August 14




USA//CALIFORNIA:

Man accused of accosting Nobel winner Wiesel apologizes in court


The man accused of accosting Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel in a San
Francisco hotel apologized to the Nobel Peace Prize winner in court Monday
as Wiesel recounted what he described as his most harrowing ordeal since
World War II.

"I'm terribly sorry about what happened," Eric Hunt, 23, blurted out as
the 78-year-old Wiesel was on the witness stand in San Francisco Superior
Court at the defendant's preliminary hearing.

Superior Court Judge Harold Kahn will hear arguments next week and decide
on whether to order Hunt to stand trial and on what charges. He ordered an
independent mental evaluation of Hunt over prosecutors' objections Monday.

Hunt told Wiesel in court that he was sorry both that he had scared him
and that Wiesel had suffered during the Holocaust. Hunt also told Wiesel
that his grandfather had fought the Nazis.

Hunt's attorney, John Runfola, tugged on his client's shoulder in an
attempt to keep him from talking. Runfola later said Hunt has cared for
his grandfather, a paratrooper during the war who now suffers from
Alzheimer's.

Wiesel said outside court that he was skeptical of the apology.

"I expected it," he said. "I'm a novelist. I imagine situations - this is
something a character would do. It's clever, very clever."

Asked if he thought Hunt's apology was sincere, Wiesel said, "No, I
didn't," but later added, "I don't know."

Hunt is accused of six felonies, including attempted kidnapping, battery
and stalking, in connection with the Feb. 1 incident at the Argent Hotel.

The Sussex County, N.J., resident is accused of traveling 3,000 miles to
confront Wiesel at a conference that was being held at the hotel.

Wiesel testified that Hunt had grabbed him by the arm in a hotel elevator
and told him, "You must come with me."

When Wiesel replied that they should go to the lobby, he testified, Hunt
said, "You must come to my room."

"I felt threatened; I felt frightened," Wiesel said. "I felt he could kill
me and I began to shout, 'Help! Help! Help!' "

As Wiesel struggled to free himself, he said, Hunt told him, 'You are
afraid of the truth.' "

Wiesel managed to get away and rode down to the lobby. The experience left
him feeling "violated" and more frightened than he had been since the war,
he testified.

"The shock to me was so great that I lost a sense of time and space,"
Wiesel said.

Hunt was arrested three weeks later, after someone identifying himself as
Hunt posted an account of the incident on an anti-Semitic Web site.

In an interview with New York police, Hunt admitted that he had written
the post in a library in Chicago as he headed home, New York police Sgt.
Al Fiore testified Monday.

Hunt told Fiore that he had been trying to get Wiesel to confess that the
Holocaust never happened, the sergeant testified.

Hunt was voluntarily committed soon after returning to New Jersey and was
ultimately arrested at a mental clinic.

He has pleaded not guilty. His attorney has said Hunt suffered from a
manic phase of bipolar disorder and said he had sent a psychiatric
evaluation to prosecutors and to Wiesel.

Wiesel testified that the fear he felt that evening has yet to dissipate.

"If a young man could devote his life now to the cause of Holocaust
denying, what kind of world do we live in?" Wiesel said. "The anguish I
felt multiplied."

Runfola suggested that Wiesel had suffered no harm and that there was no
evidence Hunt had wanted to do anything other than talk to the author. But
Wiesel said that when he was pulled out of the elevator, "I was convinced
that if he managed to get me to his room, something terrible was going to
happen. That's how I felt."

Wiesel was sent by the Nazis in 1944 to Auschwitz, where his mother and
three sisters were killed. His father died on a forced march to
Buchenwald, another concentration camp, three months before the camp was
liberated in 1945.

Wiesel has written more than 40 books based on his Holocaust experiences.
He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986.

He testified that Holocaust denial goes hand in hand with anti-Semitism,
as it suggests that the Nazis' murder of 6 million people was fabricated
by Jews.

Hunt was going to "force me to say that my testimony was false," Wiesel
said, "that the whole story, the whole event, the whole tragedy was
nothing but lies."

After he left the stand, Wiesel was approached by the defendant's mother,
Naomi McCloskey, who was in tears.

