June 24




GERMANY----book review

Whose Orders?
By RICHARD J. EVANS



THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
By Saul Friedlnder.

870 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $39.95.



In 1997, Saul Friedlander published "The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939,"
the first of his projected two-volume history of Nazi Germany and the
Jews. In the introduction to that volume, he announced his intention of
establishing a historical account of the Holocaust in which the policies
of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society and the world of
the victims could be addressed within an integrated framework. Such a
framework has indeed been missing from most historical accounts of this
most difficult and challenging of subjects. They have focused either on
the processes of decision-making and their implementation or on the world
of suffering and death experienced by the victims. Friedlander's first
volume stood out from most other work in this field because it
successfully combined both of these aspects. And his second volume does so
as well. It now establishes itself as the standard historical work on Nazi
Germanys mass murder of Europes Jews.

And yet "The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945"
is no ordinary academic book. True, Friedlander seems to have read
virtually every printed source and secondary work on his vast subject in
English, German and French. His judgments are scrupulous and levelheaded.
And he treats the historical controversies that have raged around so many
of the topics he covers with untiring fair-mindedness. He writes without a
trace of polemic or of facile retrospective moralizing. The book
meticulously satisfies every requirement of professional historical
writing.

What raises "The Years of Extermination" to the level of literature,
however, is the skilled interweaving of individual testimony with the
broader depiction of events. Friedlnder never lets the reader forget the
human and personal meanings of the historical processes he is describing.
By and large, he avoids the sometimes unreliable testimony of memoirs for
the greater immediacy of contemporary diaries and letters, though he also
makes good use of witness statements at postwar trials. The result is an
account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel.

Friedlander's witnesses run into scores if not hundreds, and range from
well-known figures like Anne Frank and Adam Czerniakow, the head of the
Jewish administration of the Warsaw Ghetto, to more obscure individuals
like Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian writer in his 30s, who recorded the
descent of his country into its own barbarous version of genocide, and
Raymond-Raoul Lambert, an Alsatian veteran of the French Army in World War
I. Their haunting words chronicle the horror and disbelief of European
Jewry as it slid down through discrimination and persecution to
deportation and death. "If my life ends," the Warsaw religious teacher
Chaim Kaplan wrote not long before he was taken away to perish in the gas
chambers of Treblinka, "what will become of my diary?" Like many others
cited in this book, it survived not least by chance, having been smuggled
out of the Warsaw Ghetto into the hands of the Polish underground
resistance movement, from where it eventually found its way to New York
and publication in the 1960s. The writings of diarists like Kaplan,
committed to paper in conditions of terrible adversity, provide much of
the human dimension of this remarkable book: they did not write in vain.

These people were the victims, Friedlander argues, not of anonymous
processes generated in the machinery of Nazi and SS administration, but of
one man above all: Adolf Hitler. Friedlander is critical of the recent,
voluminous literature, mainly by a younger generation of German
historians, that attempts to depict the extermination program as the
outcome of coldly rational processes of decision-making by administrators,
experts and officials in the German-occupied areas of Eastern Europe, who
decided that the Jews would have to be killed so that the limited food
supplies available in the area could go to the Germans, or to make room
for German settlers or Germans left homeless by Allied bombing raids.

Such arguments do not explain the manic obsessiveness with which Heinrich
Himmler, the head of the SS and the man in charge of implementing the
extermination program, tracked down Jews to arrest and kill, even
traveling to Germanys ally Finland to try and persuade its government to
surrender that countrys tiny Jewish population, which was of no objective
economic or strategic importance to Germany at all. Nor do these arguments
do justice to the virulent language of hatred used by the Nazi leaders,
Hitler and Goebbels in particular, when they spoke, as they did almost
unceasingly, of the Jews.

