Sept. 3




GERMANY:

Nazi Hunters Criticize Slow German Justice System


In Berlin, a prominent Jewish rights group on Monday gave Germany an
"inadequate" rating for the first time for sluggish prosecution of
suspected Nazi war criminals after previously topping the annual rankings
of 26 nations.

"In light of the high number of suspects and the political consensus
behind prosecuting Nazi murderers we expect better results from the German
justice system," said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
which hunts former Nazis.

In its annual reports the organization gives countries grades for efforts
to prosecute Nazi criminals. This is the first time since the centre began
issuing its reports six years ago that Germany received an unsatisfactory
grade.

The report criticizes the fact that Germany obtained no convictions and
filed no indictments, despite 22 investigations being initiated in the
last year and 20 ongoing investigations.

"It's not deliberate, it's a lack of zeal, a certain tiredness," Zuroff
told Reuters. "Germany doesn't have enough young enthusiastic
prosecutors."

America was the only country to be awarded the top grade, the work of the
U.S. Office of Special Investigations being singled out for particular
praise.

Germany's Justice Ministry and the country's Central Office for
Investigation of the Nazi Past declined to comment on the Wiesenthal
Center's report.

During the last six years Germany has convicted three former Nazi war
criminals while the United States has convicted 34.

There are 1,019 investigations of possible Nazi war criminals underway
worldwide, the report said.

(source: Reuters)


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


Memorial planned for African killed by Nazis


A series of more than 9 000 mini-memorials in Germany to people
killed by the Nazis is for the first time to include an African, Mahjub
bin Adam Mohamed, organisers said on Monday.

The 10-centimetre-square brass plaques have been cemented into pavements
all over the country since 1997 by an artist, Gunter Demnig. They are
placed outside apartment blocks where the victims lived before they were
arrested.

Mahjub's extraordinary story has already been told in a book by German
academic Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst. As a boy he served in the German
colonial forces in Tanzania and moved to Germany in 1929, working as a
waiter and an entertainer, with bit roles in films.

Blacks in Nazi Germany faced harsh restrictions though they were not
routinely interned.

The Mahjub plaque will be cemented into the pavement

Mahjub, who refused to be submissive, was arrested in 1941 on an
allegation of miscegenation and died in 1944 in Sachsenhausen
concentration camp, an appalling disease-ridden detention centre near
Berlin.

The Mahjub plaque will be cemented into the pavement outside
Brunnenstrasse house number 193 in Berlin on September 14, Demnig's office
said.

The plaques are known as "stumbling blocks", though this term is
metaphorical, since they are always flush with the pavement. Each contains
a name and a date of death for passers-by to read.

Demnig says the plaques thwart the Nazis' bid to wipe out all memory of
the Jews, gypsies and outspoken people killed by the Hitler regime.

Very few blacks lived in pre-War Germany. Journalist Hans Massaquoi, 81,
later wrote a best-selling autobiography, Destined to Witness, about what
it was like to be shunned as a black German, including his vain attempts
to enlist in the Nazi armed forces.

(source: SAPA-DPA)




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


Secret tapes of top Nazis


Richard Overy reviews Tapping Hitler's Generals: Transcripts of Secret
Conversations, 1942-45 ed by Snke Neitzel

From 1942 onwards the British kept a number of captured German staff
officers, most of them from the army, at Trent Park house in the north
London suburb of Cockfosters. Here they lived a boring but relatively
free-and-easy existence, chatting, exercising, enjoying an occasional
ramble.

What they did not know, though several seem to have guessed at it, was
that a dozen of the rooms were bugged so that their private conversations
(there was nothing strictly 'secret' about them) could be overheard by
British Intelligence officers and, if useful, employed for Allied
operations.

The conversations were, as it turned out, of very limited help to the
conduct of the war, though they did supply a wealth of evidence on the
nature of the National Socialist system which seems to have been largely
ignored or poorly exploited when it later came to putting German generals
on trial for war crimes.

