Dec. 6


USA:

Holocaust justice hits a wall: Exile or mercy for old Nazi guards?


John Kalymon, Johann Leprich and Iwan Mandycz are old men now, hobbled by
the same aches and pains that plague many senior citizens in their 80s.

Only these men are not ordinary senior citizens.

In the 1940s, the U.S. Department of Justice says, they helped the Nazi
killing machine as it steamrolled across Europe, exterminating millions of
people deemed enemies of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.

As it has in scores of similar cases, the government has gone to court to
strip all three Detroit men of their U.S. citizenship so they can be
deported.

But getting rid of them has created a moral, legal and diplomatic dilemma.
Their families and neighbors regard them as harmless old men who were
victims, forced to choose between the Nazi juggernaut or death. Survivors
of the Holocaust regard them as tormentors who helped mercilessly kill
their loved ones and friends. And the federal government, which is racing
to expel them from the country before they die, is having a tough time
finding European countries to take them.

"If their mothers and fathers had been killed and if they saw what I saw,
they would feel differently," William Weiss, a Holocaust survivor from
Detroit who lost his mother, father and two sisters during the war, said
last week in response to suggestions that the government should let
bygones be bygones.

Eli Rosenbaum, head of the Justice Department's Nazi-hunting Office of
Special Investigations, is mainly concerned about making travel
arrangements for the men.

"Right now, we have six people who we could put on a plane tomorrow,"
Rosenbaum said, adding that Leprich is one of the six.

"In recent years, we've had great difficulty persuading European nations
to take these people back," Rosenbaum said. "And in some cases, we've hit
a brick wall."

Rosenbaum said many European countries are too embarrassed to take back
people they can't prosecute because they lack the laws or the desire to do
so.

Jonathan Drimmer, a former deputy director of the Office of Special
Investigations and lead prosecutor in the Mandycz case, said many
countries don't want the old men because they don't want to take care of
them. And leaning on foreign governments to take them back isn't high on
Washington's priority list because of other pressing international issues.

The problem became apparent in October when the Office of Special
Investigations reluctantly agreed to release Leprich to his family on an
electronic tether after 39 months in federal custody because Romania,
Hungary and Germany wouldn't accept him. Kalymon and Mandycz are free.

Leprich, an ethnic German born in Romania, served as an SS Death's Head
Battalion guard in 1943-44 at the Mauthausen concentration camp in
Nazi-held Austria. An estimated 119,000 Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses
and others died at the camp.

A federal judge in Detroit stripped Leprich of his citizenship in 1987 for
concealing his wartime service to the Nazis before coming to the United
States. After losing his citizenship, Leprich went to Canada before the
government could initiate deportation proceedings.

Federal agents arrested him in 2003 as he hid in a secret compartment
under a stairwell in the home he shared with his wife in Clinton Township,
Mich. The agents had a judge lock him up as a flight risk.

Leprich, like Kalymon, declined to be interviewed or photographed for this
story. Mandycz's lawyer didn't return calls and no one answered the door
of Mandycz's home.

Kalymon and Leprich admitted working for the Nazis during the war, but
said they did so because they had to and never persecuted anyone. Mandycz
denied working for the Nazis, but a judge found otherwise. Leprich and
Mandycz were concentration camp guards. Kalymon worked for a Nazi-run
auxiliary police force in wartime Poland.

Leprich's lawyer, Joseph McGinness of Cleveland, has defended several
people whom the government calls "Nazi persecutors" and accused the
government of heavy-handed tactics. He said men like Leprich were
compelled to work for the Nazis. He said they merely guarded camp
perimeters and were never allowed to enter areas where prisoners were
kept. "The man isn't guilty of anything," McGinness said of Leprich. "Do
you have any idea how little influence a 17-year-old private ... in the
Waffen SS had? The only influence they had was to go out and get their
head shot off on the Eastern Front."

But McGinnis' argument doesn't go down well with Holocaust experts like
Professor Sidney Bolkosky of the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

"You couldn't guard one of those camps and not have some degree of
complicity in brutality," Bolkosky said, adding that decades of research
have failed to produce a single case of anyone being shot or shipped to
the Eastern Front for refusing to help persecute Jews.

