March 19




GERMANY:

EVERYDAY MURDER
Nazi Atrocities, Committed by Ordinary People


From doctors to opera singers, teachers to truant schoolchildren, the
extermination of European Jews was the work of roughly 200,000 ordinary
Germans and their helpers. Years of research -- not yet complete -- reveal
how sane members of a modern society committed murder for an evil regime.

Walter Mattner, a police secretary from Vienna, was there in October 1941
when 2,273 Jews were shot to death in Mogilyov in Belarus. He later wrote
to his wife: "My hand was shaking a bit with the first cars. By the tenth
car, I was aiming calmly and shooting dependably at the many women,
children and babies. Bearing in mind that I have two babies at home, I
knew that they would suffer exactly the same treatment, if not ten times
as bad, at the hands of these hordes." After World War II, it was obvious
to most observers that such acts could only have been committed by sadists
and psychopaths, under orders from a handful of principal war criminals
surrounding Adolf Hitler. It was a comforting way of looking at things,
because it meant that ordinary people were not the real perpetrators.

But the horrifying results of an opinion poll that the Americans conducted
in their occupation zone in October 1945 could have raised doubts even
then about the version of the story that blames everything on a few
pathological criminals. Twenty percent of the respondents "agreed with
Hitler's treatment of the Jews." Another 19 percent said that although
they felt that his policies toward Jews were exaggerated, they were
fundamentally correct.

It took until the 1990s before historians and other experts embarked on a
large-scale search for those men (and women) who carried out the
Holocaust. The research isn't complete yet, but the results available to
date are shocking.

The researchers found that the perpetrators included both committed Nazis
and people who had nothing to do with the Nazis. The murderers and their
assistants included Catholics and Protestants, the old and the young,
people with double doctorates and poorly educated members of the working
class. And the percentage of psychopaths was not higher than the average
in society as a whole.

The number of perpetrators is now estimated at 200,000 Germans (and
Austrians). They were police officers like Walter Mattner,
concentration-camp personnel, members of the SS, or administrators.
Another 200,000 Estonians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and other foreigners
also helped kill Jews, some because they were forced to do so and others
voluntarily.

Crimes of Conviction, Crimes of Excess

Like Satan in the Old Testament, evil had many faces. There were those who
committed crimes out of conviction, the dedicated Nazis in the police
force -- members of the SS and the military who, like Hitler, were
convinced that the Jews were the root of all evil. Some committed their
first murders in the 1920s and 1930s. There were also those who committed
crimes of excess, taking advantage of the Jews' lack of rights in Eastern
Europe to rape and steal. In Western Galicia, for example, members of the
occupation police force would spend their free time shooting Jews in the
ghetto or blackmailing them for their jewelry.

There were those who just carried out orders from above, like Major Trapp
of Reserve Police Battalion 101. According to witness testimony, Major
Trapp was in tears when he ordered the shooting of 1,500 women, children
and elderly Jews near Warsaw, all the while saying: "An order is an
order!" In July 1942, his men drove the victims out of their houses,
loaded them into trucks and took them to a remote clearing to be executed.
They shot them in the head or in the back of the neck, and in the evenings
the soldiers' uniforms were covered with bone fragments, brain matter and
bloodstains.

Just as there is usually more than one perpetrator, there is a host of
reasons why perfectly normal men turn to murder: years of indoctrination,
blind faith in leaders, a sense of duty and obedience, peer pressure, the
downplaying of violence as a result of wartime experiences, not to mention
the lust for Jewish property.

One man who seemed to have no trouble switching from his desk to the
massacres in the East was Dortmund native Walter Blume, born in 1906, the
son of a teacher and a lawyer who completed the German equivalent of the
bar examination with a poor grade of "adequate." Nevertheless, in 1932
Blume got a job as an assistant judge on the district court in his
hometown.

Blume's career in the Hitler regime started on March 1, 1933, shortly
after the Nazis came to power. His first position was as head of the
political division at the police headquarters in Dortmund. After joining
the Nazi Party and the Storm Troopers (SA), he became head of the Nazi
secret police, or Gestapo, in the eastern city of Halle, in Hannover and
later in the capital Berlin. The main purpose of rapid rotation in
high-ranking positions, typical of the Gestapo, was to provide
opportunities to gather repressive experience.

