May 3



CZECH REPUBLIC:

Czech Terezin recalls last execution at Gestapo prison in 1945


The 51 young members of various resistance groups, the last Nazis victims
to have been executed in the Gestapo prison in the Small Fortress in
Terezin, were commemorated.

Jiri Janousek, deputy director of the Terezin Memorial, told CTK that the
names of the executed were not written on the 824 bronze plates that
non-ferrous metals thieves stole from the National Cemetery earlier in
April.

The names of the last execution victims are written on a large board that
has remained untouched.

The stolen bronze plates are to be replaced with ones of resin. The
memorial would like them to be installed at the cemetery by May 18 when
tribute is traditionally paid to the Nazi victims in Terezin.

The last execution in the Gestapo prison was the largest in its history.

The Terezin prison and ghetto and the Litomerice concentration camp made
the largest complex of its kind in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and
Moravia. Some 220,000 people from all over of Europe passed through it
during the war.

Only about one third of them lived to see the end of the war. Some of the
prisoners died in Terezin, others in extermination camps.

The Terezin Memorial was established in Terezin's Small Fortress in May
1947.

(source: Ceske Noviny)




GERMANY:

Would-be Hitler assassin dies Story Highlights

Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager was in on 1944 plot to kill German
dictator

Von Boeselager, 90, provided explosives for briefcase bomb

Many conspirators were executed, but von Boeselager evaded detection

Separate plan to shoot Hitler and SS chief was called off at last minute


In Berlin, Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, believed to be the last
surviving member of the inner circle of plotters who attempted to
kill Adolf Hitler in 1944 with a briefcase bomb, has died. He was 90.

The German military said in a statement Friday that the former army major
died Thursday night. It did not give a cause of death.

Von Boeselager was part of a group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on
July 20, 1944, supplying explosives for the operation led by Col. Claus
Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was
meeting with his aides and military advisers. Hitler escaped harm when
someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the
bomb's explosive force.

Almost immediately afterward, von Stauffenberg and many of his cohorts
were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings that saw some
hanged by the neck with piano wire.

Though many of those rounded up by Nazi officials were tortured in the
hopes they would give up other conspirators, von Boeselager's name was
never divulged and he was never found out.

Still, he carried a cyanide capsule with him until the end of the war in
case his secret was revealed.

The von Stauffenberg plot is the basis for the upcoming Tom Cruise film
"Valkyrie" in which the American actor plays the aristocratic colonel.

Von Boeselager, who lived in Altenahr, near Bonn, was first recruited by
von Stauffenberg co-conspirator Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow in 1942, he
told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview three weeks ago
that was published Friday.

He said he knew that Jews were being systematically killed and that
Germany was waging a war of annihilation along the Eastern Front with
Russia and that he never considered declining taking part in the plot.

By 1942, he said that "It was no longer about saving the country, but
about stopping the crimes," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

The plotters first arranged for von Boeselager, assigned to the army high
command as an aide to Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, to try and shoot
both Hitler and SS chief Heinrich Himmler at a meeting in 1943.

Von Kluge, who committed suicide a month after the 1944 attempt on Hitler,
called the assassination off at the last minute after learning that
Himmler would not be at the meeting.

Von Boeselager followed von Kluge's orders, but told the FAZ the decision
never ceased to haunt him.

"I always see Hitler from here to the fireplace in front of me and think,
'What would have happened if you had shot him?"' he told FAZ, describing a
distance of about two feet with his hands.

He also recalled when he joined the von Stauffenberg plot: His brother
called him in the spring of 1944, asking for his help in providing
explosives.

Von Boeselager recommended English-made explosives as the best, and -- as
part of his assignment to an explosives research team -- was able to
acquire them without drawing suspicion.

He delivered them to Maj. Gen. Helmuth Stieff, packed into a suitcase.
Stieff was later executed for his role in the plot, and von Boeselager's
brother was killed in fighting on the Eastern Front.