He said there are many instances of people being shot or imprisoned for
helping rescue Jews. He said there must be consequences - such as
deportation - for Nazi persecutors.

For years, the U.S. government did little to prevent them from immigrating
to the United States or to make them leave.

From the end of the war until the late 1970s, only one person was stripped
of citizenship for helping the Nazis - Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan, a
Queens, N.Y., homemaker and Austrian- born concentration camp guard who
was extradited to Germany in 1973. Former prisoners called her "the
Stomping Mare" because they said she stomped old women to death with
steel-studded jackboots.

U.S. officials began taking an interest in Nazi persecutors in the early
1970s, after then U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, D-N.Y., was shocked to
discover that federal immigration officials maintained a list of suspected
Nazi persecutors living in the United States but did nothing to remove
them.

She persuaded Congress to pass legislation in 1978 to denaturalize and
deport participants in wartime persecution. The Office of Special
Investigations was created the next year. Since then, OSI lawyers have
investigated 1,700 suspected Nazi persecutors, stripped 84 of their
citizenship and deported 63. The office has 50 open Nazi-era
investigations and 15 cases in litigation. It has lost only nine cases.

One of its targets was Kalymon, who in 1942-44 served in the Nazi-run
Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The government says the force helped the
Germans round up nearly all of the 100,000 Jewish residents of L'viv,
Poland, to be killed.

The government asked a federal judge in Detroit in January 2004 to strip
Kalymon of his citizenship after discovering captured wartime documents
from the former Soviet Union showing that he repeatedly shot at Jews who
tried to escape during roundups. Kalymon killed one Jew and wounded
another, the reports said.

During 3 1 / 2 hours of trial testimony in September, Kalymon insisted he
never shot his rifle, never persecuted any Jews and never saw any Jews
being mistreated or killed in L'viv.

He also denied submitting a handwritten report showing that an Ivan
Kalymun fired four shots during a roundup of Jews at 7 p.m. Aug. 14, 1942,
wounding one and killing another.

Kalymon and his lawyer, David Domina, insisted Kalymon is a victim of
mistaken identity. They said the shooting reports, which officers
submitted to account for ammunition, were created by a precinct commander
who was stealing ammunition to sell on the black market.

Kalymon admitted lying to U.S. authorities about his wartime activities on
his visa application in 1949. Kalymon, who was born in Poland, said he was
afraid of winding up in the hands of the Soviets, who he said killed his
wife's father, a Greek Orthodox priest.

After arriving in the United States, Kalymon and his wife, Lubow, moved to
Detroit, where he worked as a draftsman for Chrysler. He retired in 1989
after 25 years of service.

His son, Alexander Kalymon, said the past two years have been hard for his
family.

"Can you imagine how difficult it is to prove your innocence when no one
from that time period is still alive?" Alexander Kalymon said. "Where do
you get the resources to even find out? The government has almost
unlimited resources."

He said he doesn't know what his family will do if U.S. District Judge
Marianne Battani strips his father of citizenship, paving the way for
deportation proceedings. John Kalymon's neighbor Eleanor Rink, who worked
with Kalymon's wife years ago, said she feels bad for the couple.

"They're absolutely wonderful neighbors," Rink said.

She said John Kalymon helps remove snow from her sidewalks since her
husband died 10 years ago.

But Weiss, the Holocaust survivor, was skeptical of Kalymon's court
testimony.

"How could he not have known what was going on?" said Weiss, 81, who was
born in L'viv and lost both sisters and his mother during roundups of Jews
conducted by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police.

Weiss, who survived several concentration camps and prisons and watched
his father die when the Nazis forced them to march to a camp, said
Ukrainian Auxiliary Police officers were a constant and brutal presence in
the L'viv ghetto.

Weiss testified last year in Chicago in a similar court case against
another former Ukrainian Auxiliary Police officer and at one point was
asked to testify at Kalymon's trial.

