Sept. 15




USA:

Giants, Jets drop Holocaust-era insurer


Two NFL football teams have ended talks with a Holocaust-era insurance
company over naming rights to their new stadium.

In a statement Friday, Mark Lamping, president and CEO of the new stadium
for the New York Jets and Giants, said his organization is "no longer in
discussions with Allianz for a naming rights partnership. We are
continuing discussions with other potential partners for the new stadium
and look forward to the summer 2010 opening of this new icon for our
region."

Criticism of the deal emerged earlier this week after reports that the two
NFL franchises were in talks with Allianz, the Munich-based German
insurance giant, over the naming rights to their new $1.3 billion stadium.
The stadium is being built in the current Meadowlands sports complex in
New Jersey and will seat more than 80,000 fans.

More than six decades ago, Allianz insured facilities and personnel at
concentration camps like Auschwitz and Dachau, had a chief executive who
wore an SS uniform and served as Hitlers economics minister, and refused
to pay the life insurance policies of Jews, instead sending Jewish
beneficiaries cash to Nazis.

Various Jewish organizations had joined critics of the potential deal,
saying it was inappropriate to name a major sports stadium for an
organization with a Nazi past, particularly in an area with the nation's
highest concentration of Holocaust survivors.

"The New York region is home to many Holocaust survivors and their
families and to World War II veterans for whom memories of the war are
still vivid," the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement Thursday. "We
hope that the teams' ownership will take this into account as they move
toward a decision on naming rights."

Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, wrote to Giants and Jets
executives asking them to end talks with Allianz, according to The New
York Times.

Allianz's defenders said the company attempted to make amends for its
wartime history, participating in the International Commission on
Holocaust Era Insurance Claims and paying millions to elderly Holocaust
survivors believed to have held policies with the company. But critics say
the company did so only under duress and should not be permitted to commit
another affront to the sensibilities of survivors.

"This company, Allianz, had to be forced to make the payments," said Rabbi
Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "They fought it tooth
and nail."




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


Survivors' group lobbies against Holocaust bill


An American Holocaust survivors' group reiterated its opposition to a
congressional bill on wartime insurance policies.

The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their
Descendants, in a letter last week to U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.),
the chairman of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, urged
the rejection of a bill paving the way for lawsuits against European
insurance companies.

The Holocaust Insurance Accountability Act is under consideration by the
committee. It would open the door to lawsuits against European insurers
who defaulted on policies held by Jewish victims of the Nazis.

Several major Jewish organizations have actively opposed the bill, arguing
it would undermine ongoing restitution negotiations with European
governments. But proponents argue that the bill remedies the supposed
failures of a commissiom established to address the insurance issue but
which paid out only a fraction of some estimates of the value of prewar
Jewish policies.

"The legislation will, in the end, deeply disappoint survivors by creating
lofty expectations of insurance payments for many which will, at best,
occur for only a few," the group wrote. "Even the handful of survivors who
might successfully overcome the onerous evidentiary and other legal
burdens posed by a lawsuit will, most likely, not live to see the result."

(source for both: JTA)






GERMANY:

Germany holds rare war crimes trial over 1944 Nazi massacre


Germany is to put on trial a 90-year-old former officer in one of its last
ever war crimes trials dating from the Second World War--62 years after
senior Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, possibly the last ever case from
World War II will be heard.

Prosecutors will accuse Josef Scheungraber of ordering the killings of 14
civilians in Falzano, near Cortona in Italy.

Mr Scheungraber denies the charges, but he will have to face testimony
from a survivor of the massacre, a 79-year-old former Carabinieri officer,
who was a 15 year-old boy on June 27 1944.

That was the date that German soldiers from Mountain Infantry Battalion
818 set out on a reprisal operation after two of their number had been
killed by partisans.

When the trial opens in Munich on Monday prosecutors charge that, led by
Scheungraber, the German soldiers began their revenge attacks by shooting
three farmhands and a local woman, Maria Bistarelli Casucci, aged 74, who
crossed their path after the Partisan attack.

