Sept. 30




UNITED KINGDOM:

Irving plans British speaking tour


Convicted Holocaust denier and British author David Irving is attempting
to revive his career as a historian.

Irving told the Guardian newspaper he would be launching a series of
speaking tours in British cities and universities as well as offer new
books to potential readers.

In 2005, Irving was sentenced to three years in an Austrian jail for his
1989 speeches in which he questioned the existence of Nazi death camps and
called the Auschwitz gas chambers a fairy tale.

A judge granted Irving early release, partly because he claimed to
renounce his Holocaust denial views.

But in the Sept. 29 Guardian interview, Irving said Jews were to blame for
the Holocaust and that the "Jewish problem" was responsible for nearly all
the wars of the past 100 years. In addition, he said of Auschwitz, Much of
what is shown the tourists there is faked postwar -- watchtowers, even the
famous gas chamber."

Irving now reportedly rents a 10-bedroom house near Windsor.

(source: JTA)





HUNGARY:

Anti-Semitic slogans sprayed on Hungarian Holocaust memorial


Unknown vandals have sprayed anti-Semitic slogans on a mobile Holocaust
memorial exhibition just outside Budapest, police said Thursday.

Police from the small town of Godollo said that the vandalism of the train
carriage, which has been on display throughout Hungary since April 2006,
was discovered early on Thursday morning.

Jewish leaders and the Hungarian Prime Minister have recently warned that
anti-Semitism is on the rise in Hungary.

In particular they are concerned by the formation of the Hungarian Guard -
a body affiliated with far-right party Jobbik.

The Hungarian Guard has been accused of deliberately wearing uniforms and
insignia reminiscent of fascist forces during the Second World War.

However, the guard says it is merely an organization dedicated to the
protection of Hungarian culture.

Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were killed in death camps during
the Second World War.

(source: DPA)





USA//NEW YORK:

Painting at Center of Holocaust Case


The grandson of an Austrian woman who disappeared during the Holocaust is
demanding restitution for a Gustav Klimt painting now owned by cosmetics
magnate Leonard Lauder, saying the artwork was stolen from his
grandmother's home.

Lauder, who purchased the painting "Blooming Meadow" in 1983 from the late
Manhattan gallery owner Serge Sabarsky, says his investigation found no
evidence that the work ever belonged to man's grandmother.

The man, Georges Jorisch, 79, believes the painting was first acquired by
his great-uncle, Viktor Zuckerkandl, a Viennese steel magnate and friend
of Klimt. After Zuckerkandl's death in 1926, the painting passed to his
sister, Amalie Redlich, according to Jorisch's attorney, E. Randol
Schoenberg. Redlich was deported to Poland by the Nazis in 1941 and was
never heard from again.

Schoenberg said he was preparing a letter demanding the return of the
property, which he says could be worth as much as $20 million.

"I hope they'll return the painting or agree to purchase it," the attorney
said.

Lauder's attorney, Andrew Frackman, said he and his client have been "in
discussions" with Schoenberg for five years over the painting.

"We've told Jorisch all along that if in fact his painting belonged to Ms.
Redlich, Mr. Lauder would do the right thing," Frackman said.

He said that he and Lauder had conducted an "extensive investigation" of
documentary evidence from the 1920s and '30s surrounding six Klimt
paintings in Zuckerkandl's estate, and "we have satisfied ourselves that
Mr. Lauder's painting is not any of those six."

(source: Associated Press)

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


Cosmetics king fights to keep 4m Klimt 'looted by Nazis' ---- Este Lauder
heir faces court challenge from painting's 'rightful owner'


It started with a casual flip through an art book and is likely to end, 15
years later, in a courtroom with the billionaire philanthropist Leonard
Lauder, scion of the Este Lauder cosmetics empire, battling to keep a
painting allegedly looted by the Nazis during the Second World War.

The painting is Blooming Meadow by Gustav Klimt, the Austrian symbolist
painter whose work from the early years of the last century is now among
the most highly valued and sought after in the world.

Blooming Meadow, created in 1905, is thought to be worth around 4m, and
currently hangs in the New York home of Mr Lauder, the son of Este Lauder,
and one of the world's richest men.

However, Georges Jorisch, 79, a retired shop owner from Montreal, says
that the painting rightfully belongs to him. He claims that it originally
belonged to his grandmother he remembers it hanging in her villa just
outside Vienna as a boy but was looted by the Nazis as the war engulfed
Europe.

