September 24




GERMANY:

Down Time From Murder

So now we know where Eva from Mannheim and Angela from Dortmund and
Irmgard from Dresden ended up during the war years - jiving in pleated
skirts to the strains of an accordion, or gorging themselves on
blueberries, or lounging on deck chairs in the shadow of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoriums.

How fresh-faced and playful the SS women look in the 116 photographs that,
62 years after the liberation of the Nazi camp, have found their way by a
circuitous route to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is not
easy to imagine these young ladies moving on from a picnic to administer
death wholesale.

In thinking about the Holocaust, we have grown accustomed to images of the
Nazis victims: shadowy naked figures on the edge of ditches about to be
dispatched by the SS-Einsatzgruppen; huddled wide-eyed children; skeletal
human simulacra; piles of bones. Getting the perpetrators in focus is
harder.

But here, revealed by these newly discovered photographs, are the German
murderers in all their dumb humanity, flirting and joking and lighting
Christmas trees, as if what awaited them after the frolicking were just
the bus to some dull job in a dental office rather than the supervision of
Auschwitz's industrialized killing machine.

If they were downwind of the camp, did some trace of the acrid-sweet
stench of death ever mess with the merry-making? Did the image of a Jewish
girl from Budapest being herded toward the gas mar a mouthful? Did
conscience stir or doubt impinge? Was it clear that the children had to
die in order to eradicate not only a people, but also their memory? Such
questions are useless. The facts must speak for themselves.

Goethe's hero Faust declared: "Two souls, alas, are housed within my
breast, and each will wrestle for mastery there." The light and dark of
Germany, the disturbing proximity of civilization and barbarism, speak of
that battle and its universal echoes.

I wish I could say I was surprised by the photos (on display at the museum
Web site - www.ushmm.org). My years in Germany eroded my capacity for
shock. The walk from Buchenwalds brick-chimneyed crematorium to the
genteel streets of Weimar - home to Schiller and Goethe, birthplace of the
Bauhaus - is illusion-stripping. In 1942, Buchenwald prisoners were
ordered to make wooden boxes to protect Schiller's work.

Germans, through distinct postwar stages, have engaged in a painful
examination of who the people giving and obeying such orders were and how,
in Gnter Grass's words, an "entire credulous nation" believed in Santa
Claus, but "Santa Claus was really the gasman."

Just how hard that introspection has been was illustrated when Grass, a
moral reference to the Bundesrepublik, broke a 61-year silence and
revealed that he served as a 17-year-old in the Waffen SS.

More such revelations are needed; the threads of truth's tapestry are not
all tied. Germans will gaze at these photographs and ask: is that my
grandmother or great-aunt? If not, might they have been? Jews and Germans
are tied at their hip in their contemplation of the two sides of the
crime.

Historians are voyeurs; they like nothing more than reading other people's
mail. They need to pry to put names to these faces of "ordinary Germans"
doing their jobs at Auschwitz.

The album was kept by Karl Hcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant.
Hckers father was killed in World War I; his mother struggled. And what of
the stories of Eva and Angela and Irmgard? Will any Germans step forward
to claim these young women and give them real names rather than those
invented here?

Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in 1960 of a Germany "overcrowded with
absentees," full of people "who happen to be in this country fleeing from
this country." With the years, Germany has gained confidence, pried open
locked drawers, filled some of the absences. But these photos are an
invitation to do more.

Inevitably, they pose the question: What would you have done? Filled your
mouth with blueberries or balked and paid the mortal price? Perhaps no
single question is more important. The voyeur has the luxury of posing it
whereas those living then had to answer it. The overwhelming majority
acquiesced to the unspeakable.

It has become banal to quote Hannah Arendt. But she encapsulated these
photos' conundrum when she wrote: "Under conditions of terror most people
will comply but some people will not," adding that "Humanly speaking, no
more is required and no more can reasonably be asked for this planet to
remain a place fit for human habitation."

Like Germany's unfinished but already remarkable postwar voyage from
self-amputation to self-realization, these words bear pondering.

(source: Opinion, Roger Cohen, New York Times)

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

Nazi-era ghetto laborers get pension


More Holocaust survivors who worked in ghettos will receive compensation
from Germany.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Wednesday the creation of a
$137 million fund to pay laborers who failed to meet criteria for social
security pensions under Germany's 2002 Ghetto Pension Law.