Sonke Neitzel, a professor at the University of Mainz, has edited a volume
of key extracts from the tape-recorded discussions and there is no doubt
that they are of much more service to the historian than they ever were to
British Intelligence.

After a brief introduction, where Neitzel explains with great clarity and
detachment why the conversations matter, the book deals first with the
officers' views of German politics and strategy, then their discussions of
war crimes and atrocities and finally a shorter section on their reaction
to the July Plot, the failed attempt in 1944 by a small coterie of army
officers to assassinate Hitler.

Not surprisingly there is no clear unity on any of these issues. Some of
the officers were inclined to dismiss atrocity stories as Allied
propaganda until confronted by a fellow-general whose detailed description
of some of the terrible horrors he had witnessed made the stark truth all
too clear ('18,000 Jews killed in one morning', one Eastern Front
commander told a doubter).

Some thought the July Plot a trick of Hitler's, to secure popular support
for a last-ditch war effort. On politics the group remained divided: some
unambiguously blamed the German people and their blind loyalty to the
dictator, others thought Hitler a good thing, but badly advised. All
detested Heinrich Himmler and the SS, and in that repugnance lay the root
of the post-war myth that atrocities were the work of the black-shirted
security corps and not of the army.

The 167 extracts, though well supported with extensive notes and a helpful
'who's who', will be hard going for anyone not already familiar with the
territory. For the wider public the most revealing and accessible of the
documents concern the issue of war crimes.

Although some of the officers found it hard to imagine that regular
soldiers had committed crimes, there are simply too many instances
exchanged between them for the idea of a 'clean' war to hold up. Over the
three years during which the recordings were made, the whole panoply of
crimes (the mass murder of Jews, the shooting of hostages, burning down
churches filled with victims, and so on) is acknowledged and described.

Some of the nastier generals clearly disliked the Jews, although few would
admit that murdering them en masse was a good thing. But at least one
thought that killing 100 hostages for the death of a single German was
quite justified - 'that's military law'.

At one point one of the prisoners remarks to a confidant that when it came
to crime, the Allies had no idea of 'what really happened'. Little did he
know that the British knew exactly, because they listened in to every
confession. The question that remains is why so few of the officers were
ever tried afterwards - despite the things to which they privately
admitted - or why, on reading accounts from as early as 1942 and 1943, the
British did not expose more fully the horror of what was going on on the
Eastern Front.

To their credit a number of the prisoners were simply aghast at what they
heard, and thought German defeat a punishment from God. But others hoped
for German victory, or at the least the idea that even in defeat the
German armed forces had fought a 'war with honour'. After 1945 it was this
view that prevailed. By the 1960s the idea of the 'clean war' undermined
by party fanatics was dominant.

These extracts exert a grim fascination. They represent a unique and
unmediated window into the minds of a military elite, brutalised by the
First World War, embittered by what they saw as Germany's unjust
treatment, and finally ensnared in the seductive coils of Hitler's radical
nationalism. The strange blend revealed here of resentment, racism,
political innocence and professional arrogance is a cocktail that leaves a
nasty aftertaste.

(source: The Telegraph)






POLAND:

Dispute widens over Nazis' destruction of Polish art
By Judy Dempsey

Wednesday, August 29, 2007
BERLIN: Poland's nationalist conservative government could claim as much
as $20 billion in compensation from Germany for the destruction of its art
treasures during the Nazi occupation, in what is becoming a growing
dispute between the countries as Polish parliamentary elections approach,
officials in Warsaw said.

The latest dispute, one of many that have led to a sharp deterioration in
relations between Warsaw and Berlin since the Polish government was
elected nearly two years ago, linked the destruction of Polish art
treasures by Nazi Germany to attempts by Germany to recover art it had
transported to eastern territories in what is now Poland to safeguard it
from the Allied bombing of German cities.