Starting on March 1, 1941, Blume headed the personnel department in
Division I of the so-called Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main
Office, or RSHA). His first assignment was to assemble suitable personnel
for one of the murder commandos of the so-called Einsatzgruppen (Special
Action Groups), a force consisting of roughly 3,000 men, known as the
"Gestapo on Wheels." This group followed Hitler's army as it marched
eastward and was charged with the immediate liquidation of "Jewish
Bolshevism" and the "excision of radical elements."

Blume himself led a unit known as Special Commando 7a, which was part of
Einsatzgruppe B. According to Blume's own records, his unit killed roughly
24,000 people in Belarus and Russia between June and September 1941. A
short time later, Blume returned to the RSHA, where he was promoted to the
position of division head and SS banner leader. In August 1943, he went to
Athens, where he and two associates of Adolf Eichmann organized the
deportation of Greek Jews to the Auschwitz extermination camp.

Blume was placed on trial in Nuremberg in September 1947, together with 22
other men, whose regular occupations qualified them as members of
upper-class civil society. They included a dentist, a professor, an opera
singer, a Protestant pastor, a teacher -- and a few journalists. Fourteen
were sentenced to death, but only in four cases was the sentence carried
out. US High Commissioner John McCloy pardoned the rest, including Blume,
and they were gradually released from prison over the years. Blume went on
to become a businessman.

Most of the perpetrators were never punished. There have been 6,500
convictions to date, and only 1,200 of them were for murder or
manslaughter.

(source: Der Spiegel)


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


INSANITY ON THE SPREE----New Exhibit Explores Hitler's 'Germania'


Hitler was confident of winning World War II and planned to give Berlin a
monumental makeover by 1950. A group in Berlin has collected records about
his 'Germania' vision -- and plans to lead tours through what's left of
the old construction site.

Hitler never liked Berlin. He saw it as a dirty, liberal-minded place and
was disdainful of its leftist political leanings. But he had an idea for
fixing it after World War II came to an end. His famous vision of Berlin
for 1950 -- planned in detail by his architect, Albert Speer -- was a
grand Fascist city called "Germania," and a new Berlin exhibition looks at
models and physical traces of it left behind by Hitler's regime.

The exhibit, called "Myth Germania," shows just how far from reality
Hitler's mind wandered when he dreamed about Germany's future. One
centerpiece is a scale model of the Volkshalle, a gargantuan domed
auditorium that Speer imagined rising over the River Spree. The Volkshalle
dome would have risen 290 meters (951 feet) into the air, higher than some
New York skyscrapers. The exhibit's model makes scale models of the
Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag look like toys from a model train set.

The exhibit also includes building plans, photos and documentation from
Nazi schemes to relocate Jews in Berlin. And it features a model from the
Hitler movie "The Downfall," showing the so-called "North-South Axis" -- a
multi-lane boulevard Speer hoped to build from the Volkshalle to a future
"Sdbahnof" near Tempelhof airport.

Other German cities like Nuremberg and Munich were also due for a Fascist
makeover after the war, as was Linz in Austria, but Hitler wanted Berlin
to soar on an epic scale. His Volkshalle was modelled on Hadrian's
Pantheon in Rome, and in 1942 he said, "Berlin will be comparable as a
world capital only to Egypt, Babylon or Rome. What is London or Paris in
comparison?"

Underground Tours of Germania?

Models and building plans of Germania have been exhibited in museums
before, but the new show's organizers, "Berliner Unterwelten," want to
lead tours through Germania construction sites dug by the Nazis under
Berlin's Tiergarten park. Blind tunnels started as early as 1938 -- subway
and traffic tunnels, mainly, lined with marble -- were rediscovered in the
1960s. These remnants of Germania were first made semi-accessible after
2001, when a new underground road called "Tiergarten Tunnel" was finished.