"I want to ask you for your forgiveness," she told him in the hallway of
the courthouse. "He is a kind boy, a sensitive boy. He took care of my
father. I want him to do good in this world. I believe he can."

Wiesel listened, despite efforts by prosecutors to stop the conversation,
but left without giving Hunt's mother a reply.

(source: San Francisco Chronicle)


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

Raul Hilberg, pioneer scholar of Holocaust, dies



Raul Hilberg, who spent more than half a century researching the
Holocaust, has died at 81 of lung cancer, the University of Vermont said
on Tuesday.

The Vienna-born Hilberg, a Jew himself, was best known for his massive
study "The Destruction of the European Jews" which chronicled how Nazi
Germany constructed and operated history's most lethal killing machine
that murdered 6 million Jews.

When he started his research soon after World War Two, Hilberg was a
rarity in his early scholarly passion for the topic. "In the Jewish
community the topic was almost taboo," Hilberg told Reuters in a 2004
interview. "I went ahead with my work starting with the end of 1948,
almost, I would say, as a protest against silence."

"There was a kind of defused resentment that somehow a topic of such
magnitude was ignored."

Hilberg published the first version of his book in 1961, giving numbing
detail on everything from the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany to the
bureaucratic underpinnings of the concentration camp system.

He continued his research through the vast Holocaust archives into what he
saw as a "gigantic jigsaw puzzle" long afterwards, leading ultimately to a
much expanded third edition in 2003.

Some criticized him for focusing more on perpetrators of the Holocaust and
the machinery they created rather than victims.

Hilberg was often able to work dispassionately on the grim theme but said
he was sometimes overcome by the subject.

"In my dreams, I was a victim," he said in the interview. "I was on my way
to Auschwitz. I was on the train and I was confronting SS guys and I was
going to kill them."

Such nightmares cut close to the bone as his family only left Austria in
1938 following the German Anschluss of its neighbor. After a stop in Cuba,
the Hilbergs arrived in the United States, and he later became a U.S.
citizen.

NAUSEA FROM THE DETAILS

Sixty years later he remembered the horror he felt when he returned to
Europe as a soldier with the U.S. Army in the later part of the war. While
in France he came across the notebook and personal possessions of a dead
student of chemistry -- a subject he had studied.

"I became totally nauseated," Hilberg recalled, saying he identified with
the young student. "The chemistry notebook made me ill."

As a soldier he also came across crates with Adolf Hitler's library, a
find that fascinated him.

Sometimes Hilberg would react particularly strongly to small details of
the Holocaust, such as when he found out about a Jew who sued the Nazis
for the right to purchase coffee.

"I was nauseated because obviously this Jew was picked up and sent to
Auschwitz or wherever they sent him and died," he said. "Why did this
particular incident affect me when I could calmly read about mass murder?"

After the war, Hilberg got a PhD from Columbia University and began a long
association with the University of Vermont in 1956, during which he wrote
several other books. He retired from teaching in 1991 but remained an
emeritus professor.

"When you are done writing the work, bringing it to the public
successfully, even being praised, you wake up one morning and say to
yourself, 'They're still dead', and that's really the most profound
reaction there is," he said.

Hilberg, who had not been a smoker, died on Saturday of lung cancer in
Williston, Vermont.

(source: Reuters)



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


USA//KENTUCKY:

Doctor to accused in Nazi war trials dies


Former Louisville resident Dr. Roy A. Martin, who served as courtroom and
prison physician during the Nuremberg trials in Germany following World
War II, has died. He was 91.

Martin, a native of Cloverport, Ky., died Saturday in Greer, S.C.

Although the war was over, Martin was called up as a reserve soldier and
left for Paris in 1946 after he had received a military deferment to earn
his medical degree from the University of Louisville in 1944.

Then 30 years old, he was the only American physician present at the
trials.

He pronounced convicted Nazi war criminal Hermann Goering -- Germany's
highest-ranking Nazi official after the war -- dead of suicide Oct. 15,
1946.

Goering had been scheduled for execution.

The following day, he pronounced 10 other convicted Nazis dead as they
hanged from the gallows.