German government pensions have been available since 1997 to survivors who
were employed for remuneration during their internment in Nazi ghettos
annexed to the Third Reich. The law was expanded in 2002, but the
expansion added only about 9,000 of 70,000 new applicants, according to
the Claims Conference. This latest change loosens criteria specified in
the 2002 law, and will yield payments to an estimated additional 50,000
survivors, the conference said.

The Claims Conference, which has been pressing the cause, called Merkel's
decision a "positive step." The group, however, criticized the maximum
individual payment of about $2,800 as insufficient, suggesting the
proposed criteria for eligibility be "clarified and revised."

Further information is available at the Claims Conference's Web site, at
www.claimscon.org, though the program is being administered wholly by the
German government, not the Claims Conference.

(source: JTA)


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


Germany: We're doing our best to prosecute Nazi war criminals


Germany's national office for catching Nazi war criminals rejected
criticism by the Simon Wiesenthal Center that not enough of them
were being prosecuted.

Kurt Schrimm, who heads the special prosecutions office in Ludwigsburg,
said the slowing pace was related to the scarcity of legally acceptable
evidence 62 years after World War II.

Schrimm told Deutsche Presse-Agentur in an interview. Often important
documents were missing or witnesses had died of old age.

An annual report by the Wiesenthal Center criticized the Germans for
failing to produce an indictment or conviction since March 2006. The
report praised Italy and the United States.

Schrimm said the number of indictments should not used to measure the
success of his office's investigations. Schrimm insisted that his
investigators were conducting worldwide inquiries "at top pace."

The office has authority to hunt former Nazis in all of Germany's 16
states.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, founded in 1977 and named after the late
"Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal, is based in Los Angeles. This week's
report was issued by its Jerusalem office.

(source: DPA)





AUSTRALIA:

'Nazi mascot' ends almost 60 years of silence


As a five-year-old, Alex Kurzem watched Nazi soldiers slaughter members
of his Jewish family in 1941, little realising that he would spend the
rest of World War II acting as a child mascot for the Latvian SS.

Forced to hide his Jewish background from the terrifying stormtroopers who
became his protectors, Kurzem told no one of his wartime experiences for
more than 50 years before finally unburdening himself to his son.

After revealing the secrets he said were eating away at him "like vipers
in my bones," Kurzem's tale has been published in Australia, the country
where he sought refuge from the turmoil of post-war Europe.

His book "The Mascot" details a story so remarkable that Holocaust
authorities initially dismissed it as nonsense, until research by Kurzem's
son Mark unearthed documents, photographs and film footage to back its
accuracy.

Part of the evidence is a confronting image from a newsreel that shows
Kurzem as an impish six-year-old in a miniature SS uniform, complete with
jackboots and tiny toy machine gun, posing with grinning Nazi soldiers.

It contrasts with a photograph showing Kurzem in late 1944, at a party for
what he calls the "pretend birthday" given to him by the Nazis, where he
appears blank and exhausted by the horrors witnessed in the intervening
years.

"I just switched off the whole time I was with them, I couldn't think
about what I saw because I would have gone mad," Kurzem told AFP in his
adopted hometown of Melbourne.

"Every moment I was terrified they would find out I was a Jew and that
would have been the end of me. I was totally alone and I could never
relax."

Kurzem, who believes he is 72 but is unsure because precise records of his
birth have never been found, was born in the village of Koidanov in
Belarus, where he lived until the Nazis came on October 20, 1941.

He fled to a nearby forest, watching from a treetop as the soldiers shot
his mother then bayoneted his sister and brother.

The boy lived wild in the forest for months, clothing himself in oversized
garments taken from dead bodies and climbing trees to avoid packs of
wolves on the hunt.

Eventually, a woodsman caught him and turned him over to a Latvian police
patrol in a bid to curry favour with the Nazis who were eliminating Jews
in the area as part of Hitler's Final Solution.

But a sergeant with the patrol, Jekabs Kulis, separated Kurzem from a
group of Jews bound for the extermination camps and told him never to
reveal his background.

The reason for Kulis' action still mystifies Kurzem.

"Perhaps he had seen so much killing and took pity on a small child? Maybe
it was because I looked Aryan, not Jewish?" he said in a voice still
bearing a heavy European accent.

"I've often thought that it is simply because I looked Aryan that I
survived."

Kulis' patrol adopted Kurzem as a mascot, providing him first with a
police uniform, then with an SS outfit when the unit was seconded into
Hitler's feared paramilitary force later in the war.

"I was an amusement for them, they liked to laugh when I saluted in my
little uniform," he said. "I helped relieve the tension of being on the
frontline."

