August 31



BELGIUM:

Belgian Authorities Destroy Holocaust Records


The Belgian authorities have destroyed archives and records relating to
the persecution and deportation of Jews in Belgium in the 1930s and 1940s.
Some of this happened as recently as the late 1990s. This was revealed
during hearings in the Belgian Senate last Spring. Though the Senate
report dates from 4 May the Belgian press has not yet mentioned the
affair. The Senate report says that documents about the period 1930-1950
have been destroyed on a massive scale.

The systematic destructions of the records of police and judiciary from
the 1930s and 40s happened chiefly in Brussels and Wallonia, the
French-speaking south of Belgium. The Senate report states that in
Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of the country, archives have been
saved thanks to conscientious archivists. This policy of having competent
archivists manage dead archives contrasts with the disastrous situation
at the offices of the public prosecutors in Brussels and Wallonia.

While the records about the persecution of the Antwerp Jewry have been
kept intact, documents about the fate of the Jews in Brussels and in
French-speaking cities with large pre-war Jewish communities, such as
Charleroi and Lige, were purposely destroyed. In Charleroi all the
archives relating to the 1930s and the war years have vanished. In
Brussels the judicial archives are present until the early 1930s, while
there is (almost) nothing left of the period thereafter, the report says,
adding that Reference is often made to the 1944 fire of the Palais de
Justice to explain this lack of archives [...] However, there is no doubt
that large parts of the Brussels judicial wartime archives were destroyed
after 1944.

The report says that some archives disappeared very recently, during the
reform of the Belgian police forces in the late 1990s and early 2000s,
when the Gendarmerie was abolished and the Federal Police was instituted.
Crucial parts of the Gendarmerie archives vanished in the process.

In Charleroi the archives of both the municipal police as well as the
judicial police were completely destroyed in the late 1970s. Before the
war Charleroi had a relatively large Jewish community which was all but
exterminated during the war, while in Antwerp a significant proportion of
the Jews managed to survive. Yet in Belgium no-one is familiar with the
extermination of the Walloon Jewry, while Antwerp is regularly blamed for
having been a center of anti-Semitism. By destroying paper trails people
are made to forget that certain events ever took place.

Hugo Vandenberghe, the leader of the Flemish Christian-Democrats,
suggested that the destruction of the archives may have had a political
motive. Senator Vandenberghe referred to the anti-Semitism of the Belgian
authorities in the 1930s. The historian Nico Wouters told the Senators
during the hearings that even after the war the Belgian authorities
continued to arrest German Jews who had survived the holocaust by going
into hiding, under the pretext that they were citizens of a hostile
nation.

Records relating to the so-called phantom trains have also disappeared.
The phantom trains were convoys of unpatriotic Belgians, such as
Flemish-Nationalists and Communists, and non-Belgian citizens, most of
them Jewish fugitives from Germany and Poland. They were arrested by the
Belgian authorities at the beginning of the war and deported to France.

Thousands of Jewish families had fled to Belgium in the late 1930s. They
had not been welcome. After the German annexation of Austria in March
1938, Charles du Bus de Warnaffe, the then Belgian Minister of Justice,
ordered the Belgian embassy in Vienna to deny visas to Jews. The Minister,
a Walloon member of the Catholic Party, opined in the Belgian Parliament
(22 Nov. 1938) that the Jews had for centuries constituted a problem in
Europe. In an article he called them an extremely unreliable people; they
have no word of honour and do not keep it. Charles du Bus de Warnaffe
became Minister of Justice again after the war, and gave the death penalty
to Flemish-Nationalists who had fought with the Germans on the Eastern
Front.

In January 1940 the Belgian King Leopold III, the father of the present
King Albert II and an outspoken anti-Semite, told the Belgian government:
The number of Israelites that have entered the country illegally since
September 1939 is estimated to be 30,000. Action against them cannot be
harsh enough.

When German troops invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940, the Belgian authorities
rounded up thousands of unpatriotic Belgians and foreigners, often entire
families. Their exact number is unknown, as the records have been been
destroyed. In Antwerp alone, however, 3,000 suspects were arrested. The
majority of them were Jews; about 400 were (non-Jewish) German citizens
and 20 were Flemish-Nationalists. Citizens from allied and neutral
countries were arrested as well.

