Oct. 5



GERMANY:

Suspected Nazi mass grave found


In Menden-Barge, German authorities have unearthed the remains of 51
people, many of them children, in what may be a mass grave for murdered
victims of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.

Local officials said on Thursday that the skeletons of 22 children and 29
adults had been exhumed from the grave in a Catholic church cemetery in
the village of Menden-Barge. The exhumation process was still underway.

"We assume that these were victims of the Nazi regime," state prosecutor
Ulrich Maass said, pointing to signs that those buried met a violent end,
especially the children.

The children's tiny skeletons had been tossed into the grave without
coffins and three of them showed signs of physical disability, he said.

Forensic investigators dressed in white anti-contamination suits used an
excavator to dig out the bones at the picturesque cemetery. They took
notes and photos of the scene, which was roped off.

Next to where the excavator was digging stands a stone monument
commemorating the victims of World War Two bombings -- a sign that the
reasons for the mass deaths may have been knowingly or unknowingly
misrepresented by past officials.

During Hitler's 12-year rule, which ended with the Nazi leader's suicide
in 1945, he oversaw the slaughter of six million Jews and other minorities
across Germany and Europe.

People with mental and physical disabilities were murdered with poison gas
and lethal injections as part of a programme aimed at "cleansing" the
German gene pool of those the Nazis deemed unfit for a master race of
Aryan supermen.

Kept quiet
Local church historian Theo Ostermann, who helped bring the grave to the
attention of prosecutors, told WDR public television that local residents
had long known that as many as 200 war dead were buried at the site but
had kept quiet.

"It was at the unveiling of a war memorial in 2000 that a woman said
something that caught my attention. She said that dead from a clinic in
the neighbouring village of Wimbern had been brought here," Ostermann
said.

"At this clinic, as is now well known everywhere, euthanasia was
practiced," he said.

The prosecutor's office will now look for witnesses and documents from the
period. Maass said he had the testimony from a former church assistant who
said he saw corpses brought on horse-drawn carts and dumped into the
grave.

However, he added it would be difficult to indict anyone 61 years after
World War Two and said it would be hard to detect traces of poisons that
might have been used to kill the victims.

Maass said he would investigate whether the victims came from a nearby
Nazi clinic which was established on the orders of Hitler's personal
physician Karl Brandt, who headed the Nazi euthanasia programme and was
executed after the war.

Once the investigation is completed, officials plan a memorial service at
which the dead will be laid to rest.

"These dead will hopefully never again vanish completely from the
consciousness of this village," he said.

(source: Reuters)





UKRAINE:

Ukraine memorial of Holocaust: Remember Babi Yar!

Religious and political leaders marked the 65th anniversary of the Babi
Yar massacre in Ukraine; Catholics and Jews cooperating to uncover over
500 mass graves of other Nazi victims.


Over 1,000 religious and political leaders, in addition to members of the
public, marked the massacre of more than 34,000 Jews murdered by National
Socialist forces in 1941 in just two days. The memorial took place on
September 27 at a ravine near Babi Yar Ukraine where Jews were
systematically shot to death by Nazi forces from September 29-30, 1941. In
addition, a conference on the Holocaust was organized jointly by the
Government of Ukraine, the Yad Vashem Memorial of Israel, and the World
Holocaust Forum.

Survivors recall that Jews in Ukraine were told 65 years ago to gather
warms clothes and belongings as if they were going on a journey in the
custody of their Nazi captors. They were instead ordered to strip naked
and then were machine-gunned in their thousands by Nazi guards and their
bodies left in a pit prepared for them. Witnesses recall that Nazi
soldiers laughed and taunted their victims before murdering them. Some
observers claim that the worlds silence in the wake of Babi Yar served to
embolden the Nazis Final Solution and carry out further massacres,
atrocities, and mechanized death-camps.

At the memorial service, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, and
Israeli President Moshe Katsav, solemnly processed behind an honour guard
of Ukrainian soldiers bearing flowers to mark the place where the victims
fell. Both of the dignitaries spoke to the assembly, while witnesses,
liberators, and survivors as well as some now recognized as Righteous
Gentiles by the Israeli Government were also on hand. Representatives
from other countries were also present. The memorial was the brainchild of
Russian Jewish businessman and founder of the World Holocaust Forum
Vyacheslav Moshe Kantor. Most people today simply dont know what happened
here, said Kantor who added that the idea for the memorial came to him
some years ago when he noticed children playing soccer at the site of the
massacre. Some observers express misgivings that the site is now used as a
park for picnickers and childrens sports. The September 27th memorial was
held at a Soviet era monument, while a more private memorial service was
held by Jews at another nearby monument in the form of a menorah.

