June 5


USA//FLORIDA:

Sarasota man fights museum for return of art seized by Nazis


Collecting poster art was Hans Sachs' passion. The
well-to-do German dentist compiled 12,500 pieces he painstakingly
cataloged and displayed throughout his home in Berlin. He even published a
magazine dedicated to the art form.

Like many German Jews, Sachs lost almost everything to rampaging mobs of
Nazis during what became known as Kristallnacht - "the night of broken
glass" - on Nov. 9, 1938. The Gestapo arrested him and hauled away his
poster collection, which he never saw again.

Today, several thousand of the posters - likely worth millions - are
stored in a German history museum, and Sachs' son wants them back.

But the museum is refusing to hand them over. Officials there say Hans
Sachs was compensated by the German government for the loss of his
collection more than 40 years ago. His son, they say, is entitled to
nothing.

A legal battle seems to be on the horizon.

"His passion was to make this available to the world, to expose the world
to the art form," Sarasota resident Peter Sachs said of his father, who
died in 1974. "I don't think they should be languishing in a basement, nor
do I think the Germans have a right of ownership, considering the
circumstances under which they were stolen."

Peter Sachs, 67, hired New Jersey lawyer Gary Osen, a Holocaust
restitution specialist. Osen last year won a landmark case, getting back
land in downtown Berlin for a descendant of the Wertheim department store
family, whose fortune was lost under the Nazis.

Osen said talks with the German Historical Museum, which has the posters,
haven't produced results. The government's culture ministry recently
offered arbitration before a committee that hears stolen art cases, but
Osen said he is prepared to sue the museum to force the issue.

"Obviously, it's ironic that the German museum of history doesn't have
much regard for history," he said.

Hans Josef Sachs was a teenager in the early part of the 20th century when
he began collecting the bright-hued placards, which in those days were a
primary medium to promote cultural events, advertise products and
disseminate political thought.

Sachs - widely credited with elevating commercial graphics to an
internationally recognized art form during the first decades of the last
century - lost it all to the Nazis. Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels
intended for the seized collection to be the basis of a museum exhibit on
the art of commerce, according to Hans Sachs' written account of the
seizure.

After 17 days in a concentration camp after Kristallnacht, Sachs was freed
and fled to America with his wife and son. He was certified to practice
dentistry, and the family thrived in Boston and then New York City.

Represented by the United Restitution Organization, a Jewish aid group,
Hans Sachs filed a claim and was compensated the equivalent of about
$50,000 for the collection in March 1961, according to Rudolf Trabold, a
spokesman for the German Historical Museum.

And when some of the posters resurfaced in an East German museum a few
years later, Sachs did not demand their return, Trabold said. So his heirs
have no claim.

Osen is arguing that whatever Hans Sachs was paid doesn't matter. He notes
that the German government has committed to returning property seized by
the Nazis to the heirs of the rightful owners, regardless of whether
restitution has been paid.

Peter Sachs said his parents never told him part of the collection still
existed. It was only last year, as the retired commercial airline pilot
was trying to find original copies of his father's poster art magazine,
Das Plakat, that he learned 3,700 pieces were in the German museum. What
happened to the rest is unclear, although the museum said some were
removed and auctioned in 1981.

Robert Brown, whose Reinhold-Brown Gallery in New York City specializes in
poster art, said Hans Sachs' original collection included lithographs from
many of the leading artists of the era. The remaining specimens in the
museum are likely worth millions, he said, considering that most poster
prints didn't survive because they were pasted onto walls.

Beyond hanging some in his Sarasota home, Peter Sachs said he's not sure
what he would do with the art if he gets it. He can see lending some of
the pieces to a museum for display.

He and his lawyer say they are hoping the German Historical Museum will
give them up without involvement of the courts.

"For us, it's inconceivable that they would allow Goebbels to have the
last laugh," Osen said.

(source: Associated Press)


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USA://ILLINOIS:

Holocaust mystery is solved in Chicago


For years, a professor at the University of Amsterdam was
haunted by a photograph of a boy dating to the era of the Holocaust. He
came across it while researching the fate of the Jewish community of a
small Dutch town.

Erik Besseling knew that the child's parents had perished. But the boy
with the youthful mop of hair survived, older townspeople told Besseling.