But they hope to prove that the attack did not stop there. Instead, the
unit rounded up 12 local men, aged from 15 to 74. One of the men, a German
speaker, was released, but the others were lined up against a wall of a
local farmhouse.

"I was wearing shorts and remember the grass scratching my legs," said the
survivor, only identified as Gino W. "I was sure that we were going to be
shot."

According to Gino W however, new orders were given at the last minute for
the 11 to be driven to a farmhouse, locked inside, and blown to pieces.

"The Germans pushed us into the ground floor, a kind of stall. I pushed
myself into a corner, the others lay on the ground. Through the door frame
I saw the Germans bringing up heavy boxes and heard someone running down
the stairs. After the explosion I remember nothing." Later that day, the
15-year-old was pulled from the rubble by villagers. He was the only
survivor.

The killings were later marked by a memorial, but no judicial action was
taken against the suspected perpetrators until 2006, when a court in Italy
convicted Josef Scheungraber and another soldier of murder.

Their life sentences were passed in absentia, with Mr Scheungraber living
openly in southern Germany, where he frequently attended meetings of
veterans from his wartime days.

Now however, after a long battle to prove that, despite his age, Mr
Scheungraber is mentally and physically fit enough to respond to the
accusations against him, his trial in Germany is set to get underway.

During the case, German prosecutors will have to prove that the killings
were not carried out in the course of prosecuting the war, but were
particularly brutal. That would allow them to press charges of murder,
which has no statute of limitations, as opposed to homicide, charges for
which expire 10 years after the alleged crime.

(source: Telegraph)


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


INTERNET LAW - Germany Convicts Non-Resident Blogger for Inciting Hatred
by Denying Holocaust


Claiming the Holocaust is a hoax is illegal in Germany, even online, and a
non-resident alien man who denied the veracity of the Third Reich's "Final
Solution" on a blog was imprisoned for the act. A German court sentenced
Ernst Zndel, a former Tennessee, USA and Canadian resident, and lifelong
Holocaust denier to five years in prison for incitement of racial hatred.
His publications include "The Hitler We Loved and Why." Zndel was
convicted in Berlin on February 15, 2007, and received the harshest
sentence possible for his acts.

The accused 67-year-old man was convicted in the regional court in
Mannheim, Germany on 14 counts of incitement, including one charge
involving offense and slander to the memory of the dead. The successful
prosecution was a symbolic win for Germany, which has expressed a strong
interest in making the act of Holocaust Denial an EU-wide crime, which has
been defeated in such countries as Spain and Italy.

Mr. Zndel is a German citizen born in the Black Forest region, who
immigrated to Canada at age 19 to avoid the draft. He spent the next four
decades in Canada, where he began his pamphleteering career, releasing
Nazi and anti-Jewish works. In the late 1970s he created Samisdat
Publishers, one of world's biggest distributors of Nazi and neo-Nazi
propaganda and memorabilia. He has also become a central "revisionist"
figure and author for his Zndelsite, since 1995 a hub for Holocaust-denial
propaganda.

Zndel was not popular with the Canadian Government, as his activities led
to many trials when he lived in the country, between 1958 to 2001. Zndel
married his neo-Nazi Webmaster, Ingrid Rimland, and they immigrated to
Tennessee, USA in 2001. But his stay was short-lived as U.S. officials
deported him back to Canada for visa violations, due to his
Nazi-promotions as a security risk. When Zndel arrived in Toronto, he was
arrested and detained until a Canadian judge ruled in March 2005 his
activities posed a threat to national and international security. He was
deported back to Germany.

German courts wasted no time prosecuting Zndel, charging him with inciting
racial hatred, for publishing on his site such works as Arthur Butz's "The
Hoax of the Twentieth Century," and Austin App's "The Six Million
Swindle."

The law used in Zndel's prosecution is found in the German Criminal Code
(Strafgesetzbuch, StGB), promulgated on November 13, 1998 (Federal Law
Gazette I, p. 945, p. 3322), in Section 130 Agitation of the People.