Sixty-five years ago, Nazis murdered some 33,771 persons at the Babi Yar
site, while during the balance of the Second World War, a total of perhaps
100,000 including many non-Jews were annihilated there. Before invading
Russian liberators reached the Ukraine in 1943, Nazi captors ordered
survivors to unearth and burn the remains of all those buried at the site.
The total count of the murdered remains a mystery. The Soviets did not
mark the site afterwards and were long apprehensive about marking the
sites of murdered Jews, just as they were loathe to mark the burial site
of Polish army officers the Soviet Union murdered at the Katyn Forest in
Poland during the Second World War. It was not until 1961, after Russian
poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem Babi Yar, that the Soviet
regime decides to erect a monument at the massacre site. Officials in
Israel calculate that only 20 percent of the former Soviet Unions victims
during the Holocaust have been accounted for, while in Western Europe the
figure stands at 90 percent. Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who died in the
mid-1950s, was himself an anti-Semite.

In August 2006, a secret mission to find Jewish graves in Eastern Europe
discovered a site near Lvov Ukraine where the remains of 1,800 Jews were
found in a mass grave. The search for the graves was initiated by the
Roman Catholic liaison to the Jewish community in France. It is now
believed that there are some 500 mass murder sites in Ukraine yet to be
discovered. Pope John Paul II visited the site in 2001.

Lvov had a Jewish population exceeding 110,000 before the outbreak of the
Second World War. During the war, the Jewish community there was bolstered
by some 100,000 Jewish refugees. Ukrainian nationalists, in cooperation
with the German National Socialists, began the series of mass murders in
July 1941. In 1943, the Jewish ghetto in Lvov was leveled by the Nazis and
its remaining Jewish population of 65,000 deported and murdered.

(source: Spero News, Sept. 28)





UNITED NATIONS:

Europe's Roma Ask U.N. To Recognize Them As Holocaust Victims


Europe's Roma, or gypises, asked the United Nations to include them in
Holocaust commemorations and to be recognized as victims of the Nazis.

The German Central Council for Sinti and Roma introduced plans for an
exhibition at U.N. headquarters that details gypsies who died in the
Holocaust and the discrimination they still endure in Europe.

The exhibition will open January 25 as part of annual events commemorating
the U.N. International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of
the Holocaust.

The council's Chairman Romani Rose spoke about the exhibition at a news
conference that was sponsored by Germany's U.N. mission.

Rose said to Reuters, "The objective of this exhibition is to raise public
awareness of the Holocaust and the murder of half a million Sinti and
Roma, which is not as well known as the murder of six million Jews."

According to Reuters, between 200,000 and 800,000 Roma people were killed
in Nazi concentration camps.

Rose said, "Over 60 years after the end of the Second World War, Roma and
Sinti continue to face cases of serious violations of their human
rights... And there is still insufficient knowledge in the international
community of the historical dimension of the Holocaust against the Roma
and Sinti."

Roma and Sinti are the largest minority in central and eastern Europe,
with about 12 million people.

(source: All Headline News)




ITALY:

Italy sentences 2 ex-Nazis to life in prison for 1944 massacre


In Rome, an Italian court has sentenced two former German soldiers to life
in prison for their role in the 1944 massacre of 16 people near the Tuscan
town of Arezzo, a lawyer said Friday.

The military court in the northern port town of La Spezia found Herbert
Stommel and Joseph Scheungraber guilty of complicity in murdering
civilians, said Stommel's court-appointed lawyer, Giovanni Battista
Santini.

The two, both in their eighties, did not attend the trial and are believed
to be in Germany, Santini said.

Prosecutors accused the two former officers of leading their engineering
corps unit in a two-day rampage in June 1944 against civilians, including
women and elderly residents of Falzano di Cortona, south of Arezzo.

The massacre was a reprisal for the killing of two German soldiers and had
its most bloody episode when the troops shut 11 people in a farmhouse and
then blew up the building.

Stommel and Scheungraber were also sentenced on Thursday to pay
compensation to the town of Cortona and to the families of the victims.
However, the two do not face any immediate penalties, since in Italy court
rulings go into effect only once appeals have been exhausted.

Santini said prosecutors had insufficient evidence to prove that those on
trial were involved in the massacre. He plans to appeal the sentence.

In a separate case last year in La Spezia, 10 former members of the Nazi
SS were sentenced to life in prison for another 1944 massacre of more than
500 villagers in the Tuscan village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema.

(source: Associated Press)