The prisoners were stowed in railway wagons and deported to France. One
victim later recalled: It took our train seven days to get from Brussels
to Orlans. Under a torrid heat, locked up with 40 people, including women
and children, in a hermetically sealed wagon where we had to stay day and
night, we suffered from hunger, a lack of air and especially from thirst.
We were left for 43 hours without receiving even a drop of water. [...]
Many people died en route. The exact number of the victims is unknown.

Most records relating to the phantom trains have disappeared, but one
case, involving 79 prisoners, is well-known because it included a
prominent Flemish politician, Joris van Severen, the leader of a fervently
pro-Belgian Fascist party. The group was made up of 21 Belgians (including
an agent of the British Intelligence Service) and 58 non-Belgians: 19
Jews, 15 non-Jewish Germans, 9 Italians (including at least 4 Communist
opponents of Mussolini), 6 Dutchmen (including an 18-year-old girl with
her mother and grandmother), 3 Luxemburgians, 2 citizens of neutral
Switzerland, a Spaniard, a Dane, a Frenchman and an English-speaking
Canadian. French soldiers gone berserk massacred 21 of them at the French
town of Abbeville. The victims included the Canadian, the Dutch
grandmother, a German Catholic monk, a Hungarian Jew, a Czech Jew, a
Communist Brussels town councillor and Joris van Severen and his deputy.

Thousands of civilians deported by the Belgians on the phantom trains were
released by the Wehrmacht, the German army, after the surrender of France.
Their number included many Jews. They were the only Jews ever liberated by
Hitlers army. The Wehrmacht allowed them to return to Belgium. However,
3,537 Jews holding German and Austrian passports were kept imprisoned.
This group later ended up in Auschwitz, where they were murdered. They
were the only Auschwitz victims who had been arrested at the order of a
Western goverment. Leo Frenssen, an Antwerp Flemish-Nationalist and
pacifist member of the Belgian Parliament, who had also been imprisoned in
the South of France, tried in vain to get his Jewish co-prisoners
released.

In July 1940 General Eggert Reeder, the head of the Wehrmacht in Brussels,
had Robert De Foy, the boss of the Belgian secret police, arrested for the
deportations. The SS, however, immediately ordered that De Foy be
released. Reeder received this order personally by telephone from Reinhard
Heydrich, the head of the German State Security, the
Reichssicherheidshauptamt (RSHA), in Berlin. In a 1943 letter to Heinrich
Himmler Reeder explained that it emerged that De Foy had in the months
preceding the invasion closely collaborated with the RSHA and with
Heydrich himself, to whom he had provided important material.

After the war Robert De Foy resumed his position as head of the Belgian
secret police. No wonder no-one ever investigated how and on whose orders
the Belgian secret service had assisted Heydrich before the war. Nor did
Belgium ever pay damages to the phantom train victims. On the contrary, it
even refused to repatriate the bodies of the 21 victims in Abbeville.

(source: Brussels Journal)




GERMANY:

German Officials Under Fire Over Holocaust Gaffs


A speech on postwar German expellees and a misdirected fax have caused
embarrassment for the ministry of culture and roused accusations that
Germany doesn't take the Holocaust legacy seriously.

Red-faced officials at the German culture ministry scrambled to apologize
Tuesday after two gaffes at former Nazi concentration camps.

The first occurred when Hermann Schfer, the deputy minister for culture
and media, gave a speech at a memorial concert for victims of the
Buchenwald camp near Weimar in central Germany.

He spoke at length about the ordeal faced by Germans expelled from their
homes by Red Army forces in the final days of World War II but failed to
mention Nazi crimes or Holocaust victims at any point during the speech.

Some 250,000 people from 36 countries were imprisoned at Buchenwald
between 1937 and 1945, 56,000 of whom were killed or died as a result of
the camp's grueling conditions.

Speech "bewildered" survivors

Bildunterschrift: Groansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Some
56,000 people died in Buchenwald during its eight years of existence

The director of the Buchenwald memorial center, Volkhardt Knigge, and the
head of the International Committee of Buchenwald-Dora, Bertrand Herz,
said they were stunned by the speech, which was delivered Friday.

"I have never had such bewildered reactions from survivors," said Knigge,
who called the remarks "a scandal" and suggested that the government no
longer takes its responsibility for Germany's Nazi legacy seriously.

