Nov. 7



USA//NEW YORK:

Judge halts Picasso sale because of lawsuit over claim of Nazi intimidation


In New York, a judge temporarily blocked the highly anticipated auction
of one of Pablo Picasso's works worth up to $60 million while he decides
if a wealthy Berlin banker of Jewish descent was forced to sell the
painting by the Nazis during World War II.
U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff issued the order Monday, three days
after Julius H. Schoeps, an heir to banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy,
filed a lawsuit in Manhattan to stop the sale of "Portrait de Angel
Fernandez de Soto" by an art foundation started by Broadway musical
composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. He blocked the sale at least until a hearing
Tuesday morning.

The lawsuit to stop the sale of the painting of Angel Fernandez de Soto,
scheduled for Wednesday at Christie's auction house in Manhattan, was
filed under seal on Friday and was unsealed Monday. The painting of de
Soto, who shared a studio with Picasso, was to be sold by the Sir Andrew
Lloyd Webber Art Foundation, a London-based charity.

In the lawsuit, Schoeps sought to be declared the lawful owner of the
painting and for the foundation to be forced to turn it over as
restitution.

The oil-on-canvas painting, signed and dated in 1903, was described in a
Christie's catalog as capturing de Soto's haunting face with heavy
features.

"The elegantly dressed sitter appears to scrutinize the viewer with an
intense gaze, his inner agitation suggested by the forceful brushstrokes
and the cloud of smoke hovering above him," said the catalog for the
Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale.

Christie's said the painting, estimated to sell for between $40 million
and $60 million, was being sold by the foundation for income to be spent
on a variety of charitable purposes.

Christie's had not seen the lawsuit by late Monday and would not speculate
on the matter, spokesman Toby Usnik said. A spokeswoman for the foundation
in London did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment.

Before his death in 1935, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was subjected to Nazi
intimidation, pressure and such a loss of fortune that he was forced to
flee his mansion and begin selling prized paintings into a depressed art
market, the lawsuit said.

In October 1934, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy placed on consignment for sale with
Berlin art dealer Justin K. Thannhauser the de Soto painting and four
other Picasso pieces, including "Head of a Woman" and "Boy Leading a
Horse."

In September 1936, Thannhauser sold the painting to M. Knoedler & Co. in
New York City. Since the sale, the painting has been in the New York art
market for about 50 years. It was sold at auction at Sotheby's New York in
1995 to Webber, the lawsuit said.

(source: Associated Press)

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Book to detail Columbia's Nazi relations


A book being written by an Oklahoma historian accuses New York's Columbia
University of maintaining cozy relations with the Nazi's during the
1930s.

Stephen Norwood, who holds a doctorate from Columbia, says his research
indicates the school failed to sever ties with Germany even after the
Third Reich purged German universities of Jewish professors, burned books
by Jewish authors and stripped Jews of citizenship, The New York Post
reported.

Norwood said that shortly after the Nazis took over, Columbia President
Nicholas Murray Butler had a campus reception for the German ambassador.

Through his research Norwood also discovered that Butler "helped
legitimize the Nazi regime" by sending a Columbia professor to Germany in
1936 to celebrate Heidelberg University's 550th anniversary.

A professor at the University of Oklahoma, Norwood is an expert on Nazi
Germany and the Holocaust.

A spokesman for Columbia told the Post the administration hasn't decided
whether to investigate the accusations.

(source: UPI)


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


Nazi hunt keeps paying off---- One woman who married a survivor of the
Holocaust had been a guard at a death camp


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 II.

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 found in the former Soviet Union and other communist countries a
veritable treasure trove of evidence," Rosenbaum said, explaining the
increase in the number of 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 U.S. cannot prosecute the cases, mainly because the events took place
on foreign territory. But it can assist in the extradition of Nazi war
criminals to stand trial abroad.

Rosenbaum 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.

"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)







GERMANY:


The reverse of Holocaust: The Nazis' chosen


For Guntram Weber, the journey that led to this quaint town of horse-drawn
carts and half-timbered houses was long, wrenching and anything but
redemptive.

Four years ago, Weber discovered that his father was not, as his mother
had told him, a young soldier who died honorably on the battlefield during
World War II. Instead, he was a high-ranking SS officer, who oversaw the
deaths of tens of thousands of people while stationed in what is now
western Poland.

"He died peacefully in Argentina, with his old comrades standing at his
grave and raising their right arms," Weber said, his voice thick with
anger and grief. "A racist is forever a racist."

As Weber, 63, told his story to a hushed room of gray-haired men and women
here, there were sympathetic nods, but there was little surprise.

Most had their own tales of deceit and discovery - life histories that
proved to be homespun fairy tales, the dark truth buried under layers of
silence.

These are the children of the Lebensborn, a program of the Nazi's Waffen
SS that was designed to promote an Aryan race. On a chilly weekend, they
gathered in this corner of Eastern Germany to share their stories and to
speak publicly, for the first time, about the horror of finding out that
they had been bred to be the next generation of Nazi elite.