As the soldiers' plaything, Kurzem witnessed the atrocities committed by
Nazi troops on the Russian front, including seeing Jews herded into a
synagogue then burned alive.

The soldiers also made him hand out chocolates to help calm crowds of
anxious Jews gathered at a Latvian railway station. The trains were
destined for Hitler's extermination camps.

On one occasion, the soldiers gave the child flowers and sent him into a
village to lure women to their camp, then brutally raped them as he hid in
a corner.

Eventually, a high-ranking officer spotted the mascot's propaganda
potential for the fascist regime and he was featured in newsreels and
newspaper stories as a miniature model Nazi.

The Nazis said he was a Russian orphan rescued by the stormtroopers and
Kurzem said, despite his tender years, he was fully aware of the dangers
he faced because of his Jewish heritage.

"I was a Jew, I knew these were not my people.

"But I couldn't do anything to stop them. What could I do? I was just a
little boy trying to survive. I just lived from moment to moment."

He was adopted by a Latvian family and became a refugee when the war
finished, eventually ending up on the other side of the world as part of
Australia's substantial post-war migrant intake.

Determined to forge a new life, Kurzem buried memories of his war-time
experiences and married an Australian woman, raising three sons and
settling down to life as an electrician in suburban Melbourne.

But his past continued to haunt him and Kurzem said he often struggled to
cope.

"I had to get on with life and look to the future. I wouldn't let what
happened destroy me," he said. "I saw too many men become alcoholics after
the war because of what they'd seen and I said I would not do that."

Finally, in the late 1990s, he could no longer bear the secrets alone and
haltingly confided in his son Mark, who began to research his father's
past.

Many of Kurzem's recollections about the location and timing of the events
he saw as a child were hazy, he could not even remember his birth name,
leading to scepticism about his story.

The breakthrough came when Kurzem's son found a newsreel in the Latvian
state archives showing his father being feted by the Nazis in his uniform.

The mascot felt vindicated but there was another twist to his story.

It turned out his birth name was Ilya Galperin and his father, who was not
in the family village when the massacre occurred, survived the Nazi death
camps and remarried, leaving a son named Erich. Kurzem has since met his
half-brother.

"In some ways that was the strangest thing of all for me," said Kurzem,
who remains spritely and alert despite his age.

"I'd spent so much time thinking I had no family except for the one I
raised in Australia, I thought they'd all been killed by the Nazis but I'd
had a half-brother all this time in Europe."

Kurzem said telling his story laid the ghosts of his past to rest,
allowing him to finally place a rose on the grave of his mother, who urged
him to flee when the Nazis approached their village more than half a
century earlier.

(source: Agence France-Presse)






ISRAEL:

Holocaust in Spain conference set

An international conference on the Holocaust in Spain will open Monday in
Jerusalem.

Organized by the International Institute for Holocaust Studies at Yad
Vashem, the conference will feature prominent experts in the field from
Israel, Spain, Germany and Belgium.

Interest in learning about the Holocaust in the Spanish-speaking world has
been rising.

The conference, thought to be the first of its kind, will feature a
workshop allowing educators to review educational material in Spanish.

Last week Yad Vashem was honored with the Prince of Asturias Award for
Concord presented by the Spanish Prince of Asturias Foundation. The award
cites an institution whose work "has made an exemplary and outstanding
contribution to mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence amongst men,
to the struggle against injustice or ignorance, to the defense of freedom,
or whose work has widened the horizons of knowledge or has been
outstanding in protecting and preserving mankind's heritage".

(source: JTA)





USA//ARIZONA:

Mesa man was Nazi SS guard; neighbor survived same camp


Martin Hartmann has been a soldier, typesetter, father and friend.

This week, the Department of Justice said the Mesa resident was also a war
criminal.

Hartmann, 88, voluntarily left the country Aug. 31, after reaching an
agreement with the Justice Department to turn over his passport and
naturalization papers. The decision followed a two-year investigation into
his past as an armed Nazi SS guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
outside Berlin. advertisement

His departure left friends and neighbors in the Leisure World retirement
community in east Mesa stunned. But one man knew his secret.

Nathan Gasch, 83, had been in Hartmann's home years ago and saw, hanging
on the wall, a photo of a man in an SS uniform. The man was Hartmann, and
Gasch recognized the uniform because he had been a prisoner in the same
camp in 1944.

Gasch walked out of the house and never mentioned it, and the men even
worked on home-improvement projects and exchanged pleasantries in German
over the years.