But Sascha Keil, spokesman for Berliner Unterwelten -- which normally
conducts tours of unused tunnels and bunkers in Berlin -- said it was too
early to announce a formal start date for the tours. "It will be several
weeks from now," he estimated. "That's public property (under the
Tiergarten), so it takes time to get permission."

For now he hopes the Germania exhibit will find a permanent home in
Berlin. Berliner Unterwelten has rented an independent space for the show
through 2008 near the Holocaust Memorial and the Brandenburg Gate -- about
half a kilometer from the old planned site of the Volkshalle.

"Myth Germania" opens Saturday, March 15, and runs until December 31,
2008.

(source: Der Spiegel, Mar. 10)



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


Nazis' Gunman Dodges Jail, Ages in Peace


Heinrich Boere's first victim was a pharmacist. Two more victims would
follow on a single day, one gunned down at point-blank range in his
doorway, the other on the road.

And although the killing spree happened in 1944, a footnote to the far
greater carnage raging across World War II Europe, it still haunts Germany
and Holland, leaving a sense of justice denied by dueling court systems
despite the continent's long march to unity and harmonized institutions.

Boere was part of a Waffen SS death squad of mostly Dutch volunteers
tasked with killing fellow countrymen in reprisal for attacks by the
anti-Nazi resistance. His is among more than 1,000 cases worldwide which
the Nazi-tracking Simon Wiesenthal Center says are still open as of last
April 1.

Though sentenced to death in the Netherlands in 1949 later commuted to
life imprisonment Boere has managed to escape jail so far. One German
court has refused to extradite him because he might have German
nationality as well as Dutch. Another won't make him serve his Dutch
sentence in a German prison because he was absent from his trial, having
fled to Germany.

Now, The Associated Press has learned, a German investigator has quietly
reopened the case in a last-ditch attempt to bring charges against the
86-year-old Boere and see that he faces justice.

Boere volunteered for the SS only months after Holland fell to the German
blitzkrieg in 1940. After the war he spent two years in an Allied prison
camp where he made the statements later used to convict him, but he
escaped to Germany before the Dutch could bring him to trial.

Much of what is known about the case comes from the Dutch file on the 1949
trial that convicted Boere.

According to Ulrich Maass, the prosecutor now investigating him, the death
squad is known to have been responsible for 54 killings. Boere was
convicted of three of them, which he detailed, almost gunshot by gunshot,
in statements to Dutch police preserved in the court file.

The first was in July 1944.

According to Boere's statement, he and fellow SS man Jacobus Petrus
Besteman set off for the town of Breda, and the local office of the
Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi internal intelligence agency. There they were
given a list of names slated for "retaliatory measures."

Their target that day was Fritz Hubert Ernst Bicknese, pharmacist.

Wearing civilian clothes, Boere and Besteman walked into the pharmacy and
asked the man there if he was Bicknese. When he answered "yes," Boere
pulled his pistol from his right coat pocket and fired two or three shots
into Bicknese's upper body, then Besteman moved in and fired another two
or three shots into the fallen man.

The next one, in September, followed a similar pattern: Boere and an
accomplice named Hendrik Kromhout shot bicycle-shop owner Teun de Groot
when he answered the doorbell at his home in the town of Voorschoten. They
then continued to the apartment of F.W. Kusters, and forced him into their
car. They drove him to another town, stopped on the pretense of having a
flat tire and shot him.

"Kusters fell against the garden door of the Villa Constance and sank to
the ground ..." Boere told investigators. "Blood shot out of Kusters'
neck."

The SS unit, code-named Silbertanne, or Silver Pine, consisted of 15 men,
primarily Dutch, who were mustered to exact reprisals for attacks by the
Dutch resistance on collaborators.

It's not certain why all of Boere's victims were on the death list. De
Groot's son says his father wasn't a member of the armed resistance, but
he helped hide fugitives and his bicycle shop was a hangout for anti-Nazi
activists.

After the war, when the Allied war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg finished
its work, it fell to the West German government to prosecute remaining
Nazis.

But Boere wasn't among them. Today he lives in Eschweiler, outside the
German cathedral city of Aachen, in an upscale old-age home with its own
barbershop and caged parakeets tweeting in the lobby. Staff say he uses a
walker but rarely leaves his room.

