June 18


GERMANY:

Holocaust Archivists Piece Together Bits of Lives ---- The Red Cross'
tracing service has unearthed the facts and fates of millions of the
Nazis' victims. Now it will open its vast paper archives.


He was a Jew with missing teeth and flat feet. He was married with three
children. He fixed heaters, wore reading glasses and wheezed with
bronchitis. On March 28, 1943, he surrendered his trousers, winter coat,
socks, slippers and shaving kit and stepped through the gates of
Auschwitz.

The man known as Max C. is a ghost of pencil and ink, shreds of his memory
preserved by the notations of those who made up the Nazi bureaucracy of
death. These officers, guards and clerks logged the mundane and the
mesmerizing across millions of pages, their meticulous keystrokes and
ornate penmanship belying the brutality of their trade.

Max C.'s Auschwitz medical card listed a cursory history: hand injury,
missed five days of concentration camp work, Dec. 31, 1943; open head
wound, March 31, 1944; gangrene, May 16, 1944; virus, July 9, 1944.

He was transferred to Buchenwald. The last medical report is for a back
injury on March 30, 1945 - two weeks before the camp was liberated. There
is no mention of Max C. after that.

Such stories are stacked in files here at the Red Cross International
Tracing Service, which houses one of the largest collections of documents
on World War II concentration and slave labor camps. The service was founded
in 1943 to search for missing persons. It has unearthed the facts and fates
of millions of Nazi victims, and this year the organization is expected to
open its archives to historians and scholars for the first time. A Times
reporter was recently shown samples of the papers.

Jewish organizations and Holocaust survivors have long sought to study the
50 million documents and 17.5 million names of those considered undesirable
by the Third Reich. But the tracing service, overseen by a commission
representing 11 countries - including Germany, which has strict
confidentiality laws - has restricted access for decades.

In April, Germany agreed to open the files, though questions about privacy
are still being debated by the commission.

"Given the number of documents, I personally believe we'll have a new
understanding of the Holocaust," said Deidre Berger, director of the
American Jewish Committee in Berlin. "We'll see what the victims had to
endure, and the details will sharpen the horror of what happened.
Historical documents always cast new light."

Along rows of dull metal filing cabinets, past maps and artifacts, past
sepia papers and brittle photographs, is a room where scanners click and
spin, turning fading documents into computer bytes. The room is crowded with
boxes, binders and shelves, and the paperwork seems as constant as ocean
tides. The people working here don't look up much; their fingers are supple
and quick, peeling away plastic coatings, gently smoothing crinkled edges.

Their sounds linger down the hall and into another room, where Gabriele
Wilke spends her days cataloging in the section on concentration camps and
deportations. She is a detective, twisting strands of symbols and words into
short narratives.

She knows that a black upside-down triangle sewn on camp clothing signified
a Gypsy; a pink triangle, a homosexual; a red one, a political prisoner; a
star, a Jew. Her finger runs over lines of ink that dried more than half a
century ago: A Slovakian Jew, born in 1923, died of pneumonia in Auschwitz
at 8:40 a.m. on Aug. 6, 1942.

"It's a special thing to touch such an original document," she said. "After
a while you develop a routine and it's work, but every now and then
something jumps out and touches you. I do this person the best favor I can
if I can say I found something, if I have some piece of evidence. Nothing is
more sad than closing a file that says, 'Nothing Found.' I have been not
only amazed by the amount of paperwork the Nazis kept, but by the
meticulousness of it."

Every year the service accumulates thousands of new files, many of them
combed from archives and folders in the former East Bloc. The Red Cross has
responded to more than 11 million requests from 62 countries since documents
seized by Allies at the end of World War II were first stored in a former
Nazi SS barracks in this Baroque spa town. The center had 151,000 queries
last year, many of them from former slave laborers with compensation claims
or children and grandchildren of Nazi victims seeking to construct mosaics
of lost lives.

