Nov. 8


GERMANY:

A NAZI INHERITANCE FOR GERMAN MUSEUMS----Jewish Heirs Want Their Art Back
By Michael Sontheimer and Andreas Wassermann


Wednesday evening's art auction in New York promises to be a premier society
event. But it will also reopen a major question facing German museums: When
it comes to art taken from Jewish collectors by the Nazis, does morality
trump money?

When the crme de la crme of art collectors gather at Christie's in New
York Wednesday evening, it'll be one of this autumn's premier society
events. The world's largest auction house expects more than 1,500 potential
buyers to attend its "Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale" at the
Rockefeller Center, not far from Fifth Avenue. Up for auction will be works
by Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Gustav Klimt, as well as a painting by
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner that was on display in Berlin's Brcke Museum until
Aug. 1.

The evening's sales could well exceed $300 million. Christie's expects the
1913 Kirchner painting, "Berlin Street Scene," which the Berlin Senate
returned to the granddaughter of Jewish art collector Alfred Hess, to fetch
more than $20 million.

When this icon of German Expressionism changes hands, it will inevitably
reignite a debate in Germany over the difficulties Germans face in dealing
with a singular aspect of their Nazi past. Indeed, the Kirchner case is only
the beginning.

Jewish heirs have laid claim to many valuable pieces of art currently
hanging in German museums. Those charged with reaching a decision over the
artworks -- whether they are museum directors or local politicians -- face a
dilemma. On the one hand, there are the claims of the descendants of
persecuted or murdered German Jews, who want works returned that were once
taken from their ancestors under duress. On the other hand, it is in the
public interest to ensure that important pieces of art remain in the
country. Museum directors accuse some of those involved of being more
concerned about the millions at stake than moral issues -- business-minded
lawyers eager to satisfy an art market hungry for new material.

Morality versus money

The core issue revolves around whether the act of returning the works on
moral grounds is not being morally discredited by art deals running into the
millions. But one thing is certain, and that is that German museum directors
have come under considerable pressure as a result of the Berlin museum's
return of the Kirchner painting, especially when one considers how many
works could face the same fate. Experts estimate that up to 50 famous works
now in German museums could eventually end up in the mansions and safes of
collectors around the world. The heirs of the former owners of paintings by
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Lyonel Feininger and Franz Marc have
all demanded that the works be returned. Stuttgart's Staatsgalerie Museum,
for example, was asked to hand over Marc's 1911 oil painting titled "The
Little Blue Horses." The Wilhelm Hack Museum in the central German city of
Ludwigshafen received a claim for the restitution of Kirchner's "Judgment of
Paris," and the Sprengel Museum in Hannover has been asked to return Marc's
"Cat Behind a Tree." More than a dozen state-owned museums are affected by
the claims.

But no one knows whether the current list is exhaustive. The one thing all
the parties involved -- the attorneys of the heirs, as well as museum
directors and politicians with an interest in preserving Germany's cultural
heritage -- have in common is confidentiality. Not even Christian Democrat
(CDU) Bernd Neumann, State Minister for Culture and the Media, knows exactly
which museums have been confronted with which claims. Alarmed by vocal
public criticism of the Berlin museum's return of Kirchner's painting,
Neumann plans to invite the directors of major cultural institutions and
museums, as well as legal experts, to a meeting at the Chancellery this
month to discuss the situation.

Neumann is in a tight spot. After all, it was the German government, at a
conference in Washington in December 1998, which had promised to return
artworks to the descendants of Nazi victims. It was a conference that German
government officials attended with great apprehension. While the then State
Minister for Culture Michael Naumann was passionately in favor of returning
such artworks, the Foreign Office was worried that Germany would end up
playing the role of the accused in Washington. According to the minutes of a
preliminary meeting involving several government ministries, officials were
"concerned" that the US approach "could signify the establishment of new,
unlimited claims for restitution."

Unimpressed by the staggering figures

Diplomats at least managed to defuse one sensitive issue. Following one of
the preparatory meetings in Washington, they sent a cable home to Germany,
writing that there would be no "rhetorical connection made between Nazis and
Germany." But in another telegram they warned that the return of about
110,000 pieces valued at $10 to 30 billion was up for discussion.

But officials in Berlin were unimpressed by these staggering figures, and
their instructions to Germany's representatives in Washington remained the
same. The Germans, together with delegates from 43 other countries, signed
an eleven-point statement. According to the essence of the statement,
artworks confiscated during the Nazi era were to be searched for, identified
and the rightful heirs determined. Once that had taken place, "a fair and
just solution" would be reached with the heirs.