Had the bombing succeeded, von Boeselager said he was assigned to lead a
1,000-man unit into Berlin to secure the capital.

Von Boeselager told FAZ that in the years immediately after the war, he
spoke with his wife, Rosa, about his role in the resistance, but otherwise
said little else.

"There was nobody one could talk with about it," he said. "They were all
dead, and with others it would just have been bragging."

There was also the fact that immediately after World War II, the July 20
plotters were widely viewed as traitors, a label the Nazis gave them that
stuck for years.

"For a long time, it was not believable to normal Germans that the
government was criminal," he recalled. "And as soon as one thought they
had pushed that out of the way, then people just didn't want to know."

(source: Associated Press)


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

Nazi-hunters turn historian


Germany's chief Nazi prosecutor is now more likely to be consoling the
grandchild of a war criminal than chasing Adolf Hitler's murderous
henchmen.

More than 60 years after World War Two ended, Nazi hunters are running out
of targets and increasingly becoming historians who shine a harsh light on
dark family secrets. "It's hard to keep prosecutors here," said Kurt
Schrimm, who leads Germany's department for prosecuting Nazi war crimes.
"I tell them when they start that the prospects of prosecution are slim.
The suspects are getting older. It's more about finding out and explaining
what happened."

For many Germans, the search for Nazis in their family ends in the small
western town of Ludwigsburg.

Hundreds of thousands of index cards fill the cellar of the former prison.
Each card carries a name and often a list of war-crime prosecutions. A
librarian leafs through the indexes, looking for names put forward by
callers researching family members they may have never known.

For Schrimm, the face of one such bewildered teenager is as vivid a memory
as that of her grandfather, Josef Schwammberger -- the "most brutal Nazi"
he ever put behind bars.

The Austrian's purges in a Polish ghetto included shooting 40 children in
an orphanage and offering a false amnesty to Jews living underground only
to order them stripped and executed.

After paying 500,000 Deutsch Marks to an informant, Schrimm traced
Schwammberger to Argentina which extradited him in 1987.

In his initial interviews, Schwammberger appeared to be a gentle,
grandfatherly figure. He told Schrimm he had turned to "the Pope" for help
in escaping the advancing allied forces.

Over the course of his trial, he emerged as a sadist who once encouraged
his dog to maul a man to death.

During the hearings, Schrimm received a visit from a 17-year-old girl:
"His granddaughter had read it in the newspapers and wanted to know
firsthand if it was true," Schrimm recalls. "She was totally shaken."

Correcting history has also become an important part of Eli Rosenbaum's
work.

Head of the U.S. Office of Special Investigations, Rosenbaum has unmasked
Nazis who settled inconspicuously into suburban America as well as
knocking prominent citizens off their pedestals.

When Rosenbaum discovered Arthur Rudolph around 1980, the architect of the
Saturn V rocket that put man on the moon was one of America's most
celebrated adopted sons.

UNDERGROUND CHAMBERS

But during the war, Rudolph had managed a "hell-like" underground factory
in Germany where slave workers built the V2 rocket, Rosenbaum says.
Prisoners were tortured, killed and, on one occasion, forced to watch a
mass hanging of inmates.

After the war, Rudolph and others were hired by the U.S. military and
brought to their new home under a secret program called Project Paperclip,
formerly known as Operation Overcast.

In German archives, Rosenbaum discovered a report signed by Rudolph
describing a visit to an aircraft factory using forced labor. "He writes
that this is great from the security perspective and recommends they use
camp inmates to build the V2."

Disgraced, Rudolph surrendered his U.S. citizenship and returned to
Germany. "I remember he died on New Year's day," says Rosenbaum. "He spent
many years trying to rehabilitate his name. "We had rewritten history.
Very few people knew about that aspect of the German V2 programme." "At
the air and space museum (in Washington), they have a V2 missile. I
remember going to see it when I was investigating Rudolph and there was
nothing that indicated how this thing was made. After the case, they
changed the display."

