April 29


GERMANY:

Academics: Reprint Hitler book in GermanStory Highlights
German historians want Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," republished in German

Publication banned in Germany since World War II, resale is tightly
regulated

Copyright lapses 2015, academics want annotated version to deter
right-wingers

10M copies of the 700-page book -- English translation: "My Struggle" --
in circulation




German historians want Adolf Hitler's infamous manifesto, "Mein Kampf,"
to be republished in the country before the copyright lapses in 2015.

An autographed first edtion of "Mein Kampf," which has been banned in
Germany since Wolrd War II.

Though widely available in the English-speaking world, the book's
publication has been banned in Germany since World War II and its resale
is tightly regulated.

But German copyright law dictates that an author's work enter the public
domain 70 years after his or her death, and that deadline is fast
approaching. Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945.

Before that anniversary, historians want Bavaria -- which controls the
copyright because Hitler's last official address was in Munich -- to
authorize an annotated version of "Mein Kampf."

They say a thorough, academic presentation that places Hitler's work in
historical context would be the best defense against radical right-wing
groups and neo-Nazis who might want to use the book to advance racist
agendas.

"The legends and myths connected with this book should be destroyed once
and for all," said Hans-Christian Taeubrich, director of the Documentation
Center at the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, the Bavarian city
where Hitler staged some of his most monstrous gatherings.

Taeubrich envisions a joint project between his center, prominent
historians and the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. The
institute's director, Horst Moeller, has also called for "Mein Kampf" to
be annotated and republished.

The work should begin soon, says Taeubrich, because it might take up to
three years to illuminate all the sources Hitler used in his rambling and
highly subjective tome.

"This work has not been done before," said Taeubrich. "Everyone knows this
book and what it symbolizes, but no one has recorded where his inspiration
came from."

Bavarian lawmakers have routinely turned down calls to reprint the book
for fear that it might be misused by right-wing extremists and out of
respect for the victims of the Holocaust.

A representative of Bavaria's finance ministry, which manages the
copyright, told a German radio station last week that the decision not to
publish the book was "commonly accepted and highly valued, especially by
the Jewish community, domestically and abroad." The ministry did not
immediately respond to calls seeking comment on Tuesday.

The general secretary of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Stephan
Kramer, told The Associated Press he does not object to work on a new
academic edition.

"In principle, I'd rather see the book with commentary than printed in a
normal version, or made available on the Internet," Kramer said.

Hitler wrote the 700-page book -- its English translation is "My Struggle"
-- after he was jailed in the aftermath of the failed Beer Hall Putsch in
1923. After the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s, the book became a
best-seller that made Hitler rich.

Copies of it were given free to every German soldier and newlywed couple,
bolstering circulation that reached around 10 million copies.

"Mein Kampf" was banned from publication after World War II. Possession
and resale of old copies in Germany is legal, but highly regulated. And
while the book is widely available in translations including Arabic,
Russian and Japanese, Bavaria has sought to block it from publication and
sale in some countries.

Last year the state filed suit against the owner of a Polish bookstore who
was selling German-language copies of the book online without permission.

The book has sold well in translation in the Arab world and in Turkey,
where it became a surprise best-seller in 2005.

(source: Associated Press)


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



Concentration camp doctor heads list of top 10 wanted Nazis


Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen
concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched
SS doctor Aribert Heim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a
foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was he so fit.
The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner's foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut
him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second,
Lotter said. The victim's head was removed and the flesh boiled off so
that Heim could keep it on display.

"He needed the head because of its perfect teeth," Lotter, a non-Jewish
political prisoner, recalled in testimony eight years later that was
included in an Austrian warrant for Heim's arrest uncovered by The
Associated Press. "Of all the camp doctors in Mauthausen, Dr. Heim was the
most horrible."

But Heim managed to avoid prosecution, his American-held file in Germany
mysteriously omitting his time at Mauthausen, and today he is the
most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminal on a list of hundreds who the
Simon Wiesenthal Center estimates are still free.