Mr Jorisch began his search for the painting in earnest in the early
1990s, after he saw a Klimt portrait of a relative in a Taschen art book.
But it wasn't until five years ago, when he employed the Los Angeles
lawyer Randol Schoenberg, who specialises in tracing lost paintings, that
the trail began to warm up.

"Georges's grandmother died in Lodz or in a death camp," Mr Schoenberg
said. "She had this terrible fate. Everything she owned was lost." He
added: "The standard of proof is 'what is most likely?'. Is it Georges'
grandmother's painting or not? I can't say with 100 per cent certainty it
is. But all the evidence is pointing in that direction. If they don't hand
it over we'll file a lawsuit."

Mr Lauder's lawyer, Andrew Frackman, said: "If he presents the evidence we
will do the right thing with regard to Mr Jorisch.

"We're very sympathetic to Holocaust survivors and we believe in the
principle of restitution. But we can't just hand it over because Mr
Jorisch says it is his."

The Art Newspaper reports that a new catalogue had identified the painting
as belonging to the estate of Mr Jorisch's grandmother, Amalie Redlich. It
goes on to explain that the painting was originally acquired by her
brother, Georges' great uncle, a steel magnate and friend of the artist.
His sister was given the painting on his death in 1928 and put it in
storage in 1938, from where it is thought to have been looted.

The Redlich provenance has been unclear since an early monograph listing
it as the "estate of Amalie Redlich" was later dropped by a catalogue.
After the war it was reportedly sold by a Viennese gallery to Rudolf
Leopold, who sold it to the Manhattan dealer and collector Serge Sabarsky,
from whom Mr Lauder bought it in 1983.

"It belongs to me," Mr Jorisch said. "I remember it very well. My great
uncle was a huge collector. It represents a lot of value. I am not a
wealthy man."

From blusher to Braque

Leonard Lauder, 73, is worth about $3bn (1.4bn) according to Forbes. He
was chief executive of Este Lauder until 1999 and now chairs the board.
His mother died in 2005. He is one of the world's biggest art collectors,
specialising in cubists such as Picasso and Braque.

(source: The Independent)


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


USA//FLORIDA:


Boynton woman battles for Dutch art, claims stolen by Nazis


A Boynton Beach woman has filed a claim with the Dutch government for
millions of dollars' worth of artwork she says belonged to her father, a
prominent Dutch art dealer who lost much of his collection during the Nazi
occupation.

Sybilla Goldstein, along with two sisters and a brother who live in
Europe, are seeking restitution for more than 200 pieces of art that
originally belonged to their father, Nathan Katz.

Katz owned a large collection of Rembrandts and other Dutch masters, so
his children's claim represents millions of dollars' worth of art, some of
which Goldstein and her husband, Sid, have seen on the walls of Dutch
museums. Three years ago, Christie's art auction house conservatively
estimated the value of Katz's collection at $15 million.

Goldstein and her husband have spent decades and more than $50,000 in
their quest for restitution. But despite extensive research, they found
out only by accident that an agency had been created in the Netherlands to
consider claims such as theirs. On a 2001 visit to a Dutch art museum,
they recognized one of Katz's paintings on display.

When they inquired about the painting, a secretary said they should
contact a new agency, the Advisory Committee on the Assessment of
Restitution Applications for Items of Cultural Value and the Second World
War.

In 2003, they petitioned the committee for Horsefair at Valkenburg, a 1633
painting by Salomon van Ruysdael, which is displayed at the Stedelijk
Museum in Leiden, Netherlands.

Three years later, the committee informed them that their claim was not
sufficiently documented. According to the committee's Web site, claims
take at least 34 weeks to be investigated.

The deadline for filing all claims to the committee was April 7. In March,
Goldstein and her siblings filed a claim for more than 200 pieces of their
father's art.

The Goldsteins provided all the documentation the Dutch government
requested, said Tina Talarchyk, Sybilla Goldstein's attorney in West Palm
Beach. But the government is not playing by the same rules, she said.

"These are Dutch national treasures, we understand that," Talarchyk said.
"But you know what? The family still owns them."

Apart from its monetary value, the artwork is a crucial part of Katz
family history. Nathan Katz used his paintings to save lives.