"I was flabbergasted," he said after learning Hartmann was back in
Germany.

Next door to Gasch, Ellen Hartmann wonders how her seemingly-idyllic life
could have fallen apart so quickly.

"I'm just devastated," said Ellen, 85.

Her husband is staying with family in Berlin, Ellen said, and she plans to
join him there next month.

1944 Germany

That's where their relationship started more than 60 years ago.

In 1944, Martin was a young Nazi soldier and Ellen was a 17-year-old girl
working at the Red Cross. Their second date was in a bunker in Berlin as
bombs went off overhead.

"He was a young man from Romania, and instead of fighting against the
Germans, he was in the SS," Ellen said. "When you're coming from Romania
and the Russians want to take you and make you fight against the Germans,
would you do that if you were German?"

Martin chose to go with the Nazis and ultimately served as a guard at
Sachsenhausen, a death camp where the Germans killed an estimated 35,000
people.

"He didn't know what was going on. How did he know what was going on?"
Ellen said. "I didn't know anything about Sachsenhausen, and here I grew
up in Berlin. We just thought it was regular prisoners like here, in
Florence, they have prisoners. Why would you think anything else?"

But officials with the Justice Department's Office of Special
Investigations, a division created in 1979 to pursue war criminals, said
Martin Hartmann knew what was happening.

Pursuit of war criminals

The OSI has a team of historians who comb through countless documents,
checking names on SS member rosters with U.S. immigration records and
pursuing cases when they get a match. In the past 15 years, the office has
investigated more than 50 cases and only three have come from outside
tips, OSI Director Eli Rosenbaum said.

Rosenbaum wouldn't comment on Hartmann's case but said the OSI pursues a
case when agents find someone who participated in Nazi-sponsored
persecution.

"Obviously, we are interested in people who were something more than just
soldiers," Rosenbaum said. "They had to have participated somehow in
Nazi-directed or Nazi-sponsored persecution."

Hartmann had the option to enlist in combat duty or work as a
concentration-camp guard when he signed up for duty, said Edgar Chen, an
OSI attorney who investigated the case.

SS soldiers had opportunities to transfer once they arrived at the camps,
Rosenbaum said.

"There was no request for transfer in this case," he said.

To Holocaust survivors, that means Hartmann should be held responsible for
the atrocities they suffered with their family members during the war.

"If he was what they think he was, he should get the punishment," Gasch
said. "It's not that he's 88 or 84 or whatever. Anytime is the proper
time."

Helen Handler has spent the past 20 years speaking to schoolchildren and
in public meetings about the need to remember the horrors of the
Holocaust. She said she could never forget the way SS guards, male and
female, treated the prisoners she was with at Auschwitz.

"Hitler wasn't the only Nazi. Hitler never killed a Jew. He had people
like (Hartmann) doing that, and doing that with pleasure," said Handler,
who survived Auschwitz but lost her family there.

"This man lives here in peace since 1955 and enjoys all the privileges
that our boys from here were dying for. He enjoys the freedoms that he was
fighting against," said Handler, a Phoenix resident "Our boys got hurt and
got killed for it, and all you have to do is see the cemeteries in Europe.
There they lie, and he was enjoying this country's golden, peaceful
privileges."

Typical American life

Hartmann's life since his arrival in U.S. was, in fact, typically
American.

Martin and Ellen Hartmann came to America in 1955, courtesy of the
Lutheran World Federation, Ellen said, though Justice Department officials
said Hartmann concealed his Nazi involvement to enter the country.

They settled in Mankato, Minn., before moving to Helena, Mont., Ellen
said, where Martin worked as a typesetter and printer before mastering
computers.

The couple bought a winter home in Leisure World in 1987 and moved to the
area permanently a few years ago, where the Hartmanns planned to live out
their days.

(source: Arizona Republic)

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


USA//NEW YORK:

Secret diary details Holocaust and Nazi crimes


Forty years ago, Scott Kellner's German grandfather gave him a sacred
trust: the secret diary he had kept throughout World War II, detailing
Nazi atrocities.

Kellner is on a crusade to put a copy in the hands of Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has dismissed the Holocaust as a "Zionist myth."

"I see in him a would-be Hitler," said Kellner, 67, who spent 40 years
translating the diary.

"My grandfather saw it as his duty to write the diary against the
terrorists of his time, and I see it as my duty to use that diary in the
fight against today's terrorists. The truth is a weapon," Kellner said.

Kellner's crusade is ramping up with Ahmadinejad's pending visit to New
York.