"The Nazis documented any tiny thing," said Maria Raabe, who has worked at
the service for 36 years. "For some concentration camps we have all the
names but not all the documents. In parts of Eastern Europe we have very
little. We have almost no documentation from the Nazi-run camp Gross-Rosen.
But what we do have from there are documents specifying how many lice were
found on inmates' heads, and this may be the only paperwork to show that
this person was here when."

A page in the Gross-Rosen entry reads: "Lice List, Block 8, 886 prisoners,
12/20/1944." Fifteen lice were found on the heads of 11 inmates; each
inmate's name is listed along with the number of insects plucked from him.
There is nothing else on the page, which lies in a cabinet next to a small
box holding a silver pocket watch, a few rings, a cigarette case with
faded engraving, trinkets pulled from dirt and ash.

An inmate number and a handful of letters on a sheet of paper make the
composite of a life: "Russian woman, 43 years old. Catholic. Worked as
employee. Died, 9:10 a.m. of flu and weak heart. Auschwitz."

Another page, more fragments: the dental history of an inmate at Buchenwald,
a red mark near each of the four lower teeth worked on in 1944. Another page
holds scrawled markings and dates of medical experiments at Dachau. Another
page, titled "Unknown Russians," notes the fate of 11 people, such as death
by suffocation and a crushed skull on May 28, 1944.

Shaded by oaks and set behind a bike path, the service's main office, which
has housed the archives since 1952, has many windows and looks like a hotel.
Walking through rooms of binders and encroaching paperwork, one is struck by
all that is still unknown about the lives that disappeared and the enormity
of what took them. Similar details taken from all those killed around the
world in terrorist attacks since 2001 would fill a small fraction of this
space.

Opening the files may divulge secrets and lies; the Nazis often embedded
slander within their paperwork. There also may be references to inmates who
acted as informers and conspirators to survive amid the mud, frost and smoke
of the camps. Such potential information, emerging decades later in a
different world, may not provide an accurate picture of the pressures and
fears many faced. It is one reason countries such as Germany and Italy have
stressed confidentiality when rousing the past.

"Painful choices had to be made in those days of life and death," said
Berger. "These files will help us humanize them."

Wolfgang Luckey, a red-faced man with a light mustache, distills and
deciphers for the service's central name database. The 10 or so languages he
deals with - a reflection of the sweep of the Nazi regime - have the
universal tongue of phonetics applied to them, allowing Slav, German,
Russian, Italian, French and other surnames to be transliterated by Red
Cross archivists into a common spelling.

"W" means "V." "Z" means "S." There are six pages of such rules. Each has to
be mastered by the staff so a name doesn't slip into obscurity. Alexander,
for example, can be spelled in different ways, and to further complicate
matters, Alexander in Russian can also mean Sasha. Imagine a French clerk at
a Nazi deportation center taking down the name of a Polish man with Bosnian
ancestry and having that later respelled by a German guard at a
concentration camp.

Luckey turned to one of the cards he was working on: A man who arrived in
Buchenwald on Sept. 27, 1944, has his name spelled four ways.

"It's a soup of letters," he said. "The worst is the old German penmanship.
We didn't learn it in school, and it's very elaborate and difficult to
read."

Luckey's fingers ripple like water over the keyboard, his eyes darting from
document to computer screen.

The last of the Holocaust survivors are dying. There's much mystery; a
person born in 1920 could be alive today, but he also could have died in the
camps, or deliberately disappeared after the war, not wanting to remember.

It's this uncertainty that bothers Luckey and the others here.

Raabe recalls a Gypsy name she found in a file from Auschwitz. She tracked
it to another name and then to another and another, going from generation to
generation. She realized, she said, that emerging on the pages before her
was the sparse bookkeeping of a family's annihilation.

"It really shocks you sometimes," she said. "But this is my job. One has to
be very precise. If you don't give everything, the consequences could be
devastating. It could mean that the survivor of a slave labor camp won't get
his pension."

