Dec. 13


GREECE:

Greek historian convicted over book denying the Holocaust


A far-right Greek historian was sentenced to 14 months in prison Thursday
for inciting racial hatred with a book that denies the Holocaust took
place, court officials said.

Historian Costas Plevris appealed his sentence and was not taken into
custody.

A three-member panel of judges voted 2-1 to find Plevris guilty of
inciting violence and racial hatred. The court cleared three other
defendants of similar charges: the publisher, the editor and a journalist
at a small right-wing magazine that published extracts from the book.

Greek Jewish community leaders had testified that Plevris' book The Jews:
The whole truth has led to an increase in attacks on Jewish monuments in
the country.

Plevris protested to the court that his right to free speech had been
violated.

It was the first trial in Greece on the recently introduced incitement
charges.

An estimated 60,000 Greek Jews, most of the country's prewar Jewish
population, were killed by the Nazis during World War II.

(source: Associated Press)




GERMANY:

NPD Leader charged with Holocaust denial


Udo Voigt, the leader of the far right National Democratic Party has been
charged under Germany's Holocaust denial laws, it was reported in Mainz on
Monday evening.

According to the charge Voigt is reported to have said to Iranian
journalists that the figure of six million dead could not be accurate.
"340,000 at most could have been killed in Auschwitz" he said.

In the same interview Voigt demanded the return of Germanys eastern
territories lost at the end of World War 2. His deputy Sascha Rossmller
also gave the Iranian journalists an interview in which he asked for
financial support for the Party. He also expressed the hope that Iranian
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be "an ally for a new Germany."

(source: Functionpix)



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

Insult with stones to Jewish memorial in German town


Police were investigating Thursday who insulted Holocaust victims in a
small German town by leaving pebbles marked with names of Nazis on a
monument. Schoolchildren attended a memorial service at the monument in
Weiden, 100 kilometres west of Frankfurt, last month to commemorate 46
Holocaust victims from the town.

The pupils engraved the names of those killed on 46 pebbles and left them,
in an adaptation of the Jewish custom of placing stones rather than
flowers on the graves of loved ones.

Area police said most of the pebbles had since vanished and nine new
pebbles marked with names of senior members of the 1933-45 Nazi regime had
been found at the Weiden Jewish Monument.

An inquiry has been opened into insulting the memory of the dead, a
criminal offence, prosecutors said.

(source: Earthtimes)



CANADA:

ART: RECOVERY

Taken by Nazis, painting makes its way home
Third artwork from dealer Max Stern's looted collection will be returned
70 years later to its rightful owners in Canada



Seventy years after Nazi officials forced the noted German art dealer Max
Stern to sell his collection, one of his paintings has found its way
home.

A 17th-century landscape by Dutch painter Jan de Vos was unveiled at the
Ben Uri Jewish Museum of Art in London yesterday.

Its retrieval is the result of international detective work by a European
auction house and the Canadian foundation dedicated to rebuilding Mr.
Stern's collection.

"We're very excited," said Clarence Epstein, head of the Max Stern Art
Restitution Project at Montreal's Concordia University, in London for the
unveiling.

"This is the third recovery in a year. We never anticipated recovering
the works in the short term this way."

The painting, An extensive landscape with travellers on a track near a
walled town with a castle and church, a village beyond, dates from the
early-to-mid 17th century.

For many years, it was mistakenly attributed to Dutch artist Franois van
Knibbergen, and it was only when it was correctly found to be a de Vos
that art experts recognized its ties to Mr. Stern's lost collection.

Mr. Stern, who was Jewish, was born in Munchen-Gladbach, Germany, in 1904
and inherited his father's Dusseldorf art gallery 30 years later.

He was forced by the Nazis to stop dealing in art and, in 1937, had to
liquidate all his remaining holdings at auction - around 200 Old Master
and Northern European paintings.

He fled to Paris, then London, and finally to Canada, where he was
interned for two years.

On his release, he found work in Montreal's Dominion Gallery and went on,
with his wife, to become its owner and a highly influential dealer in
20th-century Canadian art.

"This was an individual who had seen great personal loss in his lifetime,
which he denied when he came to Canada," Mr. Epstein said.

Mr. Stern made attempts to retrieve his lost European works, but had
little success.

He died in 1987 and, having no children, left most of his estate to
Concordia and McGill universities and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The de Vos painting was last seen at an exhibition in Germany in 1968, and
then fell out of public sight until a seller brought the canvas to the
Amsterdam branch of Christie's auction house to be appraised.