Telephoned by the reception desk to ask if he would meet with a reporter,
he replied curtly: "I don't want to be disturbed."

But last year he spoke to the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, saying of
his wartime deeds: "It was another time, with different rules."

He described ringing de Groot's doorbell and asking him for his papers.

"When we knew for sure we had the right person, we shot him dead, at the
door," he said. "I didn't feel anything, it was work. Orders were orders,
otherwise it would have meant my skin. Later it began to bother me. Now
I'm sorry."

The Dutch didn't give up, and sought his extradition. But a German court
in 1983 refused on the grounds he might have German citizenship, and
Germany at the time had no provision to extradite its nationals.

A state court in Aachen ruled in 2007 that Boere could legally serve his
sentence in Germany, but an appeals court in Cologne overturned the ruling
months later, saying the 1949 conviction was invalid because Boere was
unable to present a defense.

The case continues to stir Dutch public opinion. Last August, opposition
lawmakers queried Dutch Justice Minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin who, in his
reply, named "four Dutch war criminals still alive and in Germany who have
not served a Dutch prison sentence." One of them was Boere.

It was after the Cologne decision that Maass' office, which is responsible
for investigating Nazi war crimes for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia,
took up the case again.

Efraim Zuroff, Jerusalem-based director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
said Boere may not be a senior Nazi, but "he is certainly worthy of
prosecution."

"The fact that Germany has spared killers like Boere ... is absolutely
outrageous," he said.

Besteman, Boere's partner in the first killing, is still alive, living in
the Netherlands after serving jail time for his wartime crimes, and Maass
hopes to be able to call on him if the case goes to trial.

But it's a race against time as ex-Nazis die of old age. "We haven't had a
lot of success in the past years," Maass conceded. "It's resolving itself
biologically."

The bike shop owner's son, also named Teun de Groot, doesn't want to leave
it to biology. He insists Boere should serve his life sentence, whatever
that means nearly 59 years later.

"For him, life is two years. Ten years is life, five years is life," de
Groot told The AP. "He's 86!"

De Groot, the oldest of five children, was 11 when his father was killed.
The murder, he says, devastated his family. They sold the shop at a
fraction of its value, his mother went to pieces, and the three older
children were sent to live with relatives and in foster care.

He still has the wallet his father fumbled for in his doorway to show his
visitors his ID papers. It is torn by a bullet.

(source: Associated Press)






ISRAEL:

Merkel Says Holocaust Fills Germans 'With Shame'


Angela Merkel on Tuesday became the first German chancellor to
address the Israeli Parliament, crowning a 3-day visit intended to
upgrade ties between Israel and Germany.

The visit is seen as highly symbolic by each side as Israel prepares for
the 60th anniversary of its establishment against the background of the
Holocaust.

Paying tribute to the 'special relationship' between Israel and Germany,
Mrs. Merkel said the genocide by the Nazis filled Germans 'with shame.'

High on the agenda was what Israel views as Germany's crucial role in the
international campaign against the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
Germany, a major trading partner for Iran, has reduced its commercial ties
with Iran. But Israeli opinion is that more could be done.

"The chancellor is fully aware they have to do more," said Shimon Stein, a
former Israeli ambassador to Germany.

Mrs. Merkel told Parliament that it was up to Iran to convince the world
that it was not building a nuclear weapon, and that Iran's acquisition of
one would have "disastrous consequences" and "must be prevented."

Iran has repeatedly asserted that its uranium enrichment program is for
civilian energy, not weapons. It has denounced United Nations sanctions
intended as punishment for defying resolutions calling for it to stop
enriching uranium. Mrs. Merkel said Germany wanted "a diplomatic solution,
together with its partners," and, if necessary, would support more
sanctions.

"It's an uphill battle," Mr. Stein said of her commitment. "Let's hope she
can live up to it."

Eight ministers of the German government accompanied Mrs. Merkel and held
a joint session with the Israeli cabinet on Monday, agreeing to broad
cooperation. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel called the meeting "a
unique event, perhaps even unprecedented." Earlier, he accompanied Mrs.
Merkel to Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, a move she
called an "exceptional gesture."

