June 17



UKRAINE:

Mass graves unearthed in Ukraine bring calls for Holocaust openness


With the discovery of a mass grave believed to contain the remains of
thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis, angry Ukrainian Jewish leaders are
demanding their country come clean on the Holocaust.

"During the Soviet era, Ukrainian authorities did not tell the truth about
the real number of Holocaust victims" in Ukraine, said Mikhail Frenkel,
head of the Association of Jewish Media in Ukraine. "Today some local
authorities are still trying to conceal the numbers."

Ukrainian officials say that isn't the case.

"The situation is a rudiment of Soviet mentality and stereotypes," Vasily
Gazhaman of the Ukrainian State Committee on Religions and Nationalities
told JTA.

Some Jewish leaders are insisting that the grisly discovery in the
southern village of Gvozdavka be used to teach greater sensitivity
regarding the massacre of Jews during the Holocaust and tolerance to
younger Ukrainians.

About 1.5 million Jews are believed to have been killed in Ukraine during
World War II.

Meanwhile, a grave believed to contain the remains of dozens of Jews
killed by the Nazis was found in western Ukraine. Along with the remains
of at least 60 people, workers digging on the site of a future office
complex near Netishin, a town in the Khmelnitzky Region, also found what
resembled fragments of Torah scrolls.

"Torah fragments suggest that probably this was a massacre of Jews killed
in 1942," said Valeriy Malkin, deputy head of the Khmelnitzky regional
state administration.

Local authorities assigned a special commission to investigate the case.

The Gvozdavka grave was found last month when workers were preparing to
lay gas pipelines in the village about 100 miles from Odessa, said Roman
Shvartzman, head of the Odessa Regional Association of Jewish Prisoners of
Ghettos and Concentration Camps.

Residents of Gvozdavka, in the Lyubashivsky District, confirmed that their
village contained a ghetto during World War II, and that Romanian and
German Nazis brought Jews there from Moldova, as well as from the areas of
Odessa and Zhitomir.

Shvartzman said the Romanians and local collaborators established a
concentration camp near the village that was active between November 1941
and March 1942. About 5,000 of the camp's predominantly Jewish prisoners
were murdered. More died from starvation and disease.

But according to Shvartzman, despite the scale of the operation, local
residents "forgot about the tragedy," and Jews after the war were unable
to establish where the victims were buried.

Iliya Levitas, a Holocaust expert and a veteran leader of the Jewish
community of Ukraine, said he was not surprised by the recent find. He
also blamed the local population for not disclosing the news after the
war.

"The locals knew about the tragedy and the massacre but did nothing, and
local authorities were also silent," Levitas said. "Only due to the
pipeline construction did we learn about the site."

Jewish leaders and some non-Jewish Ukrainian public figures successfully
appealed to the authorities to halt the construction and investigate the
wartime tragedy.

"When the workers found the remains, I gave an order to stop the
construction and set up a commission right away," Anatoly Ostrovsky, a
Lyubashivsky District official, told JTA. "Thanks to me this case received
publicity."

Rabbi Avraham Wolf of Odessa, a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi, told JTA that the
Jewish community has asked local authorities for ownership rights to the
land that contains the remains, so the victims can be buried according to
Jewish tradition and a monument erected in their memory.

Jewish leaders and Holocaust researchers believe there are 350 to 700 mass
graves of Holocaust victims in Ukraine that remain undiscovered.

Schvartzman estimates that about 240,000 Jews were murdered in the region
of Odessa, but only the names of 93 Jews killed at the Gvozdavka site are
known.

But some Jewish leaders say that burying the remains will not solve the
bigger problem of proper Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine.

This tragedy, Wolf said, "should be a lesson for future generations on how
not to behave toward other ethnic and religious groups."

According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Education, the Holocaust is taught
in schools as an elective subject. The ministry says the schools also
feature lectures, exhibits and media presentations on the subject.

Jewish leaders say Ukrainian authorities should do more to combat the
growing xenophobia and anti-Semitism in the country. They are concerned
that Ukraine, in bidding to build a new national identity, is making
heroes of those who were responsible for killing Jews while fighting for
Ukrainian independence during and after World War II.

President Viktor Yuschenko recently signed a decree calling for a law
recognizing the Ukrainian soldiers who fought alongside the Nazis in the
Great Patriotic War. He also welcomed the upcoming commemoration of the
100th birthday of Gen. Roman Shukhevich, commander-in-chief of the
Ukrainian Resurgent Army, or UPA, that was allied with the Germans.