Meanwhile, Rosenbaum warns the suspects not to get too comfortable with
the idea of remaining in the United States. "The message I would have for
Leprich and the others is this: I suggest you keep your bags packed
because we don't give a lot of notice when it's time to go," Rosenbaum
said. "The time will come."

---

6 suspects

Three Detroit-area men are facing possible deportation for allegedly
helping the Nazis kill and persecute Jews and other civilians during World
War II. A look at them and three other Michigan cases:

_Iwan Mandycz, 86

Nationality: Born in a Polish village that now is part of Ukraine.

War history: In 1943, served as a guard at SS-run Trawniki and Poniatowa
slave labor camps in Poland. Justice Department says Mandycz's unit
cordoned off Poniatowa camp on Nov. 4, 1943, so SS and German police could
march 14,000 Jewish men, women and children into trenches to be shot.

How he got to U.S.: Concealed Nazi service to immigrate in 1949 and became
a citizen in 1955.

Afterward: Was a Chrysler autoworker, retired in 1983. Federal judge
revoked his citizenship in 2005. Justice Department is deciding whether to
seek deportation.

Family said he has Alzheimer's disease.

What he says: Denies working for Nazis.

_John Kalymon, 85

Nationality: Ethnic Ukrainian, born in Poland.

War history: Justice Department says he joined the Nazi-run Ukrainian
Auxiliary Police, which helped the Nazis exterminate most of the 100,000
Jewish residents of L'viv, Poland, in 1942-43. Wartime records say he
fired several shots at Jews, killing one and wounding another, in 1942
roundups.

How he got to U.S.: Concealed Nazi service to immigrate in 1949; became a
citizen in 1955.

Afterward: Worked as a draftsman for Chrysler and retired in 1989 after 25
years.

Status: Government has asked a federal judge to strip him of citizenship
so he can be deported.

What he says: Admits lying on visa application, but denies shooting or
persecuting Jews.

_Johann Leprich, 81

Nationality: Ethnic German, born in Romania.

War history: Justice Department says he was member of the SS Death's Head
Battalion and guarded prisoners in 1943-44 at the Mauthausen concentration
camp in Nazi-held Austria, where some 119,000 Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah's
Witnesses, Poles and others were starved, beaten and killed.

How he got to U.S.: Immigrated in 1952 and became citizen in 1958 after
falsely claiming he had served in the Hungarian army and lived on a farm
during the war.

Afterward: Worked at a Fraser machine shop. Went to Canada in 1987 after a
federal judge stripped him of his citizenship. Found hiding in his wife's
home in 2003 and then jailed. Federal judge ordered him deported in 2003,
but he was freed in October until officials can find a country to take
him.

What he says: He was forced to join the SS, guarded the perimeter of the
camp and never persecuted anyone.

_Peter Quintus

Nationality: Yugoslavian.

History: In 1942-44, he was a member of the SS Death's Head Battalion at
the Majdanek concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where tens of
thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other prisoners were tortured and
killed.

Status: Surrendered his U.S. citizenship in 1988, but was allowed to stay
in the United States because of heart problems. Died in 1997 at age 82.

_Ferdinand Hammer

Nationality: Croatian.

History: Former SS Death's Head Battalion guard at Auschwitz in
Nazi-occupied Poland and Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where thousands
of prisoners were starved, beaten, tortured and killed. He said he
belonged to an SS combat group, not a concentration camp unit.

Status: Deported to Austria in 2000 at age 78.

_Archbishop Valerian Trifa

Nationality: Romanian.

History: Head of the 35,000-member Romanian Orthodox Church in the United
States. As leader of the Iron Guard, a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic student
group, he gave a speech in 1941 that sparked four days of anti-Jewish
riots in Bucharest, Romania. Hundreds of Jews died.

Status: Deported to Lisbon, Portugal, in 1984 and died there in 1987 at
age 72.

(source: Detroit Free Press)


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

Elliot Welles Is Dead at 79; Indefatigable Nazi Hunter


Elliot Welles, a Holocaust survivor who spent the years after World War II
as a tireless hunter of Nazis, starting with the man who murdered his
mother, died on Tuesday at his home in the Bronx. He was 79.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, his son, Mark, said.