To get family members out of Nazi-controlled Europe, he traded one
Rembrandt painting for 25 visas. A high-ranking Nazi SS officer demanded
another valuable painting in exchange for releasing Katz's mother from the
Westerbrook concentration camp. The officer planned to present it to Adolf
Hitler as a birthday gift.

The family left the Netherlands in 1942.

The Dutch masters were highly desirable acquisitions for the Nazis, who
considered them examples of "pure" art and collected them from their
owners by force and intimidation. The artworks of Katz and many other
collectors, many of them Jewish, were intended to grace the Third Reich's
museums as well as the private collections of Hitler and his henchmen,
many of whom were avid collectors. They employed agents to locate such
works and persuade the owners to give them up.

As Hitler invaded more European countries, he ordered German soldiers to
round up thousands of artworks from museums in occupied countries and from
wealthy Jews who were then sent to death camps.

The Nazis looted as many as 100,000 pieces of museum-quality European art,
according to some estimates.

The art was ultimately to be displayed in a grand "Fuehrer Museum." Hitler
and Hermann Goering, his second-in-command, were art connoisseurs and
systematically identified private and public collections to be confiscated
for the Nazis' pleasure.

After the war, much of the art was returned, but many other pieces
disappeared into private collections or were never found. Some were sold
to pay for the Nazi war effort. Others were stolen by soldiers or
neighbors.

Further complicating restitution, Nazis forged records of ownership.

For all those reasons, documentation is nearly impossible. But Katz's
children managed to save some of their father's inventories, with detailed
descriptions of artwork to buttress their case.

Still, the burden of proof in such cases is huge, according to art
curators and attorneys in similar cases.

One problem is that some art dealers voluntarily sold art to Nazis at the
beginning of World War II. As the war continued and Nazi power increased,
the Nazis stopped buying art and began collecting it by force.

That time difference is a key factor in determining whether a family
should receive restitution.

"At some point, people feared for their lives, there was an overt threat
to their safety and people had no choice but to buy their freedom," said
Roger Ward, chief curator for the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.
The Norton is part of an effort by American museums to help determine the
proper ownership of art.

"Even when the documentation may seem to be airtight, it is often open to
multiple interpretations," said Ward, a specialist in European art. "That
in itself is one of the sad facts of the Holocaust."

(source: Palm Beach Post)

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

Family Claims Art Recovered From Nazis



The Netherlands may have to give up paintings once acquired by the Nazis
for Adolf Hitler's collection if a state commission determines that a
Jewish art dealer was forced to sell the 227 works, Dutch officials said
Wednesday.

The claim filed this summer includes works by 17th-century masters Jan
Steen, Gerard Dou and Jacob van Ruisdael once owned by art dealer Nathan
Katz. It was submitted by Katz's daughter, Sybilla Goldstein-Katz, who
lives in the United States, and her three siblings.

The Nazis bought or stole thousands of artworks during their World War II
occupation of the Netherlands. The Netherlands reclaimed many after the
German defeat in 1945. The works were returned wherever possible but about
5,000 remained in the possession of the state, said Bob van het Klooster
of the Ministry of Culture. Most were distributed to state museums on
permanent loan.

The Katz family's claim is the largest ever made to the Dutch government
over a single collection in terms of the sheer numbers of disputed works,
said Evert Rodrigo of the Dutch Art Collections Institute, which manages
state-owned art.

The decision on whether to relinquish the works will hinge on the Dutch
Restitution Committee's determination of whether Nathan Katz was forced to
sell them.

CODART, a network of curators from Belgium, the Netherlands and
Luxembourg, said Katz was coerced into selling many of his works to Alois
Miedl, who was directed by Hermann Goering to sweep the Nazi-occupied
countries for artworks for Hitler's planned Fuehrer Museum. Goering seized
many of the works for his own collection.

Postwar U.S. military records also say Katz bartered a painting by
Rembrandt in 1941 to buy a way out of Nazi-occupied Holland for himself
and his family. Art historians say that under a deal apparently brokered
by the Swiss government, Katz gave up Rembrandt's "Portrait of a Man" in
exchange for 25 visas for Spain for his extended family and the release of
his mother from Westerbork, a concentration camp for Jews in eastern
Holland.

"In order to emigrate from Holland he was obliged to hand over certain
valuable oil paintings to the Swiss Consul for the benefit of the German
occupational authorities," said a report on Katz by the Office of
Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, obtained from the U.S.
National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md.