The law specifically focuses on Holocaust-deniers saying,

(3) "Whoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or renders
harmless an act committed under the rule of National Socialism...in a
manner capable of disturbing the public piece shall be punished with
imprisonment for not more than five years or a fine. "

One of the most controversial aspects of this case was the fact that all
the publications had been made outside Germany, which some analysts argued
took the crime outside of Germany's jurisdiction to prosecute. Since all
of Zndel's publications were made outside of Germany, and created in
Canada and the U.S., it could have been argued that the robust
Anglo-American law of freedom of speech should have applied.

But German courts had already ruled on this issue, in the case of
German-born Dr. Fredrick Tben, who was also charged with denying the
Holocaust from the Adelaide Institute, in Australia. Toben was sentenced
to 10 months in prison. He appealed on the grounds that since his Internet
material was "printed" outside Germany, it should not be subject to German
legislation. In response, the German Federal Court of Justice ruled that
any persons publishing pro-Nazi material on the Internet is subject to
German law, regardless of their country of origin.

(source: IBLS)


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


Nazi war criminal's son wants him declared dead


The son of the world's most wanted surviving Nazi war criminal says he
wants him declared dead so he can get his hands on the family fortune and
donate it for research at the place where he committed his crimes.

Dr Aribert Heim is number one on the list of wanted Nazis in a hunt
organised from Israel. A doctor at the notorious Mauthausen concentration
camp in Austria, he performed hideous medical experiments on inmates and
tortured many others.

Dubbed "Dr Death", he has been on the run since 1962 and has not been seen
since. Investigators with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel have him
at the top of their most wanted list. His son Ruediger, 52, has told a
German newspaper that he and his mother received mysterious notes in their
letter box in the five years after he went on the run.

"Between 1962 and 1967 two notes appeared in our post box. There was a
single sentence written on them 'I am doing fine.' But whether these
letters were really from my father, I don't know."

Heim is thought by investigators to be in Chile, where a daughter lives,
but despite a number of supposed sightings, they have been unable to find
him.

Ruediger says: "The past of my father is a part of my life. To deny that
would be pointless, although I don't have to explain to anyone that I am
no Nazi."

He said he was working with a lawyer to work out how to have his father
declared missing and then dead, in order to gain control over the more
than one million euros in a Berlin bank under his father's name.

"We only found out about this bank account in 1997. If I was actually the
heir, I would donate the money for the historical examination of the
suffering in the Mauthausen concentration camp."

(source: The Telegraph)


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


War criminal who handed Jews over to Nazis for extermination 'lives openly
in Germany'

Living free: Alligimatas Dailide, who helped round up Jews for
extermination


A man convicted of collaborating with the Nazis in the mass murder of Jews
during World War II has been found living in Germany.

Algimantas Dailide, 87, was stripped of his US citizenship and fled the
country in 2004 after lying about his wartime activities.

He was an officer in the collaborationist Lithuanian Security Police and
handed over innocent Jews from the Vilna Ghetto to the Nazis to be
slaughtered.

Dailide, who is the ninth most wanted man on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's
list of Nazi war criminals, settled in Kirchberg, Saxony, where he has
been living with his wife ever since.

A court in Vilnius convicted him of war crimes in March 2006, but did not
impose a custodial sentence.

In July, a high court in Lithuania ruled that he would not go to prison,
partly because of his frail health, but he has never been given a health
examination by the Lithuanian authorities and he was spotted last week by
the Israeli reporter out shopping for groceries near his home.

He declared he was 'innocent' of the war crimes charges for which he was
convicted.

Dailide and his wife live with his wife in a modest apartment on
Torstrasse, opposite the local town hall. Even though he is a convicted
war criminal, he has made no attempt to hide his identity. His name
appears on the mailbox and the intercom at the entrance to the apartment
block.

Dailide's German-born wife, whom he met in 1945 after escaping Lithuania,
has relatives in Kirchberg, a town of 7,000 in what was formerly East
Germany.

