Oct. 21



ITALY/IRAN:

FASSINO -UNACCEPTABLE WORDS RE HOLOCAUST REJECTED


"Once again, unacceptable and mad words that every democrat can but only
reject in the firmest of manners": with these words the left democrats
secretary Piero Fassino expressed his firm rejection on the part of the
left democrats of the comments on Israel, made by the Iranian president
Ahmadinejad.

"Denying the Holocaust and the legitimacy of Israel to exists is wrong
twice - added Fassino - because it denies history and the rights of the
Jewish people and because there will never be peace in the Middle East if
we do not recognise the rights of Israel next to and together with the
rights of the Palestinian people".

(source: Agenzia Giornalistica Italia)




USA:

INTERVIEW - Detective work, luck uncover 100 Nazis in US

Painstaking detective work, scouring historical records and an occasional
lucky break have helped the U.S. government solve some of the coldest
cases of the Holocaust era and find more than 100 Nazi collaborators.

"You get to put together some of the most intricate detective puzzles,"
said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting
Office of Special Investigations.

"We've got the coldest cases of all," he said, using the police phrase for
old, unsolved cases. "If you can prove one of these cases, you can do just
about anything."

He described how his investigators discovered Elfriede Rinkel, a San
Francisco woman sent back to Germany last month after admitting she served
as a guard at its Ravensbruck concentration camp during World War Two.

The U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington obtained copies of the personnel
cards from the concentration camp as part of its efforts to preserve
Holocaust records and shared them with his office, Rosenbaum said.

Of the 1,000 names, his investigators found that the 83-year-old German
native and citizen was the only one living in the United States. They did
further research on her responsibilities at the camp for female prisoners.

As part of the investigation "we Googled her name," Rosenbaum said. The
researchers found an article in a Jewish newspaper about the death in 2004
of her husband, a German Jew and a Holocaust survivor.

Rosenbaum interviewed Rinkel about a year ago and asked whether she ever
told her husband about what she did during the war. "She waved it off and
said, 'Yes, but he wasn't interested.'" But he said Rinkel now claims she
never told her husband.

She was the first woman deported since the office's creation in 1979. With
an annual budget of $5 million, and a staff of 30 that includes 12
attorneys and 10 historians, it has deported or stripped the U.S.
citizenship of 103 individuals.

The office brought a record 10 new prosecutions in 2002, and has 17 cases
in litigation. "We are swamped," Rosenbaum said.

TREASURE TROVE OF EVIDENCE

"We found in the former Soviet Union and other communist countries a
veritable treasure trove of evidence," he said in explaining the increase
in cases.

Rosenbaum said his office is in a race against the clock to bring cases as
soon as possible, with most of the suspects now in their 80s. "The grim
reaper has been depriving us of suspects," he said.

The United States cannot prosecute the cases criminally, mainly because
the events took place on foreign territory. But it can assist in the
extradition of Nazi war criminals to stand trial abroad.

One of the office's most notorious cases involved John Demjanjuk, who was
accused of being the sadistic Nazi death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible."

Extradited to Israel, he was tried and sentenced to death. But he was
freed in 1993 after newly released records from the former Soviet Union
showed another man was probably the sadistic guard.

Demjanjuk returned to the United States, and the office brought a new case
against him. A judge ruled Demjanjuk could be deported to his native
Ukraine for being a guard at three Nazi concentration camps, a ruling that
Demjanjuk is appealing, Rosenbaum said.

He said the office's mission in the future will shift to investigate
naturalized U.S. citizens who have participated in more recent acts abroad
of genocide, torture or state-sponsored murder, an expanded mission that
Congress approved in 2004.

The office now has 46 individuals under investigation, mostly from Rwanda
and the former Yugoslavia, Rosenbaum said. That for the first time exceeds
the number of individuals -- 45 -- under investigation for Nazi
activities.

"We are very aggressively pursuing the modern cases," he said. Of the Nazi
cases, he said, "We are in the closing phase of this effort."

(source: Reuters)




CANADA:

Fate of Jewish lawyers under Nazis documented


Sigwart Suessel had a well-established law practice in Mainz, Germany,
when the Nazis came to power in 1933. Like his fellow Jewish lawyers,
judges and civil servants in the judiciary system, he was soon
disbarred and stripped of his right to pursue his profession under the
Nuremberg racial laws.