(source: Jerusalem Post)





USA:
New Wiesenthal documentary recounts Nazi hunter's turbulent life


"I Have Never Forgotten You: The Life and Legacy of Simon Wiesenthal" runs
for close to two hours, but the documentary is barely long enough to
encompass the 96 years of the legendary Nazi hunter.

The image of the sad-eyed, balding man with the wide mustache is almost as
well known as that of Albert Einstein, but the film fills in the portrait
by showing Wiesenthal as a student, survivor, husband, father and scorned
troublemaker in his single-minded pursuit of his people's murderers.

The Moriah Films production opens with a map tracing Wiesenthal's stay at
various concentration camps, a curious itinerary through the circles of
hell, until he was liberated, barely alive, by American troops at
Mauthausen in Austria.

With a group of volunteers and scavenged furniture, he opened the Jewish
Historical Documentation Center in the Austrian city of Linz. In one of
his life's many ironies, he discovered that his office was only a few
houses down from Adolf Eichmann's family residence.

It was not a good time and place to start hunting Nazi war criminals. The
Cold War had put the short-lived American interest into deep freeze, and
the Austrians wanted nothing more than to forget about the atrocities and
their part in them.

In 1954, Wiesenthal closed down his struggling, under-funded operation and
shipped his voluminous files to Yad Vashem, with one exception - the
dossier on Eichmann, the engineer of the Final Solution.

During the next six years, Wiesenthal tried to resume his professional
career as an architect and devoted some time to his wife and daughter, but
the capture of Eichmann in Argentina and trial in Jerusalem catapulted
Wiesenthal into the global media spotlight.

In 1961, he reopened the documentation center, this time in Vienna, and
the next two decades saw some of his greatest triumphs, as well as a few
of his bitterest controversies.

Due to his meticulous research and an ace detective's ability to connect
the dots, Wiesenthal is credited with ferreting out 1,100 war criminals
during his lifetime. Among them were Hermine Braunsteiner, the sadistic SS
supervisor at Majdanek; Franz Stangl, the commandant at Treblinka and
Sobibor; and Karl Silberbauer, the Nazi functionary who arrested Anne
Frank and her family.

Yet, as Wiesenthal's reputation grew, so did attacks on his integrity,
which the film discusses openly.

Some Mossad agents charged that Wiesenthal took undeserved credit for the
Eichmann capture, while other critics noted that he had traced Dr. Josef
Mengele to the wrong South American country. In the lowest blow of all,
Bruno Kreisky, the Jewish chancellor of Austria, hinted that Wiesenthal
had collaborated with the Gestapo.

Wiesenthal certainly made some mistakes, but the film notes that, as a
private researcher, he had less legal power and resources than the most
obscure district attorney in rural America.

Nor was Wiesenthal a gunslinger, or, as he himself put it, "I am not a
Jewish James Bond." Indeed, he was pilloried by some of his strongest
supporters when he refused to condemn Austrian President Kurt Waldheim as
a war criminal, believing that the evidence was not conclusive enough.

"You don't mix politics with justice," he observed at the time.

However, Wiesenthal's successes far outweighed any failures, and his
international stature grew as he spoke out on the sufferings of gypsies,
homosexuals and other victims of the Holocaust.

Without Wiesenthal's pioneer work, concludes one historian, there would
have been no subsequent trials of the perpetrators of the Bosnian, Rwandan
and other genocides.

Director-screenwriter Richard Trank, who co-wrote and co-produced the
documentary with Rabbi Marvin Hier for the Simon Wiesenthal Center's
Oscar-winning Moriah Films division, has infused his work with an
important third dimension. He has done so by picturing the private, human
side of a man who, however driven by his self-imposed mission "never to
forget" the 6 million, could be witty, charming and even self-deprecating.

His somewhat prim secretary was shocked by his occasionally risqu jokes,
but added a light touch herself by filing the steady flow of hate and
anti-Semitic mail in a drawer labeled "M" for meshugge.

On a more serious note, when his lonely young daughter asked why she had
no grandparents or aunts like other kids, Wiesenthal did not talk about
the 89 relatives he and his wife lost during the Holocaust but instead
invented a host of imaginary "cousins" living in different parts of the
world.