Herz, a Frenchman who was imprisoned at Buchenwald at the age of 14,
called the speech "nationalistic" and an insult to victims of Nazi
atrocities.

Parliamentary deputy speaker Katrin Gring-Eckardt of the Green party
demanded an explanation from the government "to avoid further damage here
and abroad."

"No intention of relativizing victims"

Amid calls for his resignation Tuesday, Schfer apologized for any offense
he caused.

"I did not know there were concentration camp victims sitting in the front
rows," he told public broadcaster 3sat, referring to the audience at the
ceremony. "I am sorry and apologize for that. I should have included them
more in the speech and was probably obliged to."

He said he had not included specific references to the Nazis' slaughter of
six million Jews because he had been asked to speak on the government's
policy on historical remembrance in general. Schfer added that he had no
intention of weighing the suffering of one group of victims against the
other.

Schfer's boss, Culture Minister Bernd Neumann, expressed his regret in a
statement issued Tuesday for any offense caused by the speech, but said it
was "completely absurd" to assume from it that Germany no longer saw the
Holocaust as an unparalleled crime.

"I extremely regret any political misunderstandings and adverse effects to
the event caused by my department director's speech," he said. "The Nazi
dictatorship and the Holocaust it caused are unique in their cynically
barbarous dimensions."

Fax mistakenly sent to concentration camps

Neumann's office was forced to apologize again Tuesday when it was
revealed that all former Nazi concentration camps received a fax calling
on them to hoist the German flag on "Home Day," Sept. 3, a memorial day
for just the expelled Germans to whom Schfer dedicated his speech.

A culture ministry spokeswoman said a "technical oversight" had included
the camps, which are maintained in Germany as memorials, on the
distribution list and that the ministry regretted the error.

(source: Deutsche Welle)





DOMINICAN REPUBLIC/USA:

Dominican Republic ambassador to open Holocaust exhibit in New York


Commemorating 1,000 Jews rescued from Nazi Germany by the Dominican
Republic, the Dominican Republic Ambassador will open an exhibit
in New York on Sunday, September 10, 2006, to honour the Dominican
Republic community for its heroic role during the Holocaust.

The Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center & Archives in
New York, in conjunction with Rabbi Isidoro Aizenberg, a noted scholar of
Jewish communities in the Caribbean, has produced an historical exhibit,
Sosua, Haven from the Holocaust in the Tropics.

This powerful exhibit presents a compelling insight into the process that
helped save the lives of almost 1,000 German-Jewish refugees.

In September of 1939, amid mounting repression of the Jews in Nazi
Germany, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo offered to accept as many as
100,000 Jews for resettlement in the Dominican Republic. His offer came
after neither the European Allies nor the United States came forward to
help the Jews. More than 1,000 Jews eventually settled in Sosua, forming a
cooperative that specialized in dairy farming and meat production. In
addition to farming, they pursued cultural activities, with several
premier Jewish musicians among the Sosua Jewish community.

At a time when the Jews of Germany sought refuge from the growing Nazi
terror that was enveloping them, explained Dr. Arthur Flug, Executive
Director of The Kupferberg Center, it was the Dominican Republic that
welcomed them. Other nations, including the United States, found
convenient excuses not to provide refuge.

The story of Sosua remains a beacon of hope and compassion amid the
devastation and genocide the Jews faced during the World War II. The
exhibit brings the story to life, and provides an insight into mans
compassion as well as mans cruelty. The exhibit is free to the general
public, and is scheduled to run from September 10 through December 31,
2006.

(source: Caribbean Net News)




AUSTRIA:

Irving could be released within months


The British Holocaust revisionist David Irving, jailed in Austria in
February on Holocaust denial charges, could be released in a matter of
months according to European Jewish Press, a Brussels based news portal.

"I don't think the Supreme Court has any other choice than to overrule the
verdict as grave errors were made in the initial trial," Irving's lawyer
Herbert Schaller said. "The sentence imposed on my client is ridiculously
long - child abusers often don't get half of that. I personally find the
matter outrageous.

"Mr. Irving was thrown into prison for something that he said 17 years
ago. There really is no legal ground for the dubious decision made so far,
and I'm not even contemplating the possibility that the Supreme Court will
uphold the verdict."

