March 19



GERMANY:

SAVING A NAZI CHURCH----Aryans on the Altar; Swastikas on the Church Bells


A Protestant parish in Berlin has grabbed an ethical dilemma by the horns
with an appeal for funds to save Germany's last Nazi era church. The
building's interior is full of Third Reich symbols. The aim is to turn it
into a place of remembrance.

The Third Reich collapsed 61 years ago but you wouldn't know it if you
walk into the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin. The stark entrance
hall is lit by a black chandelier in the shape of an iron cross. The
pulpit has a wooden carving of a muscular Jesus leading a helmeted
Wehrmacht soldier and surrounded by an Aryan family. The baptismal font is
guarded by a wooden statue of a stormtrooper from Adolf Hitler's
paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) unit clutching his cap.

Friezes depicting the eagle of the Reich and helmeted soldiers' heads have
been carved into a giant stone arch framing the chancel. The organ was
used at the 1935 Nuremberg rally of the Nazi party and egend has it that
the church was originally meant to be named after Adolf Hitler. Indeed,
the only thing that might irk the Fhrer were he to inspect the building
now is the absence of swastikas -- there used to be plenty, but they have
been scratched out from the walls because the Nazi symbol is illegal in
Germany.

The church bells -- which were also embossed in swastikas -- are likewise
missing. They were removed and melted down in 1942 to forge much-needed
guns and ammunition.

It is the country's last surviving Nazi era church with an interior still
dominated by fascist symbols. Consecrated in 1935 two years after Hitler
seized power, its exterior was designed in the Bauhaus style in 1929,
before the reign of the Nazis began. Brown-tiled and cavernous, it is
foreboding and devoid of grace, yet religious services took place here
regularly until just a year ago when the church was deemed unsafe because
tiles started falling off the faade.

"When you hold sermons in this church your words clash with the symbols
around you," Isolde Bhm, dean of the parish, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It's
hard work talking about human dignity when you're constantly aware that
your surroundings evoke a system that trampled on dignity. Sometimes I had
the feeling that the symbols overpowered the words."

Despite the remnants of Nazism in the church though, Bhm and other priests
and parishioners are trying to raise the 3.5 million needed to rescue the
church from collapse. It's an ethical dilemma, but one they regard as
worth tackling. The building could serve as a warning to future
generations and as a reminder of how the German church aligned itself with
the Nazis in the 1930s, they say.

In the early 1930s the Protestant church came under the influence of a
racist and fascist movement called the "German Christians" -- called
"stormtroopers of Jesus," by the group's leader and founder Rev. Joachim
Hossenfelder.

"The people who designed this interior wanted to show that religion and
the Nazi philosophy could merge into one. But it can't," said Bhm. "The
church highlights a problem religion always has -- the need to adapt to
prevailing culture, and the dangers of doing so."

She said she was relieved that it had so far not been discovered by
neo-Nazis as a place of pilgrimage.

Even if the church is repaired, it will never be used for regular services
again because it isn't needed. The large nave is too big for Protestant
congregations in the Tempelhof parish of southern Berlin.

But Bhm said it could be used for special religious services on important
anniversaries such as the January 27, 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz
death camp or the November 9, 1938 attacks on Jewish property across
Germany -- known as the "Night of the Broken Glass."

The cash-strapped city of Berlin and the Protestant Church have ruled out
making anything but symbolic donations but the the regional parish hopes
the building will be officially classified as a historic monument. That
would make it easier to gain funds from various memorial foundations such
as the one that oversees the Holocaust memorial in central Berlin or the
Pltzensee prison where nearly 3,000 people were executed by the Nazis.

The parish has asked two historians to work out a plan for presenting the
history of the church.

"The only way we'll preserve the church is by finding various different
uses for it," said Bhm. "I hope we'll manage to keep its interior as a
warning and supplement it with a documentation center. But it may be that
it just turns into a ruin and that the generations after us will decide
how to deal with it."