The impact of Wiesenthal's life pursuit on his family is heart-breakingly
recalled in a remark by his wife, Cyla: that she is married "to a million
dead people."

When Nicole Kidman saw some of the preliminary footage of the film, the
glamorous and talented actress was so moved that she volunteered to serve
as the unpaid narrator. Perhaps concerned about adding her own emotions to
an already emotional subject, her reading of the narration is so
restrained as to border on flatness.

"I Have Never Forgotten You" will screen at noon on July 1 at the Mann
Festival Theatre in Westwood as part of the June 21-July 1 Los Angeles
Film Festival.

Admission is free. For information, call (866) 345-6337.

On July 6, the film opens at Laemmle's Fallbrook 7 in West Hills (818)
340-8710 and the Music Hall 3 in Beverly Hills, call (310) 274-6869.

(source: Jewish Journal)



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

Couple donates $1M to Holocaust museum


A $1 million donation to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by two Miami
residents will help release documents that could reveal the fate of
Holocaust victims.

The gift by Norman and Irma Braman will support the museum's efforts to
open and copy the International Tracing Service Archive in Germany, which
contains information about 17.5 million people and is governed by an 11-
nation committee.

'The information contained in the ITS archive may provide answers to many
survivors' questions about the fates of their loved ones -- questions they
have waited more than 60 years to have answered,'' said Norman Braman, a
Miami car dealer and a member of the University of Miami board of
trustees.

The museum expects to receive the first part of the archive this fall, and
will work on developing a nationwide searchable database.

Opened in Washington, D.C., in 1993, the museum has drawn millions of
visitors from around the world. To learn more, visit www.ushmm.org.

(source: Miami Herald)





CANADA/POLAND:
A small window of hope is slammed shut by the Nazis

PART ONE: Citizen senior writer Andrew Duffy launches an eight-part
narrative series with the story of how the Stermer family, after being
accepted as emigrants to Canada, are trapped in Poland by the outbreak of
war. They suffer under the occupying Russians, then the murderous Germans
move into town.


The Polish town of Korolowka, on the country's eastern border, was built
on a hilltop overlooking a spread of fertile fields. The town was home to
about 500 Jewish families.

The Stermers -- Esther, her husband, Zaida, and their six children --
owned a large house near the central marketplace with a barn and grain
silo in back. They managed nearby fields and traded with the Ukrainians
and Poles who lived in neighbouring streets and villages. The family was
prosperous.

The Stermer family had been in Korolowka for generations. Still, their
neighbours often called them "the Germans," since their forefathers had
emigrated from that country in the 1700s.

Korolowka had a thriving Jewish community, with five synagogues and a
Hebrew school. Some of the Stermer children were active in the local
chapter of the Zionist youth movement.

As the winter of 1938 set in, the Stermers were deeply unsettled by events
in Europe. Adolf Hitler had already moved troops into Austria and
Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Nuremberg Laws had marked Jews for
persecution in Germany; thousands had been deported or assigned to labour
camps.

With war on the horizon, Esther Stermer was convinced the situation could
only get worse. She worried that old hatreds would again come unmoored in
the region.

But there was a window of hope for the family: Canada. Earlier that year,
Esther had seen a newspaper ad in which the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society
of Canada was offering to help Jewish families emigrate. The notice said
that to be eligible families had to have four able-bodied members, enough
money for passage to Canada and $1,000 for a down payment on a farm in
Saskatchewan.

Esther had written to Canadian officials in the summer of 1938 to begin
the immigration process.

"We hurried, but they did not," Esther recalled in her memoirs.

Canadian officials didn't meet with the family until Feb. 22, 1939, to
confirm that the Stermers qualified as immigrant farmers. Everyone passed
the required medical exams.

"When they looked at my mother's hands, they accepted her right away,"
remembers Saul Stermer. "The poor woman, she worked very hard."

But there was another delay before travel permits could be issued. When
everything was finally in place, the Stermers sold their farm supplies and
packed for their voyage to Canada. They booked passage on an ocean liner
and made arrangements to be in Warsaw on Sept. 8, when their journey was
to begin.

It would prove to be exactly one week too late.

Hitler's army invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and the German Blitzkrieg
quickly overcame the country's antiquated defences. Hitler halted the
advance in keeping with secret provisions of the Nazi-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact, which essentially divided the country between Germany
and Russia.