After the trials, he spent 44 years in private medical practice as an ear,
nose and throat specialist.

In 1986, he began writing his personal account of the Nuremberg trials,
published 15 years later as "Inside Nurnberg: Military Justice for Nazi
War Criminals."

Using notes he had taken and sketches he had drawn of the prison and his
surroundings, Martin wrote about his personal impressions of the Nazi
criminals and the atmosphere and attitudes in Germany during the trials.

He also wanted to set the record straight on Goering's death, he told The
Courier-Journal in 2001.

"I visited them every day. They all spoke excellent English; I knew them
well," Martin wrote of the 21 Nazi prisoners, some of whom escaped
execution.

In the book, Martin described Goering as arrogant and deceitful.

According to Martin, Goering had complained for days about the noise from
the gallows being assembled outside.

His suicide, by cyanide capsule, pushed the other executions back four
hours to the next day, Martin said.

He wrote that Rudolf Hess -- called "next in line to Hitler" although he
was not sentenced to execution at Nuremberg -- was "undoubtedly the worst
hypochondriac it has been my misfortune to know."

Martin also knew Alfred Rosenberg, a strong advocate of the Nazi genocide,
Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, who had been the German Army's chief of staff,
Gestapo leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Gen. Alfred Jodl, who signed
Germany's surrender documents.

Martin wrote that Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was the German foreign
minister, was "a house falling apart" as he walked to the gallows.

Their remains were cremated in one of the ovens at a former concentration
camp.

(source: Courier-Journal)




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


US to Add Info on Nazi Holocaust to Web Site After Complaint

Condoleezza Rice's staff members have some revising to do



US State Department officials have said they would rewrite an account of
Nazi Germany on their Web site after the head of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center had accused them of playing down the Holocaust.

"We intend to change the language in order to more accurately reflect
historical facts," said J. Christian Kennedy, the State Department's envoy
for Holocaust issues, on Monday.

The office's Bureau for European and Eurasian Affairs, which penned the
entry on Germany, said it had not intended to trivialize the genocide.

In a letter to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Rabbi Marvin Hier
of the Simon Wiesenthal Center had criticized the department's information
on Germany for minimizing the role the country played in the murder of six
million Jews in the Holocaust, the Jewish human rights organization said
in a statement.

The controversial account appears on the "Background Notes" section of the
State Department's Web site. It is dated July 2007.

"Holocaust" goes unmentioned

The account doesn't use the term "concentration camp"

The only mention of the Holocaust reads: "The Nazis implemented a program
of genocide, at first through incarceration and forced labor and then by
establishing death camps." Neither the terms "Holocaust" nor
"concentration camp" appear in the text.

Hier pointed out that Jews were not identified as the principal victims of
the genocide or that eliminating Europe's Jews was a Nazi policy. He said
the entry was "most offensive" in comparison to "Background Notes" on
other countries where genocides were committed, such as Cambodia, Rwanda,
Sudan and Russia under Stalin. Those entries went into greater detail,
including providing numbers of victims.

The rabbi said it seemed that the department didn't want to hurt Germany's
feelings, according to the Associated Press.

(source: Deutsche Welle)






GERMANY:

Neo-Nazi to serve time for Holocaust denial


A leader in a far-right party in Germany was sentenced to prison for
Holocaust denial and beating up anti-fascist activists.

Marcel Wll, the 24-year-old leader of the National Democratic Party's
division in the German state of Hessen, was sentenced to four months in
prison, according to The Associated Press.

Woll has called school trips to former concentration camps like Auschwitz
a form of "brainwashing" and has said the government should not subsidize
such outings to the "so-called sites of National Socialist terror." The
remarks prompted a lawsuit against him by a local politician.

More recently, Wll was kicked out of a council meeting in June after he
physically accosted youths who were handing out anti-fascist leaflets
calling for the banning of his right-wing extremist party. The youths had
received official permission to hand out the leaflets.

Wll said he would appeal his sentence, which was handed down in the
Friedberg County court on Tuesday.