(source: New York Times)





USA:

Congressman Says IBM Aided Holocaust Planning, Slams Google For 'Net
Censorship

Congressman Chris Smith called out Google, Yahoo, Cisco, and Microsoft for
censoring politically sensitive content in China and other countries.


In comments sure to provoke a firestorm of controversy, a New Jersey
Congressman echoed claims that IBM (NYSE: IBM) abetted the Holocaust and
said that Internet companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NSDQ:
YHOO) who today censor content at the behest of repressive foreign
governments are acting little differently.

"Did you ever wonder why the Gestapo always had all those very
well-laid-out prints of where the Jews lived? Because IBM made it happen,"
said Congressman Chris Smith (R-N.J.), repeating allegations against IBM
presented in a book.

"High-tech is doing it today, regrettably, in places like China and
Belarus and Saudi Arabia," said Smith.

Smith spoke Thursday in Washington, D.C., at a hearing of the Commission
on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which is also known as the Helsinki
Commission. The hearing focused on funding an expansion of the Museum of
the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

Smith, a Helsinki Commissioner, called out tech companies Google, Yahoo,
Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO), and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) for censoring politically
sensitive content in China and other countries lacking free speech
protections.

"Google censors out anything you and I would believe is human rights,"
said Smith. "And they do it voluntarily, amazingly," said Smith, according
to a transcript of his comments obtained by InformationWeek.

China this week blocked access to Yahoo, YouTube, and a number of other
sites in an effort to stem the flow of news about anti-Beijing uprisings
in Tibet. U.S. lawmakers have in the past criticized Internet companies
for providing the Chinese government with the technical means for
censoring content and for providing it with information on dissident
Internet users.

In his testimony last week, Smith said he wants to ensure that "Google,
Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft and like are not complicit with dictatorships,
have standards that they have to follow in terms of personally identifying
information, not being part of -- for instance, like in China -- of the
effort to promote propaganda."

Smith has sponsored the Global Online Freedom Act, which would put limits
on how U.S. Internet providers cooperate with foreign governments.

Smith's comments last week appear to indicate he's bought into claims in
Edwin Black's 2001 book "IBM And The Holocaust" that IBM cooperated with
Hitler's Nazi government by selling it computers used to help plan and
carry out the Holocaust.

"The author talks about how, when he was going through the Holocaust
Museum, he saw this small box that had IBM indicia on it," said Smith,
adding that Black's book was "heavily footnoted."

IBM has acknowledged that its Hollerith computers were used by the Nazis,
but has repeatedly pointed out out that its German operations fell under
control of the Nazi government during the 1930s and 1940s. An IBM
spokesman said Tuesday that there is "no basis" for Black's assertions
that the company actively cooperated with Hitler's regime.

The spokesman also noted that two lawsuits against the company based on
Black's contentions were dismissed.

Calls to Smith's office were not immediately returned.

(source: InformationWeek)





CANADA:

Play tells the tale of unsung Holocaust heroine
BY LISA RAINFORD
March 19, 2008 08:55 AM
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print email Life in a Jar, a play about Polish Holocaust heroine Irena
Sendler, which has become a sensation across the United States, is making
its debut in Toronto at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre next week.
It's the story about a woman who rescued 2,500 Polish Jewish children from
certain death during the Holocaust, a story discovered by high school
students as part of a history project.

"Their teacher, in a small town in Kansas showed the students a newspaper
clipping about the woman who smuggled them out, but he thought it was a
typo because she would have been as famous as (Oskar) Schindler," said
Peter Jassem, chair of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada,
one of the organizations that helped bring the play to Toronto.

The students discovered that Sendler, as a non-Jewish social worker, had
gone into the Warsaw Ghetto, talked to Jewish parents and grandparents and
convinced them that all would die in the Ghetto or in death camps.

She tricked the Nazi guards by smuggling the children out in body bags,
saying they were ill and then adopting them into the homes of Polish
families or hiding them in convents and orphanages. She risked her life
and underwent torture by the Nazi's Gestapo (secret state police) for her
brave work.

