July 5



POLAND:

Poles Unveil Monument to Jews Massacred in '46


In Kielce, sirens wailed and a rabbi led prayers in a Jewish cemetery
Tuesday as Poland unveiled a monument to dozens of people killed by angry
mobs in a rampage 60 years ago known as Europe's last pogrom.

President Lech Kaczynski marked the anniversary of the Kielce massacre,
which left 42 dead, by declaring in a statement that in Poland there is
"no room for racism and anti-Semitism."

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, led the Hebrew prayers. A little
more than a month ago, he was attacked, though not injured, by a man linked
to neo-Nazi groups who punched his chest and released pepper spray. Police
arrested the attacker last week.

"As the president of Poland, I want to say it loud and clear: What happened
in Kielce 60 years ago was a crime," the president said in his statement.
"This is a great shame and tragedy for the Poles and the Jews, so few of
whom survived Hitler's Holocaust."

An aide read Kaczynski's remarks at the monument's unveiling, saying the
president was ill and could not attend.

The massacre in Kielce came July 4, 1946, when townspeople and police
attacked the Jews of Kielce with guns and clubs little more than a year
after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The mob killed 42 people, mostly Jews. About 30 others died in the ensuing
frenzy.

(source: Los Angeles Times)




USA/HUNGARY:

Holocaust survivors in L.A. rush to get restitution from Hungary


Hundreds of Holocaust survivors flocked to the city's Jewish social
service agencies to get help as they rush to apply for a restitution
program offered by the Hungarian government.

The paperwork must be postmarked and on its way to Budapest by July 31.

The large turnout overwhelmed the legal service group Bet Tzedek, whose
officials hastily scheduled extra sessions to help with the complicated
paperwork. Officials there said they expected about 50 or so of the
approximately 10,000 Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles to sign up for the
sessions. Instead, five times as many have sought help.

Advocates see the surge as a sign that elderly survivors, no longer
working and in ill health, need aid more than ever.

"They are willing to overcome the insult of what they could view as blood
money," said Mark Rothman, Bet Tzedek's Holocaust services advocate.

The money comes at a time when other restitution funds from other
governments and insurance companies across Europe are dwindling.

"As the need becomes greater, the availability of funds become less," said
Michael Bazyler, a Whittier Law School professor who has written a book
about Holocaust restitution. The problem is worldwide, he said, with
survivors in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe facing the worst
crisis.

This year, Jewish Family Service is helping 600 Los Angeles survivors with
utility bills, food, medication and home care. Bet Tzedek officials say
their organization has offered 3,000 Holocaust survivors help in staving
off eviction and getting Supplemental Security Income and Medicare
benefits.

Hungary's program is designed to provide some compensation to people for
the loss of relatives; its focus is not restitution for having been in a
concentration camp. Family members are eligible to receive $1,800 for each
parent and $900 for each sibling who died in Nazi extermination campaigns
with the help of Hungarian collaborators.

"If I could get anything from them, I would take it," said Irving
Goldberger, 82, who went to Bet Tzedek's office in North Hollywood to make
claims for half a dozen family members lost in the Holocaust.

(source: Associated Press)

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


Gay Holocaust Exhibit Headed to Chicago



An exhibit that promises to generate plenty of emotion in the LGBT
community is headed for Chicago.

STICKS + STONES: From Pink Triangles to Gold Medals: Reclaiming Our
Identity will feature a traveling exhibition from the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum as well as AIDS awareness pins and other
thought-provoking items. Roosevelt Universitys Gage Gallery, 18 S.
Michigan, will host the free exhibit from July 13-Aug. 6.

There is an opening reception July 13, 6-9 p.m. featuring hors doeuvres
and beverages.

This unique exhibit, which will be held in conjunction with this summers
Gay Games, has three sections: Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 19331945, a
traveling exhibition organized and circulated by the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum; Red Ribbons: To Remind Us All, an extensive
collection of AIDS remembrance pins, buttons, and stamps from Chicagoan
Norman L. Sandfield; and Gold Medals, selected memorabilia from past Gay
Games.

The event is being funded by a private committee and hosted by the Giloury
Institute.