Bringing war criminals to justice is getting ever tougher but Schrimm
rebuts criticism from Nazi-hunting institution the Simon Wiesenthal Centre
that convictions are too low. "The results are bad and they are going to
get worse," he says. "They will have more cause for disappointment next
year. "But that is no reflection of our competence or willingness. I can't
pull witnesses out of a hat."

Setting history straight, however, offers some compensation. Schrimm
recalls a meeting with a frail Jewish woman he visited in New York who had
lost her family to Schwammberger's executioners. "'I've told the story to
my children and my grandchildren,' she said. 'I've waited 45 years for
someone from Germany to express an interest in hearing it. "Now that you
have come, I can die in peace.'"

(source: Reuters)







USA:

Fund helps Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe

Actress and director Zane Buzby's Survivor Mitzvah Project sends funds
directly to poor Eastern Europeans.



The letters are simple, full of gratitude and overflowing with history.

"Zane, I received your letter of May 21 on June 13," wrote Sonia, an
89-year-old Ukrainian Holocaust survivor. "I also received the gelt
[money] -- thank you very much to everyone."

She continued, "During the war, our family was evacuated to far Siberia.
We lived through cruel deprivations; hungry, naked and barefoot we
returned home after Kiev was liberated. My father died while in the
evacuation, my brother perished at the front. Much time passed before life
somehow straightened itself out."

The letter, among hundreds of others, is a thank-you note, from a
beneficiary of the Survivor Mitzvah Project, a charity founded by actress
and director Zane Buzby that distributes money to impoverished Eastern
European survivors of the Holocaust. On Friday, designated Holocaust
Remembrance Day, Buzby talked about her life in Hollywood and her new
work.

Buzby was born in New York City to Jewish parents who were
first-generation Americans. She came to Los Angeles in 1978 as the singer
in a rock 'n' roll band and was quickly cast in a role as Jade East, a
wild-haired, pill-popping groupie, in "Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke."
Then came a series of comedies, such as "National Lampoon's Class Reunion"
and "This Is Spinal Tap." In the 1980s, she took up directing television
sitcoms.

Buzby, who is vague about her age, has long, curly auburn hair that flows
loosely around her face in a style that isn't too different from the one
she wore 30 years ago. She speaks quickly and passionately, constantly
leaning forward and gesturing with her hands.

The project started seven years ago when Buzby went to Eastern Europe to
visit her grandmother's hometown, which she thought was in Lithuania but
turned out to be in Belarus.

As she rearranged her plans and waited for a new visa, she met a language
professor who gave her a list of eight Holocaust survivors living in
Belarus and asked her to visit them.

"They're lonely, they're forgotten," he told her.

At the first home, she found a man digging for potatoes in the field
behind his small house. He hoped he could get them all dug up before
winter set in.

"That's all they eat," Buzby said. "No nutrition."

Back home, she couldn't stop thinking about winter. "How are they going to
make it?" she thought.

Her first gift was simple. She took eight $20 bills, folded each inside
some heart-shaped paper and mailed them to the people she'd met.

The project grew quickly, funded mostly by Buzby's own money and a few
friends. The project, which hopes to secure nonprofit status in a few
months, has distributed about $350,000 so far through two nonprofit
groups, Mazon and Vilnius Yiddish Institute.

Buzby asked recipients to write letters, to make sure the money was
getting into the right hands. She asked them to tell her about their
survival. When she received the letters, most of which were in Russian,
she would locate Russian-speaking repairmen working in her neighborhood
and ask them to translate.

"I received your letter from Nov. 2, 2004, and everything was delivered
intact. I am very grateful to you for your help," wrote a Ukrainian woman
named Anna. She continued:

"On Aug. 12, 1941, we had to flee from the Nazis because they were moving
very fast toward us. Our father gathered all of us (there were 4 sisters -
three of them have already died and I am left alone). We had to cross the
Dneiper River, the Don, and the Volga -- three big rivers. All those who
did not move with us died.

