Jan. 29



GERMANY:

Memo From Berlin----Germany Confronts Holocaust Legacy Anew


Most countries celebrate the best in their pasts. Germany unrelentingly
promotes its worst.

The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin
was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to
the Nazi disgrace continues unabated.

On Monday, Germany's minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that
construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments: one near the
Reichstag, to the murdered Gypsies, known here as the Sinti and the Roma;
and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed
in the Holocaust.

In November Germany broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror
center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in
October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp. At the Dachau camp, outside Munich, a new visitor center is set to
open this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the
crematoriums. There are currently two exhibitions about the role of the
German railways in delivering millions to their deaths.

Wednesday is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler and the Nazi Party
took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of
soul-searching.

"Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to
immortalize its own shame?" asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli
ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday commemorating the
Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz. "Only the Germans had the
bravery and the humility."

It is not just in edifices and exhibits that the effort to come to terms
with this history marches on. The Federal Crime Office last year began
investigating itself, trying to shine a light on the Nazi past of its
founders after the end of the war. And this month Germany's federal
prosecutor overturned the guilty verdict of Marinus van der Lubbe, the
Communist Dutchman executed on charges of setting the Reichstag fire; that
event's 75th anniversary is Feb. 27.

The experience of Nazism is alive in contemporary public debates over
subjects as varied as German troops in Afghanistan, the nation's low
birthrate and the country's dealings with foreigners. Why Germany seems
unendingly obsessed with Nazism is itself a subject of perpetual debate
here, ranging from the nation's philosophical temperament, to simple awe
at the unprecedented combination of organization and brutality, to the
sense that the crime was so great that it spread like a blot over the
entire culture.

Whatever the reasons, as the events become more remote, less personal,
this society is forced to confront the question of how it should enshrine
its crimes and transgressions over the longer term.

In the decades after the war, the central question was how Hitler ever
came to power, Horst Mller, director of the Institute of Contemporary
History, said in an interview. Even an American television mini-series
called "Holocaust" in the 1970s affected the debate in what was then West
Germany, shifting the focus more onto the suffering of the victims
themselves, Mr. Mller recalled.

Rdiger Nemitz first began welcoming back Berlin's exiled victims of Nazi
tyranny, an overwhelming majority of them Jews, in 1969. Berlin flies its
former citizens back for a week of visits, all expenses paid and complete
with a reception by the mayor.

The Invitation Program for Former Persecuted Citizens of Berlin, which has
brought roughly 33,000 people for visits to the city, once had 12
full-time staff members. Now it is just Mr. Nemitz and a half-time
employee.

The program is not, however, winding down because of waning support. At a
time when the Berlin city government has had to make deep cutbacks in
other areas, Mr. Nemitz said, the program's $800,000 budget has not been
pared since at least 2000.

"When it started, they were grown-ups," said Mr. Nemitz from his office on
the ground floor of City Hall. "Now, it's people with hardly any memory of
Berlin. Those who come today were children then." The visits will end in
2010 or 2011, Mr. Nemitz estimated, because there are so few victims left.

Overlooked next to the fact of the survivors dying out is that Mr.
Nemitz's generation, those who fought to break the silence of their
parents and teachers, is starting to retire. When the last tour group
leaves Berlin, Mr. Nemitz, 61, who says he is afraid to take vacations
and treats his position more like a mission than a job, will shut the
door to his office and retire.

Some say that young Germans, who are required to study the Nazi era and
the Holocaust intensively, have shown little indication of letting the
theme drop, despite their distance from the events. They say that the
younger generation has tackled it as a source not of guilt, but of
responsibility on the world stage for social justice and pacifism,
including opposition to the war in Iraq.

Others say that the crimes are dealt with only superficially, and that the
young will eventually, and perhaps in carefully guarded ways, express
their exhaustion with the topic. "I can't help but feeling that some of
the continued, 'Let's build monuments; let's build Jewish museums, is a
fairly ritualized behavior," Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum
in Potsdam, an international public research group, said by telephone. "I
worry terribly that its going to backfire."

Germany's relationship with its Nazi history still regularly generates
controversy, as in the case of the dueling train exhibits. The first,
Train of Commemoration, is a locomotive carrying displays detailing the
way Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.

The train is making its way through German cities, open for visitors along
the way, ultimately bound for the site of the Auschwitz camp, in Poland.
Organizers complain that rather than embrace the project, the national
railway, Deutsche Bahn, has hindered it, requiring payment for use of the
tracks.