Since 1991, both governments have been negotiating terms under which items
could be returned to Germany, with Poland insisting on its legal right to
retain the treasures - which include music scores by Mozart and Bach, and
the collections of the former Prussian State Library. The negotiations
stalled two years ago.

German officials said Tuesday that the issue would become more complicated
and emotional, now that Poland had raised the question of compensation as
part of a possible resolution.

"Compensation or reparations had never been discussed until now," a German
government official said.

Poland has claimed legal ownership of the German art treasures, according
to Wojciech Kowalski, the Polish government's special envoy assigned to
resolve the issue. "During the Allied carpet bombings of several German
cities in 1943, the German curators of cultural heritage decided to take
the collections from the towns, museums and churches and take them outside
the range of the carpet bombing," Kowalski said Tuesday.

"The treasures were moved to Poland, which was then German territory,"
said Kowalski, a law professor at Warsaw University. "They hid the
treasures in cloisters and palaces in the provinces. These territories
became part of Poland. We found the treasures and saved them. Since it was
abandoned property and formerly German property, the property was
nationalized by the Polish state."

A German government official said Tuesday that the works of art "were the
property of the German museums and should be returned." Poland's
government, led by Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, however, has
countered that because Germany destroyed many Polish art treasures during
the Nazi occupation, it could be entitled to compensation from Germany.

Anna Fotyga, Poland's foreign minister, went further. "We estimate our
losses at over $20 billion," she told the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

The issue has been simmering for weeks after the conservative daily
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said that Germany should recover the
treasures without paying. It suggested that the items in Poland were
Beutekunst, meaning looted or stolen art.

This infuriated the Polish government, since Beutekunst is a term commonly
applied to art stolen by the Red Army when it entered Berlin in 1945 and
taken to the former Soviet Union.

"The art we have is not Beutekunst," Kowalski said. "We did not steal nor
loot this property. It is not German property. It is Polish property."

While the German government has tried to play down the dispute, it is
becoming an emotional issue in Poland, where Kaczynski appears to be using
relations with Germany and the controversy over art as an election issue.
Kaczynski said Tuesday that Oct. 21 would be the best date for elections,
two years ahead of schedule.

"Our impression is that the art controversy and the repeated criticism of
Germany by the Kaczynski government is about electioneering," said
Peter-Oliver Loew, a Polish expert at the German Poland Institute in
Darmstadt, Germany.

Last week Kaczynski accused Donald Tusk, leader of Civic Platform, the
largest of the opposition parties, of having a "fascination" with Germany.
He accused Civic Platform of being so close to the European People's
Party, the European Union's center-right political party, which includes
Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union in Germany, that it
accepted German dominance.

Kaczynski said such a close relationship with Germany would undermine
Poland's tough foreign policy toward its western neighbor. Kaczynski
believes that Poland, having suffered so much at the hands of the Germans
during World War II, should be given equal status with Germany in the
European Union. In practice, this would mean having the same number of
votes or else being capable of blocking Germany and other countries over
certain decisions.

(source: International Herald Tribune)






CANADA:

Montreal remembers Holocaust


Suspended in the museum's glass display case, the heart-shaped autograph
book told a story that belied its delicate innocence.

Tiny, no bigger than a walnut, the autograph book was a gift created for a
friend by 16 young women, slave labourers in an Auschwitz munitions
factory in the early 1940s. The highlighted narrative under the exhibit
was brief, but poignant.

"The autograph book, with inscriptions in several languages, indicates a
refusal to give up hope, and the understanding that no one could survive
the camps alone."

The gift was a tiny symbol of commitment to friendship, life and common
humanity in the darkest of worlds imaginable. Having in their possession
the paper and thread that went into making this gift, would have been
enough to have all these young girls summarily executed.

"To learn, to feel, and to remember."

It might be a statement many of us would use in shaping a meaningful
vacation itinerary.

The words are found in the foyer of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial
Museum, a stirring message carved in four languages and back-lit against a
backdrop of broken glass.

