Nov. 25



GERMANY:

Holocaust Survivors, Heirs Fight On for Compensation
Though Germany Long Ago Satisfied Most Claims, Many Remain


Six decades after the end of World War II, tens of thousands of Holocaust
survivors and their heirs are still struggling to receive compensation or
the return of looted property from Germany.

More than 76,000 claims filed by Jewish families and other Nazi-era
victims who had owned property in the former East Germany remain
unresolved. About 60,000 Jews who applied for special pensions payable to
people the Nazis forced to work for subsistence wages in ghettos were
turned down. And owners of stolen artwork complain that efforts to find
their collections have been stonewalled by German museums, despite a 1999
pledge to clear up the issue.

As time passes, aging Holocaust survivors and their heirs say they have
become increasingly frustrated. In most cases, they blame a slow-moving
and inflexible German bureaucracy for delays. While acknowledging that
Germany already has gone to great lengths to atone for the crimes of the
Third Reich, claimants said they have encountered a waning desire among
some Germans to go any further.

"We have had the door slammed in our face and our history denied," said
Peter Y. Sonnenthal, 53, a U.S. citizen and former attorney for the
Securities and Exchange Commission. Along with his sister, he has been
fighting a legal battle since 1991 to reclaim hundreds of parcels of
property that they say their Jewish ancestors sold under duress in the
upscale Berlin suburb of Teltow.

Germany long ago satisfied the vast majority of claims pending from the
war. Over the past half-century, it has spent an estimated $100 billion,
adjusted for inflation, to compensate Jews and other victims of Nazism.
Now it is dealing with a new wave of property claims filed in the early
1990s after the collapse of the communist East German government, which
had generally refused to compensate Jewish losses from the Third Reich.

On Oct. 1, Germany agreed to pay an extra $250 million in pensions over
the next 10 years to Jews who were incarcerated in concentration camps or
Nazi prisons. And last year, the German government agreed to pay $50
million to cover nursing care and other medical costs for elderly
Holocaust survivors.

Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Conference on Jewish
Material Claims Against Germany, a New York-based institution set up in
1951 to negotiate restitution payments, said the German government had
shown a strong overall commitment to Holocaust victims over the years. But
he noted that the number of survivors is dwindling steadily and many are
impoverished.

"The needs are tremendous," he said. "Generally, the negotiations are
conducted in a positive spirit and there have been many achievements.
However, we feel there's still more to do and there's a very limited
amount of time."

Every so often, another hidden chapter of Germany's dark history
resurfaces, complicating efforts to turn the page.

Last month, the family that owns nearly 50 percent of luxury automaker BMW
agreed to a probe into whether it had profited from forced labor during
the Third Reich. The move was prompted by a public television documentary
that featured testimony from former prisoners at a family-owned battery
factory in Hanover.

The Quandt family, which had personal ties to top Nazi leaders, including
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, acknowledged that it had kept silent
about the slave-labor issue for decades. "We recognize that, in our
history as a German business family, the years 1933 to 1945 have not been
sufficiently cleared up," the family said in a statement.

Until recently, the German government had resisted international efforts
to open a massive Nazi-era archive to historians and the public. The
International Tracing Service, a warehouse in central Germany containing
50 million records about concentration camps and victims of the Third
Reich, has tightly restricted access to the documents for decades.

Some German officials had worried that making the records public would
lead to a new flood of compensation claims against the government. But
under pressure from researchers and Holocaust survivors, Germany last year
agreed to open the archives, which are overseen by an 11-nation consortium
and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Since then, the German government has tried to resolve another
Holocaust-era dispute by agreeing to pay $140 million to former residents
of Jewish ghettos who were forced by the Nazis to work for negligible
wages.

Germany had passed a law in 2002 granting monthly pensions to the
so-called ghetto workers. But of the 70,000 people who applied for the
benefits, more than 85 percent were rejected, often because they lacked
documentation of forced employment. (The program is separate from a $6
billion fund established in 2000 to compensate 1.7 million slave laborers
conscripted by the Nazis and forced to work for no pay at all).