Irving claimed at the trial that he had changed his views on gas chambers
over the years. However, he continued to doubt the figure of 6 million
Jews killed and the judge did not believe Irving was being genuine when he
said he had been convinced that gas chambers did in fact exist.

Schaller, who has been dubbed the "neo-Nazi lawyer," last year represented
revisionist Ernest Zundel, a German-born Canadian and distributor of the
booklet Did Six Million Really Die? and a co-publisher of the book The
Hitler We Loved and Why. He said they are now just waiting for a decision,
which he expects by autumn.

Irving was arrested in November 2005 for speeches he made in Austria in
1989 in which he said there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, no
extermination camps in the Third Reich and called Adolf Hitler a protector
of Europe's Jews. He was jailed for three years by a Viennese court for
lying about the Holocaust, a crime under Austrian law, which some thought
was too lenient.

However Austrian state prosecutors have lodged an appeal to try to
lengthen his three-year jail term. They said he remained a beacon for the
European neo-Nazi movement and had been treated too lightly after the
judge at the trial in February declared Irving's show of remorse to be a
case of crocodile tears.

During the trial, Irving changed his lawyer from the respected Elmar
Kresbach to the aging Schaller amid reports he had run out of cash.

Irving's Danish partner, Bente Hogh, admitted that she and their daughter
Jessica, 12, had had to move from their luxury apartment in London into a
small apartment.

She said: "It's all we can afford, we're practically broke." But Irving is
hoping to publish his memoirs, entitled Irving's War, which he has written
in prison and hopes it will provide a healthy income.

In prison he has made good use of the library, although he was refused the
books on Auschwitz he had requested. He said that prison was a "good place
for a writer to be - the solitude is good."

(source: Jerusalem Post)





IRAN:

Ahmadinejad: Holocaust was made up


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has told German Chancellor Angela
Merkel that the Holocaust may have been invented by the victorious Allied
powers in World War II to embarrass Germany, the semi-official news agency
Mehr reported on Monday.

The remarks by the outspoken Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly questioned
the veracity of the Holocaust, came in a letter sent to Merkel in July
whose contents have not been disclosed until now.

"Is it not a reasonable possibility that some countries that had won the
war made up this excuse to constantly embarrass the defeated people ... to
bar their progress," Ahmadinejad said in the letter.

"The question is if these countries, especially Britain, felt responsible
for the Holocaust survivors, why they did not settle them in their own
countries?" it said.

It is not the first time Ahmadinejad has voiced doubt about the mass
slaughter of six million Jews under Nazi Germany, previously describing
the Holocaust as a "myth" used to justify the creation of Israel.

"By promoting the necessity of settlement of Holocaust survivors in the
occupied Palestine, they have created a constant threat in the Middle
East," he said, referring to Israel.

Merkel on July 21 indicated that she would not formally respond to the
letter, saying it contained "totally unacceptable" criticism of Israel and
"constantly put in question" the Jewish state's right to exist.

Ahmadinejad blamed what he described as propaganda after World War II for
making "some people feel historically guilty and indefinitely pay for the
crimes of their fathers".

The letter came as it emerged Iran is to hold an international conference
on the Holocaust on December 11 to 12 that will allow historians to
present "hidden aspects" of the Nazi atrocities.

Media reports said the conference will touch on issues including the
"reasons for anti-Semitism in Europe", "the Holocaust and Zionism", "the
Holocaust in historical documents" and "Holocaust: rules and media".

Ahmadinejad in his letter also praised the German people as a nation with
potential in science, art, philosophy and politics, but "who are not
allowed to play their constructive role in the world".

"Undoubtedly, we, our two governments and nations, can make big steps to
resolve the existing global problems ... together we can convince some
powers that respecting nations' rights is in best interest of everybody,"
Ahmadinejad said.

The publication of the letter coincided with a visit to Berlin by Israeli
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, where she urged the international community
to stop the "threat" posed by Iran's nuclear programme.

"There is an additional threat, not just for the state of Israel but for
the entire international community," Livni said after talks with German
counterpart Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Germany, along with France and Britain, has been at the forefront of
international diplomatic efforts to stop Iran enriching uranium amid fears
the Islamic republic is planning to build nuclear weapons.

(source: Agence France Presse)