March 5


GERMANY:

The Final 4 Days of an Anti-Nazi's Life


Sometimes, all it takes to reveal a key moment in history is an
inquisitive mind, a telephone and a dollar.

German film director Marc Rothemund, at the time best known for directing
a teen comedy wherein a 15-year-old boy's nether regions begin talking to
him, was reading coverage on the 60th anniversary of the execution of
national hero Sophie Scholl.

A prominent member of the White Rose society, a World War II student
resistance group in Rothemund's hometown of Munich, Scholl and other White
Rose members were arrested in February 1943 for distributing anti-Nazi
leaflets. Rothemund read that Scholl had been executed on the fourth day
after her arrest in 1943. He had thought -- as many in Germany did -- that
she was arrested and executed on the same day.

What happened during those four days? No one seemed to know. It was not in
history books or the coverage on the anniversary of her death. So
Rothemund called the German Archive in Berlin.

Rothemund, in town last month for the Berlin & Beyond festival at the
Castro, summarized the conversation: " 'Do you have documents about the
White Rose time and the Gestapo?' 'Yes.' 'Could I see them?' 'Yes.' 'Can I
make copies?' 'Yes, it costs one euro.' And suddenly, I had interrogation
reports of Sophie Scholl and members of the White Rose and friends of the
White Rose. I had documents about the court and execution documents."

And that is how the director of the German equivalent of "American Pie"
did a career 180 and came up with "Sophie Scholl -- The Final Days," which
is up for best foreign film at next Sunday's Academy Awards. The film has
been a sensation in Germany, where the pitch-perfect embodiment of the
21-year-old Scholl, Julia Jentsch, won best actress awards at the Berlin
International Film Festival -- where Rothemund won best director -- and
the German Film Awards. It has earned more than a million admissions in
Deutschland and has been well received in other parts of Europe.

Scholl's interrogation documents had never been part of official history
because the documents had been sent to the German chancellery and, after
the fall of Berlin, ended up in Russian hands. The Soviets gave the file
to the Stasi, the omnipresent police force of the Communist German
Democratic Republic, or East Germany.

With the reunification of Germany in 1990, the documents landed at the
German Archive -- but so did a mountain of other material. There the
Scholl file sat, unread.

One of the revelations was that Scholl initially denied her involvement in
the White Rose group -- which included her brother, Hans (Fabian Hinrichs)
-- contrary to popular legend that she proudly admitted her role in
distributing anti-Hitler and anti-war leaflets.

Rothemund believes the documents show "she was not a born heroine. She
grew into the task."

They also revealed something else.

"She was the only one who could have saved her life," Rothemund said. "She
did not write the leaflets, and only distributed them. But she refused to
cooperate and was the only woman (of the White Rose group) who got
executed."

"Sophie Scholl" is one of several recent German films (including
"Downfall" and "Rosenstrasse") to tackle hard questions about the German
character during World War II. Rothemund, 37, believes there will be more
because the number of survivors of that era is dwindling, and they're
talking.

"There were anti-Nazi movies by the children's generation -- 'The Tin
Drum' and 'The White Rose' -- and now the grandchildren's generation makes
their own movies because they also have questions about this time of their
grandparents," Rothemund said. "What is very common in Germany -- there
are the murderers, of course -- but the majority of the Germans, the
followers and the yes-men, who said 'Heil Hitler' and profited but were
not murderers, but were guilty for not wanting to know and helping Hitler
(stay in power). They refuse to talk about their time because of a bad
conscience -- they didn't talk to their children.

"My grandmother was a Nazi too. She and my father were never close because
of that. But she was a sports lady. The dream of her life was to take part
in the 1940 Olympics. The Nazis trained her and gave her money and
pampered her -- and she had a great life. I inherited her medals with
swastikas. ... She felt guilty and wouldn't talk about it later.

"The grandchildren are asking questions, and now they are starting to
talk. Because we are really the last generation that can ask eyewitnesses.
Pretty soon, there will be no more murderers. No more victims, no more
follow-men."

Perhaps that's why Rothemund worked exceptionally hard to develop the
complicated character of Sophie's interrogator (Gerald Alexander Held). He
is a man who came to sympathize with Sophie and tried to keep her from
being executed. But he, too, followed orders.

"He's a Nazi who started thinking," Rothemund said.