(source: Windy City Times)



ROMANIA:

Interior Ministry, U.S. Holocaust Museum sign cooperation agreement


The National Archives inside the Interior Ministry and the U.S. Memorial
Holocaust Museum signed an agreement yesterday designed to search and
identify documents relevant to the history of the Holocaust.

The accord was signed by Alexandru Mircea, a state secretary in the
Interior Ministry, and Paul Shapiro, the director of the U.S. Museum's
Center for Advanced Studies of the Holocaust.

"American researchers and Romanian researchers identify the documents and
the accord provides, among other things, the possibility of copying them
to be studied afterward inside the Holocaust Museum, by any entities
interested," said Mircea during a press conference after the signing of
the agreement.

Shapiro underlined the importance of research in this field, saying that
many Holocaust survivors perusing copies of original documents from that
period have been able to find out what happened to their families.
"As years go by, what happened 65 years ago in Europe, including in
Romania, becomes easier to forget and more important to remember," he
said.

The cooperation between the National Archives and the U.S. Memorial
Holocaust Museum began in 1990. Until now, the two institutions have
signed three accords for joint research and the last one signed expired
this month.

The new accord allows the parties to copy about 300,000 pages of documents
pertaining to the Holocaust every year. "The accord has the same
provision: the National Archives and museum researchers identify the
documents that have to be copied. The documents are from the National
Archives," said Mircea.

The government set up last year the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the
Study of the Holocaust in Romania, whose primary objective is to identify,
collect, archive, research and publish documents referring to the
Holocaust in general and to the Holocaust in Romania in particular.

(source: Bucharest Daily News)





LATVIA:

Latvians remember Holocaust amid debate over modern attitudes


Latvia commemorated the Holocaust on Tuesday, amid continuing debate over
modern Latvians' attitude to their past.

On July 4 1941, Nazi forces in Latvia burned Riga's chief synagogue as
part of a Holocaust which eventually killed more than 90 per cent of the
country's Jewish population.

In Latvia, the date is marked as official Holocaust Memorial Day and a
national day of mourning.

However, some experts accuse modern Latvians of apathy in their attitude
to Nazi crimes.

"The Baltics saw active collaboration of numerous locals in the murder of
Jews, but their societies are incapable of generating the political will
to punish their own nationals," said Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi-hunter of
the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Latvia has not prosecuted a single Nazi criminal since it left the Soviet
Union in 1991, Zuroff pointed out. He also criticised recent attempts by
some groups to glorify pioneering aviator Herberts Cukurs, a member of one
of Latvia's Nazi death squads.

Latvian nationalists view the accusations as a deliberate attack on their
nation's image. During the Soviet era, Moscow propagandists accused
Latvians of wholesale collaboration, and modern criticisms are sometimes
regarded as a return to the calumnies of the past.

The Wiesenthal Centre is trying to "create the idea that Latvia is the
only country in which part of the population took part in the Holocaust,"
nationalist daily Neatkariga Rita Avize claimed in an interview with
Foreign Ministry spokesman Gints Jegermanis Monday.

The active participation of Latvians in the Holocaust is not in doubt.
Since the renewal of independence, Latvian historians have published 15
volumes of research into the crimes of the Nazi and Soviet regimes,
clearly establishing the fact of collaboration.

Debate now focuses on the nature of that collaboration, and whether the
Holocaust was actively supported by a broad spectrum of Latvian society,
or by a relatively small handful of individuals.

"Some people, including Latvians, worked for the Nazis and the Soviets.
The problem is that so much Nazi propaganda was taken over by the Soviets
that some true claims were mixed with many more wrong ones," said Uldis
Neiburgs of the Latvian Occupation Museum.

To address the issue and mark the anniversary of the synagogue burnings,
Latvia is hosting a conference on the Holocaust, opened by Yehuda Bauer,
professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and
sponsored by the Latvian president.

"The aim of our conference is not to retouch the participation of
individual Latvians in the Holocaust, but to bring together people who can
talk about these issues in a high-quality way," said Jegermanis, one of
the conference's organizers.

While the debate over Latvians' attitude to their past and Holocaust
survivors' attitude to Latvia continues, the conference is likely to raise
as many questions as answers.