Friedlander devotes a good deal of space to quoting Hitler at length,
showing clearly his personal obsession with the forces of international
Jewry that, in his mind, lay behind the actions of Churchill, Roosevelt
and Stalin. It was the Jews, he believed, who had fomented the war
launched (in reality by himself) in September 1939. As the United States
committed itself ever more firmly to the Allied side in the summer and
fall of 1941, Hitler delivered one tirade after another against the Jewish
conspiracy he thought lay behind Roosevelts policy. It was at this point
that he escalated his persecution of the Jews first to deportation to the
East and then to mass murder and total extermination.

The German defeat by the Red Army at the Battle of Stalingrad in February
1943, blamed by Hitler yet again on the Jews, raised his anti-Semitic fury
to fresh heights. The Jews, he declared, were driven by their innate
racial instinct to subvert civilization everywhere. "The modern peoples
have no option left," he said in May, as the genocide was reaching its
height, "but to eliminate the Jews." Millions of entirely innocent and
largely unsuspecting people across Europe paid for such violent fantasies
with their lives.

The diaries and letters cited in the book show graphically how even as the
prospective Jewish victims began to fear the worst, they continued to hope
for the best; only a small minority found their way into hiding or
resistance. As for the mass of non-Jewish citizens in Germany and other
parts of Europe, indifference was the commonest reaction. Police and other
state officials in most occupied countries cooperated willingly in the
roundups and deportations; in some parts of Europe, notably Poland,
Romania and Croatia, native anti-Semitism made its own brutal contribution
to the genocide.

Friedlander's narrative sweeps across an entire continent, encompassing
every country affected by the Nazi drive for domination. In Bulgaria and
Slovakia, popular outrage at the genocide forced governments initially
willing to collaborate to change their stance. Leaders of the Roman
Catholic Church in a number of countries played a part in articulating
such feelings, and individual priests in Germany and elsewhere sometimes
paid for their courageous opposition with their lives. But Friedlander
makes it equally clear that many clerics, particularly senior church
leaders who feared that open criticism of the genocide would bring down
the wrath of the Nazis on them, remained silent and inactive, except where
Jewish converts to Christianity were concerned. In some areas --
particularly Croatia -- nationalist clergymen egged on the murder squads
with their own brand of religiously inspired anti-Semitism. Pope Pius XII,
the subject of an earlier book by Friedlnder, does not come out well, but
what strikes the reader yet again is the exemplary evenhandedness with
which Friedlander weighs the arguments on both sides in an area that has
become more controversial than most in recent years.

The book's chapters are organized chronologically, each covering a period
of several months. This has the disadvantage of breaking up many of the
narratives, so that, for example, if one wants to follow what happened in
the Netherlands, or in Romania, or even in Germany itself, one has to
search through several different chapters to piece the story together. But
for the reader who persists from beginning to end, this structure has the
benefit of enabling one to see the connections between what was happening
at any one time in different parts of the Continent, to link it to the
state of play of military affairs during the war (which Friedlander
usefully sketches in at various points) and to follow the slow development
of Nazi policy and its implementation as it unfolded over time.

In a celebrated exchange with the German historian Martin Broszat many
years ago, Friedlnder argued that, faced with such events, no historian
could or should remain neutral. Born in Prague into a Jewish family in
1932, Friedlnder grew up in hiding in France during the war, and his
personal history gives him an unusually strong identification with his
subject. Broszat, who had spent much of his career compiling or overseeing
expert witness reports in German war crimes prosecutions and had a vested
interest in preserving the appearance of neutrality, disagreed.

The practical consequences of Friedlander's stance are apparent: the
personal testimonies of Hitlers Jewish victims create an overwhelming
impression of suffering and cast a lurid light on the policies and actions
of the Nazis and their helpers. The downside of this is that the
experiences of the perpetrators are presented perhaps less fully than they
might have been. Their testimony is generally used to describe the
conditions they created rather than (with the obvious exception of Hitler
himself) to chart their personal beliefs, motives or impressions. The
attitudes and behavior of the German people also remain unexplained, and
are presented in a sweeping and undifferentiated way that does scant
justice to the nuances and complexities that recent historical work has
uncovered.