After prodding from the Jewish Claims Conference and Israeli and U.S.
officials, the German government agreed in September to pay a one-time sum
of $2,800 to about 50,000 people who had been denied the benefits. German
officials described the payment as a "humanitarian gesture," insisting
that it should not be seen as compensation for forced labor.

But critics, including some German lawmakers, accused the government of
being stingy and still not doing enough. "It was very hard work to force
the government to recognize this was a problem," said Renate Kuenast, a
leader of the Green Party. Her party has sponsored legislation that would
guarantee a minimum $200 monthly pension to ghetto workers, payable for
life.

The German Finance Ministry, which oversees the program, declined requests
for an interview.

One of the thorniest and longest-running disputes over Jewish property is
playing out in Teltow, a Berlin suburb.

Until the 1930s, about 200 acres of farmland in the center of town were
owned by Max and Albert Sabersky, prominent Jewish developers and
businessmen. The Sabersky brothers had owned the land since 1872, but sold
it after Hitler came to power in 1933. The heirs say the Sabersky brothers
sold their land for half its market value; on top of that, a Nazi broker
forced them to pay commissions reaching 50 percent.


After Teltow and the rest of East Germany broke with communism in 1990,
the Saberskys' heirs filed claims to retrieve the property, arguing that
the brothers had been forced to sell by the Nazis. By then, the land was
home to about 1,500 people and worth an estimated $100 million.

The heirs won back a handful of acres. But German authorities denied the
bulk of their claim, ruling in 1996 that the brothers hadn't sold the
property under duress. As evidence, they cited a statement from a former
Nazi official involved in the sales, who insisted that the Jewish family
hadn't been persecuted.

The decision outraged the Sabersky heirs, including Sonnenthal, the former
SEC lawyer. As the only descendants of Albert Sabersky, he and his sister
stand to gain half the recovered property. They have appealed the decision
through a maze of German courts in a fight that has stretched on for 16
years.

"Teltow has to be held accountable. It's a question of principle," said
Sonnenthal, who moved to Germany in 2002 to fight his case full time.
"They're simply attempting to profit from the crimes committed by the
former Nazi administration."

After years of failed appeals, the Sonnenthals won a major decision from
Germany's highest administrative court in 2003 that appeared to open the
way for an overall settlement in favor of the heirs. But the city of
Teltow has sought to block the transfer of several key parcels, reviving
old arguments that the Sabersky brothers sold the property willingly. The
case is scheduled to go back to court in December.

Richard Martin, a Teltow resident and member of a citizens' group that has
challenged the Sonnenthals' claim, said he and his neighbors have been
unfairly portrayed as Nazi sympathizers for fighting to keep the property
in local hands.

"I have the feeling that we cannot know, really, what happened back then,"
said Martin, who stressed that he was speaking for himself and not on
behalf of the citizens' group. "Mr. Sonnenthal says this property has been
stolen from him. I cannot really deny that and say no, it hasn't been. But
it is not a black-and-white case, either."

(source: Washington Post)

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


Keeping Munich's ugly past alive
By Susan Spano | Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
November 25, 2007
Article tools
E-mail Share
Digg Del.icio.us Facebook Fark Google Newsvine Reddit Yahoo Print Single
page view Reprints Post Comment Text size: MUNICH, Germany - Munich is an
easy city to like: clean, bright and livable. It has world-class art
museums, stylish shops, wide boulevards, parks and squares. Conviviality
overflows in its fabled beer gardens, and its people have an open,
animated air.

Joachim von Halasz, a London-based financial analyst who often travels to
Munich, knows well the attractions of this southern German city, including
its towered and turreted Gothic revival Neues Rathaus, which the U.S. 7th
Army used as headquarters near the end of World War II. But he is troubled
by an inscription there that says, "To the soldiers who liberated Munich
from the national socialist tyranny on April 30, 1945."

