Oct. 1



HUNGARY:


Hungarian accused taking part in World War II massacre denies responsibility


A Hungarian man accused of having taken part in the killing of some 1,000
civilians during World War II denied on Sunday that he was responsible
for the alleged crimes.

Sandor Kepiro, 92, was identified earlier this week by the Los
Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center as having been convicted twice in
1944 and 1946 for his role in the killings committed by Hungarian forces
in Novi Sad, northern Serbia, after they entered the region in the wake of
the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia.

The Wiesenthal Center also said Kepiro participated in the deportation of
Jews in northern Serbia to the Auschwitz death camp.

"Kepiro is the most prominent unpunished Hungarian war criminal still
alive today," Efraim Zuroff, the Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi hunter,
said in a statement. "Given the fact that he was already convicted twice
for his crimes ... we call for his immediate arrest and incarceration."

Kepiro, who returned to Hungary in 1996 after living for decades in
Argentina, said he was in Novi Sad at the time of the killings, but said
his convictions were attempts by authorities to find scapegoats after his
commanding officers escaped to Germany.

"They wanted to exonerate my superiors," Kepiro said in a telephone
interview from his Budapest home. "The main criminals remained free and
only the little ones were left to blame."

Kepiro said his task as an army lieutenant in Novi Sad was to supervise
the identification of those being rounded up, but he denied knowing about
the killings until after they were carried out. The bodies were thrown
into the Danube River.

Kepiro said he had asked for written orders from his superiors and had
refused to take part in anything illegal.

"I swear to everything under heaven that I never used a weapon," Kepiro
said, adding that Hungarian authorities told him when he sought to return
to Hungary from Argentina a decade ago that there were no pending charges
against him.

Kepiro was identified as part of the Wiesenthal Center's Operation Last
Chance a campaign aimed at locating and prosecuting World War II war
criminals before they die.

Targeting people in the Baltic states, Croatia, Austria, Hungary, Poland
and Romania, the campaign has so far identified several hundred suspects.
It offers up to US$10,000 (euros7,800) for information leading to the
prosecution of war crimes suspects.

(source: Associated Press)





USA//PENNSYLVANIA:

Ex-Nazi Guard's Citizenship Revoked


In Pittsburgh, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who has lived in
western Pennsylvania for more than 40 years had his American citizenship
revoked by a federal judge. His attorneys plan to appeal.

The Department of Justice had wanted Anton Geiser deported, saying he hid
his service in the Waffen SS from U.S. officials when he immigrated in
1956.

U.S. District Court Judge David S. Cercone on Friday canceled Geiser's
certificate of naturalization. He ordered Geiser, 81, of Sharon, to
surrender any documents pertaining to citizenship.

"Individuals like Anton Geiser, who assisted the Nazis in their quest to
extinguish the lives of millions of innocent men, women and children, do
not deserve the benefits of U.S. citizenship," U.S. Attorney Mary Beth
Buchanan said in a statement.

Eli M. Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations, said the government will work to remove Geiser from the
country "as swiftly as possible."

Geiser's attorneys said in a statement they planned to appeal.

"We understand that Judge Cercone has issued an opinion in the case that
is adverse to our client. We have not had the opportunity to fully
evaluate Judge Cercone's opinion, however we do expect to file an appeal
to the 3rd Circuit on behalf of Mr. Geiser," wrote his attorneys, Jay K.
Reisinger and Samuel J. Reich.

Geiser, an ethnic German born in what is now Croatia, became an American
citizen in 1962. The retired steelworker has lived in Sharon, about 60
miles northwest of Pittsburgh, since June 1960.

Geiser, who does not deny he was a guard at the camps, has said the U.S.
visa application did not ask him to reveal his service and that the law
did not require him to volunteer information.

He served as an armed SS Death Head guard at the Sachsenhausen camp near
Berlin for much of 1943 and then was transferred to an SS officer training
camp at Arolsen. There, he escorted prisoners to and from the Buchenwald
camp, where tens of thousands of Jews and others were killed. He was at
Arolsen until April 1945.

Geiser told federal officials he was drafted into the German military. He
denied harming prisoners even though he said he had orders to shoot
prisoners who tried to escape, according to court documents.

(source: Associated Press)

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



USA://SOUTH CAROLINA:


Holocaust survivors finally get their U.S. citizenship certificate.


Sandor Koser's gray eyes gleam every time he looks at his naturalization
certificate.