(source: Der Spiegel)




THE NETHERLANDS:

Dutch Furious at Italian Minister's Nazi Jibe


The Dutch government is furious after an Italian minister this week
branded the country's euthanasia laws as akin to the policies of Adolf
Hitler and the Nazis, according to Dutch news agency ANP.

Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende is expected to raise the matter with
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi next week at a European summit,
ANP said.

``This is scandalous and unacceptable... it is not the way to get along in
Europe,'' Balkenende said on Friday.

Italian Parliamentary Relations Minister Carlo Giovanardi told a radio
program on Thursday that Nazi thinking was re-emerging in Europe through
Dutch euthanasia laws and a debate on the killing of children with
deformities.

He has refused to apologize.

In 2001, the Netherlands became the first country to legalize adult
euthanasia. The number of cases is not known as not all doctors report
them, but the government estimates there are several thousand each year.

Doctors must obey strict rules -- patients must face a future of unbearable
suffering and make a voluntary request to die; doctor and patient must be
convinced there is no other solution; a second doctor must be consulted
and life ended in a medically appropriate way.

The government recently set up a commission to regulate the practice of
ending the lives of ``seriously suffering'' newborn babies, a move critics
say could allow more euthanasia.

Euthanasia of newborns and late abortions remain illegal, but the commission
is likely to recommend that doctors who follow certain rules are not charged
in concrete cases.

Ministers want the commission to work on the basis of criteria similar to
current unofficial rules -- allowing euthanasia or late abortion if the baby
had no chance of survival and was suffering unbearably, if the doctor
consulted at least one other, the parents agreed and the life was ended in
the correct medical way.

Dutch media estimate about the lives of 15 to 20 disabled newborns are
terminated each year.

Three years ago Berlusconi was himself in trouble for telling a German
politician who was haranguing him during his debut at the European
Parliament he should play a Nazi concentration camp guard in a film.

(source: Reuters)







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


March 26



MICHIGAN:

Shadow of Holocaust hangs over museums' fight for paintings

On Dec. 14, 1938, a German-born Jew living in Paris named Martha Nathan
sold two of her most valuable paintings, van Gogh's "The Diggers" and Paul
Gauguin's "Street Scene in Tahiti," to three Jewish art dealers in Paris.
Nathan received the equivalent of $9,364 for the van Gogh and $6,865 for
the Gauguin.

Nearly 70 years later, the circumstances surrounding that sale - how and
why Nathan sold her paintings and the price she received - are at the core
of federal lawsuits brought by the Detroit Institute of Arts and the
Toledo Museum of Art against 15 distant Nathan heirs living in Europe,
Australia and America. The museums sued in January after failing to
resolve a festering ownership dispute dating to May 2004. The museums want
the court to affirm their legal title to the paintings.

The van Gogh has been in the Detroit Institute of Arts collection since
1970, and the Toledo museum bought the Gauguin in 1939. The heirs say that
Nathan was forced to sell the paintings under Nazi duress and for less
than a fair-market price. The museums argue that the sale was voluntary
and that Nathan received a price consistent with other sales at the time.

At stake is whether the pictures will remain in the museums' collections
or whether the museums must return the works to the heirs or pay
restitution. The paintings are worth an estimated $10 million to $15
million a piece in today's art market, based on auction records.

Independent experts in Nazi-era art claims in Europe and America have told
the Detroit Free Press that the documentary evidence in the Nathan case
suggests that the museums hold the upper hand on the key legal issues. But
the case, as with nearly everything touched by the long shadow of the
Holocaust, is also braised by moral ambiguities, slippery slopes and
truths lost to the quicksand of history.

The restitution of Nazi-looted art is a hot-button issue. The numbers are
elusive, but 600,000 works appear to have been seized by the Nazis with
10,000 to 100,000 still missing, according to one scholar's congressional
testimony. Attention has increased in the last decade as museums and
governments became more sensitized, sometimes reluctantly.

Museums added Holocaust-era information to their Web sites, and
organizations created databases to help families find lost art. Ethical
guidelines such as the Washington Conference Principles, which grew out of
a 1998 summit, are now widely accepted.