Kellner, a soft-spoken former New Yorker who taught college in Texas, has
invited the Iranian leader to a screening of a documentary about the diary
at the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas next week.

Kellner's grandfather, Friedrich Kellner, was an evangelical Lutheran and
member of the anti-Nazi Social Democratic Party who risked much by
denouncing Hitler at political rallies.

When the war began in 1939, he began keeping a secret diary, including
eyewitness accounts of atrocities and numerous newspaper clippings of
events of the day.

"A soldier on vacation here said he ... watched as naked Jewish men and
women were placed in front of a long, deep ditch and upon the order of the
SS were shot by Ukrainians in the back of their heads and they fell into
the ditch. Then the ditch was filled with dirt even as he could still hear
screams coming from people still alive in the ditch," he wrote on Oct. 28,
1940.

By 1945, 676 entries filled 10 notebooks.

To Friedrich Kellner's distress, his son, Fred, became an ardent Nazi, so
he shipped the teenager to New York to keep him out of Hitler's army. In
New York, Fred Kellner married a Jewish woman but soon abandoned her and
their three kids. He eventually killed himself.

Unable to deal with three kids alone, Scott Kellner's mom left them at a
children's home and became a carnival dancer.

In 1960, Scott Kellner went AWOL from the Navy to go find the German
grandparents he never knew. When he located them, his grandfather showed
him the diary he still kept hidden.

"When my grandfather stood against Adolf Hitler, not enough people stood
with him," he said. "I hope more people will take a stand against
Ahmadinejad."

(source: New York Daily News)


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


Tale of those who recovered European art a masterpiece


Robert Edsel will tell you he's no Indiana Jones. But the former Dallas
oilman has traded the search for Texas black gold for what he calls the
greatest treasure hunt in history.

Like the swashbuckling Jones, Mr. Edsel has faced countless roadblocks and
general skepticism.

Americans known as the "Monuments Men" carried paintings that had been
stolen by Nazis from Neuschwanstein castle in Germany. The Allied force
rescued thousands of works, including many of Europe's most famous
masterpieces. "I would say it's the great untold story of World War II,"
he says. "To try to convince people that there's still a great, untold
story about World War II out there you're really swimming upstream."

He sees the story as nothing short of epic: How an obscure group of 350
men and women helped save Western civilization from the Nazis'
unprecedented and systematic looting and destruction of Europe's great
paintings, monuments and other cultural treasures.

Over the last 10 years, Mr. Edsel, 50, has devoted his time and a
considerable amount of his fortune "well north of $3 million" on a
mission that many have seen as quixotic.

He wrote and self-published a book, Rescuing Da Vinci, that included
hundreds of rare photos he found in musty government archives. A
documentary that he has co-produced, The Rape of Europa, will screen Nov.
9 at the Dallas Angelika.

What keeps this story relevant, says Mr. Edsel, are the fresh headlines
about looted masterpieces that are just now being located and restored to
their rightful owners.

"This is today's news," he says.

The oil business took a lot of research and a willingness to take risks
and act on educated hunches. So does his new pursuit.


Robert Edsel gave up his oil gig to tell the story of the men and women
who recovered art stolen by the Nazis during World War II. Leonardo Da
Vinci's Lady with an Ermine was among the works taken. Mr. Edsel's is a
replica, but the original was returned to a museum in Krakow, Poland, in
1946 with the help of Allied soldiers. "I identify with the excitement of
discovery," he says. "There's something there, and you go find it."

'More to life'
About 10 years ago, the self-described "Type Triple A" found himself in
unfamiliar territory a midlife stall. Growing up with dreams of becoming
a professional tennis player, he pursued the sport with a fierce passion,
becoming a nationally ranked player on his high school and college teams.

But when he realized he couldn't excel on the pro circuit, he turned to
business. After graduating from Southern Methodist University in 1979, he
went to work for a family friend in the oil business. A quick 18 months
later, he left to start his own company.

Despite his company's success, something was missing. By the mid-'90s,
work consumed 100 percent of his time, but only 20 percent of his
abilities, he says. "I felt like a gerbil on the treadmill."

Thinking "there had to be more to life," he sold his company and went to
Europe with his wife and 2-year-old son. They left on Leap Day 1996. After
a brief stay in Paris, they visited Italy and fell in love with Florence.
There, in one of the greatest art centers in the world, they decided to
settle down.

Mr. Edsel had never shown much interest in art. But now he tackled it with
a characteristic obsession. He hired a local art professor to be his
personal tutor, and they visited museums. He devoured books about art and
cultural history.

