Feb. 19



AUSTRIA:

Austria to try 'Holocaust denier'


British historian David Irving goes on trial in the Austrian capital,
Vienna, on Monday, accused of denying the Holocaust occurred.
The charges relate to a speech and an interview he gave in Austria in 1989
in which he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Mr Irving's lawyer told the BBC his client would plead guilty.

Holocaust denial is a criminal offence in Austria which carries a maximum
sentence of 10 years in prison.

David Irving came to Austria last November to give a lecture to a
far-right student fraternity. He was stopped by police as he was driving
on a motorway in the south of the country.

They arrested him in connection with a lecture and an interview he gave in
Austria in 1989.

Mr Irving has been held in custody in Vienna ever since he was arrested in
November.

In a letter to the BBC from his prison cell, Mr Irving said some of his
views on the gas chambers had changed - but he also expressed opinions
which would be challenged by mainstream historians.

(source: BBC)





USA:

Accusation From Nazi Era: Journalists Failed the Jews


Several prominent journalists have signed a petition asking the Newspaper
Association of America to acknowledge publicly that its predecessor
organization in the 1930's "was wrong to turn its back on Jewish refugee
journalists fleeing Hitler."

The petition notes that just as other organizations have publicly
apologized, paid reparations or taken other steps to "face up to their
past," so the newspaper association should "squarely face up to the
mistakes made by the journalistic community during those terrible years."

The petition was signed by more than 70 people. They include Nicholas
Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia; Marvin Kalb
and Alex S. Jones, both of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics
and Public Policy at Harvard; Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New
Republic; and officials from many other journalism programs around the
country.

The petition is based on research by Laurel Leff, a former reporter for
The Wall Street Journal who teaches journalism at Northeastern University
and is the author of "Buried by The Times" (Cambridge University Press), a
book about The New York Times's coverage of the Holocaust.

She presented her research at a conference in December in a paper titled
"Rebuffing Refugee Journalists: The Profession's Failure to Help Jews
Persecuted by Nazi Germany."

Her paper says that journalists did not establish committees, as doctors
and lawyers did, to help Jewish refugees secure positions that would have
made them exempt from immigration limits and allowed them to come to the
United States.

"The nation's journalism schools did not add a single displaced European
scholar to their faculties, and they rebuffed pleas to re-educate foreign
journalists, sometimes offering blatantly anti-Semitic rationales," she
wrote.

"There is no question that anti-Semitism influenced those decisions," Ms.
Leff said in an interview. "It was not the only factor, but it was an
important factor."

She said that she had not sought to publish her paper yet because she was
still researching the idea that "there was something more deeply embedded
in journalism that made them more hesitant to help."

Nonetheless, the petition, which Ms. Leff said she had no part in, was
timed to coincide with the newspaper association's annual convention in
early April. Initiated by Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman
Institute for Holocaust Studies, the petition asks the newspaper
association to invite Ms. Leff to address its convention, in Chicago.

Her research says that in 1939, the association's predecessor
organization, the American Newspaper Publishers Association, had rejected
a request by Carl J. Friedrich, a non-Jewish German refugee and Harvard
government professor, to address its convention.

John F. Sturm, president of the newspaper association, said in a statement
that a detailed review of the predecessor organization's archives had
found no record or discussion of Professor Friedrich's request to speak
but that the association was giving the petition "careful consideration"
and would address it in a "constructive manner."

"The allegation in Professor Leff's paper is one we take seriously,
particularly since newspapers have played a crucial role in telling
stories of the oppressed," he wrote.

Mr. Lemann said in an interview that he had not independently verified Ms.
Leff's research and that his signature did not amount to an admission that
the school had been anti-Semitic in failing to help persecuted
journalists.

But, he said, "I felt comfortable signing the petition because it asks
only for Laurel Leff to be allowed to speak and for a very general
statement of regret that more wasn't done."

He added: "What they're asking for is fairly low-end, and it all made
sense to me."

He also said that to this day, journalists around the world seek sanctuary
of one sort or another at the school and that he often provided it.

"You could say that this is ancient history," he said of the persecution
of journalists. "But I'm surprised by how often someone says, 'I'm in
physical danger in my home country because of things I've written. Can you
provide me with shelter?' I try to be extra careful to try to do something
about these cases."




HUNGARY:

Hungary's Holocaust museum to inaugurate permanent exhibit


A permanent exhibition opening Tuesday at Budapest's Holocaust Memorial
Center illustrates how Hungarian political and religious leaders helped
lay the groundwork for the persecution of Jews in the decades before the
Holocaust.

The exhibit goes beyond the Holocaust deaths of the 550,000 Hungarian Jews
and 50,000 Roma killed by the Nazis during World War II by illustrating
the oppression Jews faced even in the 1920s and 1930s.

By touching upon the role Hungarians played in facilitating the Holocaust
- instead of simply blaming the Nazis - the collection is expected to
cause controversy.

"The exhibit examines the relationship between the state and the
citizens," said exhibit director Judit Molnar. "It shows how Jews were
first deprived of their basic rights, and over the years of their
possessions, freedom, human dignity and, finally, their lives."

The display titled "From Deprivation of Rights to Genocide" includes
personal belongings of Holocaust victims, short films, photographs and
interactive features both in Hungarian and English.

Hungary first passed laws limiting Jews' rights in 1920 and by 1938, they
were declared second-class citizens as Hungary sought to "curb the
expansionist moves of Jews in public life and the economy," according to
one of the displays.