Elation over the consensus of 1998 has since turned into irritation over the
wave of restitution claims. Experts now suspect that at least some of the
parties involved in Washington were interested in more than just the
well-being of the descendants of Nazi atrocity victims. After reviewing old
records, officials at the Chancellery came across the name of a man with
apparently multiple motives.

An American and one of the world's most prodigious art collectors played a
key role in making the conference happen in the first place. Ronald Lauder,
62, is the heir of the cosmetics fortune of his mother Este Lauder and the
company named after her. Lauder, a billionaire whose Jewish family has its
roots in Austria, was also the treasurer of the World Jewish Congress, which
established a "Commission for Art Recovery." German diplomats discovered
that the person behind this commission was "installed at Lauder's
instigation," as officials at the German consulate in New York reported to
the Foreign Office in Berlin.

It took many art experts years to realize the true extent of Lauder's
involvement, especially in the efforts of Jewish heirs to recover five
paintings by Viennese Art Nouveau painter Gustav Klimt owned by the Austrian
government. The heirs finally prevailed this year, and rightfully so.
Lauder, who had served as US ambassador in Vienna in the past, boasted over
having served as "a sort of unofficial advisor" to the family that had
reclaimed the paintings. The success of Lauder's efforts became
all-too-apparent in June, when he acquired one of the paintings, "Adele
Bloch-Bauer I," for $135 million.

Simple change in terminology

Michael Naumann was the man in Germany who wanted to ensure that the Jewish
restitution claims were handled fairly. At his instigation, a "Joint
Declaration of the Federal Government, the States and the Central
Associations of Municipalities for the Retrieval and Return of Cultural
Assets Confiscated as a Result of Nazi Persecution, Especially Those Under
Jewish Ownership" was adopted in December 1999. An advisory commission was
formed to settle potential disputes.

But when the Washington declaration was implemented, the options for
restitution in Germany were expanded through a simple change in terminology.

The phrase "works of art confiscated by the National Socialists" was
replaced by the phrase "cultural assets lost as a result of Nazi
persecution." The new wording meant that claims could also be applied to
so-called "refugee art," in other words, paintings that Jews who had
emigrated from Germany during the Nazi era had sold to support themselves.

In addition, strict conditions were imposed on the fate of disputed
paintings in museums. In the case of works that had been sold during the
Nazi era, the museums in question were required to prove that not only had
they agreed to pay a fair market value for the paintings, but that this
price had in fact been paid. The problem was that for most of these works,
receipts were either never issued or have since been lost -- as in the case
of Kirchner's "Berlin Street Scene," which was sold in 1936. Unable to
provide a receipt for the work, the city of Berlin was forced to return the
painting.

Many German museums lacked more than just receipts. "In the postwar years,"
says Naumann, "there was no awareness of injustice in German museums." In
January 1999, Naumann wrote: "To my knowledge, German museums have yet to
undertake any satisfactory efforts to address this concern, namely by taking
precise and comprehensive inventories of artworks of dubious or questionable
origin, that is, those looted by the Third Reich."

This has since changed, though not necessarily in a way Naumann would
endorse. Many museums are now doing their own research as part of an effort
to fend off claims for restitution. Their directors have complained about
"shrewd attorneys" and the "brutal moral cudgel" they have used to back up
their threats.

In fact, it is often the attorneys who encourage heirs to file claims for
restitution in the first place. This was apparently the case with the
Kirchner painting and other works that once belonged to the collection of
Alfred Hess, a shoe manufacturer in the eastern city of Erfurt. As recently
as six years ago, Hess's granddaughter, Anita Halpin, showed no interest
whatsoever in her grandfather's paintings. In the meantime, she has filed
restitution claims for several dozen paintings from the former Hess
collection. Halpin is represented by David J. Rowland, an attorney with
offices on New York's Park Avenue who specializes in restitutions.

"Subject of forced sale"

While the Berlin Senate is acting in the spirit of Naumann's earlier
efforts, there is one case in which the federal government has behaved like
many museum directors -- by simply refusing to return works claimed by the
descendants of their former owners. Indeed, it is such a high-profile case
that even German President Horst Khler became involved.