The file for inmate Heinrich D. was clear. Born in 1902, he had an oval
face, brown eyes, a big nose and ears close to his head. He was thin; a scar
ran on the left side of his throat. On Nov. 27, 1937, he was sent to
Buchenwald on a charge of treason. Two cufflinks, two collar buttons and a
comb were confiscated. He remained in the camp until the end of World War
II. He was interviewed by U.S. troops, who typed up a report.

Heinrich D. said the Nazis gave him "25 strokes [of a lash] for laziness.
The leader of the [camp's] political department tried to use me as a spy."
On April 25, 1945, he signed a document to collect his personal
belongings.

"This is an ideal case," Wilke said. "There's a paper trail."

The trail lengthens daily. The tracing service receives the equivalent of
400 yards of files each year. Clues can be a shred of paper, a ripped card,
a torn folder, anything with a scribble. They can be well preserved, as if a
clerk had gone for coffee and left his work on his desk. That's how it seems
in the room where scanners click and hum.

A cardboard ledger with a taped cover, its pages aged but crisp, was
opened.

It listed, in the immaculate arched flow of a fountain pen, 1,283 names of
inmates who died at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria between
1939 and the beginning of 1944.

It wasn't a complete list of those who died in the camp; it was only the
names of "lazy people." Other books held other names.

(source: Los Angeles Times)

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


Memories Fresh for Witness of Hitler's Last Days


In Berlin, there is nothing left of the underground bunker where
Hitler committed suicide.

But for former SS officer Rochus Misch, the memories are still fresh, more
than 60 years after the end of World War Two.

``There was a little working room, a living room, bedroom, toilet and
shower and there was no more,'' said the last surviving witness to the
final two weeks of Adolf Hitler's life, referring to the Nazi leader's
underground quarters.

Gazing at the parking lot which now covers the bunker, Misch recalled his
time as a member of the Fuehrer's close entourage in the days leading up
to April 30, 1945.

The 88-year-old, who still lives in Berlin, served Hitler throughout World
War Two as a bodyguard and telephonist.

But as the Third Reich came to an end, Hitler withdrew to the underground
shelter beneath his chancellery and dismissed most of his staff, retaining
only those whose services were considered essential -- including Misch.

``We were expecting it. Hitler let us go on April 22. I was here in Berlin
... and we stuck it out until April 30,'' he said.

Misch's account of Hitler's last days is worn smooth from years of
retelling. His answers to questions sometimes run off at a tangent but his
feelings -- particularly about the subsequent portrayal of the events of
that spring -- are clear.

``Hitler was not, as the press writes, from February on down here
vegetating,'' he says. ``He always came out and went up to his apartment
in the flat and I went to my room.

``He came down when there was an air raid warning and so I came down
too.''

Hitler's bride, Eva Braun, whom he married two days before their deaths,
also moved into the bunker, Misch says.

``(In the last few weeks) Eva came and then they stayed down there for the
last 12 days.''

WITNESS TO THE END

Dressed in an anorak, cardigan and black jeans, Misch faced a barrage of
reporters at the bunker site when a local history society unveiled the
first sign indicating the location of the shelter.

``Herr Misch is the last one still living who spent the last 15 days in
the bunker and experienced the end,'' said historian Dietmar Arnold, head
of the Berlin Underworlds organization which was responsible for the sign.

The bunker was filled with gravel and covered by a parking lot in the
1980s by the East German government. There is no trace of it left, nor of
Albert Speer's monumental New Reichs Chancellery that once stood nearby.

Misch welcomed the sign -- hoping it would help bring him respite from the
hundreds of journalists, historians and archivists who want to tap his
memories of the man behind the Holocaust.

``Groups come here every day, they want to know; then they come to me,
then they want me to come here.

``They want explanations. It can't go on,'' he said, his voice trailing
off before he launched into another reminiscence.

``There were two witnesses. We were the observers who heard and saw
everything that went on down there,'' he said.

Misch and mechanic Johannes Hentschel were two of the last people
remaining in the bunker as Soviet troops advanced on Berlin. Misch was
later captured by the Russians and interned. He was released in 1954 and
returned to Germany.