Jews are estimated to have represented half of the almost 20,000 lawyers
in Germany at the beginning of the Third Reich. A series of restrictive
measures led to a general ban by the end of 1938 on Jews practising law.
Many subsequently perished in the Holocaust; some, like Suessel, fled, He
arrived in Edmonton in 1937.

At 42, he started a new life as a farmer, despite having no agricultural
experience, buying 25 hectares in British Columbias Fraser Valley. Samuel
Sussel, which he changed his name to, worked on his dairy and egg farm
until his death in 1979.

Sussel's story is featured in the exhibition Lawyers Without Rights: The
Fate of Jewish Lawyers in Germany After 1933, which is having its first
Canadian showing at the Universit du Qubec Montral (UQAM) until Oct. 26.

Organized by the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC) and the
Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre (MHMC), the exhibitions opening last
Thursday launched the centres ninth annual Holocaust Education Series,
which continues until Nov. 9.

The exhibition was initiated by the German Bar Association after Israeli
lawyer Joel Levy asked for a list of the Jewish lawyers who were thrown
out of the profession after Hitler. As current Bar vice-president Norbert
Westenberger said at the launch, the Bar had to admit there was no such
list and, in fact, no documentation of this little-known aspect of
anti-Semitic persecution.

The Bar Association began to research this shameful chapter of German
history, which led to the creation of the exhibition. It was first shown
in Berlin in 1998, and has since been seen in more than 30 German cities
and continues to be on view.

It consists of panels of text and photos that profile 36 of the leading
German Jewish lawyers affected, set against the historical background. In
addition, the ongoing project consists of gathering information on prewar
Jewish lawyers and their contribution to Germanys legal system. To date,
Bar members have published 12 books based on their findings. As
Westenberger said, it is a way of giving these people back their dignity.

The exhibition has travelled to Israel, New York, Los Angeles and, most
recently, to Mexico City.

This is the first French version of the exhibit, and the first time it has
been shown at a university. It is located in UQAMs biology building, at
141 President Kennedy Ave., in a spacious ground-floor room where there is
a great deal of student traffic and many gather for lunch. Its also right
next to the Place des Arts metro station. Hours are Monday to Friday, from
7:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.

This is the first time the MHMC has held a Holocaust Education Series
event at UQAM, said series chair Miriam Schuster. The connection was made
through committee member Ruth Selwyn, former executive director of the
Canadian Human Rights Foundation, who knows Peter Leuprecht, director of
UQAMs Institut dtudes Internationales de Montral.

Schuster hopes Lawyers Without Rights will be a way of engaging young
francophones, as well as the public in general, in a specific aspect of
the Holocaust that raises the issues of the fragility of human rights and
democracy, and the risk of a legal system being perverted for political
ends.

UQAM vice-rector Danielle Laberge spoke at the opening.

The English version of Lawyers Without Rights will be shown at the Beth
Tzedec synagogue in Toronto from Nov. 1 to 12, as the launch event of
Holocaust Education Week, and then at Ottawa city hall from Nov. 15 to 22.

Besides Sussel, another of the 36 lawyers featured, Hugo Franck, also
ended up in Canada. Franck, who worked in Berlin, came to Vancouver in
1938 where he died in 1967. The exhibitions creators have been unable to
find out much about what he did in Canada, but do know that a son became a
law professor at New York University.

There's another Canadian connection. Helmut Kallman, a musicologist at the
National Library of Canada who still lives near Ottawa, is the son of
lawyer Arthur Kallman who died at the Theresienstadt camp in 1943, and is
profiled in the exhibit. Helmut was saved by the Kindertransport, which
brought German Jewish children to Britain just before the war.

Leo Adler, national affairs director of the Friends of the SWC, said that
what is particularly disturbing about this historical chapter is that the
measures taken against Jewish lawyers were all legally sanctioned through
laws passed by the Parliament and upheld by the courts in a country that
had been democratic and had a tradition of the rule of law. In effect,
Germanys lawyers were accomplices to the Nazis diabolical scheme to divest
their colleagues of their rights and ultimately annihilate Jews, he
suggested.

"Why were so many lawyers silent, why was there no resistance?"
Westenberger said. "We don't know. We continue to ask ourselves that
question."

Fortunately, Adler said, the collaboration on this exhibition between
Germany and Israel and the Jewish community signals a new era in their
relations and unique partnership.