Suspected Nazi war criminal, 95, found relaxing with football fans at Euro
2008

Haaretz said the couple live on his wife's German pension of 200 a month,
and the remaining profits from the sale of their house in the US.

Efraim Zuroff, Israel director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and its
chief Nazi-hunter, said he had spent many years persuading the Lithuanian
authorities to bring Dailide to trial.

'It is absolutely outrageous that he is free today,' said Zuroff. 'The
Lithuanians have managed to make a farce out of the entire judicial
process.'

'Dailide was actually convicted and sentenced but they didn't have the
courage or fortitude to implement the sentence,' he said, adding that no
Lithuanian collaborators had ever gone to jail.

'A lack of political willingness to contend with the crimes of the past,
along with extenuating circumstances stemming from advanced age, are
letting Nazi criminals off the hook,' he said.

Zuroff said the German authorities were unlikely to arrest him, because he
was not convicted directly of murder or of being an accessory to murder
with cruelty.

He called on the Lithuanian courts to implement their own judgment against
Dailide.

(source: Daily Mail)


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


German court plans trial for former SS man (86)


Germany will try an 86-year-old former SS member next year who confessed
to killing three Dutch civilians more than 60 years ago, a court official
said.

Heinrich Boere will be tried in Aachen in early 2009, the chief justice of
the city's district court said today.

Boere was captured by US forces in the Netherlands after the war and
confessed to killing the Dutch civilians as a member of an SS hit squad
targeting anti-Nazi fighters.

He then escaped and fled to Germany, before being sentenced to death in
absentia in the Netherlands in 1949. The Los Angeles-based Simon
Wiesenthal Centre lists Boere as one of the top 10 Nazi war criminals
still at large.

Germany refused a 1980 Dutch extradition request because of complications
over Boere's citizenship. Efforts to convict him in Germany also failed.

Germany's Bild newspaper said on Thursday that organisational issues and
health problems might enable Boere to avoid being tried, but the Aachen
district court chief justice denied this.

"As soon as we have recruited an expert adviser and proved the competency
of the court, the trial will begin," she said.

(source: Reuters)



ITALY:

Nazi war criminal invited to judge a beauty pagent

A Nazi war criminal has caused outrage in Italy after it emerged that he
was invited to judge a local beauty pageant.

SS captain Erich Priebke, 95, is serving a life sentence under house
arrest near Rome for his part in the World War II massacre of 335 Jews and
partisans in 1944 at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome.

However, he was allowed to transmit a video message to participants of
last week's beauty contest, causing fury among the Italian Jewish
community.

It was shown on giant screens at the pageant in the town in Lazio. He sent
"hugs and kisses" to contestants.

Preibke, who was invited as an "act of forgiveness for a new era" by a PR
company, said: "I thank the organisers for their invitation which I
consider a humanitarian gesture."

Newly elected Rome Mayor Gianni Alemanno called the idea "crazy."

Claudio Marini, the organizer of the "Star of the Year" beauty contest,
had invited the former SS officer to be on its jury. Marini said he did
not invite Priebke as a publicity stunt but as part of a "process of
pacification."

"Speculating on the macabre notoriety of a war criminal is really the
opposite of a beauty contest," Renzo Gattegna, president of the Union of
Italian Jewish Communities, told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

"And to this is added the cynicism of never considering the pain of the
families of the victims."

Priebke was jailed for life in 1998 after he was discovered working as a
schoolteacher in Argentina, and was extradited to stand trial.

In 1999, he was given leave to serve the remainder of his sentence under
house arrest in his lawyer's home, on the grounds of his ill health.

The 1944 massacre was a reprisal ordered by Adolf Hitler after partisans
killed a patrol of 33 German soldiers.

Priebke was one of several officers present during the killing of the men
and boys, 75 of whom were Jewish, at the caves.

(source: The Telegraph)



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

Rome symposium to study Pius' legacy


A symposium in Rome will reveal new information about the controversial
wartime Pope Pius XII.