The second exhibition, sponsored by Deutsche Bahn itself, opened in Berlin
at the Potsdamer Platz train station last week. Critics have derided
"Special Trains to Death" as a response to the first exhibition. But
Deutsche Bahns exhibition does lay out how the company's predecessor, the
Reichsbahn, carried some three million passengers to their deaths; it is
filled with painful statistics, photographs and powerful stories of some
of the people who perished.

Any failure to handle the history with care grabs national attention. In
Munich this past weekend, a traditional carnival season parade overlapped
with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed every year on
Jan. 27. The result was a flood of negative publicity for the city.

Stefan Hauf, a spokesman for the city, said, "There was no conscious
affront," adding that the city would have changed the date of the parade,
but that too many participants were flying in from other countries to make
the change on short notice.

Munich played a special role in Nazi history. It is where the National
Socialist party rose to prominence and was the location of the Beer Hall
Putsch of 1923, the failed coup attempt enshrined in Nazi lore. Hitler
eventually declared it the Capital of the Movement. Unlike Berlin, which
has developed a reputation as a city with a memorial on practically every
street corner, Munich has often been criticized for playing down its
history.

"Munich was the Capital of the Movement; since 1945 its been the capital
of forgetting," said Wolfram P. Kastner, an artist who said he had fought
the city over the years for permission to use performance art to keep the
memory of the Holocaust alive there.

Munich's government believes it has been very active in preserving the
history of that time. A short walk from the citys historic Marienplatz, an
entire complex of new buildings is devoted to both the citys Jewish
history and the present. The synagogue there opened in November 2006 on
the anniversary of the Nazi-led Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish people,
businesses and places of worship. The Jewish Museum and a new community
center opened in Munich last year.

The city is working on a new museum to be built where the Nazi party
headquarters once stood. Called the Documentation Center for the History
of National Socialism, it is expected to open in 2011. The stated goal,
according to the museum Web site, "is to create a place of learning for
the future."

To that end, Angelika Baumann of the city's Department of Arts and Culture
has run workshops for schoolchildren 14 to 18 years old. "We're planning
for people who aren't even born yet," she said.

(source: New York Times)


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

75 Years Since Hitler Rose to Power


The 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's elevation to German chancellor on
Wednesday is one the country would prefer to forget, but the ignominious
event that ultimately led to the deaths of millions remains part of the
nation's weighted history.

Hitler's accession to the post gave the Nazi party its "in" to eventually
consolidate absolute control over the country in the months soon after,
setting it on the path to World War II and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust remains "for us Germans an indelible part of our history,"
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Sunday, as the country
marked the 63rd year since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in
annual Holocaust remembrance ceremonies.

"The memory of the genocide committed by the Germans serves to keep us
alert and fight anti-Semitism and racial hatred around the world," he
said.

Few public events are planned to mark Wednesday's anniversary, although
many schools received letters from state governments asking them to hold
special sessions in class.

German students spend at least half a school year learning about Hitler's
rise to power and the Third Reich, part of a concerted effort on the part
of modern Germany to prevent history from repeating itself.

"It is a very important day in German history, but of course it's not as
easily remembered as, for example, Kristallnacht on November 9, because
nobody was hurt on January 30," said Frank Rudolph, 44, a history teacher
at a Berlin high school.

The rise of Hitler, and the Nazis, is viewed with a national shame and
horror, but its reasons for happening were complex, said Hans Ottomeyer,
director of Berlin's German Historical Museum.

Ottomeyer cited World War I, the rampant inflation in the postwar years,
the world economic collapse of 1929 and the country's massive unemployment
as factors that led people to vote for extremist parties.

"The general fear of social and economic decline was stirred from both the
left and the right," he said. "They all tried to consolidate their
positions with violence, and that opened the flank to this seizure of
power."

About a month after being appointed chancellor, Hitler used the torching
of the Reichstag parliament building - blamed on a Dutch communist Marinus
van der Lubbe - to strengthen his grip on power, suspending civil
liberties and cracking down on opposition parties.

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

In a move earlier this month - evidence that Germany's rehabilitation is
still going on 75 years later - German prosecutors formally overturned van
der Lubbe's conviction.

Prosecutors said his 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."

At the same time, other prosecutors are still trying to track down Nazis
believed to be hiding out in other corners of the world and bring them to
justice.

