October 19



GERMANY:

German prosecutors charge 7 for burning Anne Frank diary


Prosecutors said Thursday they have charged seven men for burning a copy
of Anne Frank's diary in an incident that stoked concern about the spread
of neo-Nazi ideology in eastern Germany.

The men, aged 23-28, are charged with incitement and disparaging the dead
for burning the book and praising Adolf Hitler's Nazis at a party in a
village in Saxony-Anhalt state on June 24, prosecutor Uwe Horburg said.

They also played down the Holocaust against Europe's Jews during their
midsummer night's party, Horburg said in a statement.

Their actions and use of Nazi-style language "mocked Anne Frank and with
her all the victims of the former concentration camps," Horburg said.

Mainstream politicians and Jewish leaders are concerned that far-right
groups, including violent neo-Nazis, are growing in strength in eastern
Germany. Far-right parties sit in three eastern state parliaments.

Experts say they are exploiting the region's shallow democratic roots
after decades of communism and tapping frustration at the depressed local
economy.

Saxony-Anhalt's state government announced a drive to prevent the spread
of far-right ideas earlier this week in response to incidents including
the book-burning and alleged anti-Semitism at a school.

Prosecutors are investigating three youths who allegedly forced a student
to run around the school yard last week with a sign around his neck
reading: "I am the biggest swine in the village, I hang around with Jews."

Anne Frank wrote her famous diary while she and her German-Jewish family
hid in an Amsterdam attic for 25 months.

They eventually were betrayed to the Nazis, and Frank died at age 15 of
typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

Only her father survived the war. He published her notes, helping make
"The Diary of Anne Frank" the first popular book on the Holocaust.

(source: Associated Press)







UKRAINE:

Ukrainian film to counter Holocaust deniers: Spielberg


A documentary film based on the accounts of Holocaust survivors in
Ukraine can help undermine activists who try to deny the attempt to
eliminate European Jewry, U.S. filmmaker Steven Spielberg said on
Wednesday.

Spielberg, whose grandparents came from Ukraine, co-produced "Spell Your
Name" and was attending its premiere after visiting Babiy Yar, the site
outside Kiev city center where the Nazis slaughtered more than 33,000 Jews
in two days in September 1941.

"In order to create an undeniability about the Holocaust, these survivors,
52,000 of them, need to be shown to students all over the world,"
Spielberg told a news conference.

"Tolerance is born of education. everything comes from what we learn. It
all depends on who our teachers are...All hatred starts with fear. And we
have experienced a century of fear and I fear we are going into another
century of heightened fear."

The film, co-produced with Ukrainian industrialist Viktor Pinchuk, brings
together poignant accounts from Jews who survived and Ukrainians who
sheltered them.

Yuri Pinchuk relates how he last saw his mother in a ghetto after she had
helped negotiate his safe passage out. Polina Belskaya describes emerging
from a mass grave.

Irina Maksimova winces at the memory of a German soldier removing a crying
infant from a truck, smashing its head and hurling the corpse back into
the vehicle. She then tells how her family took in and concealed 16 Jews.

Director Sergei Bukovsky intersperses the accounts with images of life in
towns and villages through the seasons.

HOMECOMING

Spielberg, making his first trip to an ex-Soviet state, said his
background made him feel very much at home in Ukraine.

"This is not a foreign culture to me at all. This is a very familiar
culture. I got off the aeroplane today and said 'I'm home!"' he said.

"I was brought up in a home where grandparents only spoke Russian and
Yiddish...I kind of felt I had a piece of Ukraine in my own home,
especially around dinner time."

Spielberg said showing the film would build understanding of the Holocaust
in Ukraine, where Soviet versions of history downplayed its scale. He
explored the subject of the Holocaust in his acclaimed "Schindler's List."

He said he had been moved by his visit to Babiy Yar, one of the first
sites of mass wartime killings, where the Nazis ordered Kiev's Jews to
gather 10 days after seizing the city.

No monument stood at the site until the 1970s and it was not until the end
of Soviet rule that a monument to Jewish victims was erected. Gypsies,
partisans and other victims were later shot there, with the total number
believed to exceed 100,000.

"I had mixed feelings to be quite honest because the epicentre of Babiy
Yar is a train station...," he said.

"I had a very tough time picturing what that place looked like 60 years
ago and why it had changed so much. I was then able to see some pictures
in books...get my bearings and my geography and go to the monuments."

(source: Reuters)




USA//MICHIGAN:

Nazi Guard Is Released


Federal authorities freed a former Nazi concentration camp guard after
failing to find a country willing to take the 81-year-old man, who had
been stripped of his American citizenship. The United States Court of
Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in January upheld a decision to revoke the
citizenship of the man, Johann Leprich of Clinton Township in Macomb
County. In September, Mr. Leprich's lawyer asked a federal judge to order
his client released, citing a Supreme Court decision requiring the freeing
of those still held for deportation six months after a removal order. The
Justice Department said it released Mr. Leprich on Monday because Romania,
Hungary and Germany had refused to accept him, the Detroit Free Press
reported. Mr. Leprich must report weekly to the immigration and customs
agency.

(source: Associated Press)