For more than two decades until his retirement in 2003, Mr. Welles
directed the Bnai Brith Anti-Defamation Leagues task force on Nazi war
criminals. Though he preferred to work out of the limelight, he was
considered one of the most influential forces in identifying Nazis who had
settled in the United States and having them extradited to stand trial
abroad.

Mr. Welles spent years trolling dusty archives and marble corridors in the
United States, Germany, Austria and elsewhere, painstakingly tracing the
whereabouts of men and women who had hoped to vanish into obscurity. He
tenaciously pressed reluctant governments around the world to divulge
information, to find suspects, to apprehend them and bring them to trial.

"If you were an official who was not inclined to pursue these cases,
Elliot Welles was not the person you were happy to see," said Eli Rosenbaum,
director of the Justice Departments Office of Special Investigations, in a
telephone interview on Friday. The office was established in 1979 to
identify, investigate and prosecute participants in Nazi crimes.

Mr. Welles was known in particular for his work on the case of Boleslav
Maikovskis, who had been charged with ordering the arrests that led to the
mass execution of 200 Latvian villagers during the war. A native of
Latvia, Mr. Maikovskis was sentenced to death in absentia by a Soviet
court in 1965. He continued to live quietly in Mineola, N.Y., where he had
settled after the war, before fleeing to Germany in 1987.

In large part because of Mr. Welles's persistence, Mr. Maikovskis, then
86, was put on trial in Germany in 1990. The trial was suspended in 1994
because of Mr. Maikovskis's failing health; he died two years later.

Among the other cases on which Mr. Welles worked was that of Josef
Schwammberger, a former Nazi labor camp commander who hid for 40 years in
Argentina. Mr. Welles helped have him extradited to Germany, where he was
convicted in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison. He died in prison in
2004.

Mr. Welles, whose original name was Kurt Sauerquell, was born in Vienna on
Sept. 18, 1927. After the war started in Europe, he and his mother, Anna,
were deported by the Nazis to Riga, Latvia. There, Anna was pulled aside
and placed on a bus. The bus was driven to the woods, where the occupants
were shot.

"Two days later, they returned with clothing from the victims," Mr. Welles's
son said. "He recognized his mothers dress."

Mr. Welles spent the next few years on his own in the Riga ghetto before
being transferred to the Stutthof concentration camp in Poland. As the
wars end neared, the Stutthof inmates were sent on a forced march to a
death camp in Magdeburg, Germany. During the march, he escaped and made
his way back to Vienna.

In Vienna, he met Ceil Chaiken, a survivor of the ghetto in Kovno,
Lithuania; they were married in 1946. Three years later, the family came
to the United States, where Mr. Welles adopted his new name. (He based his
first name on his Hebrew name, Eliyahu. His original surname, Sauerquell,
is German for "mineral wells" - hence Welles; he chose the spelling as an
homage to Orson Welles, his son said.)

In addition to his son, of Roslyn, N.Y., Mr. Welles is survived by his
wife; a daughter, Suzanne Vick of Forest Hills, N.Y.; and three
grandchildren.

Settling in New York in 1949, Mr. Welles took a series of menial jobs. He
hauled sides of beef in a salami factory on the Lower East Side. He
carried sacks in the Jack Frost sugar factory. He eventually got a job as
a waiter at the Lorelei, a restaurant in Yorkville, a heavily German
enclave on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. With two partners, he saved
enough money to buy the place.

"It sort of helped with his research," Mark Welles said. "Through the
restaurant, he was able to maintain contacts in the German-American
community, and at the German Consulate."

Mr. Welles had never forgotten the face, or the name, of the man who
selected his mother for transport. He began corresponding with the Office
of Special Investigations, and with the German and Austrian consulates, to
try to find him.

Eventually, Mr. Welles traveled to Germany, where he persuaded officials
to unseal government records. He found the man, a former SS officer,
living in a German town. In 1976, the man was put on trial.

"He was found guilty on certain counts, and not on others," Mark Welles
said. "There were not a lot of witnesses."

He was sentenced to just two to three years in jail.

