Nov. 8



GERMANY:

Report: Auschwitz blueprints found in Berlin apartment


Original plans for the construction of the Nazi extermination camp of
Auschwitz, including a gas chamber and crematorium, have been found in a
Berlin apartment, a newspaper reported Saturday.

The daily Bild published copies of some of the 28 plans, which the head of
Germany's federal archives, Hans-Dieter Krekamp, called "authentic proof
of the systematically planned genocide of the Jews of Europe."

Bild gave no indication of where, when or by whom the plans were found.
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It said they were dated between 1941 and 1943 and stamped, "Waffen-SS and
Police Construction Directorate." Some were signed by senior SS officials
and one initialled by the head of the Nazi ideological corps, Heinrich
Himmler.

Kreikamp told the newspaper the documents were "extraordinarily
important."

One plan, drawn by a detainee as early as November 1941, when experiments
in eliminating prisoners were already under way, had a gas chamber clearly
labelled, Bild said.

Another showed a crematorium with places for ovens marked, and storage
space for bodies.

The "final solution to the Jewish question", namely the extermination of
Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe in what became known as the Holocaust,
was decided by officials of Adolf Hitler's regime in January 1942 at a
conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee.

More than one million Jews, gypsies and others deemed "subhumans" by the
Nazis were killed at Auschwitz, near the Polish city of Kracow, out of a
total six million slaughtered up to the fall of the regime in 1945.

Advancing Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, but camp
authorities had blown up the gas chambers, and Holocaust deniers have
claimed there was no proof of the camp's purpose.

(source: Reuters)



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

Merkel Urges Action Against Racism on Kristallnacht Anniversary


Germans must act against racism in general and anti-Semitism in
particular, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday, Nov. 8, a day before
Germany marks Kristallnacht, a 1938 pogrom against Jewish residents.

Ceremonies were to be held Sunday to recall Kristallnacht, or the Night of
Broken Glass, when Nazis smashed up Jewish-owned shops, burned or
ransacked synagogues and killed 91 people throughout Germany, according to
the official toll.

The late November 9, 1938 pogrom, a precursor to the Holocaust, ultimately
led to more than 1,300 deaths from injuries, by suicide or in
concentration camps, official historians add.

Merkel, in a weekly video podcast, said Sunday would be a day of mourning
for "the most terrible events in German history" as well as memories of
more hopeful events on another November 9 -- in 1989 -- when the Berlin
Wall parted.

The commemoration of 1938 "obliges Germans to act decisively against
racism and particularly anti-Semitism, jointly and throughout society,"
Merkel said.

Vicious pogram a precursor for Holocaust

Flames leapt into the sky across Germany when the Nazis gave a foretaste
of the Holocaust in the vicious pogrom against the Jewish community. By
the time the rampage had ended, thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and
synagogues had been burned down or looted by thugs as police and fire
brigades looked on.

"Everything said about it is harmless compared to the reality of what
actually happened," said one Berlin woman whose recollections are
documented at the Central Jewish Information Office.

Another witness from Dusseldorf described how Jews, "dragged from their
beds in pajamas and nightgowns," were forced "to walk through the broken
glass without any footwear."

More than 400 people were beaten to death, shot or driven to suicide,
records show. More than 30,000 were rounded up and packed off to
concentration camps.

The tyranny marked a turning point in the anti-Semitic policies pursued
after Hitler took power in 1933 and which eventually led to the Holocaust,
the systematic state-sponsored killing of Jews.

New anti-Semitism resolution adopted

Germany's parliament adopted a resolution against anti-Semitism to mark
Sunday's 70th anniversary of the pogrom after a dispute over whether a
far-left party should be included.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats lobbied to have The Left
excluded because of its cooperation with "extremists hostile to Jews" -- a
reference to the Palestinian movement Hamas.

Merkel herself will represent the government at a remembrance ceremony
held together with the Central Council of Jews in Germany at the country's
largest synagogue, located in Berlin.

Built in 1904, the Ryke Street synagogue was badly damaged in the 1938
pogrom, but was not burned down, apparently because the Nazis feared
damage would be caused to adjacent buildings.

It was reopened in August 2007 after being restored to its original glory
at a cost of 7 million dollars.

Some 600,000 Jews lived in Germany before the war, but the figure declined
to around 12,000 after 1945. Today, there are more than 110,000 Jews or
people of Jewish origin, giving Germany one of the largest Jewish
populations of any country in Europe.