It's a lesson that is resonating anew in Germany.

(source: San Francisco Chronicle)







POLAND:

Auschwitz photographer still sees images
60 years later, prisoner talks of horrors he was ordered to record



For years afterward, photographer Wilhelm Brasse saw them in his dreams --
emaciated Jewish girls, herded naked in front of his camera at Auschwitz.

Eventually, his dreams stopped. But he never took pictures again.

"I didn't return to my profession, because those Jewish kids, and the
naked Jewish girls, constantly flashed before my eyes," he said.

"Even more so because I knew that later, after taking their pictures, they
would just go to the gas."

Even today, more than 60 years after it ended, there are still stories to
be told about the Holocaust, and the grisly work of running a
concentration camp. Brasse recently told his story on Polish television.
Now he is talking to The Associated Press over coffee and pork cutlets at
a friend's restaurant in Zywiec, his hometown in southern Poland. He is
cheerful, friendly and sharp-witted at 89.

But his voice occasionally wavers as he remembers.

Political prisoner

Brasse was sent to Auschwitz at 22 as a political prisoner for trying to
sneak out of German-occupied Poland in the spring of 1940. Because he had
worked before World War II in a photography studio in Katowice, in
southern Poland, he was put to work in the camp's photography and
identification department.

Brasse, who isn't Jewish, survived because of his photography job, which
enabled him to get better conditions and to swap food for pictures with
guards. Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jewish, died at Auschwitz
from gassing, shooting, disease, hunger or beatings.

"I was given a bath, a new prisoner uniform in decent shape, and moved to
another block," said Brasse. Because he was working with the SS, the
Nazi's fanatical elite force, he was kept cleaner, "so as not to offend
the SS men."

As the only professional photographer in the office, he took the
prisoners' pictures for camp files -- part of the Nazis' obsession with
documenting what they were doing.

"I must have taken 40,000 to 50,000 of those identity pictures," he says.

Sometimes the prisoners had been beaten too badly to get a clear
photograph of their faces.

"The picture wasn't taken and the prisoner was sent away and called back
later, but sometimes it happened that there wasn't anybody to call back
because they'd been able to murder him in the meantime," he said.

Other prisoners eventually took over the ID photos and Brasse was given
new tasks, including pictures of prisoner tattoos. As he remembered a
prisoner from Gdansk named Zylinski, he fidgeted with his car keys on the
table.

"He had a gorgeous tattoo on his back; some artist must have done it for
him, because paradise was done so beautifully. Adam and Eve, a tree of
paradise, and Eve handing Adam an apple. It was really beautiful, and done
in two colors, blue and red."

"Some time later, maybe a month, word came from the crematorium, from a
friend who worked at the crematorium, that he had something interesting to
show. I saw it," he said, his voice catching.

"The skin was cut out from the back of the prisoner. They cut out the
whole piece, and kept the piece of skin, and tanned it."

It was done on the orders of SS camp doctors, Brasse said.

Working for Mengele
Most new arrivals at Auschwitz went straight to the gas chambers, but
those selected for work or experiments would be photographed -- at least
until 1943, when the Nazis switched to tattooing ID numbers on inmates'
arms. But Brasse's work wasn't over.

One day in 1943 his boss, an SS officer named Bernhard Walter, called him
into his office. An immaculately uniformed SS officer was waiting. The
stranger politely addressed Brasse as "sir." It was Dr. Josef Mengele, the
infamous camp doctor and practitioner of cruel medical experiments, he
learned afterward.

"He said that he was going to send some Jewish girls for pictures, and
that I had to take pictures of them naked. One from the front, but the
whole body; the second from behind; the third as a profile of the whole
figure."

Soon afterward, Brasse said, a group of some 15 Jewish girls were brought
in.

"The girls undressed, they were about 15 or 16 years old, and there were
some around 25 or 26. ..." He paused. "It was all so unpleasant."

"They undressed and I said that they have to stand straight and I had to
move the camera back to get the whole figure," he said. "I took the
pictures just as Mengele had indicated."

The doctor ordered pictures of other prisoners he was performing his
"experiments" on -- Jewish twins, dwarfs, stunted people, people with
noma, a disease common in the malnourished that can result in the loss of
flesh. Mengele, who had written his dissertation on the formation of
jawbones in supposedly non-Aryan people, was interested.