The words are an introduction to the museum's moving collection of
photographs, video recordings and exhibits like the miniature autograph
book. The two storeys of museum space present an historical panorama that
focuses on educating visitors about the Holocaust (Shoah), the attempted
destruction of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945.

In sheer numbers, the millions of Holocaust victims could easily drift
into the cold science of statistics. Sixty years on, this museum does more
than put names and faces to the victims, it adds a simple but powerful
human dimension so visitors do not become paralyzed by the enormity of the
tragedy. The pretty autograph book and the museum's other exhibits,
silently scream to your heart for recognition.

Vacations are great opportunities to escape from the usual humdrum of our
daily lives. They present us with the gift of time, even perhaps the
chance to venture beyond our comfort zone. Montreal, with its vibrant,
sophisticated nightlife, art galleries, historical monuments and eclectic
dining spots is also home to hidden treasures like this small but dynamic
gem of Jewish history.

It was the friendly concierge at Montreal's downtown Hilton Bonaventure
who put us on the right track to the Holocaust Museum. Downing a final cup
of coffee, along with the mandatory second croissant, we took our Metro
map. In less than half an hour after leaving the hotel we'd stepped into
another world, where jackbooted hate-monger were in the process of
swallowing Europe.

Canada's only Holocaust museum is tucked away in Montreal's Snowdon
neighbourhood, a 15-minute Metro ride from downtown. While a bit off the
beaten track of the old port area and Montreal's other famous sites, the
museum is nevertheless a world-class facility. Its exhibits, displays and
artifacts are riveting. We'd planned on perhaps a one and a half hour
tour. Instead, we would spend more than three hours mesmerized by images
and voices from a past that hold warnings for mankind's future.

After the Second World War, Montreal became home to 30,000 Holocaust
survivors, the third largest Jewish contingent after New York and Israel.
It was these survivors who established the Montreal Holocaust Memorial
Museum 25 years ago as a place of learning and reflection on one of the
world's darkest eras. Four years ago, the museum moved into its new
quarters, where it would become recognized internationally for its
educational and outreach programs.

While many of the images are shocking, the museum's collection also
emphasizes the quality and diversity of Jewish life before, during and
after the Shoah. Arranged in chronological pattern, the exhibits set the
cataclysmic events of the Holocaust against the rich, complex weave of
Jewish history and heritage. Rare archival film footage and eye-witness
testimony by Montreal Holocaust survivors add to the authenticity of the
human experience.

Not forgotten in the museum's stories are the millions of non-Jews who
suffered and were murdered under the Nazi regime.

Particularly moving are the oral histories presented at the video stations
located throughout the museum. Survivors tell their stories, show
snapshots of picnics and family gatherings -- happiness and normality
before the Nazi horror. Then the stark black and white images of cattle
trains, concentration camps and gas chambers haunt their memories.

"We feel we have a one-shot deal to get our message across, so the museum
tells the story about who the Jewish people were, how they responded to
the outrages perpetrated on them and the agony of their liberation," says
Marcia Shuster, vice-president of the Montreal Holocaust Centre.

Shuster explains that even after surviving the death camps, many Jews
would return to their homes to find them destroyed or occupied by others.
For many, their only option was emigration and to build themselves new
lives in a new country.

The post-liberation period was difficult for Jewish people, who often
found it difficult to get visas to emigrate to other countries. Shuster
says Canada had a particularly dismal record over issuing visas.

Ted Bolgar was a Hungarian Jew who as a teenager was sent with his parents
and younger sister to Auschwitz. Bolgar and his father survived, but his
sister and mother died in the camp.

In 1948, he came to Canada and settled in Montreal. At 83, he's retired
and is now a valued member of the survivor group volunteering in the
museum's education outreach program.

"I felt anger and hate for some time after the war. I no longer feel that,
but I do remember very well," the genial Bolgar explains as he slowly
walks through the exhibition halls.