He holds onto the edges of the document, carefully pinched securely
between the tips of his fingers, as if it were a reverent object.

The 77-year-old Holocaust survivor holds it up to his chest and displays
it with a proud smile.

"Today I am free," he says with a thick Hungarian accent.

His wife, Livia, is also free.

Mr. and Mrs. Koser received their American citizenship Monday.

The couple moved to Spartanburg from Hungary in 1998 to be closer to their
son Dr. Andras Koser and their three grandsons.

Mr. and Mrs. Koser were about the same age as their grandchildren when
they were taken to Poland and imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most
infamous Nazi death camp.

Mrs. Koser was 13 when she was placed in a group of Jewish people picked
to die in the gas chambers. Her mother pled for her life, telling Dr.
Josef Mengele that her daughter was 16 and a good worker.

Mr. Koser was forced into hard labor at 14. He and his family were later
transferred to Buchenwald, another concentration camp.

Mr. and Mrs. Koser both lost parents and other family members in the
Holocaust.

The teenage survivors met in high school after they were liberated.

They will celebrate their 53rd wedding anniversary in December.

Their American citizenship was celebrated last week with friends.

Thursday was Mrs. Koser's 76th birthday. But the crowd of friends gathered
around her sang "Happy Birthday" for another reason.

"Happy birthday, dear citizens Happy birthday, dear citizens," chimed
friends at Morningside Baptist Church, where the Kosers take English
classes.

English to Speakers of Other Languages Ministry held a reception Thursday
to celebrate the Kosers' American citizenship.

Lois Blackwell has taught English to the Kosers for three years.

Blackwell gave the couple a United States atlas at the reception.

"I wanted to give them the 50 states," she said.

The Kosers will celebrate another important milestone later this month,
when two of their three grandsons have their joint bar mitzvah, known as a
b'nai mitzvah, at Temple B'Nai Israel.

Rabbi Yossi Liebowitz says Mr. and Mrs. Koser attend services at the
synagogue with regular devotion.

"Sandor and Livia Koser are precious members of our faith and
congregation," Liebowitz says.

"Their personal history as survivors of the Shoah (Holocaust) is well
known to our members. That they are so joyous about life in the face of
all that they have known and experienced is more than miraculous."

Speaking of their grandsons' coming b'nai mitzvah, Liebowitz says, "This
b'nai mitzvah will carry with it the additional meaning of their
grandparents' special legacy, one which embraces profound meaning and hope
for their family and our Jewish people as a whole."

(source: Spartanburg Herald Journal)

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




USA//IDAHO:

Holocaust Survivor Honored at Boise Memorial


Saturday one of the most prominent holocaust survivors was in Boise to
dedicate a tree in her honor-- and in the memory of those killed in the
holocaust.

Gerda Weissmann Klein says the Anne Frank Memorial in Boise is a place of
peace and tranquility where it is important to remember people not so
fortunate as the people who live in the United States.

The holocaust survivor says she's seeing a repeat of history in current
world events with the war on terror.

"I was a young child when the holocaust happened, you know, and I thought
that it would be confined only to history books. I never thought that we
would see again the type of violence like the destruction on September
11." Klein said.

Klein survived for six years in a Nazi concentration camp. She was
liberated in 1945, at the age of 21, and ended up marrying the US Army
Lieutenant who found her. Klein has written several books including an
autobiography "All But My Life."

(source: KBCI News)






GERMANY:

Story of Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany Comes to TV


The remarkable life of Hans J Massaquoi, a black boy who grew up in Nazi
Germany, is being brought to German television in a precedent-setting
two-part docu-drama to be aired on Sunday and Monday.

Massaquoi, now 79 and living in the United States, has become a celebrity
late in life in his native country. His memoirs, entitled 'Destined to
Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany,' became a best-seller
nationwide when they were published five years ago.

Massaquoi was one of the few blacks that lived in Nazi Germany.
Unsurprisingly given the Nazis' intolerance of minorities, he experienced
rejection from the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth Movement) as well as the
local playground after learning they were not open to 'non-Aryans'.

"The Nazis put on the best show of all the political parties. There were
parades, fireworks and uniforms - these were the devices by which Hitler
won over young people to his ideas. Hitler always boasted that despite
parents' political persuasion, Germany's youth belonged to him."

After the bombs started falling on Hamburg in 1943, Massaquoi and his
mother were rejected entry to a bomb shelter after they tried to seek
refuge. It was this particular moment more than any other which stayed
with him as his life took him away from the country of his birth.