(source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur)





GERMANY:

Newly released files show: Postwar German government and CIA shielded


The recent publication of some 27,000 pages of secret CIA documents has
brought to light new details regarding the close ties between the
political elite in post-war Germany and leading Nazis who survived the
collapse of the Third Reich.

The publication is a result of a 1999 US law, which had been opposed by
the CIA, that regulates the release of US government documents concerning
German and Japanese war crimes. The documents on Japan are to be made
accessible to researchers this summer.
The historian Timothy Naftali from the University of Virginia, who has
seen the documents, discovered that the West German government under
Konrad Adenauer had known the secret whereabouts of Adolf Eichmann since
at least 1958 and had covered this up. The CIA had also shielded the Nazi
mass murderer from prosecution.

Eichmann was a participant at the 1942 Wannsee conference, held outside
Berlin, where the Nazis planned their final solution for the Jews. He was
then responsible for carrying this policy out, authorising the deportation
of more than 4 million Jews.

He was eventually, on May 11, 1960, apprehended in Argentina by Israeli
secret service agents and taken to Israel, where he was tried and
sentenced to death. He was executed on June 1, 1962.

Eichmann personified the crimes of the Nazi regime. His trial was closely
followed around the worldnot least by Hannah Arendt, who observed and
reported on the trialand had a major impact on a new generation,
especially in Germany, which began to question more sharply the role of
the German ruling class as a whole in the crimes of the Nazis.

The documents published by the CIA make clear that both the German and
American governments had shielded Eichmann for a long time in order to
protect the Nazi elements that they were deploying against the Soviet
Union in the Cold War.

A memo to the CIA by a German secret service operative on March 19, 1958,
noted that, according to reports, Eichmann had been living in Argentina
since 1952 under the pseudonym Ricardo Clement.

Eichmann escaped from an American internment camp in 1945. He then lived
in Germany for several years, using forged papers. In 1950, he, like many
other Nazis, went to Argentina along the so-called rat line, receiving
help from the Vatican. Somewhat later, he was joined by his family, and
they lived undisturbed in Buenos Aires.

The references to Eichmann were not followed up by the German or American
secret services because it was feared he might divulge information about
Hans Globke, a lawyer in Hitlers Interior Ministry and the author of a
commentary on the Nazis notorious Nuremberg race laws. Following the war,
Globke became an undersecretary of state in Germany and was regarded as
the grey (in reality, brown) eminence of the Adenauer chancellorship.

Naftali told the Reuters press agency, The newly-published CIA material
points to the fact that there were concerns at the highest levels in the
Adenauer government about what might be said about the chancellors close
collaborators if Eichmann were arrested. He added that the US secret
service had not taken part in the hunt for Eichmann for reasons of state.
Even after Eichmann was unmasked, the CIA exerted pressure on journalists
to suppress any reference to Globke.

After Life magazine had acquired Eichmanns memoirs, then-CIA director
Allen Dulles wrote on September 20, 1960, in an internal memorandum: The
entire material was read. An ambiguous mention of Globke was omitted by
Life magazine on our demand.

Who was Globke?

Unlike Eichmann, the lawyer Hans Globke had not fled abroad after the
Second World War, but had risen to become an undersecretary of state and
security advisor to Chancellor Adenauer. He was regarded as the
chancellors right-hand man, and was responsible for the fact that numerous
old Nazis gained prominent posts in the Federal Republic of Germany (West
Germany). Adenauer stood by Globke throughout his term in office, which
ended in 1963.

Globke came from a rich Catholic household, studying law after the First
World War. He attained his doctorate in 1922 and three years later was
deputy chief of police in Aachen. In 1929, he entered the Prussian
Interior Ministry and by 1932 had already risen within the Reich Interior
Ministry, where he was active until 1945.

In this position, he was the co-author with William Stuckart of the first
commentary on the Nuremberg race laws. After the Nazis had seized Slovakia
in 1939 as a so-called protectorate, Globke was involved in the
elaboration there of the Codex of Jewish Law, a euphemism for the
expropriation and repression of the Jewish population.