It is important to retell the story of the Holocaust, to keep it in the
minds of new generations, he says. But the museum's story is more than
about the Jewish sufferings, he says. It encompasses the struggles of
humanity to fight against genocide.

"Yet still it happens," he sighs. "Look to Rwanda. Look at the Balkans.
It's like the world hasn't learned anything. We have to keep telling our
stories, and after we have gone, this museum and other willing hands must
carry the torch."

- - -

IF YOU GO

The museum is housed in the Montreal Federation Combined Jewish Appeal
(CJA) building, which is both the headquarters of the Federation as well
as 19 of the Jewish community's agencies.

Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre and Museum, 1, Carre Cummings Square
(5151 Cote Ste-Catherine Road).

Metro: Cote Ste-Catherine

Bus 129

Tel: 514-345-2605

Museum Hours:

Sunday 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Monday, Tuesday and Thursday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Wednesday 10 a.m.- 9 p.m.

Friday 10 a.m.-3 p.m.

Closed on Saturday and on Jewish and statutory holidays. Due to the Jewish
Sabbath, please call to confirm Friday Museum hours from November --
March.

Admission: adults $8, students $5

Children under the age of 14 must be accompanied by an adult.

(source: Canada.com)




USA:

Holocaust museum to cite righteous gentile


The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will honor a non-Jewish
Ukrainian who helped save a Jewish woman from the Nazis.

In conjunction with the Israeli embassy, the museum will present the Medal
of the Righteous Among the Nations on Tuesday to the son of Yevgenia
Zamoroko-Lysenko, a Ukrainian who with her roommate obtained false papers
for a Jewish woman and allowed her to share their apartment. The medal was
awarded by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, the institution that
makes the determination in these cases.

Masha Spivak lived with the pair until April 1942 and performed forced
labor in Germany until her liberation. She immigrated to Israel in 1948.

Yad Vashem has honored 21,758 non-Jews for their efforts to save Jews from
the Nazis. This represents the first time the American Holocaust museum
will present such a medal.

(source: JTA)


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


Hitler's loss -- our gain
THE CHICAGO WAY | At 100, legendary law school dean who fled Nazis still
cherishes basic values: love and respect

On March 12, 1938, the Nazis marched into Austria. On the following day, a
Sunday, Adolf Hitler stood on a balcony and declared Austria part of
"Greater Germany."

On the day after that, Fred Herzog, a brilliant young legal scholar who
had recently been appointed a judge for life, got a letter in the mail.

"Upon direction of the High Court, you are suspended," stated the letter,
"because you are a Jew."

That was 69 years ago, and Fred Herzog is an old man now. He turns 100
this month.

He lives in Chicago -- far in mind and miles from the mountains and
boulevards of Austria -- in an assisted-living home on Argyle Street.

But he remembers.

"That was my lifetime appointment," he says with a rueful smile.

I look at him. He's a frail old gent in a white cardigan. His eyesight is
shot, and he sits in a wheelchair. You might not guess to look at him, but
he's also one of those Chicago treasures that get crowded out of the
headlines by athletes, politicians and gangsters.

For decades, Herzog was a professor and dean at both Chicago-Kent and John
Marshall law schools, where he trained generations of students not only in
the law, but in ethics and values -- just the sort of things a refugee
from the Nazis might prize. As dean of John Marshall, he greatly improved
academic standards.

"Hitler's loss," I say to him, "and our gain."

'He was the image of what I aspired to be'
Herzog's father, David Herzog, was among the most prominent rabbis in
Austria. You can imagine how that went over with the Nazis.

Hitler's stormtroopers and fellow anti-Semites mobbed through the rabbi's
hometown, Graz, on the night of Nov. 9, 1938 -- Kristallnacht -- and
dragged Jews from their homes, beat them in the streets, smashed their
businesses and burned their synagogue.