Pave the Way, a U.S.-based, nonsectarian organization that promotes
interreligious dialogue, is sponsoring the three-day symposium that begins
Monday to study the papacy of Pope Pius XII. Earlier this year, Pave the
Way announced it was investigating Pius' papacy by interviewing
eyewitnesses and gathering publicly available documentation and newspaper
accounts.

The organization said it had uncovered information that contradicted
criticism that Pius turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.

"We have discovered many personal intercessions of Pope Pius XII which
directly contradict the impression that he remained silent and did nothing
to save Jewish lives," said Pave the Way President Gary Krupp.

Krupp has close ties with the Vatican. In January 2007, he became the
first Jewish man to be knighted by two popes when he was promoted to the
highest Pontifical Order of St. Gregory the Great. He received a previous
papal knighthood in 2000.

A spokesman for Pave the Way said the meeting is expected to "present new
documentation that has never been revealed before" regarding Pius XII.

(source: JTA)






FRANCE:

LePen says he isn't done yet


Jean-Marie Le Pen says he isn't retiring just yet, international media
reports to the contrary.

"I'm not retired, but at my post," said the French Holocaust denier and
far-right National Front Party leader.

Le Pen has been convicted on charges of anti-Semitism and spreading
"racial hatred" for praising Nazism and questioning whether Jews were
killed in Hitler's gas chambers, among other controversial statements.

In a speech to his party Sunday, according to The Associated Press, Le Pen
responsed to a report last week in the French weekly Valeurs actuelles
that said he would not run for president in 2012, and that he would retire
by 2010 or 2011. In that interview he suggested that his politician
daughter, Marine Le Pen, replace him.

Le Pen has run for the French presidency in five elections, and his party
has thrived politically -- influencing the moderate-right to adopt some of
his platforms -- for the past 30 years through his appeals to nationalist
and anti-immigration voters.

He was given a political shot of adrenaline when he won the first round of
presidential elections in 2002, beating the favored Socialist Party
candidate, and revealing his until-then under-estimated popularity.

On Sept. 14, Le Pen reminded his party that he planned on making a dent in
upcoming European parliamentary elections as well as regional elections.

As the Socialist Party continues to drain supporters since losing the 2007
election to Nicolas Sarkozy's center-right UMP Party, Le Pen said his
party was "the only force of opposition," to the French president, the AP
reported.

(source: JTA)






SERBIA:

Nazi hunter wants US, Austrian, Hungarian suspects


The world's top Nazi hunter urged Serbia on Monday to seek the
extradition of three elderly war-crimes suspects and blasted
Austria and Hungary for failing to help bring two of them to justice.

Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,
said at a news conference with Serbian officials that he was helping them
provide evidence against Peter Egner, who lives in the United States,
Milivoj Asner, who lives in Austria, and Sandor Kepiro of Hungary.

Egner allegedly served in a Nazi unit that killed 17,000 civilians in
Serbia during World War II. Asner is wanted for WWII atrocities against
Serbs, Jews and Gypsies in Croatia.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center says Kepiro, 94, was convicted by Hungarian
courts in 1944 and 1946 but never punished for his alleged role in
Hungarian forces' killings of some 800 Jews and 400 Serbs in the wake of
the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia.

Asner caused a stir this summer when he was seen watching a soccer match
in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt. Critics contend Austria is sheltering
him.

Serbia should seek the extradition of the three "as soon as possible"
because it is "a decision of great importance to bring those people to
justice," Zuroff said.

Serbia's war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, said that Serbia will
seek the extradition of the three after collecting evidence and launching
legal procedures.

"The issue in these cases is not finding the suspects, is not finding the
evidence," Zuroff said. "The problem has been the lack of political will
by the countries in which these people reside."

"I'm referring primarily to Austria and Hungary, and not the United States
where there are serious efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice,"
he said.

Phone calls to the Hungarian and Austrian justice ministries went
unanswered Monday evening.