Several years ago Juan Carlos Emden, a Chilean, demanded that the German
Ministry of Finance return two valuable 18th-century paintings. Emden's
grandfather, Jewish businessman Max Emden, was forced to sell the works by
Italian painter Bernardo Bellotto, better known as Canaletto, after
emigrating from Germany to Switzerland. The German government has owned the
works since 1949 (West Germany owned them until 1990). But returning the
paintings to Emden, Finance Minister Peer Steinbrck's bureaucrats informed
Emden's attorneys in a final decision in August, was out of the question.
The paintings, they argued, had not been the "subject of a forced sale."

There are many parallels between the Emden case and the Hess collection. Max
Emden, an art collector who also owned works by Dutch Old Masters and French
Impressionists, left Germany for good in 1933 and settled in Switzerland's
Ticino Canton. He was later forced to sell the corporate empire he had
left behind in Germany under less than favorable circumstances.

As a result, the Jewish emigrant supported himself in Switzerland primarily
from the sale of his paintings, which he had managed to bring to safety
before they could be seized by the Nazis. Hitler's art dealer, Karl
Haberstock, bought the Canalettos in 1938 when Emden offered them for sale
through art dealers in Munich and London. Canaletto's Baroque city views
were intended to grace the "Fhrer Museum" Hitler had planned to build in
Linz, Austria after the Nazis' "final victory."

The agreed purchase price for the Canalettos was 60,000 Swiss francs, a
price Emden heir Juan Carlos calls "scandalous." To this day, no one knows
whether Max Emden was even paid for the paintings. He died in Swiss exile in
1940 and the paintings became the property of the German government after
World War II ended. The decorative "Zwingergraben" ended up in the dining
room at Villa Hammerschmidt, which became the official residence of the
German President in 1951. But current President Horst Khler had the
painting removed after being informed about its history.

Adolf -- not Alfred

Finance Minister Steinbrck's officials are apparently doing everything in
their power to prevent the loss of up to 100 paintings owned by the German
government, paintings experts classify as "refugee art." Juan Carlos Emden,
for his part, has already made it clear that he has no plans to hang the
Canalettos "above the living room couch." Indeed, major auction houses have
already made their inquiries with Emden.

Hans Ottomeyer, the General Director of the German Historical Museum in
Berlin, takes the same tough approach as the finance ministry. Last fall the
son of Jewish dentist and collector Hans Sachs filed a claim for the
remnants of an exceptional collection that once comprised 12,000 posters,
and that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, ordered
confiscated in 1938. About 3,500 of the posters resurfaced in East Berlin's
Museum of German History after the war. Restitution of the works, Ottomeyer
warned, would be "a great loss, especially if the collection is sold off
piecemeal." Only after being pressured by the Chancellery did Ottomeyer
agree to allow the case to be argued before the commission that had been set
up for disputes.

Like Ottomeyer, Katja Schneider, the director of the National Gallery
Moritzburg in the eastern city of Halle, argues "not a single painting will
be returned voluntarily." Schneider also faces a claim by New York attorney
Rowland. The subject of Rowland's claim is a group of Expressionist
paintings from the collection of Jewish Frankfurt industrialist Ludwig
Fischer. In 1924, Fischer's wife sold 24 paintings by Kirchner, Marc and
Erich Heckel in return for a 20-year annuity. But by 1935 the Nazis had
terminated the annuity. In addition to full payment of the annuity,
Rowland is demanding the return of an oil painting by Franz Marc, "The
White Cat," from the Fischer collection.

For Rowland, who represents the three Fischer heirs in the United States,
the "small offer" he received from the Moritzburg museum is inadequate.

In addition to these cases, museum directors and restitution experts meeting
at the Chancellery on Nov. 20 will discuss a general strategy. Because
museum directors and politicians involved in cultural issues are "often
overburdened," the recently retired director of the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie
Museum, Christian von Holst, is pushing for the establishment of a central
research office that would follow the often circuitous paths of the
artworks.

It's an approach that could also benefit the major auction houses. In a
classic Freudian slip, the current Christie's magazine incorrectly
identifies art collector Hess, who once owned the Kirchner paintings, as
Adolf -- not Alfred.

(Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan)

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


Kristallnacht was a prelude to the Holocaust


Martin Luther, the Protestant theologian and the leader of the German
reformation movement, issued an infamous pastoral letter, On the Jews and
Their Lies, in which he advised Germans to set synagogues on fire and
cover the ruins with dirt.

