in Iranian Holocaust contest


Renowned Portuguese cartoonist Augusto Cid will take part in a
controversial Iranian contest for cartoons of the Holocaust, his employer,
weekly newspaper O Independente, said on Friday in its latest edition.

The competition was launched on Monday in a tit-for-tat move over
caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that have angered Muslims worldwide,
with the selected cartoons posted on a Website run in association with
Iran's biggest selling newspaper Hamshahri.

Only five cartoons have been posted on the Website so far: two from Iran,
one each from Azerbaijan and Brazil and an anonymous entry.

Cid said that the contest had inspired him but he was "not sure his
drawing adhered to the spirit of the contest launched by Hamshahri" as "it
will test Iran's own freedom of expression", O Independente said.

The drawing was published on the back page of the Portuguese weekly and it
will be submitted to the Iranian embassy in Lisbon later on Friday.

It depicts Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who claims that the
Holocaust is a myth, explaining on a visit to Auschwitz that the deaths
recorded there were caused by bird flu.

Iran's ambassador to Lisbon was summoned to the Portuguese foreign
ministry on Wednesday after he cast doubts on the Holocaust.

Hamshahri, which is published by Tehran's conservative municipality, says
that the competition will explore the limits on freedom of expression in
the West following the recent publication of cartoons of the Prophet
Mohammed in mainly European countries.

(source: Middle East Times)





USA//CALIFORNIA:

Hungarian boys Holocaust nightmare is a quiet shock


Thanks to a trio of hyper-dramatic and almost unbelievable true-life epics
Europa, Europa, Schindlers List and The Pianist the Holocaust action
movie has become its own genre.

Filmgoers now expect as a matter of course a parade of indelible
incidents, incredible bits of luck and stunning plot turns, capped with a
moving yet optimistic ending.

You have to leave those expectations at the door, however, to fully
appreciate the assiduously restrained Hungarian film Fateless. An
impeccably crafted series of vignettes imbued with an overriding sense of
dislocation and shock, the movie aspires to record the imperceptible
rather than the histrionic.

Fateless shows us concentration camps through a young boys disbelieving
eyes, and is a coming-of-age story like no other. This extraordinary film
adheres to such an understated, deliberate approach that by the end of its
two hours and 20 minutes it achieves a kind of purity.

Fateless had its Bay Area premiere last fall in the Mill Valley Film
Festival, and opens theatrically Friday, Feb. 24.

Nobel Prize-winner Imre Kertesz adapted the unusual screenplay from his
1975 semi-autobiographical novel about a reserved but friendly 14-year-old
Budapest boy.

Gyuri Koves (portrayed with great sensitivity and intelligence by Marcell
Nagy) is caught up in his first crush, with a Jewish neighbor, but he is
not fated to have a normal adolescence. His father is being shipped to a
labor camp, and the film opens with several scenes of awkward,
excruciating goodbyes. While some family and friends are nave about what
lies in store, others plainly acknowledge the worst.

Gyuri himself is rounded up soon after and, to his bewilderment, put on a
train whose destination turns out to be Auschwitz-Birkenau. He is
designated for work, and Fateless follows his pained existence from
Birkenau to another harsh camp.

The lad cant fathom his new reality of upheaval and absurdity, but he has
no choice other than to adapt and survive. I was trying to grasp the
simple secret of my universe: I could be killed anywhere, at any time, he
recounts in voiceover.

Fateless is not an existential essay on the indifference of God or the
cruelty of man. Nor, for that matter, is it an emotional rollercoaster
ride with peaks and valleys. It is a film of small gestures in which a
slap in the face becomes an act of shocking brutality and a simple thank
you is a sign that civilized humanity isnt dead.

Lajos Koltai, a veteran cinematographer (Sunshine, Max) making his
directorial debut, has created a film of brush strokes and details, every
one of which is utterly convincing.

Ultimately, Koltais triumph is pouring beauty into every frame without
romanticizing the story or distracting our attention from Gyuris plight.
Needless to say, thats a dauntingly narrow line to walk, but his decision
to use almost no music contributes enormously.

Although the film spans less than two years and never drags, it feels to
us as if five years or more have passed in the lads life. Certainly it
seems that way to Gyuri when he returns to Budapest to look for his
family. Everyone who weathered the war in their insular, airless
apartments seems to be stuck in amber, and alien to him.

Or perhaps hes the alien, with no one capable of helping him accept the
profound realization that life went on while he was in the camps, and that
the world will continue on its way despite what happened there.

For Gyuri, it is a mystery without an explanation or solution. It is cause
for both comfort and sorrow. It is, finally, what makes Fateless so calmly
and quietly devastating.

Fateless opens Friday, Feb. 24 at the Lumiere in San Francisco and the
Shattuck in Berkeley.

(source: Jewish News of Northern California)





LATVIA:

Latvian NGOs addressed European Parliament on former Nazis marches in
Latvia


Coordinating council of public organizations in Latvia (CCPO) one of
biggest Russian-speaking republics organizations addressed openly to
deputies of European parliament in connection with supporters marches of
former SS legionaries, to be organized in Latvia on March 16. On February
17, CCPOs representative from Latvian committee for human rights, Latvian
Seyms deputy Vladimir Buzayev informed a REGNUM correspondent about that.
According to him, at present, the address is already sent in English to
more then 400 from 700 deputies of the European parliament and sending
goes on.

The address states, that there are problems of Nazi propaganda and
attitude to it of Latvian authorities in country. The most evident example
of pro-Nazi spirits in Latvia is annual mass actions, sanctioned by
authorities, in honor of Waffen SS Latvian legion on March 16. As it is
well known, the legion practiced mass repressions and punitive actions,
among them mass shooting of Jews and prisoners of war, during WWII, in
Latvia, Byelorussia and Russia. Now, the legions veterans have status of
political prisoners, enjoying moral and financial support of state, while
even a part of former Nazi prisoners, tortured in concentration camps in
Latvian territory, does not possess such status. The council believes,
that authorities tolerance, participation of top-level state officials and
politicians in such actions, strengthens positions of pro-Nazi forces,
contribute to the Waffen SS Latvian legions glorification, finally, all
these facts contribute, practically, to revision of International
Nuremberg Tribunals decisions, which recognized Waffen SS a criminal
organization.

The Council asked members of the European Parliament to use all their
influence and possibilities, in order to forbid celebration in honor of SS
veterans in Riga capital of European state, where next NATO summit will
take place in autumn of this year. Representatives of 13 public
organizations signed the address, among them Russian Community of Latvia,
Latvian Association of veterans of anti-Hitler coalition, Latvian
Committee for Human Rights, Byelorussian Promen Society, Armenian
Community of Latvia, etc.

(source: Regnum)