(source: JTA, Aug. 7)





ISRAEL:

Holocaust survivors discuss allowances with PMO


Representatives of Holocaust survivors living in Israel held a meeting at
the Prime Minister's Office on Monday, as part of the government's pledge
to increase paltry grants to survivors.

The negotiations between the two sides over the ultra-sensitive issue,
which is expected to be resolved by next week, will continue on Tuesday.

Holocaust survivors groups recently rejected a proposed government stipend
of NIS 83 per month to some of the country's 250,000 Holocaust survivors
as woefully insufficient.

(source: Jerusalem Post)

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


The Israeli Suit By the Children of Holocaust Victims Against the German
Government: Can It Succeed?


On July 16, a lawyer in Israel filed a class action suit against the
German government on behalf of "second-generation" victims of the
Holocaust. The suit seeks compensation for thousands of persons who were
born after the Holocaust, on the ground that the German government is
responsible for the psychic injuries inflicted by direct victims of the
Holocaust onto their children.

In this column, I will examine the legal roots of this extraordinary claim
and consider what it might teach us about the potential reach--or
limits--of reparations for historical wrongs.



The Genesis of the Idea for the Suit, and the Remedy That Is Sought

Even though the suit was brought in Israel, I think that it may have much
to teach audiences in other countries. Israel's tort law is based, in
part, on British common law, since the British set up a court system in
Palestine in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century. In addition,
Israel's class action rules were borrowed quite self-consciously from the
United States.

As with American class action suits, it is important to distinguish the
underlying liability claim from the class action structure. In this case,
I want to focus primarily on the former, asking the following question:
Even if the lawsuit were being brought as an individual case, by a single
plaintiff against the German government, does it make any sense from a
legal point of view?

The lawyer who crafted the suit, Gideon Fisher, claims that he first
thought of bringing a claim on behalf of the children of Holocaust
survivors after representing their parents in claims relating to their
wartime suffering. He noticed that the children who accompanied their
parents to his office suffered from a variety of symptoms reflecting a
condition that he believes is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). His
suit describes the medical condition of five representative plaintiffs,
and contains an opinion by a psychiatrist who claims that clinical
research shows a high frequency of emotional disorders which he identifies
as PTSD among the children of direct Holocaust victims.

Fisher wants the German government to establish a fund to pay for the
mental health treatment of the thousands of children of Holocaust
survivors. The suit estimates that the treatment program would last three
years, and cost approximately $30 million. It does not seek any other
compensation for the plaintiffs.

The Simple Part of the Suit: The Right to Recover for Remote Consequences
of Past Torts Is Well-Established

The tort principles upon which Fisher is basing his suit are both simple
and very controversial. Let's take the simple part first: It is
well-established that a person who engages in an intentional tort can be
held responsible for consequences that are very remote indeed.

For example, a person who tries to shoot another person can be held liable
for the consequences of the bullet's ricocheting in a freak manner and
injuring persons far away. Of course, the Holocaust was a uniquely
horrible event, but it was also a bundle of intentional torts--the Nazis
engaged in massive numbers of acts constituting battery, assault, false
imprisonment, or intentional infliction of emotional distress, as well as
acts constituting a variety of free-standing torts rooted in customary
international law, such as genocide and slavery. Thus, it stands to reason
that the current German government, as successor to the Nazi government,
could be held responsible for a lot of "ricochet" injuries that extend
beyond the deaths of the people taken to camps to be gassed.

The More Difficult Aspect of the Suit: An Attempt to Recover for Pure
Emotional Distress

Now for the controversial part: The tort law has always been very
skeptical of recognizing claims for pure emotional distress, and has done
so over the last century quite grudgingly. Where psychic injury
accompanies physical injury, tort law has always been willing to allow
compensation for the former, once the latter is proven, on the theory that
they are naturally paired. For example, a person who suffers mental shock
as a result of an accident that causes even very slight physical injury
has always been able to receive full, and often generous, compensation for
the shock, even if the damages for the physical accident were slight.

The law of intentional torts originally allowed compensation for pure
psychic injury only if the defendant intended that the victim be afraid of
a physical contact. It was only in the 1960's that courts first recognized
the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress, which allows the
victims of outrageous mental abuse to receive compensation, even if they
never feared that they would be touched by their abuser.