A growing mood of anti-Semitism in Germany

Despite a revival of Jewish culture, there is a growing mood of
anti-Semitism in Germany, according to the German-Israeli Society, which
held its annual meeting over the weekend.

Figures disclosed by the government on Tuesday showed there were nearly
800 anti-Semitic crimes committed during the first nine months of this
year, resulting in injuries to 27 people.

Among the events is being held in Berlin and other cities to mark the
anniversary of the pogrom is an exhibition called "It's Burning --
Anti-Jewish Terror in 1938."

The display at the capital's Neue Synagogue contains little known
photographs that underscore the extent of the violence and the public
humiliation of Jews during the Third Reich.

At the same time, the first museum to honor Germans who helped Jews
survive Nazi persecution during the Holocaust has just opened in central
Berlin.

On show are photographs, letters and other documents from more than 250
"silent heroes" who risked their lives by providing food, shelter and
other assistance to Jews from 1938-45.

Seven decades on, an Israeli journalist has been sifting for remnants of
the Night of Broken Glass in a rubbish dump an hour's drive northeast of
Berlin in the German state of Brandenburg.

Following a tip from locals, Yaron Svoray, 54, discovered a bottle
imprinted with a Star of David and part of a backrest that might have been
used in synagogues around that time.

Experts are expected to be called in to investigate the site in
Schorfheide, where Hitler's designated successor, Hermann Goering,
maintained his country residence.

(source: Deutsche Welle)

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



Kristallnacht 70 years on


Seventy years after the terror and cruelty of Kristallnacht, the event
should not be simply consigned to our history books writes Karen Pollock
of the Holocaust Educational Trust

Can you imagine your neighbours being attacked and dragged away and you
doing nothing? Seeing their houses looted and torched and you saying
nothing?

Seventy years ago on Sunday 9th November the Nazi government sanctioned
widespread destruction of property and wanton terror and violence against
the Jewish communities of Germany and Austria. In the space of a few hours
more than 1000 synagogues were torched, tens and thousands of Jewish
businesses and homes ransacked and destroyed, 91 people murdered and more
than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
The name given to this night of terror was Kristallnacht or Night of
Broken Glass in reference to the shattered glass that carpeted the streets
a testimony even a trophy to the perpetrators achievement in causing
widespread destruction.

In the years that followed Kristallnacht, it came to mean so much more
than mere broken glass. Kristallnacht came to represent broken lives,
broken families, the collapse of civilisation and humanity. It signalled
the prelude to the annihilation of six million Jewish people and millions
of others, including from the Roma and gay community, disabled people and
political opponents. It signalled the prelude to the Holocaust.

Dr Arthur Flehinger, a German eyewitness to Kristallnacht claimed that
during that night of state-sponsored violence, many people privately wept
behind their curtains at the destruction full of sorrow at the tide of
racial violence, but powerless to stop it. Indeed this was not dissimilar
to the worlds reaction to what was the most publicised event at the time
in the history of the fate of European Jewry. If this glimpse into the
future horrified so many people worldwide, why was their outrage not
translated into action?

If we are to learn anything from Kristallnacht it is a reminder to us all
of where unchecked racism and intolerance can lead and underscores our
responsibility as human beings to ensure that such evil is always
confronted whenever and wherever it occurs. The Holocaust did not begin
with the gas chambers at Auschwitz, it did not even begin with
Kristallnacht - it began with words and was reacted to with silence. The
extermination of European Jewry took place at the end of a long road, a
long history marked by centuries of age-old antisemitism and prejudice
dating back to the middle ages and most significantly it was a long road
marked by indifference. Nor was the Holocaust a mere symptom of the time;
the era. As we have seen repeatedly in the years that have followed the
Holocaust genocide and atrocities have plagued every corner of the globe
and continue to do so.

We cannot and must not consign the terror and cruelty of that night to our
history books or fool ourselves into believing that it was a history
belonging to a different era. To remove ourselves in this way is to remove
our own responsibility in fighting racism and intolerance today.

This year, many of us have no doubt felt helpless as far-right parties
continue to gain a foothold in local councils, and even in the London
Assembly - the body representing one of the most diverse cities in the
world. And make no mistake about it - these are politicians who exploit
community divisions, and whose ideology is based on the same racism and
prejudice exhibited during the Holocaust.