Still, he wasn't sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Then one day in 1997, while he stood on the Ponte Vecchio, a medieval
bridge over the Arno River in Florence, a thought occurred to him: How was
it that this bridge one of Europe's great cultural treasures hadn't been
destroyed during World War II? For that matter, how had so much of
Europe's great artwork survived a war that had destroyed so much of the
continent?


National Archives and Records Administration

A mine near Siegen, Germany, was called Golden Arrow Art Museum, for the
8th Army insignia. This Rubens painting, held by Pfc. Tony Baca, was among
the works hidden there. "I was so embarrassed, and I didn't want to ask
anyone, because I figured they're going to think I'm the dumbest person
ever," he says. "Much to my surprise, others didn't know how this stuff
survived the war, either."

Reinvigorated, Mr. Edsel decided to discover and tell the story of what
happened to cultural Europe during Adolf Hitler's Nazi reign. Hitler's
megalomania extended well beyond ruling Europe. He wanted to create a new
civilization based on the Nazis' belief in the superiority of the Germanic
race.

In his youth, Hitler was a struggling artist who was denied admission to
study at Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts. Hitler's deep resentment over his
rejection by the academy's predominantly Jewish faculty helped fuel his
anti-Semitism and obsession with creating a world-class cultural center.

Hitler set out to build the Fhrer Museum in his hometown of Linz, Austria,
an art "acropolis" that would outshine the Louvre in Paris and the
Hermitage in Russia as the greatest museum in Europe, if not the world.

He and his henchmen took time from war planning to draw up lists of the
greatest works of art throughout Europe and then set out systematically to
obtain them usually on the heels of a military invasion.

Wider appeal

The definitive book on the subject was The Rape of Europa, by Lynn
Nicholas, a 512-page volume published in 1994. A brilliant piece of
scholarship, it is not very accessible to the average reader, Mr. Edsel
says.

He met with Ms. Nicholas and then set out to produce a companion book to
hers, which would rely more on images than text.

Italian Ministry for Cultural Assets and Activities

Michaelangelo's David was too heavy to move, but Florentine craftsmen
protected the marble statue by wrapping it in cloth and building a wall
around it with sand and brick. Mr. Edsel tracked down and interviewed the
few remaining survivors among the group that was known as the "Monuments
Men." (The official name was the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives
program.) Along with a team of assistants, he explored dusty, government
warehouses, digging up hundreds of long-forgotten files filled with
extraordinary photos, which showed such things as looted masterpieces
discovered stashed away in an Austrian salt mine.

He sees the book and documentary as a chance to honor a unique group of
individuals who had rescued much of the world's greatest art, but who had
become mostly a footnote in history.

This small Allied force, which included art historians and curators, was
responsible for identifying, protecting and rescuing the thousands of
paintings, sculptures and other cultural treasures, which included many of
Europe's most famous masterpieces.

"Robert was very excited about the story and felt it should be wider known
and appreciated," says Edmund "Ted" Pillsbury, former director of the
Kimbell Art Museum and the Meadows Museum, who wrote the forward to Mr.
Edsel's book.

"He assembled and published for the first time a lot of photographs that
had been unknown and neglected," he said, calling Mr. Edsel's book "an
essential companion piece" to the scholarly Nicholas work.

Mr. Edsel also met with filmmakers who had the film rights to the story
and decided to co-produce a documentary, The Rape of Europa, based on the
author's book of the same name.

Many of the looted paintings were hidden in salt mines and other
underground depositories. While filming the documentary, Mr. Edsel
squeezed into the winding tunnels of the salt mine in Altaussee, Austria,
where thousands of pieces of art had been hidden during the war, only to
be discovered and rescued by the Monuments Men.

"I think it was an adventure for him," says Dr. Pillsbury.

He also believes that Mr. Edsel's work points out how the Monuments Men
helped influence post-war American culture. Many members of the military's
monuments task force returned to the United States to become directors and
curators of museums. They brought an expertise in European culture that
benefited the growth of the American art scene, Dr. Pillsbury says.

Honoring the team

In June, after Mr. Edsel's relentless lobbying efforts, Congress passed a
resolution honoring the World War II team's efforts.

Mr. Edsel also recently set up a nonprofit foundation to help promote the
legacy of the Monuments Men, who included Richard Howard, one of the first
directors of the Dallas Museum of Art. Mr. Edsel's Turtle Creek office
includes snapshots of these men, now in their 80s and 90s, with Mr. Edsel.