When its specialists began looking into its history and realized it had
ties with the Stern Gallery, alarm bells went off.

"When our specialists are cataloguing, they're trained to look for certain
triggers," said Monica Dugot, director of restitution at Christie's.

"And this painting came up."

Ms. Dugot, who used to be the deputy head of the Holocaust Claims
Processing Office, said that Christie's has a "sensitive names" database
consisting of thousands of names of art dealers, paintings and victims who
were forced to sell their artworks or had them seized.

The Christie's specialist noted the painting's connection to the Stern
Gallery, and alerted Ms. Dugot, who contacted Mr. Stern's estate.

This level of co-operation is common among the larger international
auction houses, but smaller museums and dealers are not always so
forthcoming with information, Mr. Epstein said.

"There are other members of the art trade that don't understand the
gravity of going after these art works, and we have to educate them."

He said that auction houses, museums and dealers in Germany, where many of
the most high-status Stern paintings remain, are particularly reluctant to
co-operate.

The Max Stern Project is in a tussle with the Van Ham auction house in
Cologne over three disputed pictures.

The Stern estate has not yet had time to value the painting, but Mr.
Epstein said the estimate will likely be "in the five figures."

Although the picture dates to the golden age of Dutch painting, he noted
that, "Dutch masters are not necessarily as collectible as Warhols or
Damien Hirsts."

Three canvases have been returned to the Stern collection since Concordia
University mounted an exhibition about the lost paintings in 2006. Aime, A
Young Egyptian, by mile Lecomte-Vernet was retrieved by Sotheby's auction
house in 2006.

The 19th-century painting of an Egyptian dancer was part of Lot 168 in an
infamous sale in Cologne known as Auktion 392.

Portrait of Jan van Eversdyck by Nicolas Neufchatel was discovered in a
Mallorca gallery early this year.

The de Vos painting will return to Canada, where it will hang in the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

(source: Toronto Globe and Mail)





CHINA/JAPAN:

The scars of Nanking: Memories of a Japanese outrage ---- It is 70 years
since one of the Second World War's worst massacres. But Japan still
struggles to admit its brutality in China.


"I really, really hate the Japanese. I was raped when I was 11 years old.
I tried to commit suicide three times afterwards," said Zhang Xiuhong, 81.
She was recalling the six-week-long Rape of Nanking, when hundreds of
thousands of Chinese were slaughtered by invading Japanese troops who
breached the Ming Dynasty city walls of the wartime capital.

The ground assault began 70 years ago this week and is still known as
China's holocaust, although many here in this southeastern city, now
called Nanjing, believe the Japanese have failed to atone sufficiently for
their wartime crimes. For their part, many conservative Japanese believe
the Chinese are exaggerating the scale of the incident.

"I've repeated this thousands of times. I pretended to be dead so the
soldier would go away," said Ms Zhang, who is quite deaf and relies on her
daughter-in-law to communicate the questions. But her face flushes as she
recalls the events of that grim December 70 years ago.

"They raped young girls and grabbed young babies from their mothers and
bayoneted them in the behind. They beat me on many parts of my body and I
still can't walk well," said Ms Zhang, who starts to weep softly.

The Japanese invasion began on 10 December 1937 and the city fell three
days later, signalling the start of the Rape of Nanking. Eyewitnesses,
both Chinese and Western, say Chinese captives were tortured, burnt alive,
buried alive, decapitated, bayoneted and shot en masse. Up to 80,000
Chinese women and girls of all ages were raped and many more murdered or
forced into sex slavery.

The Chinese say the invaders killed 300,000 civilians, while many in Japan
say it is far less. A wartime tribunal put the figure at 142,000. Many
right-wing Japanese historians dispute whether the massacre ever took
place at all and the event has left enormous psychological scars in China,
remaining a huge stumbling block in relations between Beijing and Tokyo.

For the Communist government in Beijing, the incident is a crucial event
in post-Revolution history, a milestone in the war against Japanese
aggression. There were riots in Beijing as recently as 2005 over regular
visits by Japanese leaders to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours war
criminals among the country's war dead and is seen as an enormous insult
by many Chinese, and attempts to whitewash history in schoolbooks, as the
Chinese see it.

Since 2005, relations have warmed considerably between Asia's dominant
power, Japan, and its rising superpower, China. While the 70th anniversary
is being marked in Nanjing, it has taken on a relatively low profile in
the country as a whole and senior leaders are not attending the main
events.