The launch was also addressed by German Consul General Jorg Metger and
Israeli Consul General Marc Attali, whose missions are co-sponsoring the
exhibitions Canadian tour.

(source: Canadian Jewish News)



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

Taken by Nazis, Aime is finally recovered


Max Stern was a young art dealer in 1937 when he was forced to sell his
beloved art collection and flee for his life from Nazi Germany. A
German Jew, he escaped the country with no more than a suitcase in his
hand, and eventually settled in Canada to start anew.

Mr. Stern became one of Canada's pre-eminent art dealers but he never
succeeded in recovering his looted art. He died in 1987.

Now, however, the first piece of that plundered past has finally come
home.

In what experts say is a first in recent memory, art confiscated during
the Nazi regime has found its way back to its rightful owners in Canada.

The Max Stern Estate in Montreal and other officials yesterday unveiled a
19th-century painting of an Egyptian dancer. Under the Third Reich, it was
part of Lot 168 in an infamous sale in Cologne known as Auktion 392.

Beginning next week, it will be put on view in Canada.

Max Stern considered his paintings his children. They were his life, said
Robert Vineberg, a Montreal lawyer who knew Mr. Stern and who is the
executor of his estate.

He had given up hope of ever seeing the art again. So this is a very
emotional moment.

The news came during a ceremony rich in poignancy at Concordia University,
only a few blocks from the landmark Dominion Gallery that Mr. Stern ran
for years.

The event was the culmination of an international effort that was led by
Concordia and that included lawyers in Germany, a famous art sleuth,
experts from Sotheby's, and a Holocaust claims office in New York.

Officials underscored the exceptional nature of the retrieval.

More than 140,000 pieces of artwork were looted under the Nazi regime, and
most of them remain unclaimed.

I don't know of any other instance of another painting from abroad being
returned to the estate of the owner in Canada, said Michael Pantazzi, who
retired last month as curator of European art at the National Gallery of
Canada. Mr. Pantazzi is an authority on issues of art provenance.

This is the first incident where something has been recuperated that was
outside Canada, he said in an interview from Ottawa.

It's a precedent, so others who suffered a loss like Mr. Stern have some
hope of recuperating it.

Mr. Stern had himself managed to retrieve a handful of his paintings in
the 1940s, partly with the help of the Canadian military. But a statute of
limitations halted all efforts in 1950.

Unlike many restitution claims, the beneficiaries in Mr. Stern's estate
are not private heirs but two Canadian universities Concordia and McGill
in Montreal as well as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The retrieved painting, Aime, a Young Egyptian, by French painter mile
Lecomte-Vernet, will be placed on display beginning next week at the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The story of how Aime got from Germany to Montreal is one of
fortuitousness, as well as dogged and concerted legwork.

Mr. Stern was forced to sell the painting, along with more than 200 pieces
of Northern European and Old Master works of art, in 1937 (he had been
forced two years earlier by the Nazis to liquidate some of his finest
works).

Mr. Stern fled the country weeks after the auction and ended up in Canada.
After a brief stay in a Canadian POW camp, he settled to Montreal and ran
the Dominion Gallery on Sherbrooke Street with his wife.

He rose to prominence, representing British sculptor Henry Moore and
Canadian artist Emily Carr, among others.

Concordia's Clarence Epstein, head of the Max Stern Restitution Project,
began a global effort in 2000 to hunt down Mr. Stern's artwork. The search
would enlist the help of the Holocaust Claims Processing Office of the New
York State Banking Department.

By 2002, the estate's executors learned that pieces once belonging to Mr.
Stern were circulating in the art market.

A sleuth of looted art, lawyer and former war-crimes investigator Willi
Korte, was brought on as the chief investigator.

By then, Sotheby's in New York had come into possession of Aime, and
discovered its link to Mr. Stern. But it had sold the work to an
undisclosed buyer in 2001 for about $100,000 (U.S.).

Although a Sotheby's official wouldn't disclose the terms, the renowned
auction house reached a deal with the buyer to recuperate the painting and
return it to the Stern estate. The estate did not pay for it.

Officials marvelled at how quickly and smoothly the process went, given
the complexity and frequently nasty litigation that often comes with
retrieving confiscated works.

Mr. Epstein described the retrieval of Aime as a landmark recovery because
it sends a message to other owners of Stern paintings, which officials
still hope to recover.