Despite the devastation of the verdict, Elliot Welles had found his
calling. In the late 1970s he joined the Anti-Defamation League, for which
he was also director of European affairs. Working from the leagues New
York office, he scoured the world for Nazis.

He also scoured the world for witnesses, placing advertisements in Jewish
newspapers around the globe asking Holocaust survivors to come forward and
testify. Many did.

"Survivors may not be easily reachable by governments; they may not trust
governments," Mr. Rosenbaum, of the Justice Department, said. "But Elliot
Welles, they did trust."

(source: New York Times)




IRAN:

Iran Prompts Anger as Holocaust Conference Gets Green Light: Iran's
Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust "a myth"

A proposed conference that stirred ire in Germany earlier this year is now
slated to take place next week. Iran is behind the meeting, which is
expected to be a platform for Holocaust deniers.

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has dismissed the Holocaust as a
myth.

And last January, the Iranian government announced it would hold a
conference on the Holocaust. It said it intended to invite academics such
as German neo-Nazi Horst Mahler and the Israeli journalist and Christian
convert Israel Shamir, both of whom are Holocaust deniers.

Back in January, Western politicians, especially in Germany, were up in
arms at the plan -- although it was debated at the time whether the
conference would actually take place, and what it was intended to provoke.
Now, however, it seems clear that it will take place after all.

Questioning the gas chambers

Iran's Foreign Ministry has invited scholars from 30 countries to discuss
questions such as the scale of the Holocaust, and whether or not the Nazis
really used gas chambers to kill Jews.

Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mohammadi said 67 researchers from
countries including Britain, Germany and France would take part in the
two-day meeting starting on Monday, according to Wednesday's Jomhuri-ye
Eslami newspaper.

Not in attendance will be British historian David Irving. He was on the
original invite list, but is currently serving a three year jail term in
Austria for Holocaust denial.

Ahmadinejad: Holocaust open to question

Ahmadinejad caused international outrage last year when he said the
Holocaust -- in which six million Jews were killed by the Nazis -- was a
myth. He has not repeated that remark but has said the Holocaust is open
to question.

Foreign Minister Mohammadi said the aim of the conference, dubbed
"Holocaust, World Prospect," was to give scholars a chance to discuss the
issue freely.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and Austria.

When the conference plans were firsted announced in January, German Green
party chief Reinhard Btikofer called it further evidence that Ahmadinejad
was pursuing an "unrestrained policy of anti-Semitic indoctrination" in
Iran.

Btikofer said Ahmadinejad had used public statements questioning the
legitimacy of the Holocaust to mobilize Iranian fundamentalists. This will
lead, he said, to "the international isolation of the Iranian regime."

Legal consequences?

But speaking in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel earlier this
year, Gert Weisskirchen, the foreign affairs spokesman for the Social
Democratic Party, warned western leaders not to be sucked into a further
row with Iran as the so-called "Holocaust experts" could not be taken
seriously.

As well as condemning the conference, German politicians were quick to
point out that any Germans who spoke at the conference would have to
accept the legal consequences. Holocaust denial is a criminal offence in
Germany.

But according to Gerry Gable, the former editor of anti-fascist magazine
Searchlight, "Iran obviously has no law against Holocaust denial and
therefore if (anyone) speaks there they will not be punished."

(source: Deutsche Welle)





AUSTRALIA:

Holocaust denier to face charges


The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) is launching legal action
against the Adelaide Institutes Dr Frederick Toben for his failure to obey
a court order to remove antisemitic material from his website.

But the ECAJ will have to wait until Dr Toben returns from Iran, where he
is pushing his revisionist views at a conference on Holocaust history, to
serve the 62 year old with contempt-of-court papers.

In a landmark ruling in 2002, a Federal Court of Australia judge ordered
Dr Toben to remove anti-Jewish material from his website.

Justice Catherine Branson ordered the removal of the material, claiming it
was likely to offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate Australian Jews,
and banned him from republishing any similar material anywhere on the
internet or by any other means.

The judgement stated that should Dr Toben continue to publish the
material, he would be found guilty of contempt of court, an offence that
could result in a jail sentence.