There have been about 30 claims made on U.S. museums for Nazi-looted art
in the last decade, a dozen of which resulted in the pieces being returned
or in restitution, according to the American Association of Museums. Most
cases are resolved through quiet compromise. Arbitration panels are
becoming standard in Europe but haven't caught on in the United States.

Arbitration is less confrontational, less expensive and better able to
bend to the moral complexities of these disputes, said Anne Webber of
London, co chair for the Commission on Looted Art in Europe. Litigation is
a last resort, she said.

The Nathan heirs say the lawsuit betrays ethical guidelines encouraging
alternatives. "The heirs specifically said that they would accept a
decision from an independent art commission or arbitrator, but they could
not accept a decision made by the museums without an independent review,"
said heir Claude Ullin of Armadale, Australia, in a statement issued in
February.

The museums' lawyer concedes the lawsuit is aggressive but says ethics
codes don't compel museums to submit to arbitration in the face of
spurious claims. "The museums have spent 18 months compiling extensive
provenance research, at their own expense, and have shared the findings
fully with the heirs and their lawyers," said Thaddeus Stauber of law firm
Sidley Austin in Los Angeles.

"When the other side simply chooses to ignore the documented evidence, the
appropriate action is for us to defend our ownership in federal court."
Lawyers for the heirs, Philip J. Smith and David Rowland, both of New
York, declined to comment. Smith, who is defending the lawsuits, said he
won't speak publicly on the matter until he files a formal response; the
deadline to respond is April 27.

Martha Nathan and her husband Hugo, a businessman, were part of the
affluent and cultural elite in Frankfurt, one of Germany's the most
progressive cities in the early 20th Century. Martha (Dreyfus) Nathan was
born in Frankfurt in 1874 into a prominent European banking family. The
couple's art collection - which included works by Picasso, Matisse,
Renoir, Bonnard and Corinth - was notable enough to be featured in a
German art magazine in 1916.

"They were involved with dealers in Paris and Berlin," said Laurie Stein,
an art historian specializing in Nazi-era provenance research. "They
loaned works to exhibitions. They were philanthropists. They lived a very
privileged life."

When the Nathan heirs raised questions about the paintings, Stein was
hired by the museums to research Nathan's life and the disputed works. The
investigation gave birth to a dictionary-thick stack of documents, from
government records to personal correspondence. Stein said such a detailed
paper trail is unusual, but Nathan was meticulous and relentless in
pursuing restitution.

Stein's research was shared with the Nathan heirs and counsel. The
documents, which Detroit Institute of Arts officials allowed the Free
Press to examine, establish a timeline.

At his death in 1922, Hugo Nathan willed the art to his wife with the
provision that she could sell the works "to meet her essential needs."
(The couple had no children.) In 1930, she moved the most valuable
paintings, including the van Gogh and Gauguin, to Basel, Switzerland,
where her family had banking interests. Hitler was elected chancellor in
1933; in 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, stripping Jews of
citizenship.

Nathan moved from Frankfort to Paris in 1937, residing for 2 1/2 years in
fine hotels and acquiring French citizenship. Nathan was forced to pay an
enormous exit tax (reichsfluchtsteuer) of 87,431 reichsmarks ($35,254).
Many Jews were forced to liquidate assets, including art, for obscenely
low prices to pay the tax. Nathan sold nothing and left the country with
no debt.

She returned to Frankfort in summer 1938 to pack up household possessions,
which she shipped to Paris for storage, except for six paintings deemed of
national value that authorities confiscated. Nathan sold her Frankfort
home for considerably less than market value; the proceeds were deposited
into a Nazi-frozen emigrant account.

On Nov. 9, 1938, the Nazis unleashed a wave of violence now known as
Kristallnacht (night of the broken glass), terrorizing Jewish businesses,
homes and synagogues.

Three weeks later in Paris, Nathan gave the noted art dealer George
Wildenstein permission to view 17 of her paintings in Basel. Wildenstein
bought four pictures, including the Gauguin for $6,865 and the van Gogh
for $9,364. He paid in Swiss francs.