Heim would be 93 today and "we have good reason to believe he is still
alive," said Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's top Nazi hunter.
He spoke in a telephone interview from Jerusalem ahead of the center's
plans to release a most-wanted list Wednesday, and to open a media
campaign in South America this summer highlighting the $485,000 reward for
Heim's arrest posted by the center along with Germany and Austria.

According to an advance copy of the list obtained by the AP, the most
wanted, after Heim, are: John Demjanjuk, fighting deportation from the
U.S., which says he was a guard at several death and forced labor camps;
Sandor Kepiro, a Hungarian accused of involvement in the wartime killings
of than 1,000 civilians in Serbia; Milivoj Asner, a wartime Croatian
police chief now living in Austria and suspected of an active role in
deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies to their death; and Soeren
Kam, a former member of the SS wanted by Denmark for the assassination of
a journalist in 1943. His extradition from Germany was blocked in 2007 by
a Bavarian court that found insufficient evidence for murder charges.

The hunt for Heim has taken investigators from the German state of
Baden-Wuerttemberg all around the world. Besides his home country of
Austria and neighboring Germany where he settled after the war, tips have
come from Uruguay in 1998, Spain, Switzerland and Chile in 2005, and
Brazil in 2006, said Heinz Heister, presiding judge of the Baden-Baden
state court, where Heim was indicted in absentia on hundreds of counts of
murder in 1979.

Thousands of German war criminals were prosecuted in West Germany after
World War II. In the 1970s Western democracies began a hunt in earnest for
Eastern European collaborators who had fled West claiming to be refugees
from communism, and the end of the Cold War gave access to a trove of
communist files in the 1990s.

"All of a sudden there was pressure on countries like Latvia and Estonia
to put these people on trial," Zuroff said. "So two times in the past 30
years we've been given a tremendous infusion of new energy and new
possibilities."

The Wiesenthal Center's previous annual survey counted 1,019
investigations under way worldwide. The number is lower this year and
inexact because not all countries responded, but new investigations were
up from 63 to 202, Zuroff said.

Still, a lack of political will in many countries, and what Zuroff called
the "misplaced-sympathy syndrome" reluctance to pursue aging suspects
has meant that few people have been brought to trial and convicted.

Lotter, the witness to Heim's atrocity, was in Mauthausen because he
fought with the communists in the Spanish Civil War. His statement from
the 1950 arrest warrant was viewed by the AP at the National Archives in
College Park, Md.

Now that the necessary evidence is in place, numerous witness statements
have been taken and Heim has been indicted, all that's left is to find
him.

Born June 28, 1914 in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi
party in 1935, three years before Austria was bloodlessly annexed by
Germany.

He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a
concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and
November 1941.

While there, witnesses told investigators, he worked closely with SS
pharmacist Erich Wasicky on such gruesome experiments as injecting various
solutions into Jewish prisoners' hearts to see which killed them the
fastest.

But while Wasicky was brought to trial by an American Military Tribunal in
1946 and sentenced to death, along with other camp medical personnel and
commanders, Heim, who was a POW in American custody, was not among them.

Heim's file in the Berlin Document Center, the then-U.S.-run depot for
Nazi-era papers, was apparently altered to obliterate any mention of
Mauthausen, according to his 1979 German indictment, obtained by the AP.
Instead, for the period he was known to be at the concentration camp, he
was listed as having a different SS assignment.

This "cannot be correct," the indictment says. "It is possible that
through data manipulation the short assignment at the same time to the
(concentration camp) was concealed."

There is no indication who might have been responsible.

The U.S. Army Intelligence file on Heim could shed light on his wartime
and postwar activities, and is among hundreds of thousands transferred to
the U.S. National Archives. But the Army's electronic format is such that
staff have so far only been able to access about half of them, and these
don't include the file requested by the AP.

Heim was relatively well-known, however, having been a national hockey
player in Austria before the war, and there were plenty of witnesses from
his time at Mauthausen.

Austrian authorities sent the 1950 arrest warrant to American authorities
in Germany who initially agreed to turn him over, then told the Austrians,
in a Dec. 21, 1950 letter obtained by the AP, that they couldn't trace
him.