The Stermers were trapped. On the day after the Jewish new year, Rosh
Hashanah, the Russians announced their arrival in Korolowka by lining
tanks along the brow of a hill near town.

It was an ominous beginning to the long, dark years of war.

The Soviets rapidly nationalized the local banks, factories and
businesses. Farm supplies and food became scarce at the town's only store.
Large landowners were evicted from their estates. Many men were forced
into labour camps or conscripted into the Red Army.

Esther's son, Nissen, was drafted, along with her son-in-law, Joseph
Richter, who was sent deep into Russia. Another son-in-law, Fishel Dodyk,
hid from Russian authorities by moving to a different bed every night.

The Stermers couldn't imagine that conditions could get much worse.

Then, on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked Russia in a massive,
three-pronged invasion. Refugees flooded Korolowka in a desperate bid to
outrun the Nazis.

The Russians retreated from Korolowka before the Nazis arrived and the
local peasants used the resulting anarchy to set upon the town's Jews. The
Stermers and other Jewish families armed themselves with axes and steel
rods. Nissen abandoned the Russian army and returned home to his family.

The Germans moved in days after the Russian retreat. Jews were ordered to
wear a white armband emblazoned with a blue Star of David. It was
forbidden for Jews to leave their established sections of town, or to
trade with their Christian neighbours.

In Korolowka, a Jewish Council and Jewish police force were set up under
the control of the German Gestapo. Jewish leaders were given orders to
collect furs and other valuables from the local Jewry. Then the Gestapo
began to demand that the Jewish Council supply slave labourers to build
trenches and rail lines.

Rumours, fuelled by refugees who washed in and out of town, suggested that
some of the distant slave labour camps were death traps.

The German demands grew more onerous each day: more slave labourers, more
horses, more cattle, more coffee, tea and furniture. The Jewish police
were forced to fulfil these demands or face execution themselves.

Then came reports of the first German "actions" in nearby towns. Jews
would be lured to the city square, or seized by the police, and loaded by
the thousands onto cattle cars. Other times, they would be marched to a
cemetery and shot en masse.

"Those who were as yet spared found it difficult at first to believe that
human beings -- and cultured Germans at that -- could really perpetrate
such horrors," Esther wrote.

Someone suggested that Esther's eldest son, Nissen, or her son, Saul,
should join the Jewish police, since rumour held that relatives of the
police went untouched. But Nissen and Saul refused; instead, the family
prepared for future German "actions" by digging a series of six bunkers
beneath the family barns.

The Stermers would flee to the tall fields or to their bunkers every time
the Germans were spotted coming into town, an event that became ever more
frequent. With the winter of 1941 approaching, however, the Stermers
worried about how they would avoid future raids.

"Where does one hide during the winter cold and snows?" Esther wondered.




***********

Operation Reinhard first systematic killing operation of the Holocaust


The Stermers were among an estimated 2.2 million Polish Jews targeted by
Operation Reinhard, the secretive Nazi plan to enslave, rob and slaughter
the country's Jewish population.

Operation Reinhard was part of what Nazi leaders termed the "final
solution to the Jewish question."

During the Second World War, Adolf Hitler at first sought to "cleanse"
German territory of Jews through imprisonment and expulsion. But Nazi
policy toward Jews evolved murderously as the war progressed.

In German-occupied Poland, Jews had their property confiscated and were
concentrated in ghettos. Then, after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union on
June 22, 1941, special killing squads, called Einsatzgruppen, moved into
towns and cities on the heels of a German advance. They would round up
Jewish men, women and children, Roma families and Communist party leaders,
march them into forests or fields, rob them, strip them and shoot them.
Some of the Einsatzgruppen's victims were gassed in mobile units.

It was the first systematic killing operation of the Holocaust.

By October 1941, a policy of extermination of Jews under German control
was being discussed among the highest ranks of the Nazi regime, according
to leading Holocaust scholar Christopher Browning, an historian at the
University of North Carolina. Although there's no document that pinpoints
when the Nazis formalized their extermination policy, events suggest that
mass killing, not expulsion, became the new "operative vision" of the
regime in late 1941, he said.

"There was just too much happening at once for it to be coincidental," he
said.

In October 1941, the Nazis banned Jewish emigration from Europe,
abandoning attempts to deport the continent's Jews to the Soviet Union.
That same month, the wheels were set in motion for what would come to be
known as Operation Reinhard.

