June 6



SPAIN:

Norwegian Nazi who served in SS found in Marbella


A Norwegian Nazi who served in the SS and was awarded the Gold Cross by
Hitler has been discovered living in Marbella on the Costa del Sol in
Spain

Fredrik Jensen, 93, served in a number of SS units during the Second World
War, including the SS Panzer-Grenadier der Fuhrer, SS-Panzer-Division -Das
Reich, the Panzer-Grenadier Regiment 9 Germania and the Panzer-Division
Wiking.

He fought on the front line, which earned him the rare accolade of being
one of the few foreigners to receive the highest decoration granted by
Hitler to SS troops, the Gold Medal.

He joined the SS after the Norwegian Nazi party seized power under the
puppet-regime of Vidkun Quisling in 1942.

After the war, Jensen spent time in an American military hospital and was
later jailed for 10 years for fighting for the Nazis.

When he was released, he moved to Sweden were he founded an industrial
machine company.

Jensen was classed as a war criminal according to the archives of
Interpol. In 1994, he was deported to the United States for his alleged
war crimes, but he then went missing and moved with his wife, Karin, to
the Las Belbederes area of Marbella, a district mainly populated by
retirees from Scandinavia and Germany in which he was able to settle
without attracting unwelcome attention.

In an interview in 1999 with a newspaper catering for the Norwegian
expatriate community, he made no mention, or apology for, his membership
of the SS.

Investigators chanced across Jensen while hunting a much more important
target, Aribert Heim, the so-called Dr Death of Matthausen concentration
camp, the second most wanted Nazi in the world after Martin Bormann,
Hitler's private secretary.

Heim is said to have been responsible for the deaths of at least 500
people, many of them Spanish Republicans, in the Austrian concentration
camp. Like Dr Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" of Auschwitz
concentration camp, Heim subjected prisoners to so-called medical
experiments.

After the war, he set up a gynaecology clinic but disappeared in 1962 as
Nazi hunters closed in.

German and Spanish police as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, which
tracks down Nazis, have been pursuing Heim for years. He was at first
believed to be living on the Costa Brava, after German police in
Baden-Baden traced money transfers from his family to an artist's studio
in a Spanish town.

But Heim then disappeared from the radar until new clues suggested he was
living in Marbella.

Police watched a home in the luxury Royal Nordic Club development,
believing at first that they had finally snared one of the world's most
wanted Nazis. But the subject of their attentions turned out to be Jensen,
who at 93, is one year younger than Heim.

German police and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre believe Heim fled to Chile
and was living at the home of his daughter Waltraud Bosser. But when
investigators travelled to Chile earlier this year, they found that Ms
Bosser had moved, perhaps with her father, to Argentina.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo posed the question yesterday: "Could the
Nazi Jensen reveal where Dr Death is hiding?

(source: The Independent)





AUSTRIA:

Holocaust-era documents to go on display


It started as a clear-out job before a house sale and led to the
discovery of a window into the Holocaust.

Members of the Jewish Community Vienna were getting an apartment ready
before selling a building the group owned when they stumbled upon 800
dusty boxes and dozens of wooden cabinets filled with about a half million
documents detailing the lives of Viennese Jews during Nazi times.

"We knew there were documents in there, but we had no idea they were
Nazi-era documents," said Ingo Zechner of the group's 2000 find.

Part of the cache, which includes deportation lists, emigration documents,
poignant letters and photos, goes on display Thursday at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. A related exhibition opens in
Vienna next month.

The Jewish Community Vienna and the Holocaust Memorial have spent five
years preserving the materials on microfilm for a wider collection that
will include about 1.5 million documents from Vienna currently stored at
the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem.

When completed, Zechner, who heads the community's Holocaust Victims'
Information and Support Center, said the documents and photos will
represent "the biggest archival holding of the German-speaking Jewish
community ever found."

It's part of a growing trove of wartime and Holocaust documents being made
public for the first time in recent years.

The Dutch Red Cross began opening its archive a few years ago on the
140,000 Jews who lived in the Netherlands when the war broke out
including a complete card catalog compiled under Nazi direction by the
Jewish Council. More than three-quarters of the people listed on the cards
died during the Holocaust.

In Bad Arolsen, Germany, tens of millions of pages of Nazi concentration
camp records and documents referring to 17.5 million victims are being
copied and will be sent to the Holocaust Memorial under an agreement to
prepare them for when the long-secret archive is officially opened.

That archive contains records on the arrest, deportation, incarceration,
forced labor and deaths of people from the year the Nazis built their
first concentration camp in 1933 to the end of the war in May 1945. It
also has a vast collection of postwar records from displaced persons
camps.

The Vienna discovery includes reports, financial documents, card files,
books, maps and charts that together form a history of the final years of
Vienna's Jewish community in the lead-up to the Holocaust.

It's unclear exactly how the boxes ended up in the apartment. Zechner said
the offices of the Jewish Community Vienna moved several times in the
1970s and 1980s, so it's possible the archives were stored in the building
in between moves in the early 1980s.

The deportation lists contain names, ages and addresses of the more than
49,000 Jews who were deported from Vienna to concentration camps starting
in February 1941, Zechner said. In total, some 65,000 Austrian Jews died
in the Holocaust.

One of the thousands of names on the deportation lists is that of Salomon
K., who was deported to Minsk on May 27, 1942, and killed upon arrival on
June 1.

The emigration questionnaire gives a brief summary of his life: Salomon K.
was born in Poland, married a woman called Valerie and had a son,
Berthold, in 1928. Other documents show Berthold and Valerie survived the
Holocaust by fleeing to Mauritius via what was then known as Palestine.

Salomon K. was identified only by his first name and last initial on the
Web site for the planned Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust
Studies, which is expected to eventually house the documents alongside
files belonging to the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. However, the
project has been stalled by funding problems.

The identities of crime victims are routinely withheld by authorities in
Austria due to privacy concerns.

Anatol Steck, a program officer in the Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center
for Advanced Holocaust Studies, described the archive as "extraordinary"
because it provides vivid insights into what Jews went through under the
Nazis.

"It contains materials through which you hear the victim's own voice,"
Steck said. "These materials are the last testament."

He said the aim of preserving the archive was to make it available to
survivors and their families, researchers, scholars and the general
public. He said many of the records were printed on low-quality paper,
meaning they could be lost if they are not transferred to microfilm.

The documents are currently being stored at the Holocaust Victims'
Information and Support Center in Vienna.

___

On the Net:

Jewish Community Vienna: http://www.ikg-wien.at/static/etis/html/start.htm

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/

Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies:
http://www.vwi.ac.at/index_eng.htm

(source: Associated Press)