Jan. 11



GERMANY:

Germany overturns conviction of Dutch communist executed for 1933
Reichstag fire

In Berlin, prosecutors said Thursday they have formally overturned the
conviction of a Dutch communist who was executed after the Nazis accused
him of torching the Reichstag parliament building in 1933.

Marinus van der Lubbe, a bricklayer, was convicted of arson and high
treason in December 1933 and executed on Jan. 10, 1934.

The federal prosecutor's office said it formally "declared that the
verdict ... is overturned" on Dec. 6.

It said that it made the move after being alerted to the case by a Berlin
lawyer, whom it did not identify, and that the conviction was overturned
automatically under a 1998 law allowing for the rehabilitation of people
convicted of crimes under the Nazis.

Historians still debate whether van der Lubbe actually set the Feb. 27,
1933, fire, which came just a month after Adolf Hitler's rise to power and
was followed by the suspension of civil liberties.

Some believe the Nazis set it themselves to give Hitler an excuse for his
crackdown against what he termed a "communist conspiracy."

Van der Lubbe was the only defendant convicted of arson at the subsequent
trial. Four other communists charged with him were acquitted.

Federal prosecutors said his conviction was overturned because the death
sentence resulted from measures introduced under the Nazis "that were
created to implement the National Socialist regime and enabled breaches of
basic conceptions of justice."

(source: Associated Press)


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



Dec. 6

SOUTH AMERICA:

In South America, a 'Last Chance' to Hunt Down Nazi War Criminals


Most of them would be in their 90s now, men who have kept their
identities hidden for decades to escape punishment for their Nazi
pasts.

Concerns that they might succeed, and die without being held accountable,
have led officials at the renowned Simon Wiesenthal Center to announce one
final drive to locate elderly war criminals hiding in South America:
Operation Last Chance.

"The natural tendency is to be sympathetic toward people after they reach
a certain age, but these are the last people on Earth who deserve
sympathy," said Efraim Zuroff, the center's top Nazi hunter. "I think that
in no way does the passage of time lessen their crimes. Their victims
deserve that an honest effort be made to find them."

The Wiesenthal Center's Nazi hunters have brought hundreds of war
criminals to justice since the end of World War II, and South America has
always provided fertile ground: Permissive immigration standards after the
war allowed many Nazis to escape prosecution in Europe and create new
identities in South America.

Some of the Third Reich's most infamous names ended up in countries such
as Argentina, where the government of President Juan Pern aided Nazi war
criminals fleeing postwar Europe and the Nuremberg trials.

In 1999, an Argentine government panel reported that at least 180 Nazis
facing criminal charges in Europe had relocated to Argentina. That number,
which other research groups have said is probably low, does not include
rank-and-file Nazis who were not individually charged. No estimates are
available for the number of Nazis who fled to other South American
countries.


Adolf Eichmann, who oversaw the transport of Jews across Europe to
concentration camps, was abducted by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960
and hanged in 1962. Josef Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" for his
ghoulish experiments at Auschwitz, spent most of his postwar life in
Argentina before dying in Brazil in 1979. Klaus Barbie -- "the Butcher of
Lyon" -- was extradited from Bolivia in 1983 to France, where he died in
prison, while Eduard Roschmann -- "the Butcher of Riga" -- died in
Paraguay in 1977.

In recent decades the rate of such discoveries has slowed, though there
are still sporadic sightings. The Wiesenthal Center hopes one of the next
to be found will be Aribert Heim, an Austrian-born doctor wanted for
killing hundreds of prisoners at the Mauthausen concentration camp in
Austria by performing lethal operations without anesthesia.

Heim has a daughter in Chile and is believed by Zuroff and others to be
alive in either Chile or Argentina. Although Heim's family has said he is
dead, German authorities have discovered a bank account with more than
$1.5 million that could be claimed by his children if they were to offer
proof of his death. They haven't, and now, believing that the account
might still be financing Heim, Germany has created a special task force to
track him.