What happened next is unclear, but in 1958 Heim apparently felt
comfortable enough to buy a 42-unit apartment block in Berlin, listing it
in his own name with a home address in Mannheim, according to purchase
documents obtained by the AP. He then moved to the nearby resort town of
Baden-Baden and opened a gynecological clinic also under his own name,
Heister said.

In 1961 German authorities were alerted and began an investigation, but
when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed
him he apparently had been tipped off.

Heim continued to live off the rents collected from the Berlin apartments
until 1979 when the building was confiscated by German authorities.

Proof that he is alive may lie in the fact that no one has claimed his
estate. Heim has two sons in Germany and a daughter who lived in Chile but
whose current whereabouts are unknown.

In Frankfurt, Heim's lawyer said he still officially represents the
fugitive, but has not heard from him for 20 years and has "no clue" to his
whereabouts.

Asked in a telephone interview if Heim was dead, Fritz Steinacker said
only: "I don't know."

Ruediger Heim, one of the sons, would not comment when telephoned at his
Baden-Baden villa.

"All I can say is that it has been implied that I am in contact with my
father, and that is absolutely false," he said. "The rest is speculation,
and I can't enter into that."

(source: Associated Press)








ISRAEL:

Holocaust torch-lighter tells of role in Eichmann capture


Fifty years ago, Michael Maor returned to his native Germany on behalf of
the Mossad, and photographed documents that led to the conviction of
Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann.

On Wednesday night, he will light a torch at Yad Vashem in memory of those
who perished in the Holocaust - including his entire family.

"I've never seen a day of peace in my life," Maor, 75, told The Jerusalem
Post on Tuesday. "Of course it is a big honor to be at Yad Vashem."

Attending photojournalism school in Germany in the 1950s, Maor was asked
by the Mossad to gather evidence on Eichmann.

Under the cover of darkness, he snuck into the office of the general
prosecutor in Baden Essen to photograph documents proving Eichmann's
involvement in the murder of Jews.

"The room was heavy with cigar smoke, and when I started to take the
pictures [I realized] the documents were of Eichmann," Maor said.

The assignment almost got him caught. At one point, a cleaning lady was
about to enter the room, but hesitated, allowing Maor to leave unnoticed.

"I saw documents you never thought you would see," he said.

Eichmann was executed by Israel in 1962, the only Nazi to have been
sentenced to death by the Jewish state.

Maor is one of six survivors selected to light a torch on the eve of this
year's Holocaust Remembrance Day in honor of the six million Jews who
perished.

Born in 1933 in Halberstadt, Germany, Maor - an only child - and his
family fled the Nazis, first to Italy and then to Yugoslavia, where both
of his parents were murdered while hiding in the woods.

"I was running for my life in the forest," Maor said.

Hiding with various foster families and at an orphanage, he eventually
made his way to Mandatory Palestine, ending up on Kibbutz Mizra, near
Afula, in 1945. One of the families Maor hid with came to Israel in 1949,
settling in Nahariya; Maor is still in contact with them.

Describing his life in Israel, Maor speaks with a full German accent and a
matter-of-fact delivery that is broken up by an occasional laugh - almost
as if he himself finds it hard to believe some of the events of his life.

Following service in the Paratroopers Brigade, he returned to Germany for
photojournalism school. Some of the teachers had been officers in the Nazi
army.

"I told them, I am not only a Jew, I am an Israeli officer," Maor said.

Every morning, one of his teachers would give him a salute saying "Good
morning, Mr. Maor."

When he returned to Israel he worked as a photojournalist, including five
years at the Post.

"It was crazy, it wasn't like today with all the electronics. I remember
the shouting [in the newsroom]."

Maor didn't remain in journalism for long.

"Before the Six Day War, I went back to the army and left all of these
jobs behind," he said.

He eventually founded the Border Police's intelligence branch, serving for
15 years as a national intelligence officer. He retired in 1999.

Despite all the hardships he has endured during his life, Maor said he was
happy with his situation today.

"I have a wife, three children, four grandchildren, and I have a good
life," Maor said.

(source: Jerusalem Post)