Austria's Justice Ministry said this year that it is reviewing a request
from Zuroff to make a fresh assessment of Asner's physical and mental
state and prove he is suffering from dementia as experts have ruled in the
past.

Without a new evaluation declaring him physically and mentally fit, "our
hands are tied," ministry spokesman Thomas Geiblinger said at the time.

This summer, the U.S. Justice Department asked a federal court to revoke
Egner's American citizenship, saying he had served as a guard and
interpreter with the Nazi-controlled Security Police and Security Service
in Belgrade from April 1941 to September 1943.

Egner, 86, who lives in a retirement community in the Seattle area, can
only be extradited to Serbia if he is stripped of his U.S. citizenship.

(source: GMA News)






AUSTRALIA:

Court hears alleged Nazi war crimes


ALLEGED Nazi war criminal Charles Zentai assaulted a young Jewish man "so
badly'' that he died in Hungary in November 1944, the Perth Magistrate's
court has been told.

Mr Zentai, now 86, was a member of the horse-drawn train division of the
Hungarian royal army when he recognised Peter Balazs, who was from his
home town of Budafot, near Budapest.

Commonwealth Prosecutor Michael Corboy today told the Perth court that Mr
Zentai and two accomplices took Mr Balazs to the army part of his military
unit and assaulted the 18-year-old from three o'clock in the afternoon
until the evening hours.

"He (had) recognised this person as someone who resided in (Budafot),'' Mr
Corboy told the court.

Mr Corboy said Mr Balazs had not been wearing the yellow star identifying
him as a Jew.

It is alleged that Mr Zentai and two others then attached the teenager's
body to a ballast and threw it in the Danube River.

Mr Zentai is attending a three-day hearing to decide whether he should be
extradicted to Hungary to face war crime charges.

Commonwealth prosecutors and Zentai's lawyers will argue whether or not
the court should recommend to the Federal Government that the case
complies with the provisions of the Extradition Act.

It will then be up the federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland to
decide whether to surrender him to Hungary.

In April this year, Mr Zentai lost a High Court challenge against the
power of a state magistrate to rule on extradition matters.

The Magistrate's court today heard that criminal proceedings against Mr
Zentai started in April 1948 when an arrest warrant was issued.

The Hungarian Government began extraction proceedings in Australia in
March 2005.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre lists Mr Zentai at number seven on its list of
the 10 most wanted suspected Nazi war criminals.

(source: News.com)





BOLIVIA:

After the second world war many high-ranking Nazis fled to South America.


Among them was the head of the Gestapo in the French city of Lyon, a man
responsible for the deportation of Jews to the death camp at Auschwitz and
the torture of members of the French Resistance. Hiding in Bolivia, Klaus
Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, changed his name to Klaus Altmann and made
himself helpful to drug lords and dictators alike. Bolivian journalist
Gustavo Sanchez explains what happened when he tracked Barbie down in 1983

For decades here in Bolivia we had an infamous tradition of ruthless
dictators. In the early 70s General Hugo Banzer siezed power. He turned to
the ex-Nazi Klaus Barbie to help him with the repression. It was not the
first time that Barbie, a war criminal wanted by the French and German
authorities, had mingled with hardliners. Here in Bolivia he used to do
big business with the drug lords. He had his own team of assassins, some
from Italy and others from Argentina, called the Grooms of Death. He also
sold them weapons.

American intelligence officials helped Barbie to become established in
Bolivia as part of their crusade against communism. He acted as a sort of
counter-intelligence official. Under the alias of Klaus Altmann he worked
primarily as an interrogator and torturer. He also helped in the same way
in Peru. He did the same things here as in Germany and France. For him the
word communist meant "dead". Many Bolivians died during that dictatorship;
one that was prolonged for more than 10 years. Barbie was in charge of the
murders of many Bolivian citizens, including priests and members of the
opposition.