He was given letters the parents had written from a Nazi concentration
camp and a tablecloth that once covered the family's table.

"I couldn't stop wondering," said Besseling, 58. "What happens after the
story breaks off?"

Besseling recently discovered the unwritten chapter: The boy is now a
69-year-old Chicago businessman. Adopted by American relatives after the
war, Michael Lowenthal had only vague recollections of dinners around the
family table in Edam, a picture-book Dutch town where his parents had
sought refuge from Hitler's regime in 1937.

Learning by chance of Besseling's research, Lowenthal had invited him to
Chicago.

He came this month, bearing the tablecloth.

"It was quite emotional," said Lowenthal, who knew less about details of
his early years than the Dutch scholar who had been ruminating about him.

A year ago, Lowenthal had taken a sentimental journey to Edam. In the
cemetery, he found a Holocaust memorial with his parents listed among
local victims. Told there was a book about the town's Jewish community, he
wrote to De Stadskrant, the local newspaper:

"My name is Michael Lowenthal, but before I was adopted by my American
uncle and aunt, I was Heinz Michael Levy. In the book `Rachel's Children'
you printed a picture of my parents and me. I am anxious to contact the
author."

The publisher brokered introductions by e-mail, leading to Besseling's
trip to Chicago. His host took him on typical tourist rounds: to a Red Sox
game, to the sand dunes of Lake Michigan's eastern shoreline.

Mostly, Lowenthal and Besseling talked, putting together the pieces of a
human jigsaw puzzle.

Lowenthal's parents, Alfred and Herta Levy, were German Jews who fled to
the Netherlands and eventually Edam shortly after their son's birth.
Alfred set up a brassworks in an abandoned factory there. Lowenthal was
too young to remember the welcome townspeople gave new families, including
his.

"Edam was losing the fishing industry its economy depended on," explained
Besseling. "German-Jewish refugees, like Michael's father, established
businesses that provided jobs."

Alfred Levy employed about 40 workers, including Andre Van Mierlo, the
plant manager. In 2001, Besseling found and interviewed Van Mierlo, who
was then in his 90s and living in a retirement home, but since has died.

"His daughter had come across a bundle of letters, along with Herta Levy's
tablecloth, while cleaning out her parents' home," Besseling said. "Van
Mierlo himself had no idea his wife had saved them all those years."

Van Mierlo's memories and those letters enabled Besseling to trace the
Levy family's journey, step by step.

In 1940, German armies marched into the Netherlands, and two years later,
Edam's Jews were ordered to move to Amsterdam. The mechanics of the
Holocaust worked similarly throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

Jews would first be forced into urban ghettos, then deported to
concentration camps.

Every Saturday, Andre Van Mierlo would take a train to Amsterdam, bringing
food to Lowenthal's family, Besseling noted. Had he been caught aiding
Jews, Van Mierlo also might have wound up in a camp.

"When I asked the old man why he undertook such a dangerous thing, he
didn't seem to understand the question," Besseling said.

"Some people just think you should do the right thing, no matter what."

From Amsterdam, the Levys were sent to the Vught and Westerbork
concentration camps in the Netherlands, from which they wrote to Van
Mierlo. Once in a while, their correspondence hints that the couple still
hoped for deliverance, Besseling noted. Mostly, they asked for the
necessities of life. The faithful Van Mierlo responded by sending food
packages.

"We are thankful for every parcel," Alfred Levy wrote back.

Herta Levy ended one postcard to Van Mierlo by writing: "No more news from
us, we are thankful to you for everything."

Besseling believes the Nazis allowed that correspondence partially because
they hoped to exchange some of the inmates for German soldiers captured by
the Allies. Besseling speculated that the boy's photograph, which was
attached to a passport issued by a Peruvian consul, stemmed from an
attempt by the Levys to find a way out of Europe.

A few sympathetic diplomats were then granting passports to Jews who
weren't their nation's citizens but were desperate to escape the
Holocaust.

The Levy family was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in
Germany in 1944. Van Mierlo received one last communication from them,
through a third party. A postcard, it noted: "Are in health. Hope to get
to Palestine."

About five months before Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British and
Canadian troops, his parents died, Lowenthal recalled. Disease was rampant
in the camp.