The foundation's mission also includes raising awareness of the need to
protect art and cultural treasures in the midst of war.

National Archives and Records Administration

Adolf Hitler's plans for a new civilization included a museum to outshine
the world's finest. Discobolus was among scores of works taken from all
over Europe to stock that museum. "Frankly, that didn't happen in
Baghdad," he says, referring to public looting of museums in the early
days of the Iraq war. Protecting the cultural treasures of Iraq wasn't a
priority, Mr. Edsel says.

"And that is the key distinction with World War II," in which President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower understood the need to
protect and preserve the cultural heritage of the countries in which they
were fighting.

Finally, Mr. Edsel also sees the foundation taking a role in helping with
restitution of art that was lost during the Nazi era.

That includes art brought home by scavenging GIs and quietly hidden away
in trunks and attics.

"The foundation exists to help people who might be the kids or
grandchildren of a veteran, who might have something and don't know what
to do about it," Mr. Edsel says.

Perhaps the most notorious such case involved a Texas soldier who, in the
waning days of World War II, took priceless medieval treasures hidden in a
cave near Quedlinburg, Germany.

Joe T. Meador, an Army lieutenant, was believed to have taken the
treasures from their hiding place when his Army unit occupied the area in
April 1945 and shipped them back to his hometown of Whitewright.

After his death in 1980, two relatives tried to sell the collection of
ancient illuminated manuscripts, reliquaries and other religious artifacts
dating back at least a millennium. Lawyers for the two said their clients
never learned from their brother that the artworks were stolen and a
criminal case was dropped.

Running a nonprofit foundation isn't nearly as lucrative as the oil
business. But Mr. Edsel hasn't considered going back to his old line of
work, even as the price of oil skyrocketed and former competitors grew
richer.

"What drives me is meaningfulness and feeling fulfilled and trying to use
all my abilities," Mr. Edsel says. "That's why it's so satisfying for me
now."

(source: Dallas Morning News)



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


BOOK REVIEW
'Von Braun' by Michael J. Neufeld
A look at Wernher von Braun, patriarch of U.S. rocketry, Nazi past and
all.
By M.G. Lord
September 23, 2007
Von Braun

Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War

Michael J. Neufeld

Alfred A. Knopf: 590 pp., $35

At the height of the space race, German-born rocket engineer Wernher von
Braun -- a model for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 movie,
"Dr. Strangelove" -- didn't inspire ambivalence. Cold-warriors worshiped
him. He was the patriarch of U.S. rocketry; his soaring brainchildren
would crush the Soviets -- or "eastern hordes," as he termed them. Others
could not forget the V-2 missiles he designed for Hitler during World War
II or the concentration-camp laborers who built those weapons. To critics,
Von Braun embodied a shameful U.S. policy that valued technical knowledge
over justice and protected Nazi scientists from punishment for their war
crimes.

Yet today Von Braun is mostly unknown, especially to those under 40. Or so
says Smithsonian Institution historian Michael J. Neufeld, whose biography
of the controversial rocketeer, aptly subtitled "Dreamer of Space,
Engineer of War," aims to set the record straight. "Von Braun" is an
exhaustively researched and scrupulously balanced examination of both the
German and U.S. chapters of his life. Yet precisely because of its
evenhandedness, the book may be more damning than any one-note anti-Nazi
screed could ever be.

Neufeld does not portray Von Braun as evil but, rather, as a man like
Goethe's Faust, who "uses his infernal powers to build great engineering
works for what he believes to be the betterment of mankind." Faust
mistreats his workers and inadvertently kills people in his way, but he
feels no guilt, because "he cannot accept personal responsibility."

Popular mythology casts Von Braun as a genius engineer, yet his strongest
achievements were as a manager and a salesman. At the Nazi rocket complex
on the Baltic Sea, he was the hands-on director of hundreds of people, a
vast technical team. And at the hollowed-out mountain where the Nazis fled
after Allied raids, he became judiciously hands-off -- a policy that
permitted him to claim distance from the brutalized inmates assembling his
V-2s. To bankroll his research, he had to excel at sales -- first pitching
Hitler on the idea of rockets as a weapon, then selling himself, his
fellow scientists and their expertise when he surrendered to U.S. forces
at the end of the war.