It's a raw tale here in Nanjing. During a news conference to announce
details of a new memorial to the victims of the massacre, a Japanese
journalist asked what the panel thought about concerns that the figure of
300,000 was exaggerated. Zhu Chengshan, curator of the memorial, fielded
the question. "We want young people to think rationally and we want to
direct the visitors to the memorial to see the historical issues in
Sino-Japanese relations," said Mr Zhu.

"The Nanjing massacre is historical fact and is only one in a series of
outrages perpetrated on China by the Japanese aggressors... the figure of
300,000 is historical fact. There is no reason for people to doubt the
number," he said, to loud applause from the Chinese journalists.

The centrepoint of the new museum is a wall with a wreath containing a
picture of a victim, that changes every 12 seconds to represent how many
people died during the six-week massacre.

Many countries who were invaded by Japan during the war, which in China
lasted from 1931 until 1945, still feel that Tokyo has yet to say sorry
properly, despite billions being paid in war reparations. A sign of
Japanese ambiguity about the issue came in the respected Yomiuri Shimbun,
which wrote in an editorial on Tuesday: "On the number of victims of the
Nanjing Incident, the Chinese government has not revised its official
tally of 300,000. Indeed, when the Japanese forces wiped out the remaining
Chinese soldiers hiding in the city, many executions and violence against
civilians obviously took place, according to records and testimonies from
the time.

"However, there are theories that the number of victims was about 40,000
and that only a fraction of those deaths were murders that violated
international law," ran the editorial. "Recently, even some Chinese
scholars say scholarly debate should be deepened on the number of victims.
Such a flexible stance has started to be aired. The Nanjing Incident is an
important area for bilateral joint studies on history conducted by
Japanese and Chinese historians. It is necessary for Japan and China to
jointly proceed with empirical research toward the final report to be
compiled next year," it wrote.

While the editorial has a balanced and seemingly rational tone, it is in
sharp contrast to the kind of debate that one sees in Germany on any
issues relating to the Holocaust. What would happen if a German historian
were to accuse a Jewish historian of inflexibility on the number of people
who died at Auschwitz, or if someone were to write that the number of Jews
who died in Europe was only 600,000 and that only a fraction of those
deaths were murders that violated international law?

There is no denying the power of Zhang Xihong's testimony.

"One day three Japanese soldiers came in. We told the Japs [sic] that we
are farmers and that father was not a soldier. So the Japs beat my father
on both sides of the face and kicked me into the corner of the house. The
second day the troops burnt all the houses and we had to live in straw
huts in the fields," she said.

"Because of the violence of the rape they tore me down there and it was
hard for me to give birth afterwards. I only had one child and it took me
three days and three nights," she said.

"I can't remember exactly what happened on the days when the city first
fell to the Japanese but I remember one day when I was in the field, there
were piles of rice husks and the Japanese bayoneted the stacks to see if
people were hiding in there. I was in a small bale and they cut my finger
when they stabbed the stack," she said, holding up her hand to show where
the bayonet cut her finger. "They burned the bigger stacks and I saw
people burned alive," said Ms Zhang.

Li Gaoshan, 83, was a 12-year-old boy soldier during the invasion. "There
were dead people everywhere in the streets. We didn't dare to go out
during the day because of the aerial bombings. I escaped when soldiers
tried to shoot me in the head. I managed to escape and took shelter with
some civilians who gave me civilian clothes. We want world peace, and we
want the world to know about the Nanjing massacre," he said.

Last week, China published an eight-volume list of 13,000 victims of the
invasion, which includes the names, ages, sex, occupations and addresses
of the victims, which Japanese army unit was responsible and how the
victims were killed.

The accounts include first-hand historical documents and records, such as
US news reports, diaries and official circulars of Japanese troops,
diplomatic letters from the British and German governments, lists of
casualties and economic losses, and signatures of more than 600 Chinese
civilians seeking refuge from the invaders.

The massacre is currently the subject of nearly a dozen film projects,
with luminaries such as Oliver Stone and Steve Buscemi involved in the
debate.

One of the key witnesses to the massacre, and a central figure in many of
the films in development, is Germany's John Rabe, a paid-up member of the
Nazi party who offered refuge in the garden of his comfortable,
grey-bricked house near the city university and ultimately helped save the
lives of more than 250,000 people. Rabe led a group of Western
missionaries, businessmen and scholars in draping Red Cross flags painted
on sheets around a two-by-three-kilometre area. The quarter of a million
people who were able to get inside the safety zone survived. As far as his
diaries are concerned, the 300,000 people outside the International Safety
Zone became the victims of the Nanking Massacre.