"After that, I was taken care of by a family with six children that also
looked after the camp's orphans," he said.

He stayed with that family for a short while after the war, then went back
to Amsterdam. From there, he joined a grandmother who lived in
Switzerland. In 1946 he came to Chicago, where he was adopted by an aunt
and uncle. When he was enrolled in the Charles Kozminski School on East
54th Street, he spoke only German and Dutch. Today, not even a trace of an
accent hints at his past.

The book "Rachel's kinderen" takes its title from a biblical passage: "A
voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping
for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because
they are not."

Besseling recalled that, upon the book's publication - three years ago, on
April 24, the anniversary of the deportation of Edam's Jews - he sent a
copy to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. It has a
tree-lined Avenue of the Righteous, memorializing non-Jews who helped Jews
during the Nazi genocide. Besseling thought Andre Van Mierlo deserved to
be included among those honored, he wrote to the curators.

He said he never got a reply. He is considering renewing the effort now
that he has met the boy in the haunting photograph - a child who survived
in part because of food packages sent by his father's loyal employee.

"Maybe I'll write to them again," Besseling said. "Don't you think Andre
Van Mierlo deserves to be recognized, even posthumously?

(source: Chicago Tribune)




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USA//FLORIDA-VERMONT:

Ex-Florida mayor gives to museum


A former Florida mayor has donated $5 million to the University of
Vermont's Center for Holocaust Studies.

The money from 1951 graduate Leonard Miller, 76, and his wife, Carolyn,
will help pay for the center's relocation to a larger, more permanent home
and to endow two new professors to teach on the subject.

Miller is a retired Florida real estate developer and former mayor of
Indian Creek Village. Miller said his parents moved to Burlington from
Russia at the beginning of World War I, ultimately sparing him from
personally facing the Holocaust when World War II broke out. That was his
motivation for supporting the center, he said. ''It's realizing that my
mother and father were both Russian Jews, and had they not come over when
they did, during World War I when they were teenagers, I would have been
born in Europe and would have likely been part of that Holocaust horror,''
Miller said.

''I have many friends in the Miami area who are survivors of the
Holocaust, and when you hear their stories, you really appreciate the fact
that you didn't have to go though that agony,'' Miller said.

It is the latest donation from the couple over the past five years.

''Thanks to the Millers' thoughtful and purposeful philanthropy, the
University of Vermont will stand even taller among the handful of
institutions worldwide known for the excellence of their teaching and
scholarship surrounding one of the defining events in human history,'' UVM
President Daniel Fogel said.

(source: The Gainesville Sun)





GERMANY:

Protest Over Nazi Statues


One of the main figures behind Berlins controversial Holocaust memorial
has led calls for the towering Nazi statues that adorn the citys Olympic
Stadium to be kept under wraps during the World Cup competition in
Germany.

The bronze sculptures, many of which were created by the Third Reichs
artist of choice Arno Breker to reflect the regimes Aryan ideal, were
erected for the 1936 Olympic Games.

But now the stadium is due to stage the final of the 2006 World Cup,
the centrepiece of a tournament that organisers hope will portray the
friendly face of unified Germany. And the prospect of Brekers The Female
Victor and The Decathlete playing a part in the festivities has angered
some critics.

Lea Rosh, a local journalist who was involved in the campaign to institute
a permanent Shoah memorial, told Berlin daily, B.Z., the statues should
not be on view during the competition, which is expected to attract
thousands of football fans to Germany.

She said: At the very least, the figures by Arno Breker should be covered
up, but then with an explanation as to why. Breker was a big time Nazi.
It's bad enough that these statues are even allowed to be in public
places.

Jewish journalist Ralpf Giordano said the government should go even
further and have the sculptures destroyed.

He said: Just to cover them up would be only too symbolic - symbolic of
how Germany deals with its Nazi past, which is to say, not consequently
enough.

Others have suggested that rather than destroying the figures or draping
them in canvas, the authorities should provide detailed plaques explaining
their history and the context in which they were created.

The countrys main communal body, the Central Council of Jews in Germany,
rejected the idea of destroying the sculptures, saying such a move would
be completely wrong and play into the hands of those who sought to deny
the Nazi past.

