June 23



GERMANY:

Mapping the Holocaust archive: MSU prof explores records of Nazi
atrocities



Michigan State University professor Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish
Studies, is part of a group of 15 other scholars from North America,
Europe and Israel who have traveled to Bad Arolsen, Germany, to be the
first to examine and study records and items from the Holocaust at the
newly opened Red Cross International Tracing Service Archives.

Waltzer and the others will examine concentration camp, deportation,
transport and ghetto records; forced and slave labor records; postwar
displaced persons and migration records; and ITS institutional records at
an international workshop to identify rich new opportunities for scholarly
research. The group will then produce a report and recommendations to be
published by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is sponsoring the
workshop that runs through June 26.

After World War II and the Allied liberation of the German concentration
camps, German records were collected and subsequently deposited in the Red
Cross archives. Until recently, only Holocaust survivors and former forced
and slave laborers and their families were able to request records and
only indirectly through the Red Cross; survivors could not see the records
themselves and scholars were not permitted any access at all.

A recent agreement among the 11 nations represented on a committee
overseeing the archives now permits scholars to examine the materials and
allows for the digitized distribution of copies of the records to key
research institutions in these nations.

Waltzers area of study focuses on the children of Buchenwald concentration
camp, where U.S. soldiers discovered 904 boys among the 21,000 surviving
prisoners. Among them were 16-year-old Elie Wiesel from Sighet, Romania,
later a famous writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and 8-year-old Israel
Meir Lau, later the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel and recipient of the
Israel Prize.

Among the records at the ITS are materials related to Anne Frank's
deportation to Auschwitz, Schindler's List, numerous camp records and
transportation lists, and lists of prisoners who were killed or subjected
to medical experiments. Holdings include postwar interviews with newly
liberated prisoners.

Waltzer will study these records to better understand the flow of people
transported from factory labor camps and from death and concentration
camps in Nazi-occupied Poland to Buchenwald (near Weimar, Germany) and
their place in the history of the Holocaust and Nazi camp system. Such
research will supplement his interviews with survivors who were liberated
at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.

"In this Internet age, it is relatively easy to find former Buchenwald
boys, contact and interview them," Waltzer said.

"They live mostly in the U.S., Canada, Israel, England, France, Germany
and Australia. Many have written their memoirs in recent years, or made
video testimonies, or engaged in Holocaust education. I have collected
more than 80 memoirs and new interviews, and there are more than 100
testimonies at the Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive and
another 15 at the Holocaust Memorial in Australia.

Being able to use the additional materials at ITS in Bad Arolsen will
strengthen such memoir, testimony and oral history work and may suggest
additional lines of inquiry about the experiences of youths in the camps."

For more information, and to follow Waltzers research and read his journal
as he participates in the workshop, visit the special report at:
http://special.newsroom.msu.edu/holocaust.

(source: Michigan State University Today)



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Deal reached on painting seized by Nazis


A valuable 17th century painting seized by the Nazis has been returned to
the family of its former owner but will remain on display at a Munich
gallery, according to an agreement signed Monday. The oil painting
Still Life with a Porcelain Jug by Dutch master Willem Kalf was unlawfully
obtained from Jewish art collector Josef Block nearly 70 years ago.

It has been hanging at the Alte Pinakothek gallery in Munich, where it
will remain following an agreement signed with Block's grandson, Peter
Block. Under the deal, the gallery paid an undisclosed sum to Block for
the painting.

Willem Kalf (1622-1693) is considered one of the most important Dutch
still life painters of the 17th century.

The Nazis stole countless works of art from Jewish collectors or forced
them to sell their works at knock-down prices.

In recent years there have been growing efforts to find and compensate
families of art collectors disappropriated before and during World War II.

(source: Earth Times)


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Holocaust Academic Pans Monument to Nazis' Gay Victims


A leading Holocaust scholar has criticized a monument in Berlin to
homosexual victims of Nazi Germany unveiled this week, saying the location
was poorly chosen.