"There's now a prize of 310,000 euros on his head -- 130,000 offered by
the German government, another 130,000 offered by us, and this July the
Austrians added another 50,000 euros," Zuroff said.

But even if Heim is found, trying him in court could prove difficult, if
not impossible. The extradition process can take years. The Wiesenthal
Center's leaders met last week with government officials in Argentina,
Chile, Brazil and Uruguay to plead for cooperation if any war criminals
are found.

That cooperation has in the past been spotty. In Argentina, investigators
and human rights groups have long tried to get the government to release
immigration records and files that they believe could detail Pern's
efforts to actively aid the relocation of Nazis to Argentina.

The government's Secretariat of State Intelligence, known as SIDE, has not
released other documents that researchers believe exist and could shed
light on a period that many Argentines consider an embarrassing chapter in
the country's history.

"SIDE denies having documents related to the Division of Information that
was the office that operated steps from Pern's office," said Sergio
Widder, who heads the Wiesenthal Center's Buenos Aires office. "The truth
is that that answer is not credible."

Pern remains an icon in Argentina, and his movement still dominates the
country's politics. Uki Goni, a journalist who has written two books about
Argentina's links with the Nazis, said some Argentine politicians are
uncomfortable addressing the issue.

"The older Peronists have a really hard time dealing with it, but the
younger ones, particularly those who grew up during the military
dictatorship here, are more willing to accept that Pern wasn't a demigod,"
Goni said.

In 2005, for example, the Argentine government finally acknowledged and
repealed a secret order that prohibited Jews fleeing the Holocaust from
entering Argentina. Goni found out about the order through his
grandfather, who was one of the Argentine diplomats who enforced
"Directive 11" in the 1940s.

"I think there's a chance they might find someone who's still alive," said
Goni. "There's a slim last chance."

(source: Washington Post)





CHINA/JAPAN:

The Big Question: Why is tension rising between China and Japan over the
'Rape of Nanjing'?


Why are we asking this now?

Next week is the 70th anniversary of the infamous Rape of Nanjing, when
Japanese soldiers went on an orgy of rape and murder in the then Chinese
capital. Dubbed the "forgotten holocaust" by its most famous contemporary
chronicler, Iris Chang, the massacre is the subject of no fewer than a
dozen new American, German and Chinese movies, including the $53m (26m)
Purple Mountain, helmed by Con Air director Simon West. Nanking, released
in China earlier this year, is reportedly already the most watched
documentary in Chinese history.

What happened in Nanjing?

Virtually the only fact not disputed is the date that victorious Japanese
troops poured into the city 13 December 1937. China says that over the
following three months, the soldiers murdered 300,000 people: women and
young girls were raped in their thousands, men were tortured and butchered
with bayonets and prisoners were mown down indiscriminately.

Eyewitness accounts by the handful of Westerners in the city appear to
back up these claims. The American missionary Minnie Vautrin wrote in her
diary: "There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this
city today." The United Human Rights Council called it "the single worst
atrocity during the Second World War era in either the European or Pacific
theatres of war."

But what does Japan say?

Japanese neo-nationalists dispute those accounts and say that the casualty
figures were inflated by Chinese wartime propaganda. Most Japanese
historians, and many scholars outside the country, now doubt the 300,000
figure. On the lunatic fringe of the neo-nationalists, academics and
politicians dispute that anyone was illegally killed. "The evidence for a
massacre is faked," says documentary director Satoru Mizushima.

Mizushima is preparing to release his own movie, The Truth of Nanjing,
which will argue that Japan's Pacific War leaders, including Iwane Matsui,
the general accused of orchestrating the Nanjing invasion, were heroes. In
one recent interview he likened them to "Jesus Christ."

Why is this causing so much friction now?

Japan's undigested history has long been a poison at the heart of the
Sino-Japanese relationship. Many ordinary Chinese feel that Tokyo has
never properly atoned for the 15 years it spent ransacking their country.
Repeated denials from the Japanese establishment seem to prove their case:
Mizushima's movie, for example, is backed by 12 politicians, including
Nariaki Nakayama, a former education minister under ex-Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi.