Sendler made lists of the children's real names and put them in jars. She
later buried them in a garden so that some day she could dig up the jars
and find the children to tell them of their true identity.

Jassem said he was drawn to the uniqueness of the story.

"These (students) were not Jewish. They were not Polish. They had no
special interest so to speak. They were quite overwhelmed by what they
found out," he said.

Inspired by Sendler's heroics, the students, four Grade 9 girls, created
and performed the play, Life in a Jar, about her experiences.

It quickly took on a life of its own and was performed around Kansas and
around the U.S.

The girls garnered media attention and appeared on CNN and NBC's The Today
Show. Eventually they took the play to Poland, where they met Sendler in
Warsaw, where she still lives at 98 years of age.

"By October of last year, the play had been performed 230 times," Jassem
said. "The cast has changed a few times because it all started in 1999."

There will be four shows at the JCC on Thursday, March 27, but three of
them will be presented exclusively to schools, according to Jassem. For
more information, call the JCC at 416-924-6211.

(source: The Guardian)





POLAND:

Poland Museum Presents Holocaust Comics Book

Posted in: Arts Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Books museums Poland
The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust
at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is joining a pilot program
connected with the comic book The Search, which is intended to familiarize
young people with the story of the Holocaust. The comic book is published
by the Ann Frank Foundation in Amsterdam.

Erik Heuvel drew the comics using photographs from the Third Reich period
as his model. The European experts who had input into the contents and
illustrations include Dr. Piotr Trojanski and Miroslaw Obstarczyk of the
Museum.

Over the next few months, about a thousand pupils from all over Poland
will work with the comic book, and they and their teachers will send us
their comments, said Piotr Trojanski. The teachers attending the
postgraduate course on Totalitarianism, Nazism, and the Holocaust at the
ICEAH have already seen the comic book, and some of them, from different
parts of Poland, are using it in the classroom. Our next presentation of
the comic book for teachers will take place in Oswiecim on April 19,
during a seminar marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. If the pilot project
yields positive results, we will consider whether or not to introduce this
material in schools next year, said Trojanski.

Similar trials are underway in Hungary and North Rhine-Westphalia in
Germany. The Search is already being used in schools in the Netherlands.

The comic book brings children closer to a difficult subject. Nazism and
the Holocaust stop being abstract history. People begin to take these
matters very seriously, as something real, which actually occurred, and
not so long ago, said Julia Franz of the Ann Frank Foundation.

The pilot program is one of the many ICEAH offerings for teachers. Not
long ago, the Museum published a wide-ranging set of teaching material
titled How to Teach about Auschwitz and the Holocaust.

(source: HULIQ)





LITHUANIA:

Wiesenthal Center Criticizes Failure of Lithuanian Authorities to Prevent
Neo-Nazi Anti-Semitic Demonstration in Vilnius and Demands Harsh
Punishments for Participants

Wiesenthal Center Los Angeles

Jerusalem - The Simon Wiesenthal Center today harshly criticized the
manner in which the Lithuanian authorities handled a demonstration held
last Tuesday in the capital of Vilnius in which hundreds of neo-Nazis
marched chanting anti-Semitic slogans in the city center.

In a letter sent by its chief Nazi-hunter, Israel director Dr. Efraim
Zuroff to the Lithuanian ambassador to Israel, the Center demanded that
the demonstrators be punished as quickly as possible, noting that public
opinion poll published today in Vilnius indicated widespread public
support of the march, which clearly shows that Lithuanian society in acute
need of a lesson about the dangers of Nazism.

According to Zuroff:

"The Wiesenthal Center would therefore request that you transmit to
Vilnius not only the sense of shock and outrage felt by Jews the world
over, but our demand that those responsible for this outrage be prosecuted
and punished in an expeditious manner. I would also add that the failure
of the police to respond to the march raises serious questions about the
willingness of the Lithuanian authorities to take the necessary measures
to prevent such cases in the future."