"This is the opposite example of the Holocaust," said Gisela Heidenreich,
63, a family therapist from Bavaria, whose mother was unmarried and whose
father, she later discovered, was a senior SS officer. "The idea was to
further the Aryan race by whatever means were available."

Lebensborn, or "spring of life," refers to a series of clinics scattered
throughout Germany and neighboring countries, to which pregnant women,
most of them single, went to give birth in secret. They were cared for
doctors and nurses employed by the SS, the Nazi Party's feared
paramilitary unit.

One such clinic sits at the top of a gentle hill in Wernigerode, a remote
town near the Harz Mountains. The building, abandoned for years, was part
of a bittersweet homecoming tour for the 40 or so people who turned out
for the meeting of an association known as "Traces of Life."

To be accepted into the Lebensborn, pregnant women had to have the right
racial characteristics - blonde hair and blue eyes - and to prove that
they had no genetic disorders. They had to swear fealty to Nazism. They
were indoctrinated with Hitler's ideology while they were in residence.

Many of the fathers were SS officers with their own families. Heinrich
Himmler, the head of the SS, encouraged his men to sire children outside
of marriage as a way of propagating a German master race.

About 6,000 to 8,000 people were born in these clinics in Germany between
1936 and 1945. Because of its secret nature, most were not told for
decades the circumstances of their births or the identities of their
fathers, which were not recorded on their birth certificates. Some still
do not know the truth.

Only in the past 20 years, as the wall of silence began crumbling, have
researchers been able to document the Lebensborn program.

They have knocked down some prurient myths: that these clinics were Nazi
bordellos, stocked with flaxen-haired breeders ready to mate with SS men.

"The children were conceived in all the usual ways: love affairs,
one-night stands, and so forth," said Dorothee Schmitz-Kster, who has
written a book on Lebensborn. "Abortion was not legal in Germany then, and
in many cases, the women did not want to keep the babies."

Some mothers gave them up for adoption by SS families. Others raised the
children alone, telling them that their fathers had been killed in the
war. Having given birth to illegitimate babies in a fervently Nazi
setting, the mothers faced a double stigma in postwar Germany.

Many lived out their lives in grim silence, according to their children.
Some had psychological problems or turned to alcohol. For the children,
the discovery of the truth was equally traumatic.

Weber, a teacher of creative writing in Berlin, is still coming to grips
with his recently uncovered roots. Among the more unpleasant discoveries:
His godfather was Himmler.

"Most grew up knowing they had a secret," Schmitz-Koster said. "They were
angry at their mothers, because they had been lied to or abandoned. Some
feel shame. There are also a small number who are proud of being
Lebensborn. They feel they are part of an elite."

For Lebensborn children born outside Germany, life was even harsher. In
Nazi-occupied Norway, for example, the SS established a clinic because
Himmler valued the "Viking" appearance of Scandinavians. These babies,
born of Norwegian mothers and German soldiers, were branded as children of
the enemy after the war, and faced pitiless discrimination.

Other children were kidnapped as infants from their families in
Nazi-occupied countries and sent to Germany, where Nazi families raised
them.

If anything, the reunion served as proof that racial engineering has its
limits. The Germans here looked no different from those in any other
gathering of Germans in their golden years: the men with salt-and-pepper
beards and balding pates; the women with eyeglasses and frosted hair.

"I'm really an exception," said Heidenreich, a tall woman with long blonde
hair and bright blue eyes.

The first of the Lebensborn children to write a book about her experience,
Heidenreich argues that the program - as sinister as it was - has echoes
in the world of today. With advances in genetics, she notes,
discriminating parents will soon be able to select traits in their unborn
children.

Given that possibility, she said, the evils of the Nazi era must not be
allowed to recede into the history books.

"If we start engineering blonde- haired, blue-eyed babies, can we blame
just Hitler?" she asked.

Heidenreich was born in a clinic in Oslo, although her parents were both
German. Her mother chose to give birth there to get as far away as
possible from the village in Bavaria where she had grown up. Never told
about her background, Heidenreich became suspicious after watching a
television documentary about the Lebensborn children.

Today she has trouble reconciling the kindly figure her mother became in
later years with the committed Nazi she had been.

Not everybody has had a fraught experience.

Ruthild Gorgass, who was born here, said her mother told her about the
circumstances of her birth when she was a teenager. She had some contact
with her father, a payroll manager for a chemical factory, who had another
family.

Gorgass's mother left her a photo album with an account of her stay in
Wernigerode. She recalls it as an idyllic time, though she expressed
distaste for her daughter's naming ceremony, in which she was laid before
an altar bearing a swastika and a photo of Hitler.

"I was really lucky because I had a talkative mother," said Gorgass, 64, a
retired physical therapist.

As she thumbed through the album, she put on a pair of reading glasses.
Peering over them, she said with smile: "My eyes aren't perfect. We've got
all the same illnesses and disabilities as other people have."