The official Beijing line on Japanese war crimes was muted until recently
by China's need for Japanese foreign aid. But the line is hardening as
China flexes its muscles in Asia. Japanese nationalists meanwhile accuse
the Beijing government of banging the nationalist drum and whipping up
anti-Japanese sentiment to hold its giant country together.

These problems have not stopped the two sides from entwining their
economies and developing one of the world's most important bilateral
relationships. But tensions exploded into the open a few years ago when
anti-Japanese riots broke out in China, and few are prepared to bet that
they won't do so again.

Why doesn't the issue go away?

The massacre's central place in the construction of the modern Chinese
state the Communists say they saved the country from the Japanese
military helps it stay fresh in the minds of the Chinese population. When
asked, "What comes to mind when you think of Japan?", Chinese university
students regularly poll "Nanjing" as their top answer. But Tokyo's fudging
and denials ensure that the wounds stay open.

Prime Minister Koizumi enraged China by repeatedly visiting the Yasukuni
war shrine in Tokyo, which venerates the men who led Japan to war. His
successor, Shinzo Abe, unleashed the historical deniers and whitewashers
who have long been kept tied up in the dungeons of the ruling Liberal
Democratic Party. His cabinet was dominated by revisionists who argue for
a "reinterpretation" of history. Abe himself sparked a furore by denying
that the Japanese wartime state rounded up thousands of sex slaves in Asia
during the Pacific War. Many say that current Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda
could help remove the poison for good by visiting Nanjing and making a
formal apology, but the chances of that are virtually zero.

Any other reason why Nanjing is in the news?

Unlike Japan, Germany is growing bolder about exploring its past and is
increasingly fascinated by the figure of John Rabe the so-called Good Man
of Nanjing, who ran the local Nazi party but became leader of an
international safety zone that reportedly saved 250,000 lives.

Rabe may have been the most famous witness to the massacre: After weeks
watching children and old women being repeatedly raped then murdered, he
wrote in his diary that the suffering "dumfounded" him. He is the subject
of two new movies, including one starring Steve Buscemi; as well as John
Rabe: The Schindler of Nanjing.

Will anyone in Japan see these movies?

As yet, no Japanese distributor has been found. The co-director of John
Rabe: The Schindler of Nanjing, Annette Baumeister, said Japan's public
service broadcaster NHK told her they would make their own movie about
the subject. "And maybe they will, some day."

What will happen next?

Anti-Japanese sentiment is likely to be inflamed in China. Bad publicity
is also certain to come from Europe and America, as Tokyo is aware. "It is
a delicate issue so we hope filmmakers will not create negative emotional
reactions," says a government press secretary, Mitsuo Sakaba.

Sakaba hopes a joint academic committee, set up with China to study the
issue in a "non-political way", will narrow major differences of
interpretation over wartime events. "We expect much of this study group,
so we hope the movies don't make the work of the experts difficult."

And the deniers? "I think that it will reinforce their siege mentality,"
says Koichi Nakano, a political scientist at Tokyo's Sophia University.
Mizushima is already planning two sequels to his movie. What might we
expect from parts 2 and 3? He gives some hints in his reply to a key
question: Was the Imperial Japanese Army guilty of any war crimes? "None,"
he replies. "In war, atrocities will always be carried out by a small
number of individuals, but did the Japanese army systematically commit war
crimes? Absolutely not."

Will China and Japan ever come to an agreement over Nanjing?

Yes...

* History aside, the bilateral relationship grows from strength to
strength: China became Japan's biggest trading partner last year

* It is in everybody's interests to keep this relationship on track; the
generation that remembers what happened is dying out

* The internet has given young people on both sides access to more
information on the massacre than they ever had

No...

* In Japan, revisionists increasingly influence policy and education,
controlling the version of events that is presented to the public

* Hardening nationalism is forcing both sides to dig their heels in
further, and feelings still run high

* Measured academic discussion on what happened has become almost
impossible as the debate seeps into popular culture

(source: The Independent)




POLAND:

Polish film recounts heroism of Poles who helped Jews in WWII


A new documentary film that recounts the heroic efforts and violent deaths
of Poles who helped Jews during the Holocaust premiered Wednesday, amid
efforts by Poland to alter a lingering reputation for anti-Semitism.

