Jan. 12



USA:

Bush: U.S. should have bombed Nazi camps


The United States erred in not bombing Auschwitz during the Holocaust,
President Bush said.

Bush made the comment to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice while
viewing an exhibit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem of
U.S. aerial photographs of the Nazi concentration camps, according to the
memorials chairman, Avner Shalev.

Shalev took Bush on an hour-long tour of the museum on Friday; it was
Bushs second visit to Yad Vashem, a requisite stop for foreign dignitaries
visiting Jerusalem. Avner reported that the presidents eyes welled up with
tears twice during the tour.

"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a
sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we
must resist it," Bush said.

Wearing a yarmulke and flanked by Israels president and prime minister,
Bush also laid a red-white-and-blue wreath at the centers main memorial --
a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six Nazi
extermination camps.

(source: JTA)


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





Ex-Nazi guard's defense may hinge on defining 'persecution'


Legal complexities aside, the case of a former Nazi concentration camp
guard fighting to remain a United States citizen might very well hinge on
the definition of the word 'persecution.'

Attorneys for 83-year-old Anton Geiser plan to ask the 3rd U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals in Philadelphia in March to overturn a September 2006
decision by a federal judge in Pittsburgh to strip the Mercer County man
of his U.S. citizenship.

U.S. District Judge David Cercone revoked Geiser's naturalization, saying
he had been a concentration camp guard during World War II and was
therefore ineligible for citizenship.

Geiser, an ethnic German born in what is now Croatia, served as an armed
SS Death's Head guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. He
then was transferred to an SS officer training camp at Arolsen, where he
escorted prisoners to and from the Buchenwald camp, where tens of
thousands of Jews and others were exterminated. Geiser was at Arolsen
until April 1945.

After the war, Geiser buried his SS uniform in the woods and evaded
capture by the Allies, the government said. He went to Austria in 1948 and
applied for a U.S. immigrant visa under the Refugee Relief Act in 1956. He
came to the United States in 1956 and became a citizen in 1962.

The Refugee Relief Act bars visas from being issued to anyone "who
personally advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person or group
of persons because of race, religion or national origin."

Geiser's attorneys, however, contend that Cercone was wrong to rule that
phrase unambiguous. In documents appealing the ruling, they say the law is
"ambiguous because it is silent as to the meaning of the term 'personally
advocated or assisted in the persecution.'"

Geiser's lawyers also say the law gave the State Department discretion to
interpret immigration laws, and former concentration camp guards who were
not deemed war criminals were allowed into the United States.

The act "suggests multiple possible reasonable interpretations as to the
eligibility of some concentration camp guards for (Refugee Relief Act)
visas," Geiser's attorneys said.

Although the Refugee Relief Act doesn't define persecution, "the
undisputed evidence confirms that Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were places
of continual persecution, in which the prisoners were subject to
systematic brutality including slave labor, malnourishment, disease and
murder," the government said in court documents.

Geiser guarded prisoners, and although he told federal authorities he
personally never harmed any prisoners, he was ordered to shoot those who
tried to escape, the government said. U.S. authorities contend that any
armed guard at a Nazi concentration camp advocated or assisted in
persecution.

"The (Refugee Relief Act) was plainly meant to exclude all those who
'personally advocated or assisted in persecution.' If Congress intended to
include only 'war criminals,' it could have said so," government attorneys
said.

Geiser has lived in Sharon, about 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, since
June 1960, with his wife, Theresia. They have three sons. Geiser retired
in 1987 after 31 years at Sharon Steel.

(source: Associated Press)



FINLAND:


No. 54, 11 Adar 5767 / 1 March 2007

Finland's Tarnished Holocaust Record

An Interview with Serah Beizer


A few years ago it became public that Finland had handed over almost three
thousand Soviet prisoners of war to the Germans during World War II. Until
that time Finland had the reputation of a country that protected all its
Jews, except for eight Central European Jewish refugees who were handed
over to the Gestapo in Estonia.