ECAJ president Grahame Leonard told the AJN the new material was more of
the same Holocaust-denial propaganda.

Dr Toben is currently in the Iranian capital at a conference on Review of
the Holocaust: global vision, which is being presented by Irans Institute
for Political and International Studies. According to the conferences
website, the event is marketed to those interested in clarifying the
hidden and open corners of the Holocaust.

Dr Toben, who served seven months in a German prison in 1999 for inciting
racism, has been quoted in the Iranian Tehran Times, which supports the
anti-Israel regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Hitlers extermination of
six-million Jews and the existence of gas chambers had not been proven.

The ECAJ's national Report on antisemitism in Australia, which was tabled
at last weeks annual conference by its author, Jeremy Jones, reported
increases in web-based antisemitism, including on popular video site
YouTube.

(source: Australia Jewish News)





POLAND:

Death camp site to be renovated



In Warsaw, the International Auschwitz Council agreed Tuesday to
modernize a 51-year-old exhibition at the site of the Nazi death camp and
build walls to prevent the ruins of gas chambers from sinking into the
ground.

The decision to renovate and preserve remains of the vast Nazi death camp
in southern Poland marks a change in the long-standing approach to
maintaining the site, which has been left as the Allies found it when they
liberated the camp at the end of World War II.

But two of the gas chambers are slowly sinking into the ground and will
likely slide out of sight within the next two decades if nothing is done.
How to save them prompted debate on the council, with a majority favoring
a Polish expert's proposal to halt the erosion by building walls sunk into
the ground on either side of the slipping chambers.

"We have to preserve without reconstruction," said Piotr Cywinski, the new
director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. He warned that
doing nothing is tantamount to letting history slip away: "We must decide
to do this if we want to be able to see these gas chambers in 20 years."

However, one council member said international engineering experts should
be consulted first to avoid opening up the Auschwitz administrators to
accusations of "tampering with the gas chambers," said Jonathan Webber, a
professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Birmingham.

The council also backed a proposal to renovate an aging exhibition dating
back to the early years of communist rule in Poland.

Cywinski said the exhibition, in austere barracks at the sprawling
complex, has become old-fashioned compared to modern museums like Yad
Vashem in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington.

It is "the oldest exhibition about the Shoah (Holocaust) in the world,"
Cywinski said on the sidelines of the daylong council meeting in Warsaw.
"We really must change."

Some Holocaust survivors in Israel fear modernization could make the camp
seem more like a museum and damage the somberness of the site where nearly
1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were slaughtered by the Nazis.

Cywinski said no changes would be made to the remaining crematoria,
barracks and watchtowers, and he pledged to keep the powerful exhibits of
hair, glasses and other personal belongings that were stripped from
victims.

Possible changes include building an educational center and introducing
audioguide tours - though Cywinski promised the place would not become
"technological or multimedia."

Several Nazi camp sites, including Bergen-Belsen, have received makeovers,
which experts say is part of a trend to make them more attractive for
tourists. Some feel similar renovations at Auschwitz will to make the
Nazi's largest camp seem less foreboding.

The council - a committee made up of Holocaust survivors, scholars and
religious leaders - has strong influence on what happens at the site. The
site is administered by a group of Polish-government appointed officials.

(source: Associated Press)





VATICAN CITY:

Vatican Holocaust claim disputed


The man who later became Pope John XXIII tried in vain to challenge the
Vatican's perceived indifference to the Nazi Holocaust, a new study has
found.

Papers and diaries show then Archbishop Giuseppe Roncalli posted an urgent
telegram in 1944 to Pope Pius XII on the atrocities at Auschwitz.

The telegram's date contradicts the Vatican's official version of when it
received a report.

The new insight comes from the papers of a Jewish emissary, Haim Barlas.

He had befriended Archbishop Roncalli, then the papal nuncio to Istanbul,
in the 1940s.

Scribbled synopsis

The exchange of letters between Barlas and Roncalli, mostly in French, was
recently uncovered in a private collection in Israel.

The letters show that Roncalli was frustrated by the Vatican's silence in
the face of what was emerging in Europe.