A Life for a Life, a 33-minute film funded by Poland's Culture Ministry,
uses testimony from survivors, grandchildren and neighbors of men and
women who were killed by the Nazis for aiding Polish Jews during Germany's
World War II occupation of Poland.

"There's a lack of knowledge that there were Poles who gave their lives to
save Jews," said Maciej Pawlicki, a journalist and TV producer who came up
with the idea for the film. "And there's a dramatic lack of knowledge that
results in very negative stereotypes, especially in the West."


The documentary's release coincides with the 65th anniversary of a Polish
wartime council set up to help Jews, and the Nazi execution of 33 Poles in
the village of Ciepielow for aiding Jews. It also comes amid a broad push
by Polish authorities to alter a perception of anti-Semitism that they say
unfairly still hangs over the country.

"My grandfather, Jan Kowalski, was the sole member of his family who
survived," said Agnieszka Kowalska, 30, who in the film recounts how Nazi
SS troops murdered seven members of her family for helping Jews, burning
them alive in their neighbor's wooden home. "I'm proud and in a way happy
that somebody values that dedication because my relatives paid the highest
price."

Unlike in Western Europe where punishment was relatively light, Poles
caught aiding Jews were most often immediately shot, along with their
entire families.

"There are no immediate plans to show the film abroad," Pawlicki said,
although he says it would help correct negative perceptions held by many
non-Poles.

Jan Zaryn, a historian from the state Institute of National Remembrance
and chief historical consultant on the documentary, argues that the film
should be shown in the West and the United States and Israel to present
this largely unknown fragment of Polish history during World War II.

Earlier this year, Polish President Lech Kaczynski led a grand ceremony at
Poland's National Opera House to honor Poles who saved Jews from the
Holocaust. Most of those honored had already received the Righteous Among
the Nations award from Israel for saving Jews .

More than 6,000 Poles have received the title from Israel's Yad Vashem
Holocaust Memorial, the most of any nation.

Poland's Foreign Ministry has also made efforts in the past year to
promote knowledge of Irena Sendler, a Polish woman who helped save 2,500
Jewish children during the war, as well as Jan Karski, a Polish wartime
resistance fighter who struggled to get news about the Nazi extermination
camps to the Allies.

(source: Associated Press)






AUSTRIA:

Holocaust denier sentenced to prison


An ailing 67-year-old Austrian convicted of Holocaust denial must serve 18
months in prison.

The sentence meted out by an Austrian court to Gerd Honsik was the first
of its kind since 1992, despite the defendant's age and kidney disorder.

Honsik published books between 1986 and 1989 disputing Holocaust death
figures and casting doubt on the existence of the Nazi gas chambers. One
of his books was titled "Acquittal for Hitler?"

Holocaust denial is a crime in Austria and several other European
countries.

Honsik, an Austria native, fled to Spain after his conviction and was
extradited in October.

Austrian prosecutors are seeking to increase his jail sentences, as Honsik
published neo-Nazi material while living in Spain.

(source: JTA)





GERMANY:

Lost Holocaust Scores Given New Life----German Director Hunts Hidden
Jewish Compositions


Like a detective, Albrecht Dumling scours basements and dusty attics
digging up the past. He travels the world hunting for music hidden during
the Holocaust.

For nearly twenty years, this Berlin-based music director has spent his
days finding works that died along with their creators, and bringing them
back to life.

During World War II, Germany's Third Reich enforced a prohibition of all
music from Jewish composers. As musicians were sent to concentration
camps, their scores were buried for safekeeping.

Dumling searches for the lost compositions in hopes of reviving them to be
played on modern stages, from Berlin to Seattle.

"We try to do some sort of justice to people who have suffered so much
injustice under the Nazis," says Dumling.