At least seventy Soviet Jewish prisoners were extradited to the Gestapo.
Finnish historians claim that these people were handed over because they
were political prisoners. However, many of the Jews were barbers,
carpenters, and postal workers by profession. These are highly unlikely
candidates to have been political agitators or commissars.

The Finnish government has appointed a historical commission to
investigate the deaths, extraditions, and deportations of Soviet prisoners
of war and others to the Germans. Author Elina Sana, who has played a
crucial role in bringing the matter to public attention, says in her book
that Finland should establish a truth commission. The present commission
does not qualify as one. It has done important research but will only
partly disclose its findings. Finland's Data Protection Board decided that
in order to protect the privacy of the registered [person]...action has to
be taken so that data on a certain individual shall not be revealed to
outsiders' without his or her permission. As the data on prisoners of war
extradited sixty to sixty-five years ago, most of them 85-105 years old if
alive by today, will not be published, this is hardly a truth commission.
There was little punishment for war criminals in Finland. It now seems
that a large part of Finland's tarnished wartime record will never be
revealed.

"A few years ago, it became known that Finland had handed over Soviet
prisoners of war-among them a number of Jews-to the Germans during World
War II. Finland's wartime past regarding the Jews is worse than usually
portrayed. Until then, it had the reputation of a country that protected
all its Jews except for eight Central European Jewish refugees who were
handed over in November 1942 to the Gestapo in Estonia. Seven of them
perished in concentration camps.

"Almost fifty-eight years after the deportation, in 2000, a monument to
their memory was set up in Helsinki harbor. The then prime minister, Paavo
Lipponen, apologized to the Jewish community. It also took until 2000 for
the Evangelical Lutheran Church to make an official statement on this
matter. This text, approved by its synod, stated: The church admits to
having remained silent about the persecution of the Jews and wishes to
apologize to the Jewish community for this.... The handover, even of one
single Jew was a sin...more instruction on Judaism and the common roots of
Judaism and Christianity...should be given in the parishes.' The church
also declared that Luther's attitude toward Judaism should be
reexamined.'"

Serah Beizer, a part-time researcher on the history of the Jews in Finland
and the fate of Jewish POWs in World War II, is affiliated with the Yad
Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies and works as the
coordinator of the Jewish Agency Resource Center. Her MA thesis at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem was on the Hehalutz (pioneering-Zionist)
movement in Sweden during World War II.

She points out that Finland is a country where, until today, very few
foreigners live and that its language is an extremely difficult one,
inaccessible to most foreign readers. Beizer cites this as one major
reason why Finland's wartime misbehavior is not publicly known.



Elina Sana's Research

"The initial information about the eight Jewish refugees extradited to the
Gestapo was documented by the Finnish author Elina Suominen (Sana) in her
1979 book Death Ship S/S Hohenhrn.1 This German ship took the refugees to
be handed over to the German-occupied Tallinn in Estonia. For her research
she examined German archives as well as those of the Red Cross in
Switzerland. It has since become known that more Jewish refugees were
handed over to the Gestapo during the war.

Sana found the sole Jewish survivor, Mr. Georg Kollman, in Israel, From
him she heard that the eight refugees had ended up in Auschwitz. Sana went
to Auschwitz and asked to see lists of inmates, but was told that the data
were not organized. She insisted and within a few days the administration
found the list with the names of the refugees who in November 1942 had
been deported from Finland.

"When Sana published what had happened to the refugees and an interview
with Kollman's brother, who lived in Finland, the response from Finnish
historians was very critical. They countered that she was a journalist and
her work lacked footnotes. On that point they were right, but she cites
her sources at the end of the book and I have not yet read one critic who
has properly confronted her facts.

"Before the war, mainly in 1938, some five hundred Jewish refugees passed
through Finland, most of them continuing elsewhere. Thereafter the Finnish
authorities refused to accept any more. Sylvi-Kyllikki Kilpi, a member of
the Finnish parliament and active on behalf of the refugees, heard that
the reason was that there are anyway more than enough Jewish refugees' in
Finland. In late August 1938, Jewish refugees on the ship Adriane were
sent back to the harbor of Stettin in Germany, which is now Szczecin in
Poland."