(Most of the Nazis' horrific activities will be rightly classified as
intentional torts. But it is conceivable that some could also be swept
within negligence law. However, this would not improve the plaintiffs'
situation. In the law of negligence, meanwhile, the scope of recovery for
pure psychic injury is even narrower. Courts have disallowed compensation
for pure psychic injury, except where the victim was afraid that he or she
would be physically struck and fortuitously was not, and in a very narrow
range of cases, where the victim witnessed a close family member suffer a
physical injury.)

In sum, then, even if tort law makes intentional tortfeasors liable for a
large range of unintended consequences, those consequences still must be
the sort of injuries that the tort law typically recognizes as a
compensable harm. PTSD is not usually the kind of harm that, on its own,
is compensated in tort law; it must typically be associated with a
physical injury or the threat of a physical injury.

Other Plaintiffs Have Recovered Damages for Torts Preceding Their Birth

The plaintiffs in the second-generation Holocaust victims suit do have one
strategy they could employ, however. They might argue to the court that
the distinction between personal injury and psychic injury is specious,
and undercuts a key principle courts have developed since the 1960's:
While the wrongfulness of a tortious act may not manifest itself
immediately, this fact should not excuse the wrongdoer.

The best example of this modern principle is the DES case, where defendant
pharmaceutical companies were held liable for cancers caused in the
daughters of women to whom a defective drug was prescribed. The defendants
arguably breached a duty to the mothers, not the daughters (who were, at
the relevant time, in utero and not yet legal persons). There, however,
courts had no trouble linking the wrongful conduct before the vicitms'
birth to a right to redress after their birth.

Readers may point out that, unlike the second-generation Holocaust
victims, the plaintiffs in the DES cases were at least conceived when the
defendants acted wrongfully. But from a legal point of view, I think this
distinction is likely to be considered irrelevant. As the recent lead
paint litigation around the country shows, courts are willing to hold
defendants liable for wrongful conduct that poses a risk of injury to
persons who are not yet conceived - and indeed, were not conceived for
many decades. In those states that have permitted the lead paint suits to
go forward, the paint industry is being held liable for the mental
retardation of children who ate lead paint chips that allegedly were
wrongfully manufactured seventy years before the children were harmed, and
thus many decades before they were born.

Should It Make a Difference if the Pre-Birth Tort Causes Psychic, Not
Physical Injury?

It follows that if there is any reason to categorically exclude the
"Second Generation Holocaust" victim suit, it must be because pure psychic
injury is different in some way from physical injury--so different that we
cannot allow tort system to handle it the way it might handle a claim
about cancer (as in the DES cases) or blood poisoning (as in the
lead-paint cases).

Under this analysis, a strange consequence follows: A person born in 1963
to a Holocaust victim who was the subject of a medical experiment that
produced a physical deformity in the child would have a valid claim in
tort. However, the same person would not have a claim if the parent's
psychic wounds from the terrible experiment were so great--and the
subsequent home life so poisoned--that the child developed not a
deformity, but rather PTSD.

What might be a ground for drawing this line? I must admit, I am
personally torn on this issue. As the child of two Holocaust survivors, I
can easily see the logic of the argument that psychic wounds can affect
subsequent generations. And yet, I also can see the practical concerns
that claims based on "ricochet psychic injuries" pose for the courts.

The most obvious one is causation. The defendants in the DES cases never
seriously tried to deny that the cancers suffered by the plaintiffs were,
in fact, caused by their product--the science supporting the causation
claimed by the plaintiffs was too strong. The same could not be said,
however, for other second-generation claims, such as those involving suits
by children with birth defects whose mothers had taken Bendectin. The tort
system was embarrassed when, after a number of blockbuster damage awards,
it was realized that, in the Bendectin cases, the causal claims of the
plaintiffs were not provable.

Psychic injuries pose even larger, more difficult causation problems. How
can we know to what degree the emotional problems described by the 40- and
50 year-old representative plaintiffs in the Israeli suit are the result
of what happened to their parents in the 1940's, as opposed to factors
that may have come from outside the home? Israel itself is an environment
filled with unique stressors.