"In fact, based on the public opinion poll which appeared in today's
Lietuvos Rytas (Lithuania's leading daily) in which 32% of the respondents
expressed approval for the anti-Semitic and racist slogans chanted by the
neo-Nazi demonstrators and another 22% approved of the march, it appears
that there is much work to be done in educating the Lithuanian public
about the dangers posed by Nazism. But perhaps that is not surprising in a
country in which not a single one of the numerous unprosecuted Lithuanian
Nazi war criminals has ever been punished for his crimes."

(source: Die Judische)






AUSTRIA:

Austria marks 'Night of Silence', 70 years after Anschluss



A vigil has been held this week in Austria in remembrance of the victims
of Hitler's Nazi regime. It was the climax of a week of events marking
the "Anschluss", or annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.

80,000 candles have been lit on Vienna's Heldenplatz (Heroes' Square), the
very square where Adolf Hitler, himself Austrian-born, announced his
country's annexation by the Third Reich, cheered on by some 250,000
people.


Each candle symbolised one of the 80,000 Austrians, including 65,000 Jews,
killed by the Nazis.

Dubbed "The Night of Silence," the ceremony is to present a sober
counterpoint to the enthusiasm that welcomed the Nazis in 1938.

Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer and President Heinz Fischer presided
over a special joint session of parliament, where they and other leaders
delivered soul-searching speeches about the country's darkest chapter.

The anniversary has revived debate about the extent to which Austrians
were victims of Nazism or willing accomplices.

Most Austrians now agree they were also deeply complicit in the Nazi
machinery of war and genocide after decades of denial.

But a poll this week showed 60 per cent are weary of talk about the Nazi
past and want an end to it after six decades of democracy.

The Wehrmacht's entry into Austria on March 12 of that year paved the way
for the widespread persecution of Jews and political opponents.

Some 76,000 people were arrested in the days following the Anschluss and a
first convoy carrying 151 Nazi opponents set off for the Dachau
concentration camp near Munich on April 1.

Universities, from which Jews were banned, lost over 40 percent of their
students and professors in a matter of hours.

In total, some 65,000 Austrian Jews were assassinated under the Third
Reich and 130,000 were forced into exile, including the father of
psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, painter Oskar Kokoschka as well as several
Nobel Prize winners and scientists.

What happened was a "destruction of intellectual Vienna," according to US
university professor Egon Schwarz, who himself fled the capital as a
teenager in 1938 and who has been invited to attend the commemoration
ceremonies.

It was followed by the departure of numerous other personalities who were
not Jewish but refused to obey Nazi laws, such as writer Robert Musil or
Alma Mahler, the widow of composer Gustav Mahler.

Ironically, this led the prestigious Vienna Opera to cut down on
performances of operas by Richard Wagner -- Hitler's favourite composer --
given the dearth of talent following the expulsion of Jewish artists.

The Opera has now put together an exhibit entitled "Victims, Perpetrators,
Spectators" to shine "more light, more clarity, more tidiness on the
history of this house," according to director Ioan Holender.

"We were not and are not little saints," he added.

Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn also deplored Friday that the Roman Catholic
Church in Austria had not more strongly opposed the Nazis.

Such self-criticism is rare however and many cultural and other
institutions still refuse to open their archives of that period, according
to the historian Bernadette Mayrhofer.

The Austrian state, too, has been accused, 70 years after the Anschluss,
of failing to fulfill its duty towards the victims of the Nazis, unlike
neighbouring Germany.

Parliament's deputy speaker Eva Glawischnig, an opposition Green deputy,
has called for legislation compensating the "forgotten victims" --
homosexuals and deserters -- and forcing the Austrian state to provide for
the upkeep of Jewish cemeteries left in ruins.

An exhibit at Vienna's Leopold Museum allegedly featuring over a dozen
artworks of dubious origin has also prompted renewed criticism over
apparent loopholes in a law on the restitution of looted Jewish property.

Meanwhile, Austria is under pressure from the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Jerusalem for its lack of motivation in pursuing Nazi war criminals.

In late February, an 86-year-old Austrian woman accused of torturing and
killing women and children while a death camp guard during World War II
died without ever facing prosecution.

(source: European Jewish Press, Mar. 16)