Finland's Wartime Deportations to Nazi Germany

"Sana revealed in 2003 in another book that some three thousand
non-Finnish citizens-POWs-were handed over to the German army, security
service, and secret police or Gestapo. In that book, The Extradited:
Finland's Extraditions to the Gestapo, she speculated that many of the
approximately five hundred so-called political prisoners may have been
Jews.2 Her book was awarded the prestigious Tieto-Finlandia Prize for
nonfiction.

"Sana claims that the handing over was a systematic practice of both the
Finnish police and the military. Part of the deportations was a population
exchange: the Finns were interested to receive Finnish-related POWs and
citizens so as to settle them in Eastern Karelia, and in return, the
Germans received POWs captured by Finland. After the war, Valpo, the
Finnish national police force, destroyed large parts of its archives.
Nevertheless, Sana, in other archives in Finland and Germany, managed to
find documents that directly involved Valpo head Arno Anthoni and Gestapo
chief Heinrich Mller.

"When the transfer of Soviet POWs to the Gestapo became known, Efraim
Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel, wrote a letter
to the president of Finland, Tarja Halonen, requesting information on the
deportation of Jews from Finland to Germany during the war:

I am writing to you in the wake of recent revelations by Finnish
researcher Elina Sana, that Finland turned over approximately three
thousand foreigners to Nazi Germany during World War II, among them a
considerable number of political officers of the Red Army and Soviet
Jewish prisoners of war. They were thereby, in effect, sentenced to almost
certain death.... I am certain that you would agree that such revelations
require a forthright response by the Finnish authorities and appropriate
measures to acknowledge the wrongdoing and if possible, hold those
responsible accountable for their misdeeds.
"Surprisingly, within twenty-four hours President Halonen replied: I
accept your letter and I have appointed a professor at Helsinki University
to prepare for me a portfolio on the subject and we will indeed do
research on the subject.' The professor in question is the legal
historian, Prof. Emeritus Heikki Ylikangas."3



Historical Background

Serah Beizer underlines that Finland's wartime background is a very
singular one. Understanding it requires going back in history. "Until 1809
Finland was under Swedish rule. Then it became an autonomy called the
Grand Duchy of Finland, and as such part of Russia. In 1812, the Finnish
capital was moved from Turku on the western coast close to the Swedish
sphere of influence, to Helsinki, much closer to St. Petersburg, then the
Russian capital. The Russians saw Finland's strategic role as guarding
their capital.

"The first Jews came to Finland during the nineteenth century. One often
hears that these were so-called cantonists, young Jewish boys forcefully
conscripted to military service at an early age and, starting when they
were eighteen, made to serve twenty-five years in the army. These boys had
to be stripped of their religious and national identity. That only
pertains, however, to a few of the early Finnish Jews. Most were soldiers,
drafted during the reign of Tsar Nikolai I, who were based in Finland and
in 1858, as discharged soldiers, were allowed to stay in Finland. They
were known as Nikolai's soldiers.'

"In 1917, the Finnish parliament declared independence. Lenin and his
government, who by then were in power in the Soviet Union, announced their
agreement. Thus on 6 December 1917, the Republic of Finland was born. One
of the first things the Finnish parliament decided was to give the Jews
citizenship. It was the penultimate country in Europe-before Romania-to do
so. The Finns claim they were not independent before, and hence could not
have given the Jews citizenship. The truth is rather different. Already in
the nineteenth century, there were bitter debates on the issue and
hard-line positions against granting the Jews citizenship. Opponents said
they did not want Polish or Russian Jews but would accept Western ones.

"Finnish independence was followed by a civil war between the Reds, backed
by Russia, and the Whites, backed by Germany. The war involved a contest
between Russia and Germany over spheres of interest. Only in the 1920s
could Finland begin building itself as a modern independent state.