To von Halasz, it's fair to say that France and Belgium (not to mention
concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau) were liberated by the
Allies. Armies liberate places that are being held captive, against their
will.




But that was not precisely the case with Munich, the birthplace and
stronghold of the Nazi party. For von Halasz, the word choice seems
misleading, a verbal whitewashing of the city's firm historic connection
to Adolf Hitler. And it reflects what he thinks is a bigger problem of how
the city faces its past.

Von Halasz set out to correct that by writing "Hunting Nazis in Munich," a
guidebook on lost sites connected with Hitler and his National Socialist
party. (He has launched a companion Web site,
http://www.huntingnazis.com.)

During the Hitler era, the Nazis erected monuments celebrating their
history, including two neoclassical temples on Briennerstrasse, built to
commemorate party martyrs killed during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch when
Hitler and his cronies tried to take over the government of Bavaria (an
attempt that failed). City authorities pulled down the temples in 1947.
The few monuments and plaques that remain recall the courage of resisters,
including Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of an anti-Nazi student group
called the White Rose.

Allied bombs destroyed much of Munich during the war, so other sites that
could tell the story of Hitler's rise are gone.

Von Halasz doesn't claim that the city has forgotten the Third Reich
altogether. A display in the Stadtmuseum on Sankt-Jakobs-Platz documents
the movement's history, and the city has long debated how to deal with its
Nazi past.

Von Halasz thinks that as Germany moves into the future, it is all too
easy to forget the past. For him, marking the places where the Nazi party
was born is an important way to honor its victims and remember its horrors

German-born von Halasz is a man with a mission, as I discovered when I met
him at Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Kempinski, on elegant Maximilianstrasse
here. The choice of the hotel was no accident; it was a meeting place for
the Thule Society, an aristocratic club founded about 1918, devoted to
extreme nationalism and considered a precursor of the Nazi party. Its
emblem was a swastika.

Von Halasz said he grew up, like many children of his generation, in an
atmosphere of thinly veiled secrecy and trauma. He briefly studied the
Nazi era in school, did his military service and then went to England in
1997 to study.

He married and began a career as a financial analyst. During frequent
business trips to Munich, English colleagues asked him to show them places
related to the Nazi era.

"They knew much more about it than I did," he said. "I thought, `My God, I
don't know my own history.'"

So he began walking the streets of Munich looking for addresses and
consulting archives for names and dates. There were no prizes in this
treasure hunt, only a feeling of justification when he identified the
house on Schleissheimerstrasse where Hitler stayed when he arrived in
1913, the site of the beer hall where the SS was founded, now the Hotel
Torbrau, and the room where the Nazi party proclaimed its 25-point
program.

The room is upstairs in the Hofbrauhaus, a landmark beer hall several
blocks south of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, where waitresses in dirndls
push through happy crowds and oompah bands play.

Von Halasz thinks Munich's beer-hall culture helped the Nazi party take
shape. At the Hofbrauhaus on Feb. 24, 1920, Hitler gave a 2 1/2-hour
speech to 2,000 supporters.

We stopped at the Neues Rathaus on Marienplatz to see the inscription
about Munich's World War II liberation and passed the Roman Catholic
Church of St. Michael, where the Rev. Rupert Mayer bravely preached
against the Nazis. Nearby we found a plaque in the pavement at the
Feldherrnhalle, commemorating four policemen killed while facing down an
unruly crowd during the climax of the Beer Hall Putsch, which also claimed
the lives of 16 Nazis.

Over coffee, we discussed the possibility that marking Third Reich sites
might create neo-Nazi shrines, which city officials sometimes cite as a
danger. But von Halasz said that when a documentation center was opened at
Hitler's alpine retreat near Berchtesgaden, about 100 miles southeast of
Munich, the neo-Nazis disappeared. And recently, despite fears about
giving neo-Fascists a symbolic gathering place, a plaque was erected on
the site of the underground bunker in central Berlin where Hitler killed
himself, all the more potent because is it is about 600 feet from
Germany's memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Most moving was our visit to the university building where the Scholls
dropped White Rose leaflets, were seen and were arrested. The brother and
sister are well remembered here, with busts, plaques and a small display
about the White Rose.