A spokesman of the federal ministry of justice confirmed Tuesday the
existence of an informal request for extradition regarding war criminal
Aribert Heim, believed to be in Brazil. A court in the southwestern city
of Baden-Baden has had a case open on Heim for several decades.

In accepting responsibility for the Nazi Holocaust, in which 6 million
people, primarily Jews, were killed, Germany has established scores of
memorials and museums across the country.

Two new memorials are planned for the capital near the Reichstag building:
one commemorating Roma and Sinti, or Gypsy, victims of the Nazis and
another remembering homosexual victims.

The Reichstag building which again became the seat of the lower house of
parliament after reunification - already hosts a memorial to political
victims of the Nazis. The much bigger Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe - 2,711 concrete slabs in undulating rows that opened in 2005 -
sits nearby on the other side of the landmark Brandenburg Gate.

"The important thing is to never forget, to never erase the memory of the
Holocaust not to punish future generations of Germans, but to serve as a
warning to us all," said Rabbi Burt Schuman, an American who leads
Poland's Reform Jewish community. "I can't think of a society that Hitler
would have hated more than the Germany of Angela Merkel or most of her
predecessors."

(source: Associated Press)



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


REMEMBERING THE HOLOCAUST----How Many More Monuments for Berlin?


Monuments in Berlin dedicated to homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis as
well as to Sinti and Roma Holocaust victims are finally nearing
completion. But what about the other groups?


When the German magazine Cicero reported earlier this month that over half
the pillars of Berlin's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe were
cracked, it was tempting to blame the weight of history. Or the divisive
nature of lingering disputes over how best to honor the victims of Nazi
Germany.

This week, as Germany marks 75 years since Hitler and the Nazis rose to
power, it seems that progress has been made in solving some of those
disputes. The federal government on Monday announced that two new
Holocaust monuments -- within walking distance of the sprawling, five-acre
Jewish memorial -- will soon be completed. One will be dedicated to the
gay and lesbian victims of the Holocaust. And in February, construction
will begin on another new monument dedicated to the Sinti and Roma, often
called Gypsies, who died in the Nazi camps.

"The road is finally clear for these monuments to be erected and
inaugurated," said German Cultural Minister Bernd Neumann on Monday.

The announcement has been long in coming. Despite Berlin's willingness to
call attention to its often dark and tragic history, commemorating the
Holocaust has been a controversial undertaking. The stark, concrete
pillars of the Jewish memorial, which opened in 2005, were originally
conceived of as a monument to all of the Nazi's victims. But a German
activist, Lea Rosh, led a contentious public effort to associate it solely
with Jews killed in the Holocaust. That left advocates for other groups
persecuted and murdered by the Nazis -- homosexuals and Gypsies, as well
as the handicapped, Jehovah's Witnesses and Soviet prisoners of war --
looking for memorials of their own.

Berlin's Memorial Mile

Groups representing both the homosexuals and the Gypsies began many years
ago to plan for their own plot on Berlin's memorial mile. But they were
both stalled, not only by long processes to secure land and funding, but
also by contentious infighting over what the memorials should look like
and to whom, precisely, they should be dedicated.

For the Sinti and Roma, the dispute has been raging for years, with
construction of the fountain to commemorate the 500,000 Sinti and Roma who
died in the Holocaust originally set for 2004. But two separate groups
representing Gypsies in Germany could not agree on the inscription, and
the project stalled -- transforming a rickety wooden sign marking the spot
across the street from the German parliament building as an unintended
monument to bitter infighting. Even the 2006 agreement by the German
government to provide funding failed to resolve the stalemate.

The design calls for a fountain conceived by Israeli sculptor Dani
Karavan, inscribed with a poem called "Auschwitz" by Italian poet Santino
Spinelli. A triangular pillar will jut out of the fountain with a rose
placed on the top of it. Once a day, the pillar will sink down into the
fountain and the flower will be replaced. The project is expected to cost
2 million ($2.95 million). Construction is now set to begin in February.

Plans for a monument to homosexual Holocaust victims (the Nazis imprisoned
54,000 homosexuals and some 7,000 died in concentration and work camps)
were delayed by a similar dispute. In 2003, the German government approved
plans for a 600,000 memorial, but some advocacy groups objected to one
facet of the design: a video of two men kissing that would play on an
endless loop at one end of the monument. The video, they argued, did not
recognize the suffering of lesbians as well as gay men. In the final
design, a video of two women kissing will rotate every two years with the
video of a male couple.