(source: The Independent)


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

Nanjing Massacre; Still poisons relations between China, Japan


Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, a forgotten
holocaust that was one of the worst instances of mass extermination in the
20th century and still poisons relations between China and Japan.

The anniversary is being marked by the reopening of a memorial hall built
to honour nearly 300,000 people who China says were beheaded, burned,
bayoneted, disemboweled and buried alive by Japanese Imperial troops
during a six-week orgy of atrocities.

In Japan, neo-nationalist extremists and political moderates will mark the
event by denying it ever happened.

Satoru Mizushima, a documentary filmmaker who is working on a movie titled
The Truth of Nanking, said this week, "The evidence for a massacre is
faked."

Even Yomiuri Shimbun, a national daily that claims to have the world's
largest newspaper circulation, published an editorial on Tuesday that
refused to refer to the prolonged simultaneous killing of Chinese soldiers
and civilians as a "massacre," calling it the "Nanking Incident."

"Indeed, when the Japanese forces wiped out the remaining Chinese soldiers
hiding in the city, many executions and violence against civilians
obviously took place, according to records and testimonies from the time,"
the editorial said.

"However, there are theories that the number of victims was about 40,000
and that only a fraction of those deaths were murders that violated
international law."

If anything, today's grim anniversary is a reminder of a wound that hasn't
healed.

The Nanjing Massacre is still inflaming relations between the two most
important countries in Asia.

While Japan has repeatedly offered vaguely worded apologies for its
wartime behaviour, it has never directly addressed atrocities such as the
Nanjing Massacre, the treatment of prisoners of war (including Canadians),
experiments with germ warfare or the practice of forcing Asian women into
sex slavery.

In June, 100 Japanese parliamentarians, headed by a former education
minister, created a furor in China when they claimed documents in Japanese
archives indicated only 20,000 people were killed in Nanjing during the
winter of 1937-38.

They dismissed talk of a massacre as a fabrication, claiming it was
Chinese propaganda designed to humiliate Japan.

Shinzo Abe, then Japan's prime minister (he resigned in September),
created further controversy when he refused to accept the legitimacy of
the U.S.-led Tokyo war crimes trials, which initially claimed more than
150,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed in Nanjing.

Mr. Abe's grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, another former prime minister, was
held in prison for nearly four years as a war criminal but was never put
on trial.

In China, accounts of the Nanjing Massacre have been used to serve the
Communist party's ends, enabling it to take credit for defeating Japan and
blaming the Nationalists under General Chiang Kai-shek for failing to
prevent it.

The smouldering dispute over Nanjing has also fuelled anti-Japanese riots
in China and frequently erupts into racist slanging matches on the
Internet when video images of the event appear on YouTube.

While Japanese nationalists say thousands of photographs of mass
executions in Nanjing have been doctored, there remains undeniable
evidence documenting the city's nightmare.

When Japanese soldiers stormed the walled city on Dec. 13, 1937, they
launched a six-week orgy of destruction, pillage, rape and slaughter.

On the pretext of rooting out Chinese soldiers hiding among civilians,
they looted and burned, raped tens of thousands of women, and executed
captured soldiers and civilians indiscriminately.

Survivors describe incidents in which Chinese men were forced at gunpoint
to rape their mothers and daughters. Japanese soldiers gang-raped tens of
thousands of women. Chinese men were bound, lined up in long rows and
executed, before being buried in mass graves.

Japanese newspapers of the day described soldiers holding killing contests
to see who could execute the most prisoners.

A few Western missionaries and businesspeople who remained in Nanjing
throughout the occupation tried to protect residents by declaring a safety
zone under the protection of the Red Cross that was off limits to the
Japanese.

The foreigners are credited with saving the lives of nearly 250,000
refugees, and provided some of the most vivid accounts of Japanese
atrocities.

John Magee, a Christian missionary who smuggled film of the massacre out
of China, described Japanese soldiers killing not only "every prisoner
they could find, but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages.

"Many were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets," he said.

Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary who kept a diary, wrote, "How many
thousands were mowed down by guns or bayoneted we shall probably never
know. For in many cases oil was thrown over their bodies and they were
burned."

(source: National Post)