One more time before parting, I asked von Halasz whether it might be
healthier for the German people simply to let the past go. But the young
author was firm.

"You have to see the sites comprehensively," he said. "You can't pick and
choose. To be a full human being, you have to remember both the bad and
the good."

(source: Chicago Tribune)



ENGLAND:

Holocaust deniers to speak at Oxford

Nick Griffin leader of the British National Party and controversial
historian David Irving to speak with Oxford University's students


Nick Griffin, the leader of the right-wing British National Party (BNP)
and Holocaust-denier historian David Irving are scheduled to give a
lecture at Oxford University on Monday. Despite the protests, members of
Oxford's Debating Society voted in favor of inviting Griffin and Irving.

Oxford University's students associated condemned the idea as well several
Muslim students' organizations who object to Griffin's policies and the
Jewish student body. Yet, the Debating Society insisted that in the name
of free speech, all opinions must be heard.

Trevor Phillips, chairman of Britain's Equality and Human Rights
Commission, said Irving never should have been invited.

"I think it is an absolute disgrace. As a former president of the
National Union of Students, I'm ashamed that this has happened," Phillips
told British Broadcasting Corp. television. "This is not a question of
freedom of speech; this is a juvenile provocation."

He said students at Oxford were "supposed to be brilliant," and he
appealed for them to "put your brains back in your head."

Phillips said people did not fight and die for the right to freedom of
speech only for it to be used as a "silly parlor game."

Last week, British Defense Secretary Des Browne and at least three other
lawmakers canceled appearances at Oxford University's 182-year-old
debating society because of the Irving invitation. They were not invited
to attend Monday's event, but were scheduled to speak before the union on
other days.

Luke Tryl, President of the Society claimed that Griffin and Irving were
invited to a forum that will discuss the boundaries of the freedom of
speech alongside other speakers who will challenge their views.

The Society reported that tickets to event have been sold out.

(source: YNetNews)




USA//OHIO:

Museum remembering Holocaust opens in northwest Ohio town


A former postmaster has fulfilled his dream of gathering and displaying
memorabilia, mostly letters, relating to the Holocaust and World War II.

Founder Gary Levitt, Holocaust survivors and others opened the new exhibit
this month in the lower level of the post office of this northwest Ohio
village. Many of the items were obtained from museums in Washington, D.C.

Rabbi Sol Oster blessed the new permanent exhibit and offered a prayer
that mankind would be brought together in brotherhood and goodwill.

Author Liesl Sondheimer of Lima is grateful the exhibit tells what
happened to Jews in that time period.

"My husband and I and our two children fled penniless in September 1938,"
she recalled. "We went to England and then to New York. We feared for our
lives."

Sondheimer stressed the importance of keeping the Holocaust in
remembrance.

"There are only a few of us left who lived through those events. Pretty
soon it will be forgotten because there is no one to remind us," she said.

Murray Cohen of the Ethel and Nathan Cohen Foundation agreed with
Sondheimer.

"When we look back on history, we hope that the Holocaust taught the world
a lesson. When Eisenhower planned to visit one of the concentration camps,
there were 11,000 to 12,000 prisoners killed just days before he arrived,"
Cohen said. "He ordered photographers to the camp to take pictures so the
world would know what happened there."

One museum exhibit tells the story of how two cousins, one in Germany and
one in the U.S, bolstered each other's spirits by writing letters during
the war years. The cousin in Germany and most of his family perished in
the Holocaust, but a daughter managed to escape and joined the other
cousin in West Virginia, Levitt said.

"This exhibit is a testament to the fact that the written word has
sustained people through terrible times in our history," Levitt said.