'It Was Quite Late'

"I think the artist's solution that we have now is the best thing that
could ever happen, because now it's a project in constant change," Albert
Eckert, a leader of the Initiative to Commemorate the Homosexual Victims
of the Nazis, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It shows that this is an ongoing
process, that lesbians and gays are still persecuted in a lot of ways."

Eckert's group was founded for the express purpose of lobbying for the
creation of the new memorial. While press reports have claimed that
construction is to start this spring, a gigantic wooden cube --
reminiscent of an over-sized packing crate -- sitting across the street
from the Jewish memorial is testimony to Eckert's affirmation that the
monument is finished and will soon be unveiled.

"I'm relieved, but I'd say it was quite late," he said. "The war has been
over for such a long time and it took 14 years of lobbying -- this project
should have been finished a lot earlier."

Still, even when both memorials are finished, it is hard not to wonder if
more are on the way. A group representing those imprisoned and sentenced
to death for deserting the German army is also interested in a memorial.
The Third Reich likewise persecuted Jehovah's Witnesses as a group and
also killed thousands of handicapped people. None of those groups have a
prominent place in central Berlin.

Some, though, don't want one. "We are not interested in seeing the
construction of a new memorial," said Margret Hamm, executive director of
the Coalition of the Euthanized and Forcibly Sterilized, a group that
works on behalf of handicapped individuals murdered by the Nazis. "It
might have been better to have one place, one memorial, to remember all
the victims, but that's not the case. We think it would be unproductive
and illogical to concentrate our efforts on the creation of a new,
individual memorial."

Hamm said that by no means should the suffering that the Nazis inflicted
on handicapped Germans be forgotten. By her count, nearly 300,000
handicapped individuals were murdered -- 70,000 were gassed, while others
died due to starvation or after gruesome medical experiments. Their
suffering is currently commemorated by a modest plaque in the Tiergarten
Park, behind the Berlin Philharmonic. In a city that has been described as
having a memorial on every corner, and in a nation both burdened and
fascinated by its Nazi past, Hamm believes that the plaque is enough.

"We prefer to look forward, and to concentrate on working for the next
generation," said Hamm. "We carry the perspective of what happened with us
in our work for the future."

(source: Der Spiegel)





ARGENTINA:

Buenos Aires marks the Holocaust


Politicians, Jewish leaders and survivors marked International Holocaust
Remembrance Day in Buenos Aires.

David Galante, a Holocaust survivor, told the crowded event Monday at the
Buenos Aires National Bank that he still recalls dying people saying to
him: Do not give up, David. At least live to tell the world what happened
here."

Aldo Donzis, the president of the DAIA Jewish political umbrella
organization, was among the speakers along with the Argentine ministers of
education and justice.

Graciela Jinich, the director of the Buenos Aires Holocaust museum,
stressed that the commemoration is a message for the future generations.

Estela Carlotto, the president of a human rights organization that tries
to find children abducted during the dictator government of Jorge Rafael
Videla from 1976 to 1981, said she was moved by the survivors' persistence
and unwavering determination.

(source: JTA)





ALBANIA:

Albania honors resistance efforts that helped save Jews from Holocaust


Albania held a ceremony in parliament Tuesday to commemorate resistance
efforts during World War II that helped the country's tiny Jewish minority
escape the Holocaust.

Some 1,200 Jews, residents and refugees from other Balkan countries, were
hidden by Albanian families during the war, according to official records.

The ambassadors of Israel and the United States attended the ceremony in
parliament.

"The Holocaust was the defining moment of the 20th century. ... Most
nations and their people failed to meet the challenge. But that did not
happen in Albania," said Warren Miller, head of the U.S. Commission for
the Preservation of American Heritage Abroad.

Parliament Speaker Jozefina Topalli said the success of saving the
country's Jews was a source of national pride.

"But we have convened [a special session] not only out of pride in our
past but also in respect of the innocent victims of one of the darkest
time of humanity," Topalli said.

Albania was occupied from 1939 to 1943 by fascist Italy and then by Nazi
Germany until 1944. Partisan groups who helped liberate the country formed
the communist party that ruled Albania until 1990.

About 300 Jews lived in Albania until the collapse of communism, but most
have since emigrated to the United States and Israel.