They show that in 1943, the archbishop took it upon himself to write to
the president of Slovakia asking him to stop the Nazi deportation of Jews.

On 23 June 1944, Barlas passed Roncalli a chilling 30-page report.

The document, now known as the Auschwitz protocols, had been compiled by
two Jews who had escaped the camp that April.

The archbishop quickly scribbled a synopsis of the report and sent it by
telegram.

His message made clear that the camp's purpose was the mass killing of
Jews.

The date the telegram was sent contradicts the Vatican's official version
that it only received details of the report in October 1944.

Vatican officials, when asked about the alleged discrepancy, suggested the
question be directed to historians of the period.

But while all of the archbishop's correspondence with his Church superiors
has been preserved in the Vatican archives, the part that could clarify
when he sent the details has not been made available to scholars.

(source: BBC News)





(in) FRANCE:
Holocaust survivors meeting in Paris


Families of Holocaust survivors and victims, who have demanded
compensation from the French railways for aiding the Nazis in
transporting Jews to concentration camps during the World War II, are
to meet in Paris, Israel Radio reported.

Some of the families and victims now living in the United States are also
to assemble in the French capital to decide upon their course of action in
the legal battle, the report said.

Some six months ago, a French court ordered the company to pay two
survivors 62,000 Euros in compensation.

The company has said that following the court's ruling, the railway has
received at least 1,200 compensation demands.

(source: The Hindu Times)




HUNGARY:

Hungary makes new effort to identify Holocaust files in official archives


Hungary, with assistance from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, is
making a new effort to identify Holocaust documents in the country's
archives.

A working group, including officials from the prime minister's office,
other ministries and several historical archives, has been formed to
clarify what documents are still in the Hungarian archives and what became
of the missing files.

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Embassy in
Budapest are also part of the working group, Lajos Gecsenyi, director of
Hungary's National Archives and the professional leader of the group, said
Monday.

Among the issues being researched are the ghettoization of Jews, their
recruitment to serve in forced labor battalions and the records of the
Hungarian gendarmes, the armed force mostly responsible for rounding up
and deporting Jews outside Budapest, the capital.

"We already know that only a small number of these documents survived, but
to avoid further debate, we will try to track them from 1945 to the
present and determine their fate," Gecsenyi said in a telephone interview.

"Our task is to establish what exactly happened to these documents. Were
they destroyed during World War II or during the communist period or what
happened to them?"

Gecsenyi said several circumstances, including the destruction of archives
during the heavy bombing of Budapest at the end of World War II, as well
as an order issued to gendarmes to either burn their records or take them
with them as they escaped towards Germany, meant that fewer documents were
available in Hungary.

Paul Shapiro, director of Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. museum,
however, said that the gaps in the archives seemed not to be merely
incidental.

"No one knows that (the documents) exist, but it would be so unlikely that
precisely these collections disappeared in their entirety," said Shapiro,
who was in Hungary for a series of meetings about the archives and other
issues related to the Holocaust. "In some Hungarian archives, there are
rows of files until 1939, then a gap between 1939 and 1945 and then they
begin again."

Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, and deportations of Jews started in
the spring of 1944 after Nazis forces had occupied the country. Some
550,000 of Hungary's 825,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

In less than two months beginning in April 1944, 437,000 Jews had been
deported, all but 15,000 to Auschwitz and the nearby Birkenau camp.

A third of Auschwitz victims were Hungarian, historians say.

Gecsenyi said the working group hoped to conclude its task by next May and
that a report of its findings likely would be issued.

Shapiro vigorously welcomed Hungary's efforts, saying that while some of
the collections, including the national archives and Budapest's municipal
files, had been cooperative and allowed access to researchers, the
archives being examined by the working group "still haven't met the
standards."

"The real success is going to be measured in results, in terms of the
Holocaust records that get identified, declassified and become accessible
for research," Shapiro said.

"These collections of material are at the very heart of the history of the
Holocaust in any country," he added. "Success in this effort is the least
we can do for the memory of the Hungarian victims of the Holocaust."

(source: Associated Press)