"In the 1930s, like elsewhere in Europe, several right-wing parties
emerged. These published a great deal of anti-Semitic material. A doctoral
thesis was recently published on anti-Semitic writings in Finland in that
period. The author read 433 Finnish periodicals and textbooks covering the
years 1918-1944, and concluded that 16.4 percent of them contained at
least one instance of anti-Semitism. He remarked: One can see a distinct
foreign and especially German influence in the subjects and phraseology of
Finnish anti-Semitic writings from 1918 to 1944. Several known Finnish
anti-Semitic writers had some kind of link with Germany.'"4



The 1939 War with Russia

"In autumn 1939, the USSR attacked Finland in what has become known as the
Winter War. It lasted from 30 November 1939 to 13 March 1940. Most of the
fighting occurred on the Karelian Isthmus, a territory between Finland and
Russia that the Finns considered Finnish. Although the Russians fought
with all their power, Finland, which fought alone, held out very well. But
in the peace treaty concluded in March 1940, it had to secede Karelia.

"Finland was now looking for German help. There had already been many
visits to Germany by Finnish politicians, military leaders, and the secret
police before the war. On 22 June 1941, Germany attacked the Soviet Union
through Finnish territory. Four days later Finland was bombed by the
Russians and entered what would become known as the Continuation War. It
lasted from 25 June 1941 to 19 September 1944.

"After an initial advance by the Germans and the Finns until December
1941, there followed a long period of stalemate. After months of tough
fighting in summer and autumn 1944, the war ended. Thereafter a third war,
in 1944-1945, was fought by the Finns against the Germans, their aim being
to drive the Germans out of Lappland and remain independent.

"Late in 2006, the Finnish attitude during the Continuation War again
became the subject of controversy. The Swedish journalist Henrik Arnstad,
in a book about the Swedish wartime foreign minister Christian Gnther,
claims that Finland has lied about its relationship with Germany during
that war. He wrote that Finland was the only Western democracy that
voluntarily joined forces with Nazi Germany and is keeping quiet about it.

"Arnstad's book was criticized by Pertti Torstila, secretary of state in
the Finnish Foreign Ministry. He argued that the Swedish author lacked
historical perspective. Arnstad reacted by saying it was highly unusual
that a foreign ministry would attack a foreign author.5

"The earlier-mentioned Finnish professor emeritus Heikki Ylikangas gave an
important lecture in October 2004 titled, What if We Were to Take the
Skeletons out of the Closet?' He observed: The writing of history is
always an interpretation of what happened, nothing more.... Why did our
writing of history circumvent the transfers of people to Germany?'
Ylikangas claims that, first, many war veterans are still alive and the
memory of the ninety thousand war fatalities has to be honored; second,
history-writing since the war has largely been a continuation of the sort
of research conducted shortly after the war.

"Ylikangas notes: researchers in history are more or less tied up with
[political] power. They cannot just break away and write history that
argues against the line adopted at the beginning. Almost everyone...has to
make certain compromises because of pressures from society and conclusions
drawn about the topic they are researching.' Ylikangas, for his part,
maintains that Finland was not an ally of Germany but was dependent on it.
I think the writing of history would be more objective and meaningful with
more historians such as Heikki Ylikangas."6

Serah Beizer points out that the Swedes also have skeletons in their
closet. "Their neutrality during World War II has rightfully been
challenged. In 1989 two Dutch historians, Gerard Aalders and Cees Wiebes,
published a book accusing banks and companies in Sweden of collaboration
and cooperation with Nazi Germany.7 Only recently, two new books were
published in Sweden about the Swedish king Gustaf V during the war. In an
October 1941 letter from Gustaf V to Hitler, addressed to Mein Lieber
Reichskanzler,' the king thanks Hitler warmly for having decided to attack
Bolshevism everywhere."



An Unwritten Agreement

"When the Finns fought together with the Germans, the latter did not touch
the Jews who served in the Finnish army. There was an unwritten agreement
about that. The Germans knew that in the Scandinavian countries, when one
is a citizen, one belongs. The Finns treated the Jews who were of their
nationality equally during the war. The Jewish soldiers found themselves
in a position where they were fighting on the side of Germany, even if
they did not fight together with the Germans. A film titled David
documents the experiences of these soldiers.8 The refugees, however, were
unsafe; this was even worse if one was a Russian POW.