He founded his organization, Musica Reanimata, after seeing an opera,
"Kaiser of Atlantis," written and staged by Victor Ullman while he was a
prisoner in the Terezin concentration camp, in what is now the Czech
Republic.

Dumling decided he wanted to give other musicians a second chance. He
admits that not all the works are masterpieces, but many carry compelling
stories.

He shares the story of composer Siegfried Borris, a Jew given shelter by a
prominent Nazi official's wife in Germany. Borris gave the couple's
daughter music lessons throughout the war, concealing his Jewish identity.

Decades later, Dumling united Borris' daughter with the Nazi's daughter
for a public performance of his work. It was a tearful meeting for them
both.

(source: CBS News)

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

Hertha Berlin Soccer Club Examines Its Nazi Links

Nazis were mainly at the top and not among players on the field


Hertha Berlin, the capital's premier Bundesliga club, has examined its
Third Reich past and found it relatively benign.

"Hertha BSC was not infected by National-Socialism," said historian Daniel
Koerfer of Berlin's Freie University, who had been hired by the Bundesliga
club to investigate its past.

"There was no resistance against the regime, but also no deeply seated
fanatical enthusiasm for the party and its leadership, aside from
admiration for Hitler until far into the Second World War," Koerfer wrote
in the 70-page study. "There was no strongly pronounced anti-Semitism
either -- but there were also no attempts to really take a stand against
the state-mandated racist delusion."

The overwhelming majority of Hertha's players did not join the Nazi party
and most of the club's 400 members would not have sympathized with the
Nazis, the study said.

However, the club's leadership, including Hans Pfeifer -- who was
installed as president to insure Nazi ideology was adhered to -- were
either already party members or eventually joined the party.

At home in "Red Wedding"

The club was rooted in the northern working class district of Wedding,
where its stadium was.

"That may have protected us from being used more by the Nazis," said club
president Bernd Schiphorst, the initiator of the study.

Also known as "Red Wedding" before World War II, three-quarters of the
population of the district voted for the Communist party and the Social
Democrats in the 1932 election.

The soccer club is often associated with the Nazi era because of its links
to the stadium built by Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, Schiphorst
pointed out.

Star player spoke up

The club's most successful historic player, Hanne Sobeck, with whom Hertha
won its last two German league titles -- in 1930 and 1932 -- joined the
Nazi party in 1940 but kept a distance to it.

"As in the course of ever-tightening anti-Semitic isolation policies,
Jewish club members were supposed to be banned from the stands, Sobek
protested," Koerfer wrote. "He also continued his contact to Jewish club
members."

Hertha's Jewish team doctor was deported to the Auschwitz concentration
camp in 1943, where he was eventually murdered.

(source: Deutsche Welle)




ITALY:

Italian Jewish group lashes out at 'Nazi' remarks


An Italian Jewish organisation lashed out on Wednesday at a northern
Italian city counciller after he proposed using Nazi methods to make
immigrants understand how they should act.

"These unacceptable declarations are the fruit of a more and more
aggressive campaign (against foreigners) which could have dramatic
consequences," Venice Jewish community leader Vittorio Levis said.

"The question does not only concern Jews but all of civil society, because
one knows that these were methods the Nazis used," he added.

Wednesday evening, Giorgio Bettio, the member of the Treviso municipal
council who made the statement, and who is also a part of the populist
North League party, said he regretted his words.

"I recognise that I have said a grave thing, in a fit of anger. I will not
repeat it," he said, cited by ANSA agency.

"To make immigrants understand how they should behave it would be right to
use the same methods as the Nazis," Bettio had said, according to the
newspaper La Tribuna.

"For each citizen of Treviso who is harmed or annoyed, 10 non-EU citizens
should be punished," Bettio told the city council.

During World War II German dictator Adolf Hitler had ordered to execute 10
prisoners for each of 33 German soldiers killed in a resistance bomb
attack in Italy in March 1944.

Bettio went on to suggest that non-EU citizens with work permits who want
permanent residency status in Treviso should be placed under surveillance
for six months and that information about them should be collected from
their neighbours.