Almost 400 years later, in 1938, his advice was heeded with a vengeance.
On Nov. 10, Nazi stormtroopers some in civilian clothes and members of
the Hitler Youth torched more than 1,000 shuls, ransacked thousands of
Jewish-owned shops and homes, arrested 30,000 Jewish men between the ages
of 16 and 60 and killed 91 Jews in the worst pogrom in modern European
history.

Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was a watershed in the Nazi
treatment of Jews. From that point, the position of Jews in Germany
deteriorated rapidly and sharply.

Martin Gilbert, the British historian, examines this cataclysmic event in
a sober, lucidly written book, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction
(HarperCollins), which is based on his own research, eyewitness
testimonies and newspaper accounts.

Many books have been published about Kristallnacht, which set the stage
for the deportation and mass murder of German and European Jews in the
Holocaust. Although the topic has been heavily mined, Gilberts relatively
concise but comprehensive volume is a worthy addition to the genre.

The expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany and the assassination of a
German diplomat in Paris were the twin catalysts of Kristallnacht.

On Oct. 18, 1938, on Adolf Hitlers orders, some 12,000 Polish Jews living
in Germany legally were given less than a day to leave their homes. Four
thousand Jews were admitted by Poland, but 8,000 were denied entry as they
waited at the border.

On Nov. 3, a young man in Paris named Herschel Grynszpan received a
postcard from his sister Berta, who, along with her parents, had been
expelled from Germany two weeks earlier and now found themselves forlorn
and abandoned.

The following day, he read a newspaper story about the plight of the
deportees. In a vengeful rage, he bought a pistol.

On Nov. 7, he walked into the German embassy and shot the third secretary,
Ernst von Rath. German newspapers denounced the shooting and the German
government imposed collective measures against the Jewish community. It
was announced that Jewish children could no longer attend Aryan schools
and that Jewish newspapers and magazines had to cease publication
immediately.

On Nov. 9, word reached Berlin that von Rath had died of his wounds. Josef
Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, used his death to further pummel the
Jews of Germany, who had been subjected to a flurry of anti-Semitic edicts
since 1933, the year Hitler was appointed chancellor.

Gilbert flits from one city to the next as he describes the animosity that
engulfed German Jews at the instigation of the Nazis.

In Berlin, where the most widely reported violence took place, a naive
police lieutenant tried to stop goons from destroying the golden-domed
Oranienburger Strasse synagogue. He said that it was a historic landmark,
a protected municipal building. The hooligans left, but the police officer
was reprimanded.

Elsewhere in Germanys sophisticated capital, however, restraint was thrown
out the window. As the correspondent of Londons Daily Telegraph wrote,
Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete control of
otherwise decent people.

The U.S. consul in Leipzig reported that the citys three main synagogues
were irreparably gutted by flames. And in Baden-Baden, a Jewish doctor,
Arthur Flehinger, was ordered to read passages from Hitlers Mein Kampf as
the synagogue was readied for desecration.

In Dresden, firebombed by Allied aircraft in 1945, the famous Semper shul,
built in a mixture of Byzantine and Moorish styles, was also set alight.
When firemen arrived to douse the flames, the SS blocked their path. The
mayor of Dresden then proclaimed that the symbol of the hereditary racial
enemy has finally been extinguished.

Greed and theft were part and parcel of Kristallnacht. Arthur Propp, a
prosperous Jewish businessman in Konigsberg, was jailed and held
imprisoned until he gave up his three properties.

Goebbels ascribed Kristallnacht to the healthy instincts of Germans. The
German people is anti-Semitic, he wrote in a newspaper article.

Pouring salt on the wounds, the Nazi regime imposed further restrictions
on the Jewish community and announced that all damage to Jewish property
would have to be paid for by Jews themselves.

The ripples of Kristallnacht reached distant shores.

The American president, Franklin Roosevelt, said that German Jewish
refugees already in the United States on visitors visas could remain
indefinitely. But Roosevelt, wary of an anti-Semitic backlash, did not
increase the immigration quota.

The Canadian prime minister, William Mackenzie King, told Parliament that
Canada which had taken 6,000 Jewish refugees from Germany since 1933
would not throw its doors wide open to refugees, but would deal with
special cases on their merits.

Britain was more generous, but the British colony of Bermuda did not admit
a single Jewish refugee. Many countries turned away the refugees
altogether.

But in the end, Kristallnacht had its greatest impact on Germany.

Shortly after the rampage, the Nazi authorities said that the 3,767 Jewish
retail businesses in Berlin had either been transferred to Aryan control
or closed down, and that Jewish physicians could not treat non-Jews.