In the mid-1960s, the apogee of his U.S. career, Von Braun managed an even
greater number of employees -- 6,700 -- at the Alabama center where the
Saturn V, a gigantic multistage booster that launched the Apollo
astronauts, was built. From the moment he left Germany, he began peddling
space -- first to the Army, which funded his initial projects, then to the
U.S. public, whose tax dollars financed NASA. He gained celebrity through
articles in Collier's magazine and a collaboration with Walt Disney.
Congress adored him. Neufeld quotes cynical columnist Mary McGrory: "The
hardest thing the German-born scientist has to do is to say 'down, boy' as
eager congressmen press additional millions on him and beg him to tell
them if he isn't treated right."

Von Braun inherited his self-confidence. He was a baron, handsome and
aristocratic, the son of Magnus von Braun, a landowner and official who
epitomized Prussian masculinity at the time of Kaiser Wilhelm I.
Remarkably, Magnus' belief in the superiority of his bloodline survived
the fall of the Nazis and his own immigration to the United States. "This
democracy thing is just a passing fad," he told a grandson in the 1960s.
Yet despite his fine genes, Magnus was not the sharpest spike on a helmet,
and he never understood how Wernher, unlike his other two sons, could
exhibit such technical brilliance. The obvious answer was Von Braun's
mother, a keenly intelligent woman from a scientific family who in a less
misogynistic world might have been a scientist herself.

Neufeld's writing is graceful, logical and clear -- a significant feat
when explaining intricate technology to lay readers. Whenever he uses a
technical term, he clarifies it. Although the meaning of "static-test"
might be evident from its context, he explains that it is "to run a live
engine firing while the vehicle was held in place."

With the same precision and detachment he applies to rocket engines,
Neufeld spells out Von Braun's Nazi history -- from the SS-sponsored
equestrian school he attended as a college student to the Knight's Cross,
one of Hitler's highest honors, that he wore on his SS major's uniform
late in the war. He also discusses other German engineers, including
Arthur Rudolph, head of the U.S. Saturn V program, who joined the Nazi
Party in 1931, two years before Hitler took power. In 1984, Rudolph gave
up his U.S. citizenship rather than face a denaturalization hearing about
his war crimes. Most disturbing, he documents Von Braun's direct
involvement with slave labor, a fact the rocket engineer had denied.

As Von Braun's fame grew, so did his fear of exposure. Prominence brings
enemies, and few places are safe. One day, when Von Braun, his Collier's
editor and Heinz Haber, a space medicine expert, rode the elevator to the
magazine's Manhattan office, a Collier's "staff member felt Haber's
leather coat, saying: 'Human skin, of course?' " During the Apollo years,
when the head of NASA's Houston spaceflight center was annoyed with Von
Braun, he would get drunk and complain about "that damned Nazi." On the
other hand, perhaps because of a desire not to repeat past mistakes, Von
Braun, during the civil rights era, championed an African American
mathematician who had been excluded from classes at an Alabama university.

"Von Braun" is a serious, important book that does justice to its
subject's moral complexity and place in history. It details what happened
and why during the race to the moon. Yet my own taste in biography is,
alas, cheesier. I like gossip, and I wanted to know more about Von Braun's
alleged womanizing and how he got along with his kids. I wanted "Nazi
Dearest," along the lines of presidential daughter Patti Davis'
revelations about Ronald and Nancy Reagan in her 1992 autobiography.

Still, for all his respectfulness, Neufeld includes a few icky personal
details, such as the callous way Von Braun ignored letters from a French
woman punished because of her wartime affair with him, and the casual
sexism with which he surrounded himself. When Von Braun flew in to work on
Disney's space-themed TV show in 1955, "a beautiful young woman" was hired
to amuse him 12 hours a day by making fresh coffee, cutting fancy cakes
and playing recordings of classical guitar music.

Von Braun's widow and children are notoriously circumspect; they have
refused to speak with Neufeld or any reporter. This is unfortunate. I'd
love to know what, for instance, his daughter Margrit thought when, after
years of working to become an engineer, all he could say about her
achievement was: "Girls do the darndest things these days."

Von Braun was a cunning self-promoter, but he made one big mistake --
allowing Hollywood to dramatize his life. Titled "I Aim at the Stars," the
1960 biopic is rarely mentioned today without comedian Mort Sahl's
suggested subtitle: "But sometimes I hit London."

Of necessity, the movie was mostly fiction. But one section rang true.
When Von Braun tells his mother about the deal he cut with Hitler to fund
his research, she says, "Long ago, they said witches made a pact with the
devil, so they could fly on broomsticks." He replies: "My broomsticks fly
without the devil's help. But if they didn't -- I guess I'd be willing to
sign with him."

(source: Los Angeles Times)