After the war, he emigrated to the United States, serving two years in the
army as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. He studied journalism
at the University of Illinois, followed by a career at Jet magazine and
then Ebony magazine, where he became managing editor.

Grandson of the Liberian consul general to Hamburg, Massaquoi was born in
1926 to a well-to-do African father and a German mother. His early life
was one of privilege, befitting the grandson of a diplomat.

His circumstances changed dramatically when his father and grandfather
returned to Liberia in 1929. Refusing to expose her sickly son to a
tropical climate, his mother chose instead to raise her son in Germany as
best she could on her meager wages as a nurse's aide. Suddenly he was not
something special, he was something strange.

Re-living the past

Now that life as an anomoly in his home nation is being shown for the
first time on German television.

Massaquoi said it was a shock to visit the set where his story was being
produced and the memories that flooded back were "incredibly sad."

"My whole life I have tried to put my dark past behind me," he said. "But
this television production has confronted me with unsettling memories of
my childhood in Nazi Germany in 1935 that I had thought I had come to
terms with."

Brutal treatment of blacks in Nazi Germany

In contrast to German Jews or German Roma, Massaquoi was not persecuted.
He was 'just' a second-class citizen, which was actually a blessing in
disguise. During World War II, his 'impurity' spared him from being
drafted into the German army.

Historically, the separation of whites and blacks was mandated by the
Reichstag (German parliament), which in turn, enacted the outlawing of
mixed marriages in the African colonies, according to the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum website.

African German mulatto children were marginalized in German society and
completely isolated from university education, jobs including military
service, social activities and economic support.

"With the Nazi rise to power they became a target of racial and population
policy. By 1937, the Gestapo (German secret state police) had secretly
rounded up and forcibly sterilized many of them. Some were subjected to
medical experiments; others mysteriously 'disappeared'," the website
further explains.

However, Massaquoi, who now lives in New Orleans, is still positive about
returning to Germany: "It's always a home-coming for me. You can't believe
how happy and proud I am that my story is being done for television.''

He added: ''It is so very important for young Germans to understand how
precious freedom is."

(source: Deutsche Welle)


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


World War II Euthanasia Victims Found in German Mass Grave


The skeletons of 20 children and five adults believed to be victims of the
Nazi euthanasia program have been found in a mass grave in western
Germany, officials said Thursday.

The bones of 20 children were discovered this week during excavation work
at a cemetery in the German town of Menden, close to where a World War II
hospital run by Hitler's personal physician Karl Brandt was located.

The children, aged from one to seven years, were found alongside the
bodies of five adults, Hans-Bernd Besa-von Werden, a spokesman for the
district administration said.

Investigations of two of the children's skulls indicated the victims might
have been handicapped.

Euthanasia victims

The prosecutor's office in the nearby city of Dortmund said there were
indications the deaths might be related to euthanasia, which was secretly
practiced by the Nazis from 1939 to 1941.

Some 70,000 people with physical or intellectual disabilities perished in
the euthanasia program, which the Nazis believed was necessary to cleanse
the German people of racially unsound elements.

Those who were deemed "unworthy to live" by showing symptoms of mental
retardation or physical handicap were sent to the so-called killing
facilities, where they were murdered by lethal injections or exposure to
carbon monoxide gas.

An open secret

The Nazi euthanasia program, which became an open secret in the Third
Reich, was officially terminated in 1941 in the wake of protests from
members of the German clergy.

The practice, however, clandestinely continued until the end of World War
II with an ever wider range of victims, which included geriatric patients,
bombing victims and forced laborers.

Karl Brandt, who was in charge of the program, was executed for war crimes
in 1948.

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

German neo-Nazis to launch their own video news channel


The television anchorman has not yet taken to wearing a toothbrush
moustache, or ranting about a "Bolshevik-Jewish" conspiracy threatening
the Fatherland, but the message broadcast by Germany's new neo-Nazi video
news channel is essentially the same.

The news - as seen by Germany's far-right National Democratic Party (NPD)
- is all about glorious neo-Nazi rallies, unscrupulous foreigners who
attack native Germans and a new exhibition in Tehran which purports to
expose the Holocaust as a myth.

Bolstered by its recent gains in key state elections this month, the NPD
is preparing to launch its first weekly online video news channel in an
attempt to win new followers and cover stories that regular news channels
are alleged to suppress.