And the books focus on the sufferings of the Jews pushes the broader
context of Nazi racial policy which includes the mass murder of millions
of Soviet prisoners of war, the systematic extermination of the Polish
intelligentsia, the killing of about 200,000 mentally ill or handicapped
Germans, the annihilation of a large part of Europe's Gypsies possibly
too far into the background. For as a good deal of recent work has shown,
the Third Reich's genocidal policies toward the Jews have to be understood
as part of a larger policy aimed at the ethnic reshaping of Europe.
Comparisons with these other victims would have made it evident that the
Jews occupied a special place in the exterminatory mentality of the Nazis;
they were perceived not as a regional obstacle but as a global threat, not
as inferior beings like insects but as powerful enemies, whose very
existence anywhere was a terrible danger to the future of the German race.

Still, to have broadened the focus too much would have made this already
very lengthy and complex book almost unmanageable. Friedlander succeeds in
binding together the many different strands of his story with a sure
touch. He has written a masterpiece that will endure.

(source: Richard J. Evans is professor of modern history at Cambridge
University and the author of "The Third Reich in Power."----NY Times)





TALY:

Italians picket ex-Nazi's office ---- Priebke was given a life sentence in
1998


Members of Italy's Jewish community have been protesting outside a
lawyer's office in Rome where a former Nazi officer has begun work.
Shouts of "Murderer!" greeted Erich Priebke, 93, as he arrived for his
first day on the back of a scooter.

A court ruled last week that Priebke, who is serving a sentence for
multiple murders, could work on day release.

Priebke was jailed for life in 1998 for his role in the massacre of 335
Italians in 1944.

He had been discovered working as a schoolteacher in Argentina, and was
extradited to stand trial.

In 1999, he was given leave to serve the remainder of his sentence under
house arrest in his lawyer's home, on the grounds of his ill health.

But a military court ruled last week that he could go to work at his
lawyer's office "every day, freely" and also to "go out to satisfy, at
nearby places and for the time strictly necessary, the indispensable
necessities of life" - interpreted as going out for lunch.

He will work as a translator, and will also spend time on his biography,
which he began during his brief spell in jail.

'A disgrace'

The president of the Jewish community in Rome, Leone Passerman, questioned
how it was possible that a Nazi war criminal, allowed to complete a
sentence at home on health grounds, was suddenly fit enough to go back to
work.

"The first thought that I had was of the magistrate that made the
provision, perhaps had remembered the lesson that was on the gate at
Auschwitz - 'Arbeit macht frei', 'work will set you free' - and perhaps he
thought it was right to free Mr Priebke to allow him to work," he said.

One Jewish protester, 80-year-old Leone Sonnino, said: "It's an absolute
disgrace, people forget.

"People say 'It's enough now.' Enough for what? Nothing should be enough,
there can never be enough grief."

'Re-education'

But Priebke's lawyer, Paolo Giachini, defended the decision.

"The law says that after a period in prison, inmates have the right to
certain benefits, because detention here in Italy isn't just punitive, it
tries to re-educate those who have been condemned," he told Reuters news
agency.

Priebke is serving a life sentence for the murder of 335 people at the
Ardeatine Caves outside Rome.

The 1944 massacre was a reprisal ordered by Adolf Hitler after partisans
killed a patrol of 33 German soldiers.

(source: BBC News, June 18)




ISRAEL:

NIS 240 million in Bank Leumi shares belong to Holocaust victims


One percent of the shares of Bank Leumi, equal to NIS 240 million, are
still in the name of tens of thousands of Jews who were killed during the
Holocaust, according to a report submitted last week to the Custodian
General. It had previously been estimated that thousands of Jewish
Holocaust victims held accounts in Leumi, but it is now apparent that
about 20 percent of the shares of the Jewish Colonial Trust (JCT), Bank
Leumi's parent company, are in the name of Holocaust victims.