Katz, who lived in Basel, Switzerland with his immediate family after he
left the Netherlands, regained possession of the Rembrandt. As for the
other art, the Dutch Art Collections Institute notified state museums last
week that the Katz family had filed the claim for works at their
institutions.

"Many museums are involved. And not just museums. We also lend to
embassies and to official institutions," Rodrigo said.

The national Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam confirmed it also received a letter
but declined to say which paintings were involved.

"This claim by the Katz family was not at all expected here," said
Christiaan Vogelaar, curator of De Lakenhal Museum in the city of Leiden,
which displays seven of the contested paintings.

The works have not been recently appraised. Sorting out their provenance
could take anywhere from several months to a year or more.

(source: Associated Press)


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


USA//MASSACHUSETTS:

Two faces of a WWII case----To US, a Nazi war criminal; to family, a good
man


There are two Vladas Zajanckauskases.

One was a high-ranking noncommissioned officer in a Nazi training camp who
took part in one of the most heinous massacres of World War II, the 1943
liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. He lied about his war record to enter
the United States. The blood of thousands of Jews is on his hands. So says
the US Justice Department about Zajanckauskas, a 91-year-old
Lithuanian-born factory worker who came to Central Massachusetts after the
war and has lived here for almost 60 years.

The other is the Zajanckauskas his family and friends know. He is a good
and decent man, a role model for kindness, a devout Catholic who himself
suffered at the hands of the Germans. He is honest and compassionate and
patriotic, worked hard all his life, and is devoted to his family. A man
about whom a terrible mistake has been made.

Since that summer day in 2002 when a US marshal knocked on his door to
serve him with papers, Zajanckauskas and his family say their lives have
been a nightmare. In 2005 a federal district court judge revoked his US
citizenship on the basis that he'd lied about where he'd been during the
war on his immigration documents when he entered the country in 1950. Last
month a federal immigration judge ordered Zajanckauskas deported to
Lithuania, concluding he played an active role in the Nazi plan to
exterminate Jews in Warsaw.

Zajanckauskas and his family are appealing the ruling, which would make
him the oldest person ever deported as a result of an investigation by the
Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

To OSI officials, this is a story of justice served, a textbook case of a
Nazi collaborator who managed to quietly live out his life in the United
States but whose misdeeds caught up with him. A story of a man with a
defense they've heard before, many times - wasn't there, didn't do it -
whose deportation order honors their commitment to Congress and to
Holocaust survivors to remove such people from this country, no matter the
cost.

"It is essential to send the message that people who participate in crimes
against humanity will find no sanctuary in the US," says Eli M. Rosenbaum,
who heads the OSI's criminal division, which has been tracking Nazi war
criminals in the United States since 1979. Since 2004, the OSI's mission
has expanded to include the pursuit of criminals involved in more recent
genocides, such as those in Cambodia and Rwanda. "Anyone who dares to
contemplate participating in such crimes should know they may be pursued
until they take their last, dying breath."

To his family, it's a David-and-Goliath legal battle that has
Zajanckauskas as the guileless little guy, a frail, old man who worked for
35 years in a Worcester plastics factory and who has no hope of
effectively defending himself without any living witnesses to speak up for
him. A battle full of legal ambiguity that has cost him $200,000 in legal
bills, forced him to sell his house in Millbury, and taken a crushing toll
on his health and that of his 81-year-old wife, Vladislava.

Deporting him would be "cruel and unusual punishment," his daughter Diane
Lavoie wrote in April in a letter to US Immigration Judge Wayne R. Iskra.
"Throughout my life I haven't ever seen anything of a negative nature in
his character. He does not like to see any manner of suffering, even to
seeing a dog tied or penned up and not free." For this elderly man to be
deported "would be utterly devastating not only for them [her parents],
but for the entire family. Where would they go? Who would care for them? .
. . We do not know how many days they have left with us."

Support from neighbors

"Welcome to Grandma and Grandpa's . . . Open 24 hours," reads a folksy
wooden sign outside his home. He sold his own house four years ago, and he
and his wife moved into a cottage on property owned by his daughter, a
short walk from her own house on Sutton's scenic Lake Singletary. Lavoie's
well-groomed gardens surround the house, morning glory vines embrace the
entryway trellis, and a statue of the Madonna stands in the garden.