"It seems that in the latter half of 1942, the Germans began insisting
that Finnish Jews be handed over to them. The Finns, in order not to do
so, replied that they would raise the matter in parliament, which they did
not convene for a few months.

"These were bloody wars. At the time Finland had a population of slightly
over four million, and as mentioned, ninety thousand of its soldiers were
killed. Jews served in all these wars. On a personal note, my father
fought on the Finnish side, against my husband's father, who was from
Leningrad."



Maltreatment of Prisoners of War

Serah Beizer observes: "Finnish historians have devoted very little
attention to the issue of the POWs. Testimonies and a documentary film
titled A Heaven for POWs, made by Finnish television about what happened
to the Jewish POWs, suggest that they were treated better than the others
captured by the Finns. Considering the case of the seventy Jews handed
over to the Gestapo, this is an unrepresentative picture.

"Finland captured sixty-four thousand Russian prisoners in the
Continuation War. Twenty-nine percent died in Finnish POW camps. This is
an extremely high percentage, surpassed in Europe only by the number of
Soviet POWs who died in German camps and of German POWs in the hands of
the Soviets. In Lappland there was much cooperation between Germans,
Norwegians working for the Germans, and the Finns. POWs captured there
often say that the Finns were the worst of the three.

"The high number of POW deaths became known only more than forty years
after the war, when Finnish journalist Eino Pietola published a book on
the POW issue in 1987.9 He felt he could no longer remain silent after
reading a newspaper article that claimed it was well known that Finland
had in no way mistreated its POWs, and none were killed. Pietola came
under severe criticism from historians who said he was not an academic and
did not give footnotes. Yet we now know that he was right."



The Follow-Up to Zuroff's Letter

Serah Beizer returns to the Finnish follow-up to the Zuroff letter. "Prof.
Ylikangas confirmed many facts Pietola had written. There had indeed been
sixty-four thousand POWs. Twenty-nine percent of them indeed died in
Finnish concentration camps. There is some argument about the number of
those transferred to the Germans.

"Some historians say only' two thousand were handed over, while others
give a figure of 2,500. Several historians claim that those handed over
were all Bolsheviks and hence should be considered political prisoners.

"Since then, a commission has been appointed to investigate the subject
and is scheduled to work until 2008. It received a budget of some 2
million euros. At least six researchers are currently engaged in this
project, working in an old building belonging to the national archives in
central Helsinki. Although this is positive, it has come rather late. Most
surviving POWs are very old, having been captured sixty-two to sixty-four
years ago, and the research is mostly archival work and much less based on
interviews. However, some other countries have not even done this much."



The Deported Jews

"Finding out about the Jews is not easy. Those Finns who interrogated the
Soviet soldiers during the Continuation War found that there were
eighty-nine different ethnicities in the Red Army. Many Jews called
themselves Russian, White Russian, and so on because they wanted to hide
their Jewishness, as the Finns were allies of the Germans. The Jewish POWs
who fought directly against the Germans remained alive only if they lied
about their ethnicity, claiming to be Russians or Ukrainians.

"I have heard from these Finns that one soldier who was handed over to the
Germans named Vladimir Borisovitch Levin was not Jewish but Russian. That
was what he officially claimed to be. I had a very moving interview with a
Jewish POW, Mr. Abram Bakman, who lives in Beersheba. Having been wounded
in the war, he was taken to a Finnish military hospital. When asked about
his ethnicity, he said he was Jewish. The Finnish interrogator who
received him was stunned and told him he was the first Jew he had ever
seen.

"Bakman saw two other Jews before him and felt he had been a fool to say
he was a Jew. I went to the archives, and indeed three or four names
before his there are other Jewish names. These were the people Bakman had
seen."



At Least Seventy Jews Handed Over to the Gestapo

Serah Beizer says: "I suppose, on the basis of my research, that some five
hundred to six hundred Jewish soldiers were captured by the Finns of whom
at least seventy were transferred to the Gestapo. The historians' claim is
that these people were not handed over to the Germans because they were
Jews but as political prisoners. However, among these Jews were barbers,
carpenters, a photographer, postal workers, a decorator, and a musician.
These are not the sorts of people you turn into political commissars. At
least eighteen of the Jews handed over were under age twenty-five, which
also makes it unlikely that they were political commissars or agitators.