But what if these practical problem of proof could be overcome? Skeptics
raised many of the same practical objections to the DES cases when they
were first brought, and the world did not come to an end when courts
allowed them to go forward. Practical solutions were found, and rough
justice was done. After all, why should the German government fight over
$30 million dollars, when it has already paid out over $60 billion in
Holocaust reparations since the 1950's?

The Repercussions of the Second Generation Holocaust Suit for the U.S.'s
Suits By Descendants of Slaves

The significance of the "Second Generation Holocaust" suit is less for
Germany and Israel, than for the United States. As I pointed out in a
column last year, the Seventh has Circuit revived a massive class action
brought by African-Americans who claim they were injured in the present
day by the consequences of slavery, and want the corporations who
benefited from slavery to compensate them for these injuries.

The lawsuit focused primarily on the economic benefits that living
African-American claim they would have received, had their enslaved
forbears been paid fairly. However, one can easily imagine that the
plaintiff class could also make a credible argument similar to those made
by the children of Holocaust survivors, for there is a sizable body of
research that suggests that the consequences of slavery are as much
psychic as economic. While African-Americans today might not be able to
prove that they suffer PTSD, perhaps the principle that underpins the
Israeli suit could be refashioned to fit the psychic injuries suffered by
fourth- and fifth-generation relatives of victims of the African slave
trade.

Comparisons like the one to slavery show why the claims of the children of
Holocaust survivors pose an interesting challenge to tort law not only in
Israel, but also around the world. The problems of adjudicating such
claims in the context of a class action (problems that I have chosen not
to address in this column, make the challenge even greater). But at the
core of the case is a problem about the limits of redress for psychic harm
transmitted over generations - a problem that cannot be ignored, but is
not easy to solve.

(source: Anthony Sebok, Findlaw)

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



Holocaust Museum Honors Romanian



Israel's Holocaust museum on Wednesday posthumously honored a Romanian
reserves officer who blocked the deportation of Romanian Jews to
Nazi death camps.

Theodor Criveanu was inducted into Yad Vashem's "Righteous Among the
Nations" group of non-Jews who rescued Jews from the Nazis. His son,
Willie Criveanu, accepted the award on his behalf.

Six million European Jews were killed by German Nazis and their
collaborators during World War II.

The 20,000 Jews of Czernowitz, Romania, were interned during the war and
slated for deportation to death camps.

As a reserves officer in the Romanian army, Criveanu was assigned the task
of presenting authorities a list of Jews who were required to work in the
ghetto, and were thus spared deportation. According to testimonies given
to Yad Vashem, Criveanu risked his own life by handing out permits beyond
the allowed limit, including to Jews who were not essential to the work
force. Yad Vashem said it could not estimate how many Jews he saved.

Criveanu married the daughter of one of the Jews he saved. He died in
Romania in 1988.

"My father's life was based on justness, correctness. He was a great
humanitarian, that was his nature," his son said at the ceremony. "He was
a gift from God for my mother's family and to so many more."

More than 21,000 non-Jews have been honored by Yad Vashem, including Oskar
Schindler, whose efforts to save more than 1,000 Jews was documented in
the Oscar-award-winning film "Schindler's List." Of these, 53 Romanians
have been honored.

(source: Associated Press, Aug. 8)




GERMANY:

Cracks appear in Berlin Holocaust memorial


Berlin's Holocaust memorial is said to be in urgent need of repair.

Hairline cracks were found in some 400 of the monuments 2,711 slabs. Among
several possible explanations are frost damage and building works nearby.

The $14.5 million Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was unveiled
just over two years ago and covers an area of about three football fields
in central Berlin. Some 7 million visitors have made it one of the German
capital's most popular tourist sites.

The cracks began appearing after just seven months. Experts say the gray
blocks now have to be injected with a plastic resin.

A spokesman for the memorial's New York architect, Peter Eisenman, said it
was surprising the cracks had spread so quickly. Eisenman described the
concrete used for the memorial as "the best in Berlin."

(source: JTA)