Five months later, Wildenstein sold the Gauguin to the Toledo museum for
$25,000. He sold the van Gogh to Detroit collector Robert Tannahill for
$34,000 in 1941. Tannahill left the painting to the Detroit Institute of
Arts upon his death in 1969.

Nathan moved to Basel in August 1939. Three years later, the Nazis
confiscated her belongings from a Paris warehouse. After the war, Nathan
scrupulously sought and won restitution from the German and French
authorities for goods stolen from the warehouse, the duress sale of her
home, the paintings she had to leave in Germany and her exit tax. In no
claims did she mention the van Gogh or Gauguin paintings.

By the early '50s, Nathan was now in her late 70s and having severe
economic difficulties. "In the last years, she has basically lived on the
proceeds from selling the paintings she had owned for many years," her
lawyer wrote in a 1951 letter. Nathan died in 1958 at age 84.

The Nathan heirs issued a statement in February through their attorney
Rowland arguing, in part, that the timing of the sale of her paintings -
just months after the forced sale of her home and months before the
deteriorating conditions in France caused her to flee to Switzerland -
proves the sale was under duress.

"Martha Nathan did not cease to be a Nazi victim when she left German
soil, but Nazi persecution against her continued when she lived
temporarily as a refugee in France, where the Germans also confiscated all
of her property because she was Jewish," the statement said.

But Jonathan Petropoulos, a historian at Claremont McKenna College in
California and author of "The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi
Germany," disagrees. Despite the clear persecution suffered by Nathan,
there is no legal precedent for the disputed works to be considered a
forced sale or subject to restitution, he said in an e-mail.

"The fact that she was able to transport them to Switzerland, let alone
that she did so in 1930, almost three years before Hitler came to power,
means that she had freedom of action with regards to the disposition of
the works," he said. "The law as it stands now does not provide for
restitution when individuals sold property that they took with them during
their emigration to make ends meet."

Petropoulos noted that moral grounds could compel restitution when victims
clearly had to sell art to survive, but he does not think the moral
considerations are sufficient to clear the bar in the Nathan case.
Her lifestyle argues that she wasn't destitute when she sold her
paintings. In a 1956 affidavit, her brother, Willy Dreyfus, says that her
assets in 1938 were between 300,000 and 400,000 reichsmarks or $121,000
and $161,000. In today's figures, Nathan was worth $1.7 million to $2.3
million, according to a consumer price index calculator.

While some of Nathan's cash was trapped in frozen accounts, she paid her
large exit tax without liquidating assets. "She had to have access to some
significant cash from somewhere to make this payment," said the museums'
lawyer Stauber.

Determining fair-market value for the van Gogh and Gauguin paintings is
tricky. Records of comparable private sales are buried in gallery files
and correspondence that dealers tend to guard like state secrets. Auction
records can also be deceptive. Prices depend on quality, size, subject and
provenance.

The Detroit and Toledo pictures are high-quality, unique works but do not
rank with the artists' most valuable pictures. Still, the heirs think it's
a slam dunk that Nathan was cheated.

"The heirs do not think that one need be an art expert to realize that a
profit of 270 percent (sic) within such a short time indicates that an
unfair price was paid for the paintings," according to last month's
statement.

Dealers in New York and Europe with expertise in Post Impressionism said
in interviews that Wildenstein cut a shrewd deal, but the prices Nathan
got were not unreasonable. Walter Feilchenfeldt of Zurich, Switzerland,
one of Europe's leading van Gogh dealers and son of a legendary dealer,
said that $9,000 for the van Gogh and $7,000 for the Gauguin were strong
prices in 1938.

"Wildenstein never paid high prices if he could avoid it," said
Feilchenfeldt. The high profit margin, he said, reflected, in part, the
premium eager Americans were willing to pay European dealers at the time.
Auction prices, which don't always correlate to private sale prices, tell
a subtle tale. In a June 1939 auction in Lucerne, Switzerland, a van Gogh
self-portrait sold for $46,500, according to Cynthia Saltzman's book
"Portrait of Dr. Gachet." Catalog records show that in December 1939, a
portrait of Adeline Ravoux, now owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art, sold
for $19,000 at Parke-Bernet in New York.