``THE WAR IS LOST''

His story became well-known in the wake of the 2004 film ''Der Untergang''
or ``Downfall'' which tells of Hitler's last days.

However, he remains a controversial figure in Germany for his dogged
faithfulness to the memory of a man who was responsible for the deaths and
persecution of millions.

Misch, who witnessed so much, is still haunted by images from the past:
like the deaths of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' six children.

``The Goebbels children were made ready to die in my room. I know all
about (it). Frau (Magda) Goebbels could not prepare them where they were
sleeping, there were still staff there.... So she came down to the bunker
-- nobody came there -- and she prepared the children for their deaths in
peace. That happened in my room.''

Misch faced fierce criticism in calling for a plaque to commemorate the
children -- Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Hedda, Holde and Heide -- and still
seems upset by the memory of the days leading up to the children's deaths
by poisoning.

``It was such a drama, there were tears, you can't imagine,'' he said.

While the details of Hitler's suicide are well-known, Misch's account is
still chilling. By April 22, 1945, an intercepted message from the Western
allies convinced Hitler than the end was near.

He sought advice on how best to commit suicide, fearful of falling into
the Russians' hands as they descended on Berlin.

His German shepherd Blondi was sacrificed in order to test whether cyanide
capsules Hitler planned to use were genuine.

``On April 22, he definitively declared an end: 'The war is lost. You can
all rely on me, I will never leave Berlin','' Misch recalled.

(source: Reuters)





USA:

Lessons from protecting an ex-Nazi----The CIA knew of Eichmann's location
and alias two years before Israel caught him.


He was just doing his job, he testified, and had nothing personally
against Jews. He personified what Hannah Arendt called "The Banality of
Evil." He turned massacre into a bureaucratic act - the Holocaust
administrator.

I have delayed giving his name, Adolf Eichmann, because I wonder how many
still remember it a half century later. Mr. Eichmann escaped from Germany
at the end of the war and was living in Buenos Aires when Israeli
commandos captured him in May 1960 and flew him to Israel. For him, Israel
suspended its ban on capital punishment as he went to trial in April 1961.

His name comes up again because newly released documents reveal that the
CIA learned in 1958 of Eichmann's whereabouts in Argentina and his alias,
but didn't tell anybody or do anything about it. It was a time when the
cold war was dictating policy, and the CIA was using the services of a lot
of Nazis, or shall we say ex-Nazis.

I was reporting from West Germany at the time of Eichmann's trial, and I
remember how nervous the German government was about the trial in
Jerusalem. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, who had presided over an agreement
to provide Israel with $800 million in reparations, talked to me about the
Eichmann case as he was preparing to leave for Washington for his first
meeting with President John F. Kennedy.

He feared that the Eichmann trial would negate his efforts to befriend the
Jews and result in a resurgence of anti-German feeling in the United
States. I asked Mr. Adenour whether he had thought of asking to have
Eichmann brought to Germany for trial. He shook his head. "We have no
special feeling about this murderer," he said.

When the chancellor returned from Washington, he said he was enormously
relieved that American reaction to the trial had been less vehement than
he had feared.

But I wonder how they feel in the CIA now, knowing that this mass murderer
had been protected by American intelligence for two years. And that, were
it not for Israeli intelligence, he might have lived out his life in
peace.

(source: Daniel Schorr is the senior news analyst at National Public
Radio; Christian Science Monitor)




FRANCE:

France tags a Nazi collaborator: the railway


A French court ruling has reopened the country's wartime record and
revived a question that has shadowed it for years: Who should be held
responsible for the mistreatment and deportation of French Jews during
World War II?

An administrative tribunal in Toulouse, France, ruled last week that the
state-owned railroad, the SNCF, was liable for its part in transporting
some 76,000 Jews to transit centers in France and then on to Nazi
concentration camps.

The railroad did nothing to stop the operation, the court found, and on
its own initiative, chose to cram its passengers into cattle cars in
"abominable" conditions with no food or water for trips that lasted days.