Zajanckauskas is a slight, soft-spoken man with a kindly manner. On the
walls of his home hang family photos - the couple have three grandchildren
and four great-grandchildren - and some of his own artwork. He tends a
small garden and passes his time these days by reading presidential
biographies and newspapers on his computer in five languages - German,
Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, and English. He says he's received many
supportive cards and letters from people in the community. "You have our
total support now and always," reads one card from a neighbor. "Please
don't ever lose hope."

He has also recently completed a 99-page memoir, "My Bits of Life in This
Beautiful World," which describes his childhood and wartime experiences.
He says he wrote it for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, though
recalling the details of his difficult war years often made him cry. "I
want to show them what war is doing to humanity," he says in accented,
imperfect English, while his wife cries softly nearby. "They would know
what it means."

Zajanckauskas's version

The story he tells in the memoir is a very different one from that told by
the government and summarized by Judge Iskra in a 41-page written decision
issued Aug. 2. Zajanckauskas's version depicts a young man born in
Lithuania who got swept up in political and historical crosscurrents he
was helpless to resist. In 1939 he joined the Lithuanian military, which
became part of the Soviet Army after the Soviet annexation of Lithuania in
1940. He was captured by the Germans in 1941 and held in a German
prisoner-of-war camp where he was whipped, starved, and exposed to typhus.
"People started dying like flies; hundreds and hundreds a day!" he wrote.
He lost his hair and his hearing and was reduced to skin and bones. He was
recruited for German military service and in 1943 was sent to the Trawniki
Training Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

It is Zajanckauskas's version of the Trawniki period that is most at odds
with the Justice Department's account. Zajanckauskas writes in his memoir
that he was assigned to work in the canteen and kitchen and to be a
translator. His job was hard. The Germans were cruel and shot those who
tried to escape, yet he was allowed to visit a nearby village initially to
buy eggs "because the Germans were crazy about them." Soon, he was going
on leaves for other reasons. On one, he met his future wife; on another he
was allowed to visit his ill father in Lithuania. He got a promotion from
the Germans, and in February 1944 he was allowed three days off to be
married. In July, German forces evacuated the camp; after the war, the
Zajanckauskases lived in Austria and in 1950 came to the United States,
where he had relatives.

The fact that the Nazi war machine was exterminating Jews on a mass scale
is only hinted at; he suggests he had only limited knowledge of what the
Germans were doing. When his future wife's family told him that behind the
camp's tall stone wall there was another camp "only for Jews," he writes:
"I was so surprised that the Germans didn't tell anybody in the camp about
this."

He places himself in the canteen in mid-April 1943, which is when the
Germans began their assault on the Warsaw Ghetto, an operation that
triggered an armed uprising and led to the extermination of more than
50,000 Jews.

"Starting the middle of April I saw through the window of the canteen that
new people [civilian] young guys were coming . . . Young civilian men were
coming almost every day and almost every day groups of trained men were
also leaving," he writes in the memoir. "I had no idea where they were
going or what they were doing and I couldn't find out because the Germans
in the canteen didn't talk much about it."

Another scenario

Eli Rosenbaum says he is lying. "The Warsaw Ghetto liquidation was one of
the most notorious crimes of the Holocaust, and he was part and parcel of
that monstrous operation." He says the Trawniki training camp was run by
the Nazi SS and German police for a single purpose: "It was a school for
mass murder, where the Nazis trained men to take part in actions against
Jews, rounding them up, herding them off to death and slave labor camps,
and also killing them outright."

He says Zajanckauskas's name appeared on a roster of 351 men deployed to
the ghetto, a document captured by the Red Army during the war and made
available to historians in the mid-1990s. He says records show
Zajanckauskas was a midlevel noncommissioned officer and thus one of the
highest ranking men from Trawniki deployed to Warsaw.

There is no doubt, he says, that Zajanckauskas was among them. The
accuracy of the record was confirmed by "hundreds of other pieces of
documentation related to the assignment of Trawniki men to outside
deployments," says Peter Black, senior historian at the United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, who testified in the case.

Zajanckauskas was stripped of his citizenship two years ago, Rosenbaum
notes, because he was found by a federal judge to have lied on immigration
documents when he entered the United States, saying that he had worked on
a farm until 1943. He also falsified his wife's place of birth on her visa
application - she was born in Trawniki - to hide his service to the Nazis.