"At the War Archives in Helsinki, I examined lists of POWs handed over to
the SS. The first time this happened was in October 1941 in the northern
town of Salla. These included a twenty-eight-year-old barber and agitator'
Zalman Kuznetsov, a professor of Marxism-Leninism named Alexandr Malkis,
and a tailor and agitator' Haim Osherovitch Lev, as well as four other
Jews. On 4 March 1942, at least seventeen of the sixty prisoners handed
over were Jews. This is a very high percentage if one takes into account
that Jews were about 1 percent of all Russian POWs.

"In 2004, Jukka Lindstedt, a doctor of law, wrote an article about the
transfer of Jewish POWs claiming that forty-seven Jews were handed over to
the Gestapo.10 This was at the very beginning of the commission's work,
while Lindstedt headed it (he later resigned after being appointed to
another important post and was replaced by the historian Dr. Lars
Westerlund). He says thirty-three of them were officers. Jews often had
academic degrees and were drafted after completing their studies. These
Red Army officers were not all what would be called military commanders.
Neither could they all have been political prisoners/communists/agitators.

"In Finland where Bolshevism was hated, no one asked if it was proper to
hand over communists to the Nazis. It was, however, against international
law. In the modern Finnish mind, it is still acceptable to have handed
over Bolsheviks. I have little doubt that the Finnish authorities who
themselves extradited Jews to the Germans were fully aware at the time
what their fate would be.

"The lists of those handed over to the German authorities include people
with obviously Jewish names whom the researchers, and especially
Lindstedt, consider non-Jews. Some examples are: Josef Jakovlevitsh
Kirshbaum, Semjon Isakovitsh Kuper, Naum Borisovitsh Smoljak, and Grigory
Jakovlevitsh Slisinger.

"Even today, the commission maintains that the Jews were not handed over
because they were Jews. As they cannot find out what happened to POWs,
nobody can prove that they were killed. So this part of Jewish war history
remains very unclear."



Finland Needs a Truth Commission

"Elina Sana says Finland needs a truth commission. It needs to learn from
its mistakes. The present commission does not meet these criteria. It
generates a lot of information but reveals very little. The Data
Protection Board of Finland decided that in order to protect the privacy
of the registered [person], ... action has to be taken so that data on a
certain individual shall not be revealed to outsiders.' The data on POWs
extradited sixty to sixty-five years ago will not be published.

"An important issue is how high the Finnish responsibility for the
transfer of the POWs goes. It is documented that Field Marshall Carl
Gustav Mannerheim, the Finnish wartime chief of staff, who in 1944 became
president, knew about the exchange of POWs between the Finns and the
Germans. Here one is on very sensitive territory because Mannerheim is a
sacred name in Finland, remembered by everybody only in positive terms."

Mannerheim had refused to attack St. Petersburg together with the Germans.
In Serah Beizer's view: "thus, paying off the Germans with a few thousand
POWs was small change for him. I am quite sure that he knew about the POW
exchanges. We have found documents that indicate this, but this matter the
Finns will never touch, even if it would constitute the truth."



Concentrating Jewish Prisoners of War

Beizer adds: "There is another matter that raises great suspicion. At the
end of 1942, Jewish POWs were concentrated at a location in central
Finland, in work camps close to the Second Central POW camp in Naarajrvi.
This might have been to protect them. In Sana's opinion, however, it was
to prepare them for transfer to the Nazis. This did not happen because
Mannerheim and his inner circle had decided already by autumn 1942 that
Germany was going to lose the war. Hence they considered it was not
worthwhile to create problems about the Jews.

"Mannerheim was a highly intelligent person. This was evident when, in
1944, he went to the Helsinki synagogue to show his appreciation for the
Jewish community that fought together with the other Finns against the
Russians.

"The Finns were very lucky that the Soviets, after the war, did not want
to find out too much about their POWs. The Russians are still not
interested. One cannot freely visit their archives to find out what
happened to their captured soldiers.