Israel Gutman of Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Institute told a Polish daily in
an interview published Wednesday, May 28, that Germany had made a mistake
by erecting the monument to commemorate homosexual victims of Nazi Germany
in the heart of the capital, Berlin, news agency AFP reported.

"For many years after the war I had the impression that the Germans
understood the immense scope of the crime of the Holocaust which they had
committed ... But this time, they made an error," Gutman told
Rzeczpospolita.

"The location was particularly poorly chosen for this monument. If
visitors have the impression that there was not a great difference between
the suffering of Jews and those of homosexuals, it's a scandal," Gutman
said, according to AFP. "A sense of proportion must be maintained."

Across the street from Jewish memorial

The simple grey rectangular stone monument was unveiled earlier this week
by Berlin's openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, at the Tiergarten park, half
a block from the iconic Brandenburg Gate and across the street from
Germany's national memorial to Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Designed by Danish-Norwegian artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset,
the monument contains a window that invites the visitor to look inside and
see a film of a gay couple kissing.

A text on the stone surface details the persecution of gays under Hitler.
The Nazis banned homosexuality in 1936 and convicted around 50,000 people
for "unnatural" behavior deemed unbecoming of the Aryan "master race." It
is estimated that between 5,000 and 15,000 homosexuals were deported to
Nazi concentration camps, where more than half died.

Gutman, himself a Holocaust survivor, said the Nazis persecuted
"exclusively German" homosexuals, many of them Nazis. They were "victims
of internal political battles within the NSDAP," the Nazi party of Adolf
Hitler, he said.

(source: Deutsche Welle)





USA:

Painting Looted by Nazis Found at U.S. Museum

The painting was identified using a combination of sophisticated
text-based and visual matching technologies that goes beyond the
limitations of a solely text-based search.

Last week, experts with the online registry of lost art Trace.com
identified a painting they believe may have been looted by the Nazi's.
Experts estimate the value of the painting, originally reported looted by
the Belgian government, at over $250,000. The company has informed the
Belgian government of the potential find.

The painting was identified using a combination of sophisticated
text-based and visual matching technologies that goes beyond the
limitations of a solely text-based search.

"In this case, the pictures appear identical but the descriptions are
quite different, so such a match might not appear in an ordinary
text-based search. To make sure match results are credible, Trace
incorporates sophisticated visual matching technology, which transcends
the problems of text-based searching caused by differences in
descriptions, jargon or language," Benny Arbela, chief executive officer
of Trace, said.

Trace works with auction houses, dealers, pawnbrokers and more to check
whether valuable items have been ever reported missing, stolen or looted.
The organization's database contains records on more than 420,000 items
including paintings and jewelry.

"By building a comprehensive database of looted art, and making much of
this information available to the public for the first time, we are
confident that the project will contribute to the identification and
return of looted art that otherwise may have been lost to the victims'
families forever," Jacob Khokhlov, Trace Head of Art Services, who
researched the painting, said.

It has been estimated that the Nazis systematically looted about 20% of
all Western art, and there remains 100,000 items reported looted at large.

Preventing the future sale of looted art

Many of the items stolen by the Nazis disappeared into private collections
and Swiss bank vaults. Occasionally these items reappear for sale at
auctions. Major auction houses check the Trace database before publishing
their catalogues to make sure they are not auctioning an item with
questionable ownership. If a looted item is searched, the appropriate
authorities are alerted.

Trace developed the Looted Art Project to leverage its network of auction
houses, dealers, museums, collectors and law enforcement to help identify
objects plundered by the Nazis. The comprehensive database of
Holocaust-Era looted art is checked against objects for sale by dealers
and auction houses.

There are two ways individuals can identify property believed to be theirs
using Trace.com. The first incorporates a highly sophisticated
image-matching technology that allows images provided by victims to be
used to search items on the registry. The second allows families to enter
descriptions of items -- whether from memory or written documents. The
text-based matching facility will identify all items matching the
description.

(source: Government Technology)