Meanwhile, the Central Council has announced a mass rally in Nuremberg on
Sunday to protest Irans aggressive stance towards Israel and President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejads new status as darling of Germanys extreme right.

Neo-nazi groups from Germany and other countries are expected to march
during World Cup games involving Iran to show their approval of
Ahmadinejads anti-Jewish tirades.

(source: Totally Jewish, UK)





CZECH REPUBLIC:

Hunt continues for SS loot


A fairytale castle in the Czech Republic complete with secret medieval
tunnels and hidden treasures finally looks set to give up a hoard of
goods looted by the Nazis during the second world war.
Researchers at Zbiroh Castle in Western Bohemia have discovered that the
550ft (165m) well has a concealed false bottom built from reinforced
concrete.

The concealed entrance covered with jasper, a locally quarried gemstone,
has also been booby trapped by retreating German forces.

The series of hidden passageways running off the well is familiar to Czech
treasure hunters, and rumours of hidden artworks overshadow the brooding
neo-gothic beauty of the castle. Unlike some castles in the Rokycany
district, visitors are not drawn in by the medieval grandeur, but by the
tales of SS secrets hidden underground.

The first attempt to explore some of the secret passageways linked to the
well was made in 1965. But the Czechoslovakian military divers failed to
notice the concealed tunnel entrance at the bottom of the well. They
retrieved from a higher tunnel a chest full of Nazi documents and records
of a secret outfit that had occupied the castle. Later explorations
yielded more wartime Nazi documents and indications of other hidden
passageways. But the tunnel beneath the wells false bottom continued to
elude them.

According to retrieved documents, the chateau had served as headquarters
for a secret SS unit which monitored all radio traffic during the war.

As the war drew to an end, the Nazis looted Europe from east to west with
astonishing zeal and thoroughness. Countries overrun by the German army
were systematically stripped of their wealth. The treasures of museums,
banks and ordinary people were mercilessly looted. The SS even set up a
specialist unit, including top art experts, charged with the task of
scouring the continent for old and new masters and art works coveted by
the Nazi elite.

At the end of the war the looted treasures of Europe were hidden by the SS
in mines, caves, deep Alpine lakes and secret underground passages. Zbiroh
Castle appears to have been one such hiding place.

A recent excavation of two of the castles secret passageways indicated
that the treasure hunters were on the right track. Last months exploration
of the murky depths of the well established that, at 550ft, there was
definitely a false bottom concealing an entrance to a secret tunnel.

As the divers cleared part of the bottom, they found hand grenades strewn
about and indications of booby traps. The explosives were concealed,
making it almost impossible to defuse them under the tremendous water
pressure and in the narrow confines of the well. Thus the main prize once
again eluded researchers.

But Maria Slavkovska, spokeswoman for SCSA, a Czech treasure hunters
consortium which is conducting the present explorations, said that there
were positive finds and that the search for the looted treasure was
continuing.

Last month, we found German Army documents, which confirm that the bottom
conceals a secret passageway used by the Nazis to hide looted treasures,
Slavkovska said. Incongruent stuff has also been retrieved from under
Zbiroh Castle during the search of a secret passageway.

The hoard includes a cache of looted 17th-century weapons. We hope that
when the retrieved German army documents are studied we will find
something more valuable.

The Germans were not stupid. They wanted to make sure that nobody would
have access to the tunnel and they made a very professional job of it. So
now were doing everything possible to neutralise the danger at the bottom.
We are calling in a specialist underwater bomb-disposal team to get us
past the explosive false bottom.

(source: Sunday Herald)





AUSTRIA:

Painting looted by Nazis fetches $1.17 million


An Albin Egger-Lienz painting that the Nazis seized from its original
owner fetched a record $1.17 million at an auction in Vienna, with the
proceeds to go to heirs in California, it was reported on Wednesday.

"Totentanz 1809," or "Dance of Death 1809," was auctioned off Tuesday
evening at Vienna's Dorotheum. An official said that the winning bidder
was an Austrian man in his 40s but did not release his name.

The proceeds were set to go to Herta Fox of Los Angeles, a descendant of
the Austrian Jewish family who owned the work before the Nazis confiscated
it during World War II. The painting resurfaced after the war and ended up
in the collection of a museum in the southwestern city of Lienz, where
officials agreed to return it.

(source: Jerusalem Post)