Family is behind him

Zajanckauskas maintains his innocence. "I have never been to Warsaw," he
says firmly.

Both his daughter, Diane Lavoie, and granddaughter Denise Ronayne, stand
by him. They acknowledge that he was not truthful on his immigration
documents, but they say he was heeding the advice of an immigration
official in Europe who helped the displaced fill out paperwork.

They say that despite the fact that his name is on the roster, there is no
actual proof, no witness, to say he was there and that they believe him
when he says he stayed behind in the canteen.

"Why would they take the only guy at the head of the canteen who fed
everybody? The roster is the only shred of evidence they have against
him," says Ronayne. "There are times when orders get changed. They could
have inadvertently put his name on it."

She says the government could have prosecuted him long ago but waited
until potential witnesses died off. She says she believes that the OSI is
"fizzling out" now that so many perpetrators are dying and that they are
going after her grandfather because "they are trying to justify their own
existence." She adds: "I almost feel like there is a witch hunt going on."

They were shocked when the judge ordered him deported and say
Zajanckauskas did not defend himself as well as he could have. "My
grandfather is a very sweet man," says Ronayne. "He is a gentleman and
agreeable and not a fighter. When the time came to defend himself against
the allegations, what do you say except, 'I was never there?'"

(source: Boston Globe)

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

USA//MINNESOTA/ARIZONA:

Nazi guard briefly lived in Mankato----Agrees to leave U.S. after ties to
death camp found


A man who settled in Mankato for a few years after World War II has been
pressured to leave the country after investigators found he was a former
Nazi guard at concentration camp.

Martin Hartmann, 88, came to Mankato with his wife, Ellen, in 1955.
According to Mankato city directories, Hartmann worked at 718 North Second
Street and worked as a typesetter at Forde Printing.

The commercial printing business, at 120 South Front Street which is now
a parking ramp across from Chevys Bar and the VFW published plat books
and other items. Hartmann apparently lived in Mankato for only a few years
by the early 60s his name no longer appeared in the directories.

The story of Hartmann life-long secret is recounted in a story by JJ
Hensley in the Sept. 22 Arizona Republic.

After leaving Mankato, the couple moved to Helena, Mont., where Hartmann
worked as a typesetter and printer before mastering computers. The couple
bought a winter home in Leisure World, in Arizona, in 1987 and moved to
the area permanently a few years ago.

Hartmann 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 of
Berlin, according to the paper. Some 35,000 people were killed at the
camp.

In a bizarre twist, it turns out a man who was prisoner at the same
concentration camp moved in next door to Hartmann at Leisure World.

Nathan Gasch, 83, told the newspaper that he was in Hartmann's home years
ago and saw a photo hanging on the wall of a man in an SS uniform. The man
was Hartmann, and Gasch recognized the uniform from his time in the camp
in 1944. Gasch said he never mentioned the photo to anyone.

Hartmanns wife said her husband is staying with family in Berlin and she
plans to join him next month. She met Hartmann in 1944 when he was a young
Nazi soldier and she was a 17-year-old working for the Red Cross.

Hartmanns wife said he was unaware of what was happening at the camp, a
claim the Justice Department disputes. The department has a special unit
that has, since 1979, tracked down war criminals.

A spokesman for the agency said it pursues people who were more than
simply German soldiers but who participated in Nazi-sponsored persecution.
They said German soldiers were given a choice of combat duty or working as
SS guards at the camps and also could transfer out of concentration camp
duty if they chose to.

(source: The Mankato (Minn.) Free Press)




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


Ex-Nazi spies had dubious benefit for U.S.: report


The U.S. government apparently derived no clear benefit by recruiting
ex-Nazis as Cold War spies, but potentially huge gaps remain in the public
record of U.S. ties to World War Two war criminals, according to a report
issued on Friday.

The report to Congress, by an interagency group that examined the United
States' use of German and Japanese war criminals during and after the war,
also said the CIA had no set policy for hiring former war criminals to spy
on postwar foes including the Soviet Union.

The group, created by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act of 1998 and
Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act of 2000, has released more
than 8.5 million pages of previously classified government documents
dating back to 1933.

The list includes the entire 1.2 million-page operational file of the
CIA's World War Two forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services.

The 139-page report addressed a post-September 11 trend toward greater
government secrecy by laying out recommendations to improve what it called
a broken declassification system. It said agency resistance to disclosure
drove overall project costs up nearly three-fold to $30 million.