"I had to take close-ups. He said sometimes you will be able to see the
whole bone of the jaw, and that I have to do close-ups of it."

"I did the close-ups, in harsh light, and you could see to the bone,"
Brasse said.

"Later, my boss called me in, and Dr. Mengele expressed his happiness with
the pictures I'd taken, that I'd taken them just as he had needed them to
be done," Brasse said.

'I didn't harm anyone'
Asked how he felt about taking the pictures, Brasse said, "It was an
order, and prisoners didn't have the right to disagree. I couldn't say 'I
won't do that.' I only listened to what I had to do and because I didn't
harm anyone by what I was doing, I tried to address them politely. I
explained that they didn't have to be afraid here, that nothing bad was
going to happen to them here, nobody would yell at them."

As the allies advanced on Berlin in late 1944 and early 1945, the Nazis
scrambled to cover up their crimes. Boxes of Brasse's pictures were
shipped out of the camp, Brasse said. He doesn't know where to.

As Russian troops closed in on Auschwitz in January 1945, Brasse's boss,
Walter, worried about the photos still in the camp. He told the young
Pole: "Ivan is coming. Burn everything. All the photographs, all the
negatives, files, burn it all."

But the negatives were fireproof. Walter swore and left. Brasse and
another inmate doused them with water. Most of Brasse's photos
disappeared, but some survived, although it is hard to say which were
Brasse's, since camp photos as a rule didn't carry the photographer's
name. However, in the TV documentary he told the story behind some
pictures in the Auschwitz museum archives that he remembers taking.

Mengele hid in Bavaria, then fled to South America, where he died in 1979.

Jaroslaw Mensfelt, spokesman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, says some
200,000 such pictures were taken, with name, nationality and profession
attached.

About 40,000 of these pictures are preserved, some with the identification
cards, and 2,000 of these are on display in the museum. Others are at Yad
Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial.

Ahead of the Soviet advance, the Nazis evacuated Brasse and thousands of
other prisoners under heavy guard to Austria. American troops freed him
from the Ebensee camp months later. He weighed 88 pounds.

He recovered in an American hospital, and went home to Poland and his
family -- all of whom survived the war -- in July 1945. He wanted to work
as a photographer, but couldn't. Eventually, he started a business making
sausage casings.

"I didn't have a camera, I didn't have anything," he said. "After
everything, after Dr. Mengele, I had an unpleasant feeling taking
pictures."

"When I started to take them, it always seemed to me that I saw those
naked Jewish girls that I'd taken pictures of. That came to mind and I
stopped taking photos."

He still keeps a prewar Kodak Retina camera at home. It sits unused.

(source: Associated Press)




USA//TEXAS:

Tracking the Nazi looters----BOOKS: Robert Edsel doesn't want the world to
forget Germans' art thefts


Dallasite Robert Edsel was acutely aware of the hubris innate in his plan.

"There are probably more books in bookstores on World War II than any
other subject," says Mr. Edsel, a meticulous man sitting in his
meticulously kept Turtle Creek home filled with Old Master paintings. "It
was inconceivable to me that there was a topic that had not been covered."

Yet the full story of Nazi plundering of European art treasures remained
largely unknown outside the world of academia. That revelation launched
Mr. Edsel on a single-minded quest that in a less accomplished person
might be considered derangement.

It took three years of his life and a personal investment of what some
would consider a life's savings. But in Rescuing Da Vinci, the former oil
and gas entrepreneur has documented the methodical Nazi looting, the
postwar discovery and protection of millions of artworks by U.S. armed
forces "Monuments Men," and today's ongoing uncovering and repatriation of
lost works.

"It's absolutely fresh ground," says Edmund "Ted" Pillsbury, retired
director of Fort Worth's Kimbell Museum, who contributed a foreword to the
book.

With hundreds of photos, many of which had been lost since the war, Mr.
Edsel illuminates the four-decade arc of Adolf Hitler's countervailing
passion for and contempt of the art world.

In 1907, a jury that included several Jews rejected Hitler from the
Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. While fellow Viennese artists such as Egon
Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka pushed the envelope of expressionism, Hitler
painted his competent but pedestrian street scenes. Less than three
decades later, Hitler had looted the entire continent of its cultural
history. He only allowed art to be evacuated from Berlin in March 1945,
when the Red Army was kicking in the door. (A foresighted Hermann Goering
had already stashed thousands of his stolen works near Berchtesgaden.)