"After the six months, if they have behave well, the immigrants can stay.
If not, they should be watched for another three months and then
expelled," he said.

A number of northeastern Italian towns have taken controversial measures
reinforcing immigrant control over the past weeks.

Italy served 117 Romanians with expulsion orders last month after it
adopted an emergency security decree to expel EU citizens if they posed a
threat to public safety, according to the newspaper Corriere della Sera.

The measure was passed after an October murder outside Rome of an Italian
woman, allegedly by a Romanian.

(source: Agence France Presse)







SCOTLAND:
How top Nazis were brought to a secret Scottish prison camp for
brainwashing


THEY helped bring death, destruction and terror on an industrial scale to
an entire continent. And as Europe rebuilt itself following the Second
World War, they were imprisoned on a desolate Scottish moor.

Newly uncovered documents have revealed that a Caithness prisoner-of-war
camp had an extraordinary secret role as a place where some of the most
notorious figures in Hitler's Third Reich were locked up, interrogated and
- where possible - subjected to "de-Nazification".

While the existence of Camp 165 at Watten, near Wick, is known, local
historian Valerie Campbell has obtained recently declassified Government
files which reveal the existence of an inner compound with the grim
nickname "Little Belsen".

Inmates included Paul Werner Hoppe, the commandant of Stutthof
concentration camp, Poland, Dr Paul Schroder, the man behind the Nazi's V2
flying bomb project, Hitler's personal aide and SS commander Max Wunsche,
Nazi propagandist Gunter d'Alquen, and U-boat captain Otto Kretschmer,
known as the Wolf of the Atlantic.

Even today, many locals who worked behind the barbed wire fences of the
clandestine compound are reluctant to speak about it.

The compound - which operated between 1943 and 1948 - was divided into two
areas, A and B. Area A held prisoners who were assessed as low threat and
were eventually allowed to carry out unpaid work on surrounding farms. The
high security, top secret area B, overseen by armed guards in watch
towers, housed "black" prisoners regarded as hard-line and dangerous
Nazis.

The B prisoners were subjected to "de-Nazification programmes" where they
were repeatedly shown newsreels and films outlining the horrors committed
under the name of the Third Reich and highlighting their defeat by Allied
forces.

Those deemed to be reformed could be repatriated with the most unrepentant
being transferred to stand trial or face further interrogation elsewhere.
A third 'C' category was later created for those deemed to be the greatest
threat.

Little exists of the compound today, but at its height it was a mini
community of more than 70 Nissen huts. Most of its infamous inmates slept
in the freezing rusty shacks which often shook in the violent northern
winds.

As well as detention and interrogation rooms there was a makeshift church,
a barber's, workshops, classrooms and - for the low security inmates - a
theatre. Prisoners were given outfits with a distinctive diamond on the
back - which it was claimed would act as a target if they tried to escape.

Campbell said: "Most people associate the village of Watten with Alexander
Bain, the inventor of the electric clock. They would know nothing of its
significance as a PoW camp that held some of the most infamous men in the
Nazi regime.

"South of Watten it was doubtful that anyone with the exception of the
military hierarchy would have even known the camp existed."

The remote location of the camp was key to its creation. "The landscape in
Caithness was invaluable for training and subsequently holding captives,"
said Campbell.

"It could go on in secret. The farmland surrounding the camp was flat with
few hiding place."

Between 1942 and 1945, Hoppe was in charge of Stutthoff concentration camp
and personally oversaw the deaths of thousands of men, women and children
who the Nazi regime deemed to be "sub-human". When British forces
liberated the camp, many soldiers were physically sick at the horrors they
discovered.

Hoppe was held at Camp Watten between August 1947 and January 1948 and it
was expected that he would be executed on his return to Germany.

Yet, extraordinarily, the commandant escaped from a British base in Saxony
and was able to work unhindered as a landscape gardener. He was finally
re-arrested in 1953 and sentenced to just nine years imprisonment,
insisting he had been too young to understand what happened at his camp.