But a section of the report containing contributions by individuals and
agencies involved in the effort suggests the disclosure has been less than
complete.

Elizabeth Holtzman, a former New York congresswoman and member of the
panel, said the group received files on about 60,000 former Nazi and
Japanese war criminals but did not have the names of all collaborators,
particularly those in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

"Even though we employed various search strategies to obtain these
documents, there are undoubtedly huge gaps in our work," she said.

HISTORICAL RECORD

Holtzman also called into question the value of recruiting spies among
former Nazis, who were sometimes blackmailed into serving as double agents
by the Soviets.

"It is not clear that Nazis provided us with any useful intelligence, and
we know that in some cases at least they were a serious detriment to us,"
she added.

"Given the intelligence failures of the Iraq war, it might be important
for U.S. policymakers to understand that using very bad people for
intelligence activities does not automatically get us very good results,
and instead, may get us very bad results," Holtzman said.

The report noted that the CIA began withholding files after the September
11 attacks in 2001 but relented in 2005 after lawmakers in Congress
threatened to hold public hearings. In the end, the CIA said it released
an unprecedented 145,000 pages of documents.

"The CIA has provided vital support to this effort, including taking an
aggressive stance on the declassification of documents," CIA spokesman
George Little said.

Formally known as the Nazi War Crimes & Japanese Imperial Government
Records Interagency Working Group, the panel said in its report that newly
declassified records provide important historical detail about U.S.
actions in World War Two and the Cold War.

Richard Ben-Veniste, another group member, said in the report that some of
the latest documents, which were declassified in late 2006, show that the
CIA had no clear policy about hiring former Nazis.

He cited a November 1960 CIA document quoting an agency official as
saying: "We have no strong feelings against the use of a convicted Nazi
today, provided he has something tangible to offer and is kept under close
control. The question remains -- what has he to offer?"

(source: Reuters)





AUSTRIA:

Austria probes video of soldiers in Nazi salutes


Austria's defense minister said Tuesday he had launched an investigation
into an Internet video that reportedly showed Austrian soldiers making
Hitler salutes.

Norbert Darabos said an investigation was under way and confirmed that the
incident took place in Austrian army barracks.

The video - published on the video-sharing Web site YouTube - shows
several young, uniformed soldiers engaged in offensive behavior, the
newspaper Kleine Zeitung reported.

It said that during the video, two men raise their arms in the
straight-armed Nazi salute. One of the two is shown screaming "Heil
Hitler," according to the newspaper.

The roughly two-minute video was likely taken with a cell phone and showed
the soldiers in a drunken state, the newspaper said.

Attempts to view the video on YouTube Tuesday were met with a notice
saying it had been taken down by the person who originally posted it.

Darabos said those involved would have to "bear the consequences" and
account for their actions.

"These types of actions allow for zero tolerance," Darabos said.

Hans-Georg Wallner, public information officer at the provincial military
command in Salzburg, said three suspects have been interrogated in
connection with the video and that a fourth person had been questioned as
a witness. According to the defense ministry, the public prosecutor's
office has also been informed.

Wallner said the alleged incident occurred at the Schwarzenberg Caserne,
Austria's largest barracks, on the outskirts of Salzburg. He declined to
give details of the men's ages or origins but said the video was likely
filmed between June and August. Not all parts of the video may have been
taken at the same time, he said.

"We are deeply shocked," Wallner said.

Austrian law bans the glorification of Adolf Hitler and attempts to
diminish, deny or justify the Holocaust. Anyone convicted over the video
could face between one and 10 years behind bars, the Austria Press Agency
reported.

Austria's justice ministry Tuesday rebutted claims by a prominent Jewish
human rights group that it lacked the political will to bring Holocaust
perpetrators to justice.

The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a report recently
published online that in the year to March 31, 2007, Austrian authorities
did not make any "concrete progress" in prosecuting Nazi war criminals.

Thomas Geiblinger, spokesman for Justice Minister Maria Berger, said
Austria had made "serious efforts" since the beginning of the year. He
said the ministry in July offered rewards for information leading to the
capture of two fugitive Nazi criminals, Aribert Heim, a concentration camp
doctor, and Alois Brunner, the right-hand man of Adolf Eichmann, the
Gestapo officer who organized the extermination of the Jews.