So some of us felt that we had to do something about it. But in 1980,
after General Banzer, an even bloodier dictator, Luis Garca Meza, rose to
power in what was called the narco, or cocaine, coup. Barbie was a key
aide then. He was the main ideologue of that coup; he organised absolutely
everything. He was even given the rank of lieutenant colonel in the
Bolivian armed forces, and was then able to move around with total
impunity. Today Bolivians know all about Barbie, but for a long time many
even doubted that such a criminal could be here.

I was kind of obsessed with Barbie since the beginning. In the 70s, when I
was in Chile with the Marxist Rgis Debray and the Nazi hunter Serge
Klarsfeld, we masterminded a plan to kidnap Barbie. But we failed. Back
then I was a simple leftist journalist, who was on very bad terms with the
dictators regimes I knew that if I stayed I would be killed. I was in
Chile until General Pinochet took over, then in Argentina until the junta
took over, and finally in Cuba, until Bolivias return to democracy in 1982
under Hernn Siles Suazo.

One day, after my return to a democratic Bolivia, I received a phone call
from the president himself asking me to "take care of" Barbie. That same
day I was named deputy minister of the interior with one objective: to
hand over Barbie to the French authorities within 24 hours. French
president Franois Mitterrand, with the advice of Rgis Debray, who was his
aide [and who fought with Che Guevara in the 60s], agreed that Barbie
should be tried in France.

And I did so. I accomplished my mission: we actually got him for tax
evasion. I went personally to take him from San Pedro prison in La Paz to
the airport where we sent him to French Guiana, and then he was sent to
Lyon for trial. When I got hold of him he was very reluctant to talk. But
once we were at the airstrip, about to enter the plane, he asked me:
"Where are you taking me?" He seemed to think we were taking him to
another military outpost where he could meet some of his old friends, or
perhaps back to Germany. When I told him he was going to Lyon he said: "It
cannot be."

At this point I said to him: "Yes, you are going back there. Do you
remember the French adage which says that a criminal always returns to the
scene of the crime? Dont you remember sending 600,000 Jews to
concentration camps and gas chambers? As you personally killed so many in
Lyon, you are going back there." "But," he said, "in war there are winners
and losers." "So you lost," I said. "It is time to pay."

I was as afraid as any other mortal would be of retaliation from the
many radical factions linked to Barbie in Bolivia. It was the same in
France, where I was the only Bolivian witness during the trial and the
supporters of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who sympathise with the Nazis, were after
my tail. But the risk was worth taking. A man from the left, like me,
cannot be afraid of the right. If I had to be killed, then so be it. But
the Barbie issue was beyond ideologies: I knew that what I was doing was
the right thing. He was a criminal for the whole of humankind and had to
be condemned.

(source: The Guardian)

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


Klaus Barbie: women testify of torture at his hands


In 1944, when she was 13, Simone Lagrange testified yesterday, Klaus
Barbie gave her a smile as thin as a knife blade, then hit her in the
face as he cuddled a cat at the Gestapo headquarters in Lyon.

Lise Lesevre, 86, said Barbie tortured her for nine days in 1944, beating
her, nearly drowning her in a bathtub and finally breaking one of her
vertebrae with a spiked ball.

Ennat Leger, now 92, said Barbie "had the eyes of a monster. He was
savage. My God, he was savage! It was unimaginable. He broke my teeth, he
pulled my hair back. He put a bottle in my mouth and pushed it until the
lips split from the pressure."

The three women were among seven people who took the witness stand
yesterday to testify against Barbie, the former head of the Gestapo in
[Paris] during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II.

Barbie, 73, is on trial in Lyon, accused of torturing Jews and members of
the French Resistance and deporting them to Nazi death camps.

But he did not hear their testimony because he has refused to attend the
courtroom sessions since the second day of the trial, as he may do under
French law.

He has, however, denied the accusations against him and has contended that
his 1983 extradition from Bolivia to France was illegal.

Several of the seven witnesses yesterday sobbed as they told of arrest,
torture, rail convoys to the Drancy collection center near Paris and on to
concentration camps.