German Schutzstaffel (SS) commander Heinrich Himmler ordered one of his
generals to begin work on the "final solution" in a part of occupied
Poland known as the Government General, an area that included Warsaw,
Krakow, Lvov and the Stermers' hometown of Korolowka.

SS General Odilo Globocnik directed the operation, which co-ordinated the
construction of killing centres in Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.

The construction of Belzec began in November 1941 and was completed five
months later.

Like the other camps, Belzec was built next to a railroad to facilitate
the transportation of Jews from ghettos across southern Poland, including
the Borszczow ghetto, near the Stermers' hometown.

Many relatives, friends and neighbours of the Stermer family would perish
in Belzec's six gas chambers.

The killing began in Belzec in March 1942. Belzec, along with the other
Operation Reinhard extermination centres, used carbon monoxide gas,
generated by truck engines, to murder Jews, Roma and Soviet prisoners of
wars.

According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, cattle cars jammed with 4,000 to
5,000 people arrived at the Belzec railway station, where German SS
personnel announced they were at a transit camp and were to hand over all
valuables in their possession.

"The Jews were forced to undress and run through the 'tube,' which led
directly into gas chambers deceptively labeled as showers. Once the
chamber doors were sealed, auxiliary police guards started an engine
located outside the building housing the gas chambers. Carbon monoxide was
funneled into the gas chambers, killing all those inside. The process was
then repeated with deportees in the next 20 freight cars."

The encyclopedia reports that an estimated 434,500 Jews died in Belzec,
which was dismantled and plowed over in an attempt to hide the atrocities
that took place there.

(source: The Ottawa Citizen)






GERMANY:

Dresden museum to display Holocaust victims' art

Paintings and drawings by Holocaust victims will be put on display in an
eastern German museum in a first-of-its-kind collaboration with Israel's
Yad Vashem, the director of Dresden's art collection said.

The art created under conditions of extreme suffering _ often in the face
of imminent death, in concentration camps, ghettos, or during flight _
will be paired with older works from the Dresden State Art Collection,
director Martin Roth said.

''It's about the dialogue between our collection of traditional art,
mirroring European cultural and intellectual history, and an art that was
inspired by this tradition, and shaped by the reign of barbarism,'' Roth
said.

Many of the artists whose paintings and drawings will be displayed did not
survive the Holocaust. Roth said he hoped the exhibit would underline the
significance of holding onto art in the face of death, terror and
inhumanity.

Roth said the idea for the exhibit came to him after visiting Yad Vashem,
and the Israeli museum agreed to it.

''It will be the first time that Yad Vashem carries out such an exhibit in
cooperation with a German museum,'' Roth said.

Roth expressed hope the exhibit would help deepen understanding of the
Nazi era, an especially important issue in the economically depressed
east, where Dresden is located, where the far-right party and another
extremist party has representation in the state parliament.

''I want to put the art center stage and to show with it how artists who
were victims of the Nazi terror used art to endure the nightmare in the
death camps and to tolerate the intolerable.''

The exact location of the exhibition remains to be determined before the
opening scheduled for 2009.

(source: Associated Press)


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


Roll of 37,000 Buchenwald dead is completed



In Weimanr, a roll of 37,000 people murdered by the Nazis at
Buchenwald concentration camp has been completed after 10 years of work,
the head of the memorial at the site, Volkhard Knigge, said Sunday.

The book of the dead lists inmates worked to death, killed by disease and
starvation and those executed up to 1945 in the camp near the German city
of Weimar.

It is to be presented July 15 to the International Committee of Buchenwald
survivors "as a sort of symbolic grave-marker," said Knigge, the director
of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorial Foundation.

The handover date will be on the 70th anniversary of the camp's
establishment by the Nazis.

Between 500,000 and 600,000 people visit the memorial every year, 40 per
cent of them classes from German schools where the Holocaust is a major
part of history lessons.

The roll will be far from complete. More than 56,000 inmates are believed
to have died between 1937 and 1945.

Knigge said in an interview that incompetent record-keeping as the Nazi
system gradually collapsed was partly to blame, with names misspelled or
vital data muddled.

He added that 10,000 were estimated to have vanished in the last days of
the Second World War, when the Nazis forced the weakened prisoners to join
them running away from the Allied armies.