In the face of this blatant discrimination, Jews emigrated in droves.

Nearly as many Jews, 120,000, left Germany until the outbreak of the war
in 1939 as in the 51/2 years before then (150,000), Gilbert says.

On Sept. 19, 1941, in a throwback to medieval times, all German Jews over
the age of six were required to wear a yellow star.

A month later, the first deportation train from Germany, filled with 1,000
Jews from Hamburg, pulled into Minsk in Nazi-occupied Russia. Shortly
afterward, 17,000 German Jews were deported to the Lodz ghetto in Poland.

Subsequently, Jews from Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Wurzburg, Furth and
smaller towns were deported to the Lithuanian and Latvian cities of Kovno
and Riga.

The first deportation of Berlin Jews directly to Auschwitz occurred on
Jan. 12, 1943, a month before the surrender of German forces in
Stalingrad.

Three of the most prominent members of the community Rabbi Leo Baeck, Dr.
Paul Eppstein and Philip Kusover were deported to Theresienstadt in the
same month.

One of the last deportations took place on April 20, 1943, when 150
youngsters were sent to Auschwitz. They had been living on a farm in
preparation for immigration to Palestine, a British Mandate.

Germans who tried to help Jews imperilled themselves. Emmy Erdman, a
resident of Trier, gave her identity card to a Jewish friend, who survived
the war. Erdman herself was executed.

Such were the tragedies unleashed by Kristallnacht.

(source: Canadian Jewish News)


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

German deported from U.S. to face Holocaust denial charges


A German far-right activist deported from the United States goes on trial
next week charged with incitement for allegedly denying the Holocaust
happened, a court said Wednesday.

Germar Rudolf will appear on Tuesday in the state court in Mannheim
accused of denying the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews since 1997 in
documents and on the Internet, the court said.

Denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, where it carries a maximum
sentence of five years.

Rudolf is well-known among far-right activists for publishing a study
claiming to prove that the Nazis did not gas Jews at the Auschwitz
concentration camp.

Rudolf was sentenced in 1995 in Germany to 14 months in prison for
Holocaust denial, but then disappeared. He applied for political asylum in
the United States in 2000, but was rejected and last year deported to
serve the 1995 sentence.

He had been arrested when he appeared at an immigration office in Chicago
to apply for a green card based on his marriage to a U.S. citizen.

Rudolf will go on trial in a state court in Mannheim that is currently
hearing a similar but unrelated case against Ernst Zundel, a German
deported from Canada last year.

(source: International Herald Tribune)







SERBIA:

Serbian FM pledges Holocaust compensation law


Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic's heartfelt address to the Israel
Council on Foreign Relations on Monday was met by anxious questions over
restitution issues owed to Serbian Jews. When asked if the Serbian
government is going to give back the property to these Jews, Draskovic
answered: "The new parliament will likely adopt a restitution law. The
adoption of the law is inevitable."

Not everyone was satisfied with the foreign minister's answers on Monday.

"There are two ambassadors and a foreign minister over there who are not
doing anything about the problem. If there is such a great romance between
the Serbs and the Jews then why don't they give the Jews back their
citizenship and their land." said Ivan Ceresjnes, a researcher at the
Hebrew University and former head of Bosnia's Jewish community.

About 3,000 Jews left Serbia in 1948 and were forced to give up their
citizenship and land in order to leave the country. There are now 10,000
Jews from the former Yugoslavia living in Israel.

Another contentious issue surrounding the Serbian- Israeli relationship
involves Nazi war criminals.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel director met with
Draskovic over the extradition of three Nazi war criminals and sounded
very hopeful. "In Serbia, where so many suffered at the hands of the
Nazis, there's a far greater understanding for the necessity and the
importance of bringing these criminals to justice," Zuroff said.

Dr. Sandor Kepiro, Milivoj Asner and Ivo Rojnica are all war criminals who
committed crimes against Serbs and Jews on former Yugoslavian territory.

"His stance reflects widespread support in Serbia for action to be taken
by the government against Nazi war criminals. We're not encountering the
opposition we normally encounter in so many countries in Europe," Zuroff
said, regarding the foreign minister's stance on expediting the Nazi war
criminals.

Draskovic highlighted the "spiritual energy" between Serbs and Jews. "My
emotions are running high because I am in Jerusalem for the first time,"
he said.

The foreign minister also articulated the need for his country to
coordinate actions with their Arab friends in influencing others to
recognize Israel. When asked about the two countries' commonality of
misperceived histories, he pointed towards the regime of Slobodan
Milosevic.