"From my village, on Sept 16 1941, in one day, 1,785 were shot. We had a
big Jewish region and in total in this region the Nazis killed 15,000
people. In the village of Bobrovy Kut, and other villages, the Nazis threw
live people into the wells."

The letters, many of which can be read at the organization's website,
www.survivormitzvah.org, show how survivors struggle with difficulties
beyond the sometimes desperate poverty suffered by many in Eastern Europe,
Buzby said.

"We're talking about people whose entire communities were destroyed.
Everything was taken from them. There is no aunt, no grandmother, no
sister to ask for help."

Buzby sometimes veers into the language of television solicitors as she
talks about her project, saying things like for "a dollar a day you can
change someone's life" and "it's so easy to help." She isn't beyond using
guilt to solicit donations. When a potential donor calls, she says to him,
"You don't want to be the richest man in the graveyard, do you?"

The money isn't overwhelming. Sometimes it's enough for food. Sometimes
it's been enough for washing machines, diabetic testing strips, walkers,
arthritic cream and Excedrin -- and to pay for multiple cataract
surgeries. It is, she says, her contribution to the world.

Buzby spoke at her office, where the walls are decorated with head shots
and black and white stills from the movies she has made. On the wall is a
quote attributed to Hunter S. Thompson: "The TV business is a cruel and
shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run
free and good men die like dogs."

But there is also binder after binder of letters from Holocaust survivors.
Some survivors send pictures, some send simple notes.

All are reminders of history, which of course is the message of Holocaust
Remembrance Day.

On Thursday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
were at the Museum of Tolerance to dedicate a new exhibit commemorating
the life and the work of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. The exhibit
recreates Simon Wiesenthal's office in Vienna.

Also on Thursday, members of Alpha Epsilon Pi, a predominantly Jewish
fraternity at Cal State Northridge, dressed in black and marched about
campus with signs reading "Never Forget."

When one student asked what the signs meant, fraternity member Adam Devor
replied that it was in memory of the Holocaust.

"The Holocaust of what?" the student asked. "That's exactly why we had the
march," Devor said.

And on Sunday a remembrance ceremony will be held at the Los Angeles
Holocaust Monument. Among those planning to attend is Zane Buzby.

(source: Los Angeles Times)




ENGLAND:

$90,000 for painting lost in Holocaust


A 17th-century Dutch painting, lost in the Holocaust, was auctioned after
Poland helped broker a deal between the late Jewish art dealer's
descendants and the current owner.

The oil painting A Boy, in Profile, Singing, in a Feigned Oval by Pieter
de Grebber sold for $90,863, including the buyer's premium, at a
Christie's auction Friday.

The painting once belonged to Abe Gutnajer, an art dealer in Warsaw,
Poland, who bought it at auction in 1917. Nazi troops killed the art
collector in the Warsaw Ghetto in July 1942. Polish officials say the work
was either confiscated by Nazi officials or looted by Nazi troops after
Gutnajer and his family were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto.

The painting resurfaced in 2006 when a Latvian, who declined to be
identified, offered it for auction.

The auction house confirmed the attribution to de Grebber of the unsigned
work, which Art Loss Register officials found on Poland's list of art that
disappeared during the Second World War.

The work was auctioned after Christie's, aided by Poland's Foreign
Ministry, won the approval of the Latvian owner and of Eve
Gutnajer-Infanti, the widow of Gutnajer's son, Ludwik, who lives in
Philadelphia, and of her children, Stefan and Krystyna.

The buyer was London dealer Johnny Van Haeften, who only a few years ago
had returned a portrait by Adrien Brouwer to Poland after learning it had
been stolen. He said he bought the de Grebber because he really liked the
painting - though taking part in restitution to the heirs was nice, too.

(source: Brantford Expositor)