Nazi rocket scientist Schroder, who invented the V2 pilotless bomb which
killed thousands of residents in London alone, was treated even more
mercifully during his incarceration in Caithness in 1947.

Schroder co-operated with intelligence officials on sharing his knowledge
on "the technicalities of rocket projectiles" and as such was awarded
special status, despite being deemed to be a Nazi zealot and a "public
enemy". He was eventually handed over to the Americans and became a
respected adviser to the US Air Force.

Nazi journalist d'Alquen, who was handpicked by Himmler to pen the
official history of the SS and helped popularise the idea of Jews as
"vermin", was sent to Watten in 1945.

He was allowed to publish a monthly magazine for detainees called Der
Wattener.

After the camp closed he was sent to the US where he became a key member
of the CIA and helped devise its anti-communist propaganda strategy during
the early Cold War.

Viscountess Margaret Thurso, who lived near the camp, was fascinated by
the revelations.

She said: "Little did we know that the nearby Watten was Britain's most
secretive PoW camp. Nor did we know that senior Nazi officers, some close
to Hitler, were imprisoned there."

Camp 165 Watten by Valerie Campbell will be published by Whittles in
January.

(source: Scotland on Sunday)




BOSNIA:

Jewish leaders seek info on Bosnians who aided Jews in Holocaust


Leaders of Bosnia's Jewish community appealed Tuesday for help locating
Bosnians who aided Jews during World War II and have not been recognized.

The search is aimed at locating people who offered help and documenting
their stories, said the Bosnian Jewish Community. The effort is part of a
broader project to record the lives of Bosnia's Muslim and Jewish
communities over the past centuries.

Appearing on state TV, project leader Eli Tauber invited people to contact
the Jewish Community or Bosnia's Institute for the Research of Crimes
Against Humanity, which is also involved in the project.
Advertisement

This project is extremely important nowadays when Bosnia is full of
negative examples of who hates whom. It sends a message of coexistence and
we want to show to all peoples in Bosnia that the life of one nation with
another is sacred and has to be preserved, said Muhamed Mesic, of the
institute, on Bosnian TV.

One of the best-known stories of Bosnian involvement in preserving Jewish
tradition during World War II involves efforts to safeguard a 600-year-old
Jewish manuscript known as the Sarajevo Haggadah.

In 1492, when Spain expelled the country's Jews, a refugee brought the
book to Italy. A rabbi later brought the Haggadah from Italy to Bosnia and
passed it down through his family until a descendant, Joseph Kohen, sold
it to the National Museum in 1894.

The museum kept the treasure in a safe until World War II, when a Catholic
museum director and his Muslim colleague saved the book from a Nazi
officer who came to pick it up.

The two men spirited the book through Nazi checkpoints and carried it to a
village in the mountains above Sarajevo, where a Muslim cleric kept it
hidden beneath the floor of a mosque until the war ended. It was then
returned to the museum.

During Bosnia's 1992-95 war, a Muslim museum director and a Serb policeman
risked sniper fire to reach the museum, take the book and hide it in a
National Bank safe, where it remained until the end of the war. Bosnia
regards the Haggadah as its most important national treasure.

(source: Associated Press)






GREECE:

Greek historian on trial over 'anti-Jewish book'



A far-right Greek historian went on trial Tuesday for allegedly inciting
racial hatred with a book that denies the Holocaust took place and
allegedly contains offensive references to Jews.

Jewish community leaders testified at an Athens court that the book by
Costas Plevris "The Jews: The whole truth" has led to a spike in attacks
on Jewish monuments in the country.

"After the book was published, attacks against Jewish sites increased,"
said Moses Constantini, head of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in
Greece.

The trial - Greece's first for inciting racial hatred - was adjourned
until Dec. 13. On trial together with Plevris are the publisher, the
editor and a journalist on a small right-wing magazine that published
extracts from the book.

Benjamin Albalas, head of the Jewish Community of Athens, said the book
"incites violence ... and encourages people to kill us."

Defense lawyers said their clients were being persecuted for freely
expressing their views.

(source: Associated Press)