While the exhibit points out the general responsibility of Hungary's
post-World War I political, intellectual and social elite in the
"ideological preparation" of the Holocaust, it also highlights some of the
individuals it considers at fault.

A picture of Catholic Bishop Ottokar Prohaszka - who died in 1927 and is
considered by Hungarian Catholics as one of the most distinguished church
figures of the 20th century - bears the caption: "Leading figure of
conservative anti-Semitic ideology," without further details.

In a country like Hungary where numerous historical events - both ancient
and recent - are just starting to be comprehensively investigated and
discussed publicly, naming names is a guaranteed lighting rod for tension.

"There will be people who surely are going to be upset by that
description," Molnar said of the Prohaszka caption. "But it's factual and
we will stand by it."

The exhibit also includes detailed histories of several Jewish and Roma
families and how the Holocaust affected them, a haunting depiction of how
normality was destroyed.

Other displays deal with the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp - where a third
of the victims were from Hungary; the aftermath of the Holocaust and its
survivors; Gentiles who saved Jews, and Hungary's 1944 occupation by
Germany, which ended the Jews' relative safety here.

Despite the restrictive "Jewish laws" and the WWII alliance with Germany,
Hungarian authorities managed to block Nazi demands for the Jews'
deportation until German troops occupied Hungary in March 1944. Then, more
than 400,000 countryside Jews were sent to concentration camps in just 56
days.

In 1910, Hungary's 910,000 Jews made up 5 percent of the population, more
than a fifth of Budapest's population of 880,000. Today, around 100,000
Jews are believed to live in Hungary, which now has a population of 10
million.

Officials at the museum which opened in April 2004 emphasized the
educational objectives of the exhibit. During the communist era that ended
in 1990 the Holocaust was a taboo subject.

"Our aim is for every young person to see this exhibit before they finish
school," said Gabor Szekely, chairman of the museum's board of trustees,
adding that the recommended minimum age for visiting the exhibit is 14 due
to some of its graphic images.

The final part of the exhibit is located in a renovated synagogue, with a
partitioned area for meditation.

"We want to give visitors an opportunity to reflect upon what they've
seen," Molnar said.

She also pointed out that while a tour of the exhibit requires about two
hours, visitors can also find thousands of extra photographs, testimonies
and documents on computers set up in the synagogue's gallery.

"We couldn't fit everything we wanted to say and show in the exhibit,"
said Molnar, a historian. "The exhibit is not a textbook."

(source: Associated Press)






NEW ZEALAND:

Nazi hunter comes looking for war criminals here


Israeli Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff arrives in New Zealand tomorrow to
publicise Operation Last Chance, a last attempt to round up surviving Nazi
war criminals.

The Sunday-Star-Times reported today that Mr Zuroff, director of the
Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, said that the operation
might uncover Nazi war criminals living in New Zealand.

The newspaper said that in 1990 Mr Zuroff, who has not visited New Zealand
before, sent the Government the names of 46 suspected Nazi war criminals
living in this country.

But after a police inquiry, the National government decided in 1992 there
was not enough evidence to bring a prosecution.

The centre now runs Operation Last Chance, which offers a US$10,000
($15,126) reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of
war criminals.

"We think if it's okay for America to offer US$25 million for Osama bin
Laden, it's all right to offer US$10,000 for a Nazi war criminal," Mr
Zuroff said last week from Melbourne, where he had been publicising two
Australian cases.

Operation Last Chance, started in 2002, threw up the name of Karoly
Zentai, a Hungarian in Perth who is fighting extradition to Hungary to
face accusations of murdering a Jewish teenager in 1944.

In August last year, Australian Labor MP Michael Danby raised the case of
Melbourne resident Lajos Polgar, who was part of the fascist Arrow Cross
movement in that tortured and killed Jews in war-time Hungary.

The 1990 lists included a Lithuanian man in Auckland who was in the 15th
Lithuanian Police Battalion, which massacred Jews in in 1941. He died in
1994.

In Perth this month Mr Zuroff called on 84-year-old Mr Zentai to abandon
his legal challenge to extradition proceedings and face his alleged war
crimes in a European court.

Mr Zentai had been due in Perth Magistrate's Court on February 13 for a
hearing on a request for his extradition to Hungary, where he is alleged
to have murdered Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in 1944.

But a protest by Mr Zentai's legal team to the Federal Court, which
challenges West Australian magistrates' power to deal with commonwealth
extradition laws, resulted in the case being put off until next month.

"The Hungarian government would never have sought extradition if there
wasn't a solid case against Mr Zentai," Mr Zuroff told Southern Cross
Radio.

"I don't see any reason why he shouldn't be extradited frankly, and I
think it will be extremely important that he's extradited, and this would
afford Australia an opportunity to take successful legal action against
(an alleged) Nazi war criminal who found refuge in this country.

"If we ignore Mr Zentai simply because he reached a chronological age, we
are basically sending the worst possible message."

Mr Zentai denies the accusations and his family has previously said he was
too ill to be extradited.

"I suggest to Mr Zentai that he saves everyone here a lot of taxpayer
money and just goes back to Hungary, faces the courts and if he is
innocent then prove it," Mr Zuroff said.

"These people are old ... all you have to do is do the math.

"What we are saying is that because they have eluded justice does not in
any way diminish their culpability."

(source: New Zealand Herald)