In these "Marches of Death," many fell dead at the roadside and could not
be identified by Allied authorities who found the bodies.

(source: DPA)






ITALY:

Italian court allows elderly Nazi war criminal to leave house for work

Ariel David
Canadian Press


Wednesday, June 13, 2007


ROME (AP) - An Italian military court has allowed an elderly former Nazi
officer convicted for his role in a 1944 massacre to leave house arrest to
work - a ruling that sparked outrage among the families of those murdered,
politicians and Jewish groups.

Since last month, 93-year-old Erich Priebke has been allowed to leave the
Rome apartment where he is serving a life sentence to work at his lawyer's
office, according to the lawyer, Paolo Giachini.

Priebke has been in prison or house arrest since he was extradited to
Italy in 1994 from Argentina. He was convicted of war crimes three years
later for his role in the massacre of 335 civilians at the Ardeatine Caves
on the outskirts of Rome.

Priebke has admitted shooting two people and helping round up the victims,
but has always insisted he was just following orders and should not be
held responsible.

He was working as a translator because of his knowledge of German,
Italian, Spanish and English, Giachini told The Associated Press.

He said his client only came to the law firm "when necessary" and declined
to say if Priebke was there Wednesday.

Giachini added that the judges "could not refuse this request" because
Italian law affords such benefits to all convicts after 10 years in prison
if they have been on good behaviour.

"A man of 93 who gets a job at a law firm? It's absurd, it's a way to get
around his sentence," Amos Luzzatto, a former head of Italy's Jewish
communities, told the Corriere della Sera newspaper. "I hope that Priebke
will not take advantage of this to organize an escape."

Holocaust expert Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center said that the ruling "insults the family and friends of
those murdered by Priebke and his cohorts."

"The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of Holocaust
perpetrators and people like him, who had no mercy for their victims, do
not deserve any sympathy themselves," he said in a statement.

Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni expressed solidarity with angered families of
those killed in the massacre. Massimo Rendina, head of a group of former
Italian resistance fighters in the Second World War, told Corriere that
his association and the relatives were considering appealing the ruling.

The executions at the caves took place March 24, 1944, 24 hours after a
partisan attack in central Rome that killed 33 members of a Nazi military
police unit.

Nazi forces decided to kill 10 Italians for every slain German, raiding
prisons for dozens of political prisoners, taking 75 Jews, and adding
common criminals and residents from near the site of the partisan attack.

They rounded up five more men than the 330 they sought and killed them all
in the abandoned quarry.

(source: The Canadian Press)





AUSTRIA:

Exposing Waldheim's Nazi past awakened Austrians


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dinah A. Spritzer / jta, THE JERUSALEM POST Jun. 17, 2007

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Revelations about the Nazi past of Kurt Waldheim and the subsequent
international ostracism of Austria during his presidency prompted
Austrians to re-examine their wartime role, one in which they long
identified as Hitler's victims rather than his allies.

Waldheim, who served as Austrian president from 1986 to 1992 after a
decade as the United Nations secretary-general, died of heart failure
Thursday at his home in Vienna. He was 88.

Looking back, the controversy was the best thing that happened to Austria,
the head of the Vienna Jewish Community said.

"It opened the eyes to Austrians that they had to stop living a lie and
come to grips with what they did in the past," said Ariel Muzicant, who
currently serves as the umbrella group's president and was vice president
when the accusations surfaced against Waldheim in the mid-'80s.

Waldheim's cover-up of his wartime service as a Nazi intelligence officer
in the Balkans came to represent the collective amnesia to which critics
said Austria succumbed after World War II.

His direct superiors ordered the deportation of 40,000 Greek Jews from
Thessalon?ki to Auschwitz and the massacre of thousands of Yugoslav
partisans and civilians.

The World Jewish Congress played a key role in exposing Waldheim and
revealed the organization's strength as it tried to obtain justice for
Jewish causes from recalcitrant European governments. Eventually the WJC
would win billions of dollars in compensation and restitution for
Holocaust survivors and their heirs.

The Waldheim Affair, as it became known, began in early 1985, just before
Waldheim announced that he would run for the Austrian presidency following
two terms as secretary-general of the United Nations from 1972 to 1982.
Previously he had a long career in the Austrian foreign service.

Elan Steinberg, the then-executive director of the World Jewish Congress,
recalled that Leon Zellman of the Vienna Jewish Community approached him
with information that Waldheim was covering up the nature of his service
in the Wehrmacht, the German army.