"In Serbia we must cut off all links with the path of the Milosevic
regime. This was our anti-history."

Vuk Draskovic is also a novelist. He coauthored "Knife," about student-led
demonstrations against the Serbian government in the early 1990s.

(source: Jerusalem Post)







AUSTRALIA:

Appeal set for accused nazi war criminal


AN elderly Perth man fighting extradition to Europe to face Nazi war
crimes allegations will have an appeal heard by the full bench of the
Federal Court next year.

Charles Zentai, 84, has denied torturing and murdering 18-year-old Jewish
man Peter Balazs in Budapest while serving in the army of Hitler's wartime
ally, Hungary.

His extradition was due to be proceed in the Perth Magistrates Court
earlier this year but Mr Zentai - in tandem with alleged Irish fraudster
Vincent O'Donoghue - initiated a Federal Court challenge against the power
of West Australian magistrates to deal with commonwealth extradition laws.

Under federal law, extradition applications from foreign countries go
before state magistrates, who assess their validity before referring them
to the federal attorney-general for final adjudication.

Mr Zentai's lawyers argued there were constitutional problems with
investing state judicial officers with powers to perform "executive''
commonwealth roles.

The Federal Court rejected Mr Zentai's application last month but Mr
Zentai is appealing the decision.

The appeal was today set down to be heard during the February sittings of
the full bench of the Federal Court.

Mr Zentai is scheduled to appear in the Perth Magistrates Court on
December 11.

(source: Melbourne Herald Sun)






CZECH REPUBLIC:

Czechs lift deadline for Holocaust claims


The Czech lower house of Parliament passed a bill that would indefinitely
extend the deadline for Jews seeking the return of Nazi-looted art.
The Wednesday bill abolishes the previous deadline of Dec. 31, 2006, which
was set in 2000 under a special law allowing for the return of art taken
from Jews by the Nazis now in Czech state collections to claimants of any
nationality.

The bill must still be approved by the Senate and signed into law by
President Vaclav Klaus to take effect, which observers say should occur
relatively soon.

The proposal allows for claims by the original owners of artworks and
their heirs in accordance with Czech inheritance laws.

Since the law was passed, approximately 20,000 objects in Czech
collections have been identified as having been obtained by the Nazis;
some 500 have been returned.

Last week, the government agreed to extend funding for the Czech center
that researches the provenance of artworks and identifies Nazi-stolen art.

Claimants can search for items on www.restitution-art.cz.

(source: JTA)





SWITZERLAND:

Swiss Writer To Be Sentenced For Unbelieving in Holocaust Myth


Political police in the Swiss town of Baselbieter Arlesheim said that
they opened a "thought crime" case against a prominent Swiss writer and
history researcher Bernhard Schaub for unbelieving in the jewish
"holocaust" myth, and the "criminal" will be probably tried in a court.

Simultaneously, to make things sure, the political police of the Swiss
canton Solothurn also opened a criminal "investigation" against the
writer. The police stated that the writer said in leaflet that in National
Socialist Germany jews died not of gas but of typhus, like several million
Germans did. Saying so is a very serious crime in modern democratic
Switzerland, the Swiss TV Channel SF reported.

In his world-famous book "Eagle and Rose,"published in 1992, Bernhard
Schaub wrote that there had never been any alleged "mass extermination of
jews" in Germany. At that rather peaceful time, the "holocaust" myth
deniers were not yet put in prison but persecuted in a "softer" way. The
writer lost his job as Professor of History and German Language in the
famous Rudolf Steiner's Academy in Waldorf. The outstanding writer was
one of the first history researchers to cite in his book the results of
the investigation of the famous technical expert Fred Leuchter who proved
that the operation of so-called "gas chambers" was absolutely impossible
even from a pure technical point of view.

In August 2003, a gang of "holocaust" myth believers and preachers
attacked the writer in the street with wooden sticks and started to beat
him shouting "Nazi, get out". Two policeman were standing nearby, observed
the beating and did not interfere. The writer managed to escape but the
beating squad antifascist members stole his wallet with personal papers
and money he had just withdrew from his bank account.

Returning to his car at a parking place he found that the car was
completely destroyed by the gang of "holocast" myth preachers, windows
crashed and tires cut.

Surely, the police surely never found the gangsters as in all similar
cases of attacks on dissidents by politically correct persons by in the
West.

(source: KavKaz Center)