"There was little punishment for war criminals in Finland. After the war
the Finns were forced to put eight senior politicians on trial, but this
was a quite random exercise. For instance, the Russians insisted on the
Social Democrat, former foreign minister Vino Tanner being brought to
trial and he was given a prison sentence. Many others, including the
pro-Nazi Toivo Horelli, who was interior minister during the beginning of
the war, were not touched. This was despite the fact that he was the
person who decided to hand over the Jewish refugees. It seems that much of
Finland's tarnished war record will never be revealed."

Interviewed by Manfred Gerstenfeld

Translations from Finnish and Swedish to English by Serah Beizer

Serah Beizer, a part-time researcher on the history of the Jews in Finland
and the fate of Jewish POWs in World War II, is affiliated with the Yad
Vashem International School for Holocaust Studies and works as the
coordinator of the Jewish Agency Resource Center. Her MA thesis at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem was on the Hehalutz (pioneering-Zionist)
movement in Sweden during World War II.



See also:

English

http://ethesis.helsinki.fi/julkaisut/val/yhtei/vk/hanski/abstract.html

http://www2.hs.fi/english/archive/news.asp?id=20031120IE7

http://www2.hs.fi/english/archive/news.asp?id=20031104IE14

Finnish

http://www.helsinki.fi/~hylikang/HYOL.htm



Notes

1. Elina Suominen, Kuoleman laiva s/s Hohenhrn (Death Ship S/S Hohenhrn)
(Helsinki: WSOY, 1979) [Finnish]. After marriage she became Elina Sana.

2. Elina Sana, Luovutetut: Suomen ihmisluovutukset Gestapolle (The
Extradited: Finland's Extraditions to the Gestapo) (Helsinki: WSOY, 2003).
[Finnish]

3. The story of this exchange was covered by the press in Finland and
Russia and also by the Associated Press.

4. Jari Hanski, Juutalaisvastaisuus suomalaisissa aikakauslehdiss ja
kirjallisuudessa 1918-1944 (Opposition to Jews in the Finnish Press and
Literature, 1918-1944), doctoral dissertation, Helsinki University, 2006.
[Finnish]

5. "Finns Resentful over Swedish Author's Claims of Nazi Sympathies in
War," Helsingin Sanomat International Edition, 4 December 2006.

6. Heikki Ylikangas, "What if We Were to Take the Skeletons out of the
Closet?" lecture presented in Helsinki, October 2004.

7. See "Tillgivet brev frn kungen till Hitler," Gteborgs-Posten, 18
September 2006, 32. [Swedish]

8. David: Stories of Honour and Shame, produced by Lasse Saarinen, Real
Productions, Helsinki, 1997.

9. Eino Pietola, Sotavangit Suomessa 1941-1944 (The POWs in Finland
1941-1944) (Jyvskyl: Gummerus, 1987). [Finnish]

10. Jukka Lindstedt, "Juutalaisten sotavankien luovutukset" (The
Extradition of Jewish Prisoners of War), Historiallinen Aikakausikirja,
No. 2 (2004): 144-65. [Finnish]

(source: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)




GERMANY:

German rail operator attacked over track fees for 'Holocaust train'


The organisers of a rolling train exhibition about the Holocaust are
embroiled in a furious row with Germany's national rail company because
the state-owned network is charging the exhibitors tens of thousands of
euros to use its system.

The Train of Memory, a vintage steam-engine pulling two coaches containing
photographs and biographies of child Holocaust victims, began a 1,864-mile
educational tour of Germany last November and is scheduled to reach the
Auschwitz death camp in Poland in early May. The demand by Deutsche Bahn,
the state rail company, and the Ministry of Transport for toll fees is
especially controversial for Deutsche Bahn, the successor to the Deutsche
Reichsbahn, which willingly collaborated with the Nazi regime and sent
millions to their deaths by rail during the Holocaust.


But yesterday Deutsche Bahn said it was bound by law. Susanne Kill, a
spokeswoman for the network added: "Deutsche Bahn cannot allow free use of
the track in individual cases."