"I dispatched a very young Eli Rosenbaum to Vienna," said Steinberg,
referring to the man who is now in charge of the U.S. Justice Department's
Office of Special Investigations into Nazi war criminals.

In Vienna, Rosenbaum was given a photograph of Waldheim in 1943 in a Nazi
war uniform surrounded by officers who later were executed for war crimes.
The photo and other documents contradicted the accounts of his war service
in his autobiography, in which Waldheim said he had been injured and sent
back to Austria to finish his law studies.

Rosenbaum told JTA that the investigation into Waldheim came together
piecemeal over the course of a year, but the photo was "all you really
needed to know."

The photo's authenticity was confirmed by the chief of forensics at the
CIA.

"I was completely stunned," Rosenbaum said of the first time he saw the
photo, which supposedly was found in a curio shop in Austria. "There is
someone who looks like Kurt Waldheim, surrounded by notorious Nazis at a
time when he was, according to his biography, supposed to be in law
school. Then you turn the photograph over and there are all the names, and
there is Kurt Waldheim."

Waldheim apparently had joined a division of the Waffen-SS.

"He conveniently omitted that instead of going to school after his rather
minor injury, he was sent instead to Thessaloniki, where each morning he
gave a briefing about the identity of Greek and Yugoslav villages where
partisans were hiding," Steinberg said. "These villages were then
obliterated."

As an intelligence officer, the WJC argued, it would have been next to
impossible for Waldheim not to have known about the slaughter of Jews and
civilians in the region.

The WJC turned over its evidence to The New York Times, and a front-page
article ran in March 1985 detailing Waldheim's secret war service.

Waldheim responded then, and for the rest of his life, that he had simply
forgotten about his service and knew nothing about the Nazi massacres in
the Balkans. He even portrayed himself as being unfairly persecuted by the
WJC.

"The international press is dominated by World Jewish Congress," Waldheim
reportedly told the German newspaper National Zeitung in 1986. "This is
well known."

Documents later showed that the Yugoslav government fingered Waldheim as a
potential war criminal and he was listed as such by the the United Nations
War Crimes Commission in 1948.

Many Austrians resented what they saw as international meddling by
outsiders in their domestic affairs and elected him president only months
after his Nazi past was revealed.

Following his election, the WJC embarked on a campaign to have the State
Department place Waldheim on its "watch list" of war criminals, meaning he
could not visit the United States and would be persona non grata among
American diplomats and government officials.

The process was difficult, Steinberg said, but President Reagan severed
U.S. relations with the Austrian president in the face of overwhelming
evidence.

Israel Singer, also then a top official at the WJC, said Waldheim was not
Heinrich Himmler, a top Nazi official, "but fighting him was about
fighting Holocaust denial." He was part of the team that held news
conferences nearly every day for months when the WJC left no stone
unturned in its investigation of Waldheim's past.

"At first, people outside of the Jewish community viewed our effort as
obnoxious and attention-seeking," said Edgar Bronfman, the longtime
chairman of the WJC who was at its helm during the Waldheim Affair. "But
in the end it enhanced respect for the WJC in the governmental offices and
editorial rooms of Europe. After all, we were right."

Most Western governments joined the boycott of Waldheim, although he did
have a meeting with Pope John Paul II, which caused friction between the
Vatican and Jewish groups.

And not all Jews in Vienna supported the WJC campaign. Most famously, Nazi
hunter Simon Wiesenthal argued that Waldheim had erred but was not a Nazi
war criminal and should not be treated like one.

In response to criticism, the Austrian government in 1998 commissioned
international historians to investigate its former president's past. The
panel found that although Waldheim's actions were not criminal, they were
tantamount to collaboration and his denials of involvement were
insupportable.

"The major problem of Waldheim was that he was a liar," Muzicant said. "He
didn't have to say he had a personal guilt, but he could have talked about
historical guilt. Instead he falsified and did what many Austrians did and
pushed things under the carpet."

The WJC's newly elected chairman, Ronald Lauder, was the US ambassador to
Austria during the Waldheim presidency.

In a statement, Lauder said, "Fidelity to the truth requires we never
forget the details of the Waldheim controversy, but it must also be
acknowledged that Austria and her people have done much to move on even
before this day."

(source: Jerusalem Post)