(source: Associated Press)




POLAND:

Holocaust Memorial Day marked in Poland


Ceremonies marking International Holocaust Memorial Day were held at
Warsaw's Ghetto Monument on Monday.

In a letter to participants in the ceremony, Poland's President Lech
Kaczynski wrote that Holocaust was the crime incomparable with any other
in history, according to Polish news agency PAP.

"It took millions of human lives, members of the Jewish nation,
dwellers of many European countries, suffering and murdered in death camps
created by the regime of the Nazi Germany. All those people were killed
because they were Jews," Kaczynski said.

"We want to jointly pay tribute to those tortured and murdered. To do
everything for such tragedy never to happen again. For the good to win out
over the evil, understanding over distrust, openness over aversion,
empathy over indifference," the president wrote.

Holocaust Memorial Day was proclaimed by the United Nations to
commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to promote elimination of
discrimination. The date was chosen to honor the anniversary of the
liberation of the Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, on Jan. 27,
1945.

(source: Xinhua)




SERBIA:

Serbian hotel defends concept of its popular Adolf Hitler suite


The Anti-Defamation League said Tuesday it will press its effort to
persuade a Belgrade, Serbia hotel owner to stop offering guests an Adolf
Hitler-themed suite, after an exchange of letters in which the hotelier
defended the suite as an appropriate reminder of an evil leader and noted
that his father fought against the Nazis in World War II.

The Mr. President hotel features rooms highlighting current or past world
leaders.

"Using this tyrannical dictator to promote a hotel is a gross marketing
ploy and demonstrates a profound failure to understand the horror of the
Holocaust," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust
survivor.

"Reports of high demand for the hotel suite are also deeply disturbing."

Last week, the ADL wrote to hotel owner Dusan Zabunovic, demanding that he
remove the portrait of Hitler and change the theme of the suite before
International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27.

After Zabunovic responded with a defense of the concept of the suite, the
ADL this week sent a second letter, again urged the removal of Hitler's
portrait from the hotel, saying that regardless of his intentions, the
imagery was inappropriate and deeply offensive.

"Hitler orchestrated the mass murder of six million Jews, including tens
of thousands of Serbian Jews, and others," Foxman said.

"Promoting the opportunity to sleep under his portrait denigrates the
memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, who in Belgrade included
Jews, Serbs and Roma."

(source: Haaretz)





UNITED NATIONS/ISRAEL:

First joint UN, Israeli stamp on Holocaust issued


The United Nations and Israel on Monday for the first time together
issued stamps to remember the victims of the Holocaust, as an Israeli
official admitted his country and the UN have grown closer after more
than 60 years of hostility.

The stamp was designed by the UN Department of Public Information and
shows a piece of barbed wire growing into a flower. The design is used by
both the Israel Post, which put the stamps on sale on Monday, and by the
UN, which has its own postal administration and issues its own stamps.

Israeli Ambassador Dan Gillerman said Israel has come out of isolation
caused by the rejection of the once Arab-dominated UN General Assembly.
Gillerman was elected a vice president of the 192- nation body for the
current session that began in September.

'It's not the case any longer,' said Gillerman, of the Israel's isolation
in the UN, which had once left it seen as a 'permanent non- member.'

He said there have been 'improved feelings' between the UN and Israel and
several symbolic steps have been taken to integrate the Jewish state into
the international community. The assembly has adopted fewer anti-Israel
resolutions in recent years and last year elected Gillerman as one of 21
vice presidents to preside over its lengthy meetings.

The UN on Monday marked the International Day in Memory of Holocaust
Victims, the third such commemoration since 2005, when the body for the
first time recognized the massacre of an estimated 6 million Jews and
minorities by Nazi Germany.

The day-long commemorative programme included the issuance of the stamps;
addresses by survivors of Nazi death camps, including US Congressman Tom
Lantos; and an evening concert by the Tel Aviv University Symphony
conducted by Zubin Mehta.

The assembly decided in 2005 to commemorate the liberation of the Nazi
death camp at Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, and made
that date a remembrance day for victims of the Holocaust.

(source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur)






AUSTRIA:

Vienna Investigates 85 - Year - Old Nazi Camp Suspect
By REUTERS
Filed at 8:17 a.m. ET

VIENNA (Reuters) - Austrian authorities are investigating an 85-year-old
woman suspected of murder in a Nazi concentration camp during World War
Two.