We're here for the long term, he said, and we are interested in success.

(source: Toronto Globe and Mail)





VATICAN CITY:

The Vatican and the Nazis


The Vatican recently expanded access to its archives up to 1939, and it is
expected to open its archives from World War II within five years. Many
scholars believe documents in the archives may help clarify questions
about the Vatican's conduct during the Nazi period, including the
Holocaust.

Although the opening of the archives is an important development, evidence
already in the public record shows that - contrary to the beliefs of many
- both Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) opposed the
Nazis and the persecution of the Jews.

On behalf of Pope Pius XI, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal
Eugenio Pacelli - the future Pope Pius XII - drafted an encyclical, "Mit
Brennender Sorge," that condemned Nazi doctrines and Germany's persecution
of the Catholic Church. The encyclical was smuggled into Germany and read
from Catholic pulpits March 21, 1937.

The Nazis considered the encyclical a threat to their security and sought
to prevent its further dissemination. On March 26, 1937, Hans Dieckhoff,
an official in the German Foreign Ministry, wrote that this "encyclical
contains attacks of the severest nature upon the German government, calls
upon Catholic citizens to rebel against the authority of the state, and
therefore signifies an attempt to endanger internal peace."

In September 1938, Pope Pius XI's condemnation of anti-Semitism, which he
made during an audience granted to Belgian pilgrims, received
international attention. Additionally, Diego von Bergen, Germany's
ambassador to the Vatican, reported the pope's comments to the German
Foreign Ministry.

After the death of Pope Pius XI, Cardinal Pacelli was elected pope March
2, 1939, and took the name Pius XII. During World War II, the pope was far
from silent. In speech after speech, he championed human rights for all
people and called on the belligerent nations to respect the rights of all
civilians and prisoners of war.

The Nazis understood the pope's words. For example, after studying Pope
Pius XII's 1942 Christmas message, the Reich Central Security Office
concluded: "In a manner never known before, the pope has repudiated the
National Socialist New European Order. ... Here he is virtually accusing
the German people of injustice toward the Jews and makes himself the
mouthpiece of the Jewish war criminals."

The pope sought to undermine Adolf Hitler at every possible opportunity.
According to documents available in the British archives, the pope, in
early 1940, acted as an intermediary between a group of German generals
who wanted to overthrow Hitler and the British government. Although the
conspiracy never went forward, the pope kept in close contact with the
German Resistance and was given knowledge of two other plots against
Hitler.

Pope Pius XII's critics also ignore his wartime assistance to the Soviet
Union, which is established by documents in President Franklin D.
Roosevelt's archives. In response to private appeals made by the president
in the fall of 1941, the pope agreed that American Catholics could support
the extension of military aid to the Soviet Union after it was invaded by
the Nazis.

The Vatican previously published an 11-volume collection of its wartime
documents, which detail its assistance to Jews and other civilians.
Throughout the war, the pope's deputies frequently ordered the Vatican's
diplomatic representatives in many Nazi-occupied and Axis countries to
intervene on behalf of endangered Jews. One of many examples of this came
in early 1943, when the Vatican succeeded in obtaining refuge for a group
of Croatian Jewish children, including the son of Chief Rabbi Miroslav
Freiberger in Zagreb, in neutral Turkey.

Many Jewish leaders, organizations and newspapers expressed their
gratitude to the Vatican. For example, in his April 7, 1944, letter to the
papal nuncio in Romania, Chief Rabbi Alexander Shafran of Bucharest wrote,
"It is not easy for us to find the right words to express the warmth and
consolation we experienced because of the concern of the Supreme Pontiff,
who offered a large sum to relieve the sufferings of deported Jews."

The 11-volume collection also shows how the Vatican, starting in 1941,
helped alleviate the famine in Greece during the Nazi occupation.
Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, a Vatican diplomat and the future Pope John
XXIII, helped save many Greek civilians from starvation.

Several scholars, such as the Rev. Giovanni Sale and Matteo Luigi
Napolitano, who have examined the new documents, have said that they
confirm the Vatican's opposition to both Nazism and anti-Semitism. It
remains to be seen whether Vatican critics, who have long clamored for the
opening of the archives, will make any use of this new material, which
might force them to modify their views.

(source: Baltimore Sun----Dimitri Cavalli is a writer and editor in New
York City)