After 1945, Globke denied having any close involvement with the Nazi
regime. But he was by no means a mere fellow traveller, as he claimed.
Working in the Prussian Interior Ministry even before Hitler came to power
in 1933, Globke had ordered that Efforts by Jewish persons to mask their
Jewish origins by changing their Jewish names cannot therefore be
supported.

People who sought assistance from him for their relatives during the war
were harshly rejected and threatened against continuing to support Jews
and Polacks.

Globke could not deny his authorship of the commentary on the Nuremberg
race laws, printed by the C.H. Beck publishing house (Stuckart/Globke:
Kommentare zur Deutschen Rassengesetzgebung [Commentary on the German Race
Legislation], Munich and Berlin, 1936). Globkes text contains among other
things the following remark: The dramatic decline in feeling for the
purity of blood in the decades before the radical change [Hitlers coming
to power] appears to urgently demand social intervention.

He also wrote: The Jews must resign themselves to the fact that their
influence on the organisation of German life is gone for ever.

Globke also classified the degrees of Jewishness in his commentary: The
three-eighths Jew, who possesses one full-Jewish and one half-Jewish
grandparent, is considered as a half-breed with a full-Jewish grandparent,
the five-eighths Jew, with two full-Jewish grandparents and one
half-Jewish grandparent, is a half-breed with two full-Jewish
grandparents.

After the Second World War, Globke maintained that he had merely commented
on the laws, and claimed that he bore no responsibility for their
development or implementation. This was a lie.

His superior, Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, who was condemned to
death in the 1946 Nuremberg trials, had issued the following testimonial
on Globke in 1938: Senior government advisor Globke is unquestionably
among the most capable and most efficient officials in my ministry. Frick
went on: He played an outstanding role in elaborating the laws specified
below: a) The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour of
15 September, 1935; b) Law for the Protection of the Genetic Health of the
German People of 18/10/1935; c) the Civil Status of Individuals law of
3/11/1937; d) the law concerning the change of surnames and first names.

Adenauers right-hand man was involved in the elaboration, formulation and
application of laws whose consequence was the final solution of the Jewish
questioni.e., genocide in Auschwitz and elsewhere.

The CIA, the Adenauer government and the Nazis

Globke was, however, only one of many. The names of the high-ranking
officials, judges, state lawyers, SS men and Nazi party members of the
Third Reich who continued their careers in the Federal Republic of
Germany, more or less without interruption, would fill volumes. Here are
only some.

Hermann Josef Abs was a member of the executive board of the Deutsche Bank
from 1938 to 1945. Among other things, he was jointly responsible for the
Arianisation (expropriation) of Jewish businesses and banks. After the
war, he was deeply involved in the setting up of the Federal Republic of
Germany, including his role, between 1948 and 1952, as chairman of the
board of the Kreditanstalt fr Wiederaufbau (Loan Corporation for
Reconstruction), and afterwards as a financial adviser to Konrad Adenauer
and executive board member of the Deutsche Bank.

Reinhard Hhn, an administrative specialist, had been a member of the Nazi
party and SS since 1933. In the 1950s and 1960s, he trained some 600,000
managers at the Academy for Senior Economic Personnel, which he founded in
Bad Harzburg.

Theodor Maunz, who under Hitler was an influential constitutional lawyer,
wrote the first commentary on the 1949 post-war German constitution. He
did so with his student, Roman Herzog, who later became president of the
Federal Republic of Germany. This commentary by Maunz and Herzog is still
cited today. Maunz has also provided legal advice to the self-proclaimed
Hitler admirer Gerhard Frey, who founded the German Peoples Union and
publishes the German National and Soldiers Newspaper. Maunz has written
articles for this neo-fascist newspaper.

When the first German Bundestag (post-war federal parliament) met, more
than half of the deputies had been members of Hitlers NSDAP (Nazi Party)
prior to 1945.

In the Foreign Ministry in 1952, two thirds of the senior officials were
former NSDAP members. Among section heads, the number was four fifths.

Kurt-Georg Kiesinger, a former NSDAP member and leading functionary in
Josef Goebbels Propaganda Ministry, was federal chancellor from 1966 to
1969. Karl Carstens, a member of the NSDAP and the SA (Brown Shirts), was
federal president from 1979 to 1984.

