March 31



POLAND:

Poland wants to change the official name of the Auschwitz death camp on
the U.N.'s world heritage directory to emphasize that it was run by German
Nazis, not Poles, an official said Thursday.

The government requested that UNESCO, the U.N.'s educational and cultural
body, change the name from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "Former Nazi
German Concentration Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau," Culture Ministry spokesman
Jan Kasprzyk said.

Polish officials have complained in the past that foreign media
sometimes refer to Auschwitz - a death camp located in occupied Poland
where Nazi Germans killed 1.5 million people during World War II - as a
"Polish concentration camp."

That phrasing deeply offends sensitivities in Poland, which was
subjected to a brutal occupation by Adolf Hitler's Nazi forces.

"In the years after the war, the former Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration
camp was definitively associated with the criminal activities of the
national socialist Nazi regime in Germany. However, for the
contemporary, younger generations, especially abroad, that association
is not universal," Kasprzyk was quoted by the PAP news agency as saying.

"The proposed change in the name leaves no doubt as to what the
Auschwitz-Birkenau camp was," Kasprzyk said.

Polish officials hope to hear back about their request by the middle of
the year.

The death camp at Auschwitz was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in
1979.

(source: Associated Press)




GERMANY:

German court removes defence lawyer from trial of alleged Holocaust denier


In Berlin, a German court removed a defence lawyer Friday from the
trial of far-right activist Ernst Zundel, charged with denying the
Holocaust, accusing the lawyer of trying to sabotage the proceedings.

Zundel, 66, who emigrated to Canada from Germany in 1958 and lived in
Toronto and Montreal until 2001, returned to court Thursday to face
charges of incitement, libel and disparaging the dead. He went on trial
before a state court in Mannheim in November, but proceedings have bogged
down in a string of motions, objections and interruptions from his defence
team.

On Friday, the superior state court in Karlsruhe said it suspected defence
lawyer Sylvia Stolz of illegally obstructing proceedings "with the sole
goal of sabotaging the trial . . . and making it into a farce."

Stolz has a week to appeal the decision.

Prosecutors accuse Zundel of years of anti-Semitic activities including
denying the Holocaust - a crime in Germany - in documents and on the
Internet.

The presiding judge halted the trial on March 9 to ask for Stolz's removal
after she denounced the court as a "tool of foreign domination" and
described the Jews as an "enemy people" in earlier sessions.

(source: Associated Press)