But the angry exhibition's organisers, the Train of Memory group, a
privately run organisation, said they had faced resistance to their
project from Deutsche Bahn "virtually every step of the way", adding that
the "disproportionately large sums" it had to pay in toll fees amounted to
"a boycott of this public commemoration".

Hans-Rdiger Minow, a spokesman for the Train of Memory, said: "We expect
to see protests in Germany and abroad until Deutsche Bahn and the Ministry
of Transport see sense."

The former Deutsche Reichsbahn used cattle-wagons to transport millions of
people, including an estimated 1.5 million children, to the concentration
camps. Fewer than 10 per cent survived. The Train of Memory exhibition
includes Reichsbahn maps and official documents revealing the company's
role in the Holocaust, as well as photographs, poems and poignant letters
written by those who never returned. More than 40,000 people have seen the
exhibition which has visited more than 40 German towns and cities.

Yesterday was the second time Deutsche Bahn had faced criticism over
alleged reluctance to face up to its Holocaust role. In 2006, the company
refused to allow another travelling exhibition about the Holocaust to be
shown at German stations.

That exhibition, which also focused on the Reichsbahn's Holocaust
responsibility, was organised by the veteran Nazi-hunter Beate Klarsfeld
and had been shown at railway stations in France. But Hartmut Mehdorn,
Deutsche Bahn's managing director, said: "The subject is far too serious
for people to engage with while munching a sandwich or rushing for a
train."

A Transport Ministry spokesman said Deutsche Bahn was considering donating
the toll fees to charity.

(source: Belfast Telegraph)




USA:

$175M Holocaust Insurance Settlement with Generali Moves Forward


For the second time, a U.S. judge approved a settlement this week among
Holocaust victims, their heirs and an Italian insurer, turning aside
objections from a few victims who believe the company is getting off easy.

Saying the settlement was "fair, reasonable and adequate,'' U.S. District
Judge George B. Daniels ended more than a decade of litigation over the
claim that Assicurazioni Generali refused to honor policies held by
victims of the World War II-era genocide.

The lawsuit in Manhattan federal court was among nearly two dozen that
were thrown out in 2004 by then U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey, who
said the class-action suits were pre-empted by the U.S. government's
policy of trying to resolve such claims through a special commission.
Mukasey is now U.S. attorney general.

The cases were eventually settled, with Generali agreeing to pay some $175
million (euro119 million) to survivors and their relatives through the
International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims and other
channels.

Last year, Daniels approved the settlement, but a federal appeals court
returned the case to him in October, ordering potential class members be
notified by mail of the settlement.

At a Jan. 7 hearing, lawyers for the class members and Generali told
Daniels that the requirements set by the appeals court had been met by the
mailing of 50,000 copies of the class notice and by fresh postings about
new deadlines on the Internet.

"This settlement embraces all persons, not just particular religious
groups, who were persecuted by the Germans during World War II,'' said
Robert Swift, a lawyer for victims who agree with the settlement.

He said the mailings had resulted in 5,500 new claims, though some of them
were duplicates filed by people who had filed claims previously.

But Samuel Dubbin, a lawyer for several victims objecting to the plan,
said Generali was getting off easy with the deal because the company had
made at least $2 billion (euro1.36 billion) by claiming it could no longer
locate adequate records from so long ago.

He said insurance companies during World War II helped the Germans locate
Jewish families and told them what they owned. "The companies turned their
customer lists over to the killers,'' he said.

Dubbin said the company should be forced to defend itself at trial and to
pay punitive damages.

The judge, though, told Dubbin that rejecting the settlement to revive a
case that had already been thrown out by a district judge was offering
Holocaust survivors "speculation or hopeful or optimistic scenarios.''

The settlement would end the last of the large cases brought in American
courts to get money from companies responsible for aiding Nazis during the
Holocaust.

Those companies have been accused of enabling the cheating of Jews, forced
laborers and slaves of their assets, including insurance policies, during
World War II.

___

On the Net:

International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims:
http://www.icheic.org

International Tracing Service: http://www.its-arolsen.org

(source: Associated Press)