Richard von Weizscker, federal president from 1984 to 1994, launched his
legal career as co-counsel for his father, Ernst, in the Nuremberg war
crimes trials. Ernst von Weizscker was an SS Brigadefhrer and an
undersecretary of state in the Foreign Ministry from 1939 to 1943. He was
sentenced to five years detention on April 14, 1949, because of his active
involvement in the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz.

Hans Filbinger, a member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) after the
war and formerly a member of the NSDAP, resigned in 1978 as state premier
in Baden-Wrttemberg when it was revealed that he had authorised the death
sentence in several trials as a naval judge during the Second World War.
The CDU in Baden-Wrttemberg thereupon appointed him an honorary chairman
in 1979.

Hans Speidel, who had been a professional soldier since World War One,
becoming a major general in the Wehrmacht under Hitler, was a military
advisor to Adenauer and played a central role in the formation of Germanys
post-war Bundeswehr (Armed Forces). He died at 86, a highly decorated
officer, having been awarded the Knights Cross in 1944 and elevated to the
rank of four-star general in 1957.

Without the cooperation or at least approval of the US government and its
intelligence services, the Adenauer government could not have proceeded in
this way. The thousands of pages newly released from the American national
archives also cast light on the work of US agencies. The material makes
clear that the US maintained a vast spy network of former Nazis during the
Cold War.

Probably of greatest significance was Reinhard Gehlen, Hitlers chief of
the military secret service on the Eastern Front. From 1942 to 1945, he
led the espionage department in the Army general staff. Immediately after
the war, Gehlen and his entire organisation, consisting of SS or SD (SS
security service) people, were placed in the service of the American
secret service, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), predecessor to the
CIA.

Gehlen was assigned to develop Germanys foreign secret service, to be
directed against the Soviet Union. "It was important to use every swine, as
long as he was an anti-communist," the former boss of CIA operations in
the Soviet Union, Harry Rositzke, wrote. He added, "The necessity of
recruiting fellow combatants required a not too critical look at their
past."

Thus, Germany's foreign secret service (BND) absorbed whole departments
from the Nazis security service.

At first, the Adenauer government was not informed of the CIAs
collaboration with Gehlen, who had his first contact with the new federal
government only at the end of 1950. It was Hans Globke who made the first
official contact with the general, who was working with his agents in
Pullach, near Munich. "I immediately found a good contact and gained the
impression that he correctly saw the significance of my organisation,"
wrote Gehlen on this first meeting with Globke.

Gehlen led the BND till his retirement in May 1968. Even in 1970, between
25 and 30 percent of BND employees were former members of the SS, the
Gestapo or the Nazi security service.

Therefore, it was natural that the CIA was interested in covering up for
Globke in 1960. "The CIA, which cooperated closely with Globke, helped the
West Germans protect their man against Eichmann," says Naftali.

In January 1963, Adenauer was asked by a US press agency correspondent
whether it had been an error to make people like Hans Globke one of his
closest collaborators. Adenauer answered, "I have heard this question and
also other names again and again. But note this well, my dear sirs, one
needs capable and reliable people in order to develop a democratic state.
Democracy lives by the will, the readiness and the abilities of people to
secure liberty and morality within the legal order."

This seems to have remained the attitude of German governments to the
present day. The historian Naftali complains, It is very difficult to
illuminate international history from only one side.

It is a genuine disgrace that the Federal Government refuses to publish
its information on this topic. I do not understand why Berlin does not
want to release the BND files on the Eichmann case. Why not? I would be
very curious to see what information the West German government had about
Eichmann, and how the decision was reached about what should happen with
Eichmann, taken in the highest circles between Adenauer and Globke.

The German establishment has no interest in this chapter of German history
being debated once again in public. The new exposures about Eichmann and
Globke have received little coverage in the German press. They are all the
more inconvenient at a time when the German government is again engaged in
military operations around the world, and is promoting "a healthy
patriotism" on the basis of 60 years of "experience with democracy."

(source: World Socialist Web Site)