A law passed last year stipulates that stocks in the name of Holocaust
victims are to be transferred to a state company, the Organization for the
Restitution of Assets of Holocaust Victims, which is to transfer it to the
heirs. The chairman of the company's board of directors, Avraham Roth,
proposes selling the shares and using two-thirds of the proceeds for
immediate aid to needy Holocaust survivors. He proposes keeping the
remaining third for heirs, since he believes heirs will not be found for
more than one-third of the shares. He proposes the company and the state
seek out the living and deceased owners of the stock, and at the same time
sell the shares on the open market; two-thirds of the JCT stock is now
worth more than NIS 300 million.

The JCT was founded in 1899 on the initiative of Theodor Herzl as the
financial arm of the World Zionist Organization. To raise capital, Herzl
initiated an issue of shares to Jews who supported the Zionist idea. He
first approached wealthy Jews but when he was turned down, shares, he
called on Jews everywhere to purchase stock. The issue was a dizzying
success, as Jews from Eastern Europe and elsewhere purchased about 250,000
shares at one pound sterling each. In 1902, the JCT established the
Anglo-Palestine Bank, which later changed its name to Bank Leumi.

After World War II, communication was cut off with most JCT shareholders.
In 1960, JCT-Trust was established and the names of all the missing
shareholders were collected. JCT-Trust holds about 40 percent of JCT
stock, which is formally managed by the Custodian General.

The report on the JCT shareholders was written by Professor Yossi Katz of
Bar-Ilan University, who as far back as 1997 found that many JCT
shareholders had been killed in the Holocaust. Only recently, however,
following a demand by the state organization for restitution did the
Custodian General permit Katz to examine the shareholders' lists.

The number of shareholders stands at about 83,000, after a few hundred
thousand shareholders cashed in their stock over the years. Almost 56,000
(68 percent) of those who purchased shares were Jews living in countries
later occupied by the Nazis; their stock is classified as property
belonging to victims of the Holocaust. Because they held fewer shares,
however, their collective share in the stock capital is only 47 percent of
the total JCT stock. The largest number of shareholders came from the
former Soviet Union (34,300), followed by the United States (11,100),
Britain(8,087), Poland (7,676), Lithuania (5,270) and Romania (3,884).

Katz recommends transferring 47 percent of JCT stock to the organization
for restitution and 52 percent to the state by means of the Custodian
General.

The JCT stock is "just an example of the extent of assets of Holocaust
victims in Israel that were concealed through the years," Roth told
Haaretz, adding that he intended for the state and the company to
cooperate with regard to all the JCT stock.

(source: Ha'aretz)



CZECH REPUBLIC:

Israel to return property to Czechoslovak Holocaust victims


There are 230 items from the former Czechoslovakia among the property of
3000 Holocaust victims in Israel, published by the Israeli organisation
for return of the property confiscated during war this week, Robert Rehak
from the Czech embassy in Israel said on Thursday.

The relatives of the victims from the list with their names and the titles
of the companies in question can claim the property, Rehak said.

A full list along with details on the property is now available at
www.hashava.org.il only in Hebrew, but the names of people and
organisations are transcribed in Latin letters, though with some mistakes,
Rehak said.

The full English version of the webpage is to be launched within two
weeks, Israeli media has reported.

Most of the 3000 bank accounts were opened in the 1930s in the banks in
former Palestine under the British Mandate, most of them at the
Anglo-Palestinian Bank that was later changed into the Israeli Bank Leumi.

The accounts were transferred to Bank Leumi and the Jewish National Fund.
The property that will not be claimed by anyone will be transferred to
Holocaust survivors and Holocaust remembrance institutions.

Along with some 3000 bank accounts, there are also 500 items of various
property such as land, often very valuable.

(source: Ceskenoviny.cz)