New evidence from Poland suggested the woman may have committed murder in
the Majdanek camp near the Polish city of Lublin, state prosecutors in
Vienna said on Tuesday.

"We're trying to establish whether the witness statements (from Poland)
are sufficient to identify this woman," said Gerhard Jarosch, a spokesman
for state prosecutors in Vienna. "It's obviously difficult more than 60
years later."

According to media reports, the woman, whom Austrian papers identified as
Erna Wallisch, was a camp warden in Ravensbrueck concentration camp, north
of Berlin, and Majdanek in 1942-1944.

Jarosch said a previous investigation of the woman in 1973 was dropped due
to a lack of evidence linking her directly to Nazi genocide.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, said
he had discovered that a camp warden was still alive in Austria and
contacted the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which
investigates Nazi crimes in Poland.

The institute tracked down five female witnesses who said Wallisch had
abused inmates in Majdanek, he said.

"I am very happy and very pleased that this is being re-investigated,"
Zuroff told Reuters by telephone. "This is a test for Austria; this is the
last chance for Austria to do the right thing. This would be correcting an
historic injustice.

"Every effort has to be made that she does not elude justice for whatever
reasons, whether it is health or age."

(source: Reuters)


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

Austria investigates 85-year-old Nazi camp suspect


Austrian prosecutors said Tuesday they are investigating new evidence in
the case of an 85-year-old woman accused by Nazi hunters of torturing and
killing women and children while a death camp guard during World War II.

Prosecutors were looking into new witness statements from Poland which
suggested the woman identified as Erna Wallisch may have committed murder
in the Majdanek camp near the Polish city of Lublin, the prosecutors'
spokesman Gerhard Jarosch said.

"We've received new witness statements from Poland which suggest that the
woman murdered an inmate. The question is whether these statements can
clearly identify Wallisch as the perpetrator," Jarosch told AFP.

"Obviously, that can be very difficult given that it was more than six
decades ago," he added.

An earlier investigation of Wallisch had been dropped in 1972 due to a
lack of evidence linking her directly to Nazi genocide, Jarosch said.

But the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem insists she was involved in
torturing and killing inmates of the Majdanek camp between October 1942
and January 1944.

And the centre urged the Austrian authorities to expedite the case in view
of Wallisch's advanced age.

"We urge Justice Minister Maria Berger to expedite the case of Majdanek
guard Erna Wallisch... in order to ensure that she be held accountable for
her crimes," it said in a statement.

The centre's chief Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff, "noted the urgency of the
situation due to Wallisch's age."

"People like Erna Wallisch do not deserve any sympathy," Zuroff said. "The
fact that they have not previously been convicted is a travesty of justice
which can now be corrected."

Austria had failed in the past to prosecute Nazi war criminals, Zuroff
complained. He urged minister Berger to "distinguish yourself from your
predecessors by actively expediting the Wallisch case so that she will not
be allowed to elude justice."

By prosecuting Wallisch, who turns 86 in February, the authorities could
"send a very powerful message that Austria has finally ceased to be a
haven for the perpetrators of the Holocaust," Zuroff said.

Prosecutor Jarosch insisted that the authorities would not "drag their
feet."

However, Wallisch "also has rights and her rights must be respected as
well. We're aware of the urgency of the situation and will move as fast as
we can," he said.

(source: Agence France Presse)




SPAIN:

Spanish Jewish leader urges jail terms for Holocaust denial


The leader of Spain's Federation of Jewish Communities on Monday urged
lawmakers to make denial of the Holocaust once again punishable by
imprisonment.

Spanish law had mandated a sentence of up to two years in prison for
Holocaust denial but in November Spain's Constitutional Court ruled it
falls within freedom of speech and would no longer be punishable with
jail.

The court however ruled that imprisonment is a constitutional punishment
for any individual convicted of justifying the Holocaust or any other
genocide.

In an address to parliament, the federation leader Jacobo Israel Garzon
asked lawmakers to "think about how to once again introduce prison terms
for Holocaust denial in the penal code".

Holocaust denial is "the threshold of hate speech" and its
"depenalisation" could lead to the rise in the distribution of Nazi
propoganda, he added.

Holocaust denial is specifically targeted by laws in Austria, Belgium,
France, Germany, Poland and Romania.

In April 2007 the European Union made inciting racism and xenophobia
crimes throughout its 27 member states in a landmark decision tempered by
caveats to appease free speech concerns.

(source: European Jewish News)