Murals in the exhibit depict a concentration camp and a railroad box car
filled with prisoners. The paintings draw one in to a glimpse of the
Holocaust.

One exhibit was created by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington for the National Postal Museum.

It begins with the story of the SS St. Louis, a ship bound from Germany to
Havana with 930 refugees. Films concerning this voyage will be shown in
the local museum theater, including one with personal accounts of
survivors of the voyage.

Levitt also is displaying letters sent by what was known as V Mail.
Handwritten letters were copied onto microfilm and sent in tubes to their
destination. Once there, they would be projected onto paper, much like
photographic development, Levitt said.

Levitt, 57, said he was inspired by Holocaust survivors he knows and by
his own Jewish history.

"It's also part of my heritage," he said.

(source: Associated Press)



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


Museum, too, survives----6 years after fire, Holocaust Museum nearly ready
to reopen


The El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center has itself become a symbol
of survival.
After an electrical fire burned down the original building in West El Paso
in 2001, museum officials almost immediately made the decision to rebuild.

It's been a challenging, and sometimes slow, process, but the museum will
open at its new Downtown home in January, more than six years after the
fire.

The museum is in the final stages of completion -- the galleries are being
completed, the exact location of artifacts is being determined, and books
are quickly filling library shelves.

"I can't wait to open. We've worked really hard to get here," said Leslie
Novick, the museum's executive director. "We may not be as big as some of
the other Holocaust museums in the country, but when it comes to quality
and content, we're going to be right up there."

The new museum, 715 N. Oregon, is a toned-down version of a grand plan by
a Mexican architect that was first considered by the board in 2003. That
tri-level museum, visible from Interstate 10, would have cost more than $5
million to build.

Money -- and, more importantly, time -- were key factors in a decision to
shift gears.

Novick said the original plan would have cost too much money and taken too
long to build. So the board opted to buy an existing building Downtown and
modify it to fit the museum's needs.

One of the biggest motivations in the hurry to reopen the museum was the
age of El Paso's handful of Holocaust survivors.

Kellen, the museum's founder, said El Paso has been home to more than 75
Holocaust survivors over the years. Only 15 of those are still alive,
Novick said -- the oldest now 94, the youngest 78.
"Soon, the voices of the survivors will no longer be heard," Kellen said.

Kellen is also a Holocaust survivor. He escaped from a concentration camp
in Lithuania with his wife and nephew. He is 90 and wants to see the new
building for the institution he created.

He still remembers the fire that destroyed the original museum in October
2001.

"I remember sitting outside while the Fire Department was inside trying to
extinguish the fire. I was in tears, praying the damage wouldn't be too
severe," Kellen said.

"I didn't think the museum would ever be rebuilt -- that nobody would be
interested -- but there was never a delay. The younger generation
immediately made the decision to replace it."

Kellen has been an active voice in the rebuilding process and has often
been frustrated by the pace of the project.

"I'm not getting younger," he said.

But he is thrilled about the upcoming opening in January: "There's still
some work to be done, but I'm happy it's almost finished."

El Paso Mayor John Cook also said he can't wait for the museum to take its
place in a cultural district Downtown. It will be within blocks of the El
Paso Museum of Art, the El Paso Museum of History, Insights El Paso
Science Museum and the El Paso Public Library.

"The Holocaust Museum is going to add to the synergy of all the different
museums in the heart of Downtown. It's going to help our revitalization
efforts," he said.

Cook said that even before the 2001 fire, when he was a city
representative, he had been talking to museum officials to consider moving
Downtown.

"The fire was so unfortunate because they lost so many exhibits," he said.
"But I think this move Downtown is for the best."

Novick said many Holocaust museums focus on the facts of the Holocaust. In
addition to those facts, the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center
will provide a moving experience, she said.

"Every museum is unique, but ours will be an emotional experience for the
people who come through here," Novick said.

Starting again

Since October 2005, the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center has been
operating in a temporary site, the basement of the Centre Court building
across the street from the County Courthouse. The owners of the building
allowed the museum to use the space at no charge until the new museum was
built.