It was the first time a French court had condemned a government
institution, rather than an individual, in connection with Holocaust
crimes, and the case has aroused strong feelings in France.

Railroad workers and management have complained that it stains the
railroad's reputation as a bastion of resistance to the German occupation.

"While some employees may have been collaborators," wrote SNCF president
Louis Gallois in Le Figaro this week, "to go from individual guilt to
collective guilt is to go too far toward a corruption of history."

The decision has met with a mixed response from Holocaust survivors and
their families.

For many, the tribunal affirmed their own belief in the wider culpability
of French society in the roundup of Jews and said publicly what it took
French leaders 50 years to acknowledge.

"There were plenty of French people who acquiesced to the requirements of
the Gestapo," wrote historian Maurice Rajsfus in an emotional essay in the
newspaper Libration on Wednesday.

But at a time when many in the French Jewish community worry that anti-
Semitism is spreading - just Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
urged French Jews to send their children to Israel - some say they worry
that the case could cause a backlash against Jews.

Others argued that the case deflects blame from the high-ranking German
and French officials who executed the Nazi program for eliminating the
Jews.

Alain Lipietz, whose father and uncle brought the complaint against the
SNCF based on their experience of being sent by train to a Nazi transit
camp in 1944, calls the railroad's reaction "a perfect example of
self-induced amnesia."

"No one required it to put deportees in cattle cars, without food or
water," says Mr. Lipietz. "A state that wanted to express its solidarity
with deportees, even a state under occupation, had a margin of maneuver to
at least not participate in torture."

Similar arguments have been made in a class-action suit filed by Holocaust
survivors in US District Court in Brooklyn that charges the SNCF
systematically confiscated money and property from Jewish deportees.
Harriet Tamer, one of the lawyers representing the survivors, says the
ruling in the Lipietz case could help her clients' financial claims
against the railroad and their request that the SNCF be found complicit in
crimes against humanity.

"There were honorable people in the resistance but no deportation train
was ever blown up," she says. "You have to accept responsibility. And
sometimes accepting responsibility means reparations."

But others said the notion of collective responsibility was overextended
in the SNCF case.

"If the SNCF is guilty, then the guy who drove the bus is guilty, the guy
who provided the gas is guilty, the person who typed the lists is guilty,"
says Arno Klarsfeld, a Paris attorney who defended the record of the
railroad.

"The danger is that if everyone is guilty, then no one's guilty, from the
top of the chain to the bottom," he adds.

Mr. Klarsfeld's statements on behalf of the railway have received wide
coverage in France because he is the son and law partner of France's most
famous Nazi-hunters, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.

But Arno Klarsfeld, named after his father's father who died at Auschwitz,
said his position on the SNCF was consistent with the work of his family
in focusing on bringing to trial the Gestapo and Vichy officials who
directly oversaw and executed the roundup and deportation of French Jews.

In 1995, President Jacques Chirac formally acknowledged that France shared
in the responsibility for crimes against the Jews, saying "The criminal
folly of the occupier was seconded by the French, by the French state.
Commissions for reparations to survivors and victims' families were set
up.

But for decades, the question of whether postwar France bore any
responsibility for wartime crimes was not even on any French government's
agenda.

Instead a narrative was encouraged that portrayed the majority of French
as either actively or secretly part of the Resistance and the minority
were collaborators who had been executed just after the war.

The collaborationist Vichy regime that ruled in the southern part of
France, while the Germans occupied the north, was considered an illegal
entity. Subsequent French governments, then, could not be held accountable
for what it had done.

Mr. Rajsfus, the historian, noted that in 1972, then French president
Georges Pompidou called on the French nation to forget about the Vichy
period, calling it a time "when the French didn't like one another."

"But how could I forget that on July 27, 1942, my father and my mother,
were deportees in convoy No. 11, transported on French rolling stock,
handed to the Gestapo by French state employees," he added.

(source: Christian Science Monitor)