Rabbi Herzog was thrown into the Mur River but managed to swim to shore.
Then the mob decided to throw him into the burning synagogue, but the
police had already roped it off for fear the fire might spread.

After months of such brutality, the rabbi and his wife managed to flee to
England, where he established a new life as a professor of ancient
languages at Oxford.

Fred Herzog, who was living in Vienna, would flee soon afterward to
Sweden.

As Fred Herzog tells me about his father, Rabbi Herzog, the father's
influence on the son seems obvious -- both were men of books and ideas,
both were teachers. A rabbi reading the Torah is like a judge studying the
law, parsing phrases to tease out new insights and meanings.

"As you say it, it makes sense," Dean Herzog replies when I say this. "But
my father was a very distinguished man. His mission was to help people,
regardless of whether they were Jewish or not."

And that, Herzog says, is what he really learned from his father.

"I didn't get up to his high standards, but he was the image of what I
aspired to be," Herzog says, his Austrian accent still there. "If I have
any values, I owe it to him. He treated each human being with dignity."

When I ask Herzog for an example of this, he recalls a time when a high
school teacher in Graz was fired from his job because he was a Nazi --
this, of course, was before Hitler had seized power.

"My father met him on the street and asked him if he needed any money,"
Herzog says. "The man was a Nazi, but he was also a man in need. My father
helped him."


Iowa 'treated me wonderfully'
Fred Herzog fled by train from Vienna to Berlin to Stockholm but almost
didn't make it.

At the border, the Gestapo came on board. One Gestapo agent spotted Herzog
reading the book The Road to Marrakesh, by George Goodchild.

"That's a Jewish author!" the agent said.

"Well, I am a Jew," Herzog replied.

The agent walked away but returned minutes later, shouting: "Out! Out!"

The Gestapo marched Herzog and a young woman passenger off the train, and
the Gestapo might have dragged Herzog away had the woman not started
shouting, "Leave him alone!"

As it happened, the young woman was the daughter of the Swedish ambassador
to Germany, and so the Gestapo let Herzog go.

From Sweden, Herzog moved on to New York and then to, of all places, Iowa
City, where corn festivals outnumbered outdoor cafes. But Herzog, there to
earn an American law degree from the University of Iowa, loved it.

"They had basic human values," he says of the people of Iowa. "They
treated me wonderfully. I'm glad I came to a rural community. They taught
me American values."

For a while in Iowa City, Herzog even had his own half hour radio show on
Tuesday evenings, during which he sang classical songs in German and
Italian.

From Iowa, Herzog moved to Chicago -- his adopted home ever since.

It was here that he and his American-born wife raised two sons, where he
became a White Sox fan, where he practiced law and taught.

Herzog joined the Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1947 as a full professor.
He resigned as dean in 1972 to become the first assistant attorney general
of Illinois. In that job, he personally argued cases before the U.S. and
Illinois supreme courts.

Then Herzog was dean of John Marshall twice -- from 1976 to 1983 and from
1990 to 1991. He's credited with improving the faculty dramatically by
paying higher salaries, reducing class loads and demanding that professors
do research and get published. He raised admissions standards, as well,
and succeeded in bringing the school into the Association of American Law
Schools.

Herzog is, in fact, something of a living legend at John Marshall, where
they are throwing a birthday party for him Sept. 21.

But his passion was teaching.

"Teaching young people, that's what gave me the greatest satisfaction," he
says. "I could try and instill some basic human values."

What kind of values?

"Love and respect for thy neighbor," he replies. "After Hitler -- a man
who denied all human values -- it is even more important than ever."


Sees himself in father's shadow
I remember what Herzog said earlier about his father: "I didn't get up to
his high standards."
Here's a man who is 100 years old. He has lived a life full of
achievement. And yet, in his own mind, he still stands in his father's
shadow.

But I suppose that every man at every age, if lucky enough to have had a
good dad, feels about the same.

(source: Chicago Sun-Times)