(source: New York Times)

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


Monument unveiled to Catholic priests killed in Nazi camps


Catholic priests and monks, the bulk of them Polish, who were killed by
the Nazis in a concentration camp near Berlin were commemorated Saturday
with the unveiling of a stone sculpture in the presence of Cardinal Jozef
Glemp of Poland.

The sculpture is engraved with the names of 96 clergy who died at
Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the north-west outskirts of Berlin.

Historians working for the Catholic archdiocese of Berlin have so far
documented the names of 711 Catholic clergy from Poland, Germany and other
European nations who were incarcerated in the camp, where inmates often
died of starvation or disease or were executed.

Hundreds were later transferred to Dachau concentration camp on the
outskirts of Munich and other Nazi sites, where they died.

Unveiling the monument, in which a cross has been etched in the stone,
Berlin's archbishop, Cardinal Georg Sterzinsky, said the German Catholic
Church was grateful that there was now a memorial to this group of Nazi
victims, more than 600 of whom were Poles.

One of the surviving inmates, Kazimierz Majdanski, now 90, later went on
to become Catholic bishop of Szczecin-Kamien, the Berlin archdiocese said.
Glemp, who holds the title of primate of Poland, represented the Polish
Catholic Church at the ceremony.

Sterzinsky appealed for continued vigilance against right-wing extremism
and racism.

The Nazis opened the Sachsenhausen detention camp in 1936. Thousands more
died when the Nazis forced inmates to march away as defeat loomed, but the
Red Army was able to liberate 3,000 prisoners at the camp on April 22,
1945.

(source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur)





POLAND:

Holocaust against the Roma exhibition in Warsaw


An exhibition has opened in the Warsaw Zacheta gallery entitled 'The
Holocaust against the Roma and Sinti and present day racism in Europe".

The exhibition is very well documented- the exhibits: photographs,
documents, identity cards come from several dozen institutions as well as
private persons who are involved in the project. The genocide committed by
Nazi Germany on the Roma community is largely forgotten in many European
countries. This ignorance makes the long born stereotypes about the Roma
community very much alive.

The exhibition is composed of four parts which demonstrate the growth of
the racial policy towards the Roma from the early persecution and
isolation to mass extermination says the commissioner of the exhibition
Joanna Talewicz Kwiatkowska

The first part tells the story of the early stages of the organised
persecution of Roma, from the rise of the Nazis to power to the first
deportations to concentration camps. The second part remembers the
genocide committed on Roma in Nazi occupied Europe, with wall charts
featuring texts of the Nazi extermination policy . The third part is
devoted to the genocide committed on the Roma from all over Europe in the
Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp, while the fourth documents the
situation of the Roma in Europe after 1945 , describing the ways the Roma
are discriminated against in Central and Eastern Europe.

The educational aspect of the exhibition is extremely important. The fate
of the Roma is practically unknown , rarely one remembers where they come
from , what are their traditions, culture and history. Romani Rose the
chairman of the Central Council of the Sinti and the Roma in Germany
underlines that the exhibition is vital to make people realise that the
Holocaust was not only the extermination of the Jewish nation- it claimed
some half a million Roma victims across Europe.

In our case the murder of five hundred thousand Sinti and the Roma living
in Europe , by Nazi Germans was acknowledged by the German government for
the first time in 1982 as genocide on the Roma nation.

Roman Kwiatkowski the head of the Association of the Roma in Poland
underlines that the mass murders of the Roma by Nazi Germans was an issue
not discussed commonly until quite recently. Members of the Roma community
were persecuted on the basis of Nazi racial ideology, forced into ghettos
and deported to death camps. Kwiatkowski points to the need for historical
education explaining that the Roma communities are still subject to open
attacks of racism, and face many problems which remain unsolved by
politicians and institutions

There are various problems ranging from social, educational, health care
and many others. There are also problems with infrastructure. For example
the situation of the Roma in Slovakia is very poor, these people live in
conditions resembling the 19th century and not a 21st century European
Union state. To solve all the problems a special detailed research should
be first conducted , with clearly defined steps on how to deal with the
situation of the Roma in Europe.

The exhibition has been already shown in Slovakia, Hungary, Germany and
the Czech Republic. Jacek Wilczur the director of the Warsaw branch of the
Association of the Roma in Poland, says that the exhibition should be
shown in all possible towns and cities to raise the awareness of society
the problems and existence of the old , historic Roma community

This exhibition is very important, and it should travel around Poland
since people do not know much about the Roma community except the
prevailing stereotypes. It is vital to show that theses people were
subject to the worst of persecutions and death, to show that they live
among us , have their own centuries old culture, history and tradition and
should be treated as equal members of society.

The exhibition is a joint project of the German Sinti and Roma Culture and
Documentation Center in Heidelberg, The Roma Association of Poland as well
as a number of institutions and organizations. It is a continuation and
development of a 2001 exhibition that is permanently displayed in the
Auschwitz Birkenau Museum.

(source: Radio Poland News)