They depicted Barbie as a harsh, sadistic officer ready to resort to any
cruelty to extract information.

Lagrange, her voice breaking, recalled the arrest of her father, mother
and herself on June 6, 1944, the day Allied troops landed in Normandy to
drive back the Germans.

Denounced by a French neighbor as Jews and Resistance fighters, Lagrange
and her parents were taken to Gestapo headquarters where a man, dressed in
gray and caressing a cat, said Simone was pretty.

"I was a little girl, and wasn't afraid of him, with his little cat. And
he didn't look like the typical tall, blond SS officer we were told to
beware of," she said.

The man, whom she identified as Barbie, asked her terrified parents for
the addresses of their two younger children.

"When we said we did not know, he pulled my hair, hit me, the first time
in my life I was slapped," she said.

During the following week, the man hauled her out of a prison cell each
day, beating and punching at her open wounds in an effort to obtain the
information.

"He always came with his thin smile like a knife blade," she said. "Then
he smashed my face. That lasted seven days."

Later that month, Simone and her mother were put aboard a sealed train for
the Auschwitz concentration camp on a horror ride "which turned us into
different people" and that still gave her nightmares 40 years later.

From Auschwitz, where her mother was gassed, the inmates were marched to
Ravensbruck, where only 2,000 of the 25,000 people who began the march
arrived alive. On the way, Simone saw her father marching in another
convoy.

"A German officer told me to embrace him. As we were about to meet, they
shot him in the head," she said. "It wasn't Barbie who pulled the trigger,
but it was him who sent us there."

Ennat Leger, who lost her sight at Ravensbruck after her arrest, was
hoisted to the witness stand in her wheelchair by four policemen.

She was a Resistance fighter nearly 50 years old when she was arrested in
1944, she said, and Barbie and his men "were savages, brutal savages, who
struck, struck and struck again."

"Have you heard of the Gestapo kitchens?," she quoted him as saying, in an
allusion to the torture chambers.

Lise Lesevre, frail and upright despite her 86 years, described the
defendant as "Barbie the savage," saying she recognized him decades later
because of his "pale eyes, extraordinarily mobile, like those of an animal
in a cage."

Lesevre, who belonged to a resistance group, said the Gestapo arrested her
on March 13, 1944, while she was carrying a letter intended for a
Resistance leader code-named Didier.

She said Barbie spent almost three weeks trying to learn if Lesevre was
Didier, and if not, who was. She was interrogated for 19 days, she said,
and tortured on nine of them.

First she was hung up by hand cuffs with spikes inside them and beaten
with a rubber bar by Barbie and his men. "Who is Didier, where is Didier?"
were Barbie's main questions, she said.

Next was the bathtub torture. She said she was ordered to strip naked and
get into a tub filled with freezing water. Her legs were tied to a bar
across the tub and Barbie yanked a chain attached to the bar to pull her
underwater.

"During the bathtub torture, in the presence of Barbie, I wanted to drink
to drown myself quickly. But I wasn't able to do it. I didn't say
anything.

"After 19 days of interrogation, they put me in a cell. They would carry
by the bodies of tortured people. With the point of a boot, Barbie would
turn their heads to look at their faces, and if he saw someone he believed
to be a Jew, he would crush it with his heel," she said.

"It was a beast, not a man," she said. "It was terror. He took pleasure in
it."

During her last interrogation, she said, Barbie ordered her to lie flat on
a chair and struck her on the back with a spiked ball attached to a chain.
It broke a vertebrae, and she still suffers.

"He told me, 'I admire you, but in the end everybody talks.'" But she
never did, and she heard Barbie say finally, "Liquidate her. I don't want
to see her anymore."

She was condemned to death by a German military tribunal for "terrorism"
but was placed in the wrong cell and deported to Ravensbruck concentration
camp, where she survived the war. Her husband and son did not. She said
they were both deported to their deaths by Barbie.

(source: from the Saturday, March 23, 1987 issue of The Philadelphia
Inquirer)