"The media of the system refuses to recognise us as a democratic party, so
we have to find our own way to reach our supporters," said Klaus Beier, an
NPD spokesman. "Soon, we will be broadcasting a regular online weekly news
programme from our party headquarters." Internet users were given a taste
of Germany's first far-right propaganda broadcast since the Second World
War this week, when the NPD launched pilot video newscasts on YouTube
online, already a favourite neo-Nazi website.

A crop- haired young anchorman called Marcel Woell, wearing an ill-fitting
brown suit and orange shirt, sat at a polished wooden studio desk against
a backdrop of party slogans and what-looked like a pre-Second World War
map of Europe.

Were it not for a curious black sun logo - a mythical Germanic symbol
revered by the Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler that sat in the top right
hand corner of the screen - the setting would have been almost identical
to Germany's prime time television news programme. Tagesschau.

In deadpan mode, Woell regaled viewers with filmed reports of the party's
annual memorial march for Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, a story about a
Cologne housing estate that was trying to rid itself of foreigners and a
report about Tehran's Holocaust exhibition.

Although the broadcasts were mysteriously dropped by YouTube on Thursday ,
the NPD claimed that its "critical news" programme would be fully online
when the party holds its annual congress in mid-November.

The programme is a further embarrassment to Chancellor Angela Merkel's
grand coalition. Her government was shocked this month after the NPD won
parliamentary seats in elections in Ms Merkel's home state of Mecklemburg-
Vorpommern in the north-east. In 2004, the party entered a German regional
parliament for the first time in 36 years in elections in the eastern
state of Saxony. High unemployment and disillusionment with the
established parties were the main reasons for the NPD's electoral gains.

The German government tried to ban the NPD in 2004, but the case was
thrown out by the constitutional court. Judges said key evidence used to
incriminate the party had been incited by infiltrated intelligence agents.

An opinion poll shows 86 per cent of Germans think the mainstream party
politicians should provide convincing arguments to combat far-right
extremism. Most people did not believe the NPD could be defeated through
prohibition.

(source: The (UK) Independent)






UKRAINE:

Babi Yar Massacre Commemoration


Ukrainian and foreign dignitaries have honoured the victims of the 1941
Babi Yar massacre by Nazi occupiers, in a historical commemoration that is
the largest of its kind to have taken place in the former Soviet Union.

At a ceremony in Kiev on Wednesday led by Ukraine's president Viktor
Yushchenko and attended by delegations from 40 countries including Israels
president Moshe Katsav, hundreds of mourners laid flowers at the monument
to the some 33,000 Jews who were shot at this ravine over two a two day
period in 1941.

Netween September 29-30, 1941, the victims, mainly women, children and the
elderly, were marched and than machine-gunned by German troops outside
Kiev at the Babi Yar ravine.

Moshe Kantor, founder of the World Holocaust Forum, president of the
Russian Jewish Congress and the chairman of the Board of Governors of the
European Jewish Congress said that the worlds silence after Babi Yar
emboldened the Nazis.

"Babi Yar was the turning point," he said.

The commemoration was followed by a forum on xenophobia and anti-Semitism,
entilted Let My People Live !. President Yushchenko also opened an
exhibition about the massacre, and described the Holocaust as a "deep
wound" for all nations. "Time can heal wounds, but it should not erase
them from our memories," Yushchenko said.

The Let My People Live ! conference was held at the memorial ceremony. The
conference was organized by the World Holocaust Forum Foundation and Yad
Vashem - it is the second Let My People Live ! conference following the
60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. please click
here for more information on this event

A Pan-European Holocaust Educational Program for Teachers was also
inaugurated at this conference.

The memorial events in Kiev were the brainchild of Moshe Kantor, JTA
reports. Kantor said the idea came to him a few years ago when he noticed
young boys playing soccer near the site of the Babi Yar massacre,
oblivious to the travesties that occurred there decades before.

The Babi Yar Massacre

The Babi Yar massacre began on 29 September 1941, when Nazi forces who had
just occupied Ukraines capital Kiev ordered its Jewish residents to gather
at a ravine. Many believed they would be evacuated. But, the Nazis instead
began two days of executions, killing an estimated 33,000 and throwing
their bodies into a large pit. Over the following two years, the Nazis
killed tens of thousands of other people at the site, including Jews, Roma
and prisoners of war.

Historians believes as many as 100,000 people were murdered. Nazi forces
exhumed and burned many of the bodies in 1943 before retreating from
Ukraine as the Soviet army approached.

(source: EJC)