The Wiesenthal Center's report said the "obvious lack of political will in
Vienna" could be seen in the handling of Croatian-born Milivoj Asner,
indicted for alleged war crimes and who lives in the southern Austrian
city of Klagenfurt. It contends that Asner should be arrested and
extradited to his homeland for trial.

A former police chief in eastern Croatia, Asner allegedly enforced racist
laws under Croatia's World War II Nazi puppet regime, which persecuted
tens of thousands of Jews, Gypsies and Serbs.

Geiblinger said two medical reports commissioned by the justice ministry
found Asner, who is over 90, unfit to stand trial and unfit to be
questioned. Under Austrian law, that prevents his extradition, he said.

On the Net: http://www.operationlastchance.org

(source: Associated Press, Sept. 5)





UKRAINE:

Ukraine officials, Jews mark Babi Yar

Ukraine's president and government officials joined Jews in marking 66
years since the Babi Yar massacre.

President Viktor Yushchenko, Cabinet of Ministers representatives and
other officials joined Holocaust survivors in a wreath-laying ceremony in
Kiev Sept. 29, the date of the anniversary, and observed a moment of
silence to honor the Babi Yar victims. Yushchenko also paid tribute to the
members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists killed in Babi Yar.

More than 33,700 Ukranian Jews were killed at Babi Yar in 1941, when
occupying Nazi troops forced local Jews to the edge of the ravine and shot
them. The Nazis murdered an additional 10,000 Red Army prisoners of war,
resistance fighters and gypsies there.

In another memorial ceremony, about 300 people, including the chief rabbis
of Ukraine, leaders of Israeli and Jewish organizations and diplomats,
gathered Sept. 23 at a 10-foot menorah that Jewish groups erected at Babi
Yar in 1991.

(source: JTA)





ISRAEL:

Israel's purchase of German Volkswagens opens wounds

The cars are made by Volkswagen, which once was aligned with Hitler;
Israeli Holocaust survivors and others are irate.


Retired agronomist Shmuel Elhanan speaks German and talks fondly about
his parents' house in Berlin.

But like many Israelis and German-born Jews in the United States and
elsewhere, Elhanan, 77, has a love-hate relationship with his homeland.

He is a Holocaust survivor of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.
For decades after World War II ended, he refused to set foot in the
country responsible for killing his family and millions of other Jews.

So Elhanan was angry when he learned recently that the Israeli government
will begin buying Audi cars from Germany's Volkswagen. Skoda, a Czech
automaker also owned by Volkswagen, will fill out the government's fleet
of cars over the next four years.

VW's history includes using slave labor during World War II. Hitler
himself was responsible for the prototype design of the VW Beetle and the
company went on to build military vehicles for the Third Reich.

"It's a very hard thing to understand," Elhanan said. "Why would our
leaders want to drive in German cars? Do they understand the impact ...?"

Germany, Israel now allies

For decades after Israel's founding in 1948, it was virtually unthinkable
for anyone living in the Jewish state to buy German products, especially
from companies that were part of the Nazi war effort. There are an
estimated 240,000 Holocaust survivors living in Israel today.

But the anti-German phenomenon faded as time passed and wounds healed.
Germany is now one of Israel's closest political and economic allies.

Volkswagen contributed to a $1.7 billion survivors' fund set up by 12
German companies in 1999 to acknowledge "remembrance, responsibility and
the future." VW also established a separate fund for surviving workers and
families of the wartime slave labor force.

Tens of thousands of Israelis visit Germany on holiday and educational
trips each year. Israeli stores now stock all types of German-made goods:
kitchen appliances, consumer products and clothing. Israel also relies on
German-made weapons for its armed forces.

Yet both Israelis and their government have tended to shy away from German
cars.

German imports represented only 8 percent of car sales in Israel last
year, a small number that industry experts say is due to the lingering
unease about the role modern-day manufacturers played in the Nazi era and
the high cost for luxury cars.

Israeli officials have used Volvo cars for more than 20 years, so both
business analysts and politicians reacted with surprise when the
government announced this month that the Audi A6 and Skoda Superb models
would become the new autos for the government.

A spokeswoman for the Finance Ministry said the government considered
three major factors: price, safety and maintenance costs. She declined to
provide details about the cost of the contracts with Audi and Skoda.

(source: Cox News Service)