That helped the museum continue its mission of educating the El Paso
community about the horrors of the Holocaust. Novick said having the space
kept the museum in the public eye and, as a result, attendance grew even
better than it had been in the original building.

An average month at the temporary site brought in about 1,000 visitors,
mostly schoolchildren, she said.

Novick estimates about 25,000 people will walk through the new museum in
its first year.

The Oregon Street building has also allowed the museum to grow in scope.
The original site had 3,500 square feet; the new building has 8,800. That
means this new museum can have offices, a gift shop, a multipurpose room
with state-of-the-art audio and video equipment, a fully functioning
kitchen, and a library with computers.

The 4,100 square feet of gallery space is more than double the amount at
the the original museum, Novick said. The exhibits will be complemented by
four flat-screen televisions that will run video about the Holocaust.

Everything in the galleries will be presented in both English and Spanish.

The galleries take visitors through events in chronological order,
starting with a pre-World War II exhibit featuring a home typical of the
1930s in Germany, then to the rise of Naziism, Kristallnacht ("The Night
of Broken Glass"), and the horrors that followed, including concentration
camps that killed millions of Jews, with the wiping out of whole
communities.

In one of the galleries, a construction crew has built a life-size train
car that visitors can enter to get a sense of what it was like to be
transported to one of the concentration camps.

Longtime El Paso graphic designer Victor Mireles was hired by the museum
to lead the museum's design. He's been working on the project for three
years and is putting the finishing touches on the galleries.

"I've never designed anything that looked as good as this," Mireles said
of the museum.

But in addition to the aesthetics, Mireles also immersed himself in the
story of the Holocaust to be able to recreate the experience for the
museum.

"I began reading and devouring books on the subject, and one day I said,
'I can't do this.' I was feeling so let down by humanity and I almost quit
the project because it was going to be my undoing," Mireles said.

"I decided to change my focus and look for books on people who risked
their lives to save the Jews -- the liberators. By doing that, I found
what it means to be a better person."

Other galleries are dedicated to the memories of those who died in the
Holocaust as well as those who risked their lives to save people during
that tragic period.

At the end, El Paso's own Holocaust survivors are recognized.

Help from all over

When the original museum burned, most of the artifacts inside were lost.

After the fire, people and organizations from around the world donated
their own items to the museum so it could replenish and rebuild.

"They came from liberators, former World War II soldiers and families of
survivors. We were able to replenish all of the artifacts we lost," Novick
said.

The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., also donated 12 boxes of books
to the museum's library.

The donations didn't stop at artifacts. People in El Paso also opened
their pocketbooks for the new museum.

After the altered plans for the museum were finalized, officials began a
campaign to raise $2 million for the project.

"We got that and were able to surpass that amount by about $400,000,"
Novick said. "All but $150,000 of that money came from our community."

For the past few years, the museum has been operating on a budget of
$185,000, but Novick estimates that figure will jump to $300,000 in the
new space. Since the museum is privately funded, Novick said, she will
continue to raise money locally and through grants to meet that operating
budget each year.

Kellen said he never imagined his vision would turn into a museum that is
so embraced by the El Paso community. In fact, it took him 30 years after
being liberated from the concentration camp to be able to talk about his
own ordeal.

"For so many years, I was silent and never talked about the Holocaust. It
was like a nightmare that I could not comprehend.

"But in the beginning of the 1980s, there was an unbelievable phenomenon
taking place in the United States -- neo-Nazis were denying the Holocaust
and were passing out literature at schools and colleges. That's when I
realized I had to fight the lies they were creating," Kellen said.

Today, thousands of visitors, mostly schoolchildren, hear the message of
tolerance at the El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center.

"We hope the legacy of our museum of understanding will make the universe
a better and safer place to live," Kellen said. "The museum is going to be
very modern, but our visitors will learn that the Holocaust was a crime
against civilization and humanity."

(source: El Paso Times)