The high prices relative to Detroit's picture reflect the A-plus quality
and desirable subject matter of the pictures. By contrast, a small, somber
picture of an old woman sold for $2,133 in Paris in 1937.
A Gauguin landscape painted in Martinique similar to Toledo's picture -
albeit smaller and not as coveted as a Tahiti picture - sold for $2,700 at
Parke-Bernet in 1939.

Another clue to Gauguin's market is that Wildenstein gave Tannahill a
$6,000 credit for trading in Gauguin's "Bonjour, Monsieur Gauguin" as part
of the deal when Tannahill bought Detroit's van Gogh. That's about the
same price Wildenstein gave Nathan for her Gauguin.

While Nathan doggedly pursued every avenue possible for post-war
reparations, the van Gogh and Gauguin receive no mention in any document.
Museum officials say this proves she didn't consider the works sold under
duress.

But reparations experts in Germany said that since the pictures were sold
outside of Germany and France and never crossed back into Germany, Nathan
would not have qualified for restitution.

She faced similar hurdles in Switzerland where the law at first covered
only objects looted during the war. She could have petitioned the Supreme
Court after 1947, but her chance of winning was very slim, said Swiss
author Thomas Buomberger, who wrote a landmark book on the Swiss trading
of looted art during the war.

Less easy to explain, however, is why, if Nathan considered the sale of
her paintings forced, no records have been found suggesting she complained
to Wildenstein or ever tried to contact the Toledo museum or Tannahill.
Neither did her brother, Willy, who died in 1977.

"Everybody knew where the pictures were," said Detroit Institute of Arts
director Graham Beal.

Sidney Bolkosky, a historian at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and
one of the country's leading Holocaust scholars, said disputes should be
evaluated on a case-by-case basis. He said Nathan should have received
reparations (and did) for property and money seized by the Nazis but
probably not for the paintings because they weren't stolen and they were
sold outside of Nazi control.

"But the problem when you're dealing with Holocaust questions is that
frequently both sides are true," said Bolkosky. He said it was probably
true that Nathan would not have sold the paintings absent the Nazis, but
it was also probably true that she sold the pictures of her own free will.

"There's a war on and everybody is suffering losses of all sorts," he
said.

---

THE ISSUES

At stake in the dispute between the Detroit and Toledo museums and Martha
Nathan's heirs is ownership of paintings by van Gogh and Gauguin worth an
estimated $10 million to $15 million each. The heirs want the paintings
returned or compensation to let them stay at the museums. The conflict
boils down to three key issues:

Was Nathan forced to sell the paintings in 1938? The heirs contend she
would not have sold the pictures if not for Nazi persecution. The museums
say she sold the pictures voluntarily. Experts told the Free Press the
facts appear to side with the museums.

Did Nathan receive a fair-market price for the paintings? The heirs say
that because the pictures were resold at a profit of more than 260
percent, she did not receive a fair price. The museums say the prices were
consistent with other sales at the time. Art dealers with knowledge of the
period and auction records inspected by the Free Press suggest Nathan
received a fair price, though she may not have negotiated a very shrewd
deal.

Did the museums live up to current ethical standards dealing with Nazi-era
restitution issues? The heirs say the museums' unwillingness to submit the
dispute to binding arbitration is an abdication of accepted professional
guidelines. The museums argue that because the heirs refuse to withdraw
their claim in the face of overwhelming evidence against them, the museums
had to sue to protect their rightful ownership.

(source: Detroit Free Press)





UKRAINE:


Holocaust memorial vandalized in Ukraine

A Holocaust monument was vandalized in southern Ukraine.
The monument in the city of Sevastopol was smeared with black paint,
swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti. The incident took place on the night
of March 22-23. Local authorities are investigating the incident.

Acts of anti-Semitic vandalism in the southern Ukraine region of Crimea
have been occurring almost every month during the past year, local Jews
said.

(source: JTA)