The concept for Rescuing Da Vinci might never have occurred to Mr. Edsel
had he, his then-wife, Brenda, and their young son, Diego, not left Dallas
in 1996 for a new life in a restored villa in Florence, Italy. There, in
the spiritual home of the Renaissance, he could indulge his love of art
and collecting. And it was there that he began to ponder what had happened
to all of these treasures during World War II.

"No one has communicated this the way I think it should be done, which is
as a visual story," says Mr. Edsel.

From his days as a tenacious tennis player for St. Mark's prep school and
later SMU to his pioneering of horizontal drilling in Texas' Austin Chalk,
Mr. Edsel has demonstrated an iron will and a penchant for life's steepest
roads.

"Robert's temperament and the subject were a marriage made in heaven,"
says Mr. Pillsbury. "To do it justice, you have to persist. You have to
follow every lead and every story, and that's what Robert has done."

"Quitting has never been an option for me," Mr. Edsel says, eyes barely
blinking.

At personal expense, he hired a team of six researchers (in addition to
his Dallas staff) to help him comb archives not just in Washington, Berlin
and Moscow, but throughout Europe Rome, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Krakow
and more.

When not overseas, Mr. Edsel was holed up in the National Archives and
Records Administration in Maryland, digesting stupefying amounts of data,
including a tangential journey through all 44 volumes of the Nuremberg
trial transcripts.

Knitting the story's thousands of threads into the fabric of an accessible
book was the challenge.

"The public at large knows the story of the Holocaust and the methodical,
systematic extermination of whole groups of people," he continues. "What's
been stuck at the academic level is that with the same degree of
precision the Nazis looted and robbed churches, museums and people all
the way up until the last few months of the war."

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, many works that had
disappeared behind the Iron Curtain began to find daylight. Then, in 1994,
Lynn H. Nicholas' scholarly book The Rape of Europa was released,
launching an international movement to locate lost art.

But, at the mercy of her publisher's budget, her photos were limited.
Having secured a substantial personal fortune with the 1995 sale of his
Gemini Exploration to Union Pacific Resources, Mr. Edsel had no such
constraints.

He personally absorbed the cost of printing the lavish Rescuing Da Vinci
with high-quality images a traditional publisher might eschew flourishes
such as a full-page photo of Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and an amazed
George Patton with a cache of paintings stashed in a salt mine in Merkers,
Germany. The picture was taken the day Franklin Roosevelt died.

Hitler's personal obsession, Vermeer's The Astronomer, (once stashed with
6,500 paintings in an Austrian salt mine) is one of many full-page color
images.

Mr. Pillsbury says Mr. Edsel had the interest of several publishers. But
the author says he wanted the book done the right way his way.

"They're in a hurry to recoup their investment. I'm only in a hurry to
tell the story." So this month, Mr. Edsel launched a sales Web site for
the $55 book (rescuingdavin ci.com), began a press tour in New York and
kicked off a series of book-signings at the Strait Lane estate of Dallas
author Robert A. Wilson and his photographer wife, Laura.

"When I started reading Lynn Nicholas' book, I was embarrassed," Mr. Edsel
says. "I'd spent lots of my life in Europe, in museums and studying World
War II. But I never thought about what happened during the war to all of
the artwork. I was just flat-out embarrassed that I didn't know anything
about this."

He eventually ended up on Ms. Nicholas' doorstep in Washington, D.C. "I
was interested in buying the documentary film rights, so I just made a
cold call," he says. But she had already cut a deal with Actual Films (
Lost Boys of the Sudan).

Mr. Edsel joined that project as a co-producer and traveled through Europe
with the crew for the seven-week shoot. (Distribution of The Rape of
Europa documentary is being negotiated; she contributed a foreword to the
book as well.)

And while the author expects to recoup his substantial investment from
both projects, the costs appear to be a minor concern.

"When the full impact of the cost was upon me," he says, "it was too late.
The only way out was to finish."

"My primary goal is to lead a fulfilled, meaningful life," he says. "I
don't want World War II to die with our generation. My objective is to get
out and tell the story to as many people as I can."

(source: Dallas Morning News)