But we do have the ability to halt racism in its tracks. This is a belief
that goes right to the heart of our work at the Holocaust Educational
Trust. Founded by Lord Greville Janner and the late Lord Merlyn Rees in
1988, we work in schools and local communities across the UK to ensure the
Holocaust is not only learnt for its own sake, but also that its vital
lessons for today are learnt, disseminated and acted upon. We believe that
if we are to ever achieve a future free from antisemitism, racism and
discrimination, if we are to say never again and actually mean it we must
ensure that future generations are equipped with the knowledge and
confidence to face such evils head on.

Through our piloted Think Equal Project which we plan to take nationwide
we have reached disaffected young people in communities which are
experiencing problems of racial tensions and which are also being targeted
by the far-right . By working within the Citizenship Curriculum and
helping them to understand the importance of their role in society, and
the responsibility that they have as citizens to actively oppose hatred
and prejudice they literally become ambassadors for conveying the lessons
of the past; ambassadors for a better future. Not bystanders but agents of
change.

This Sunday - seventy years since that night of brutality; that night
where millions of lives were forever changed and soon to be wiped out,
let us not shed tears behind drawn curtains but instead let us all become
agents of change. Let us commit ourselves to ensuring that no one
anywhere should ever face the fear or discrimination experienced by those
during Kristallnacht; let us commit ourselves to ensuring we stop the
far-right from gaining a foothold in our political system before it is
too late; let us commit ourselves to ensuring a future we can be proud of
free from genocide and crimes against humanity.

(source: Karen Pollock is the Chief Executive of the Holocaust
Educational Trust. More information about the work of the Holocaust
Educational Trust is available at http://www.het.org.uk.----The New
Staesman)





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

As Nazis age, leads still alive----Now more historian than hunter,
prosecutor Kurt Schrimm keeps pursuing


Six decades after the end of World War II, the world's remaining Nazi war
criminals and witnesses to their atrocities are fast dying of old age. But
the German office charged with preparing prosecutions of Nazi crimes, far
from shutting down, has rarely been busier.

"Twenty-five years ago we thought our work would be coming to an end now,"
said Kurt Schrimm, lead prosecutor of Germany's central office for the
investigation of "National Socialist Crimes."

But as Schrimm and his staff of six comb records around the world in a
final push for justice, they continue to come up with fresh leads and
evidence. Today the office is pursuing 20 to 40 cases, he saidincluding
the extradition of former U.S. autoworker and accused Sobibor death camp
guard John Demjanjuk. At least a few cases are still going to trial.

"There are still thousands of cases no one's ever heard of," he said. "And
I'm sure there are still thousands of culprits out there."

War over, but suspect's battle rages

'Last Chance' to find Nazi war criminals in South America Prosecuting Nazi
war crimes has always had its challenges. The first head of Schrimm's
office, established in 1958 to pursue further Nazi prosecutions in the
wake of the Nuremberg trials, was eventually discovered to be a former
Hitler storm trooper.

Until the 1970s, German law included a statute of limitations on murder
that threatened to put an end to the office's efforts to prosecute Nazi
criminals. That was lifted.

Today, the biggest problem facing the agency is that both its targets and
the witnesses needed to effectively prosecute them are generally in their
mid-80s or older. Many have died, and others are too frail for trial.

"You can start a trial only with the accused alive and witnesses alive
that you can call to testify," said Carlo Gentile, an expert on Nazi war
crimes at the University of Cologne. "If you don't have witnesses and
perpetrators, then you can only work as a historian."

Getting aging criminals to court is an increasing challenge but not an
impossibility. Currently Josef Scheungraber, an elderly former German
infantryman, is on trial in Munich on charges of taking part in a massacre
of 11 men and boys in the Italian village of Falzano.

German prosecutors hope to prove that Scheungraber and fellow soldiers
committed murder when they locked 12 Italians in a farmhouse and later
blew it up. The sole survivor of the attack today, now 79, has been called
to testify as a witness.

An Italian court convicted Scheungraber of the crime in 2006, but in
absentia, and he had continued to live freely in southern Germany until
the latest prosecution effort.

Schrimm's office also hopes within a year to extradite Demjanjuk to face
charges of murdering Jews at a Nazi prison camp in occupied Poland, where
the Ukrainian-born U.S. autoworker allegedly was a guard.

"To prove there was killing isn't sufficient," Schrimm said. "You have to
prove it was murderfind evidence of motives like racism or show it was
extremely gruesome. And after 60 years it's extremely difficult to prove
what somebody thought."

With witnesses dying out, most of the tips Schrimm's office receives these
days are from documents. In the mid-1990s, Italian officials discovered a
room full of files documenting Nazi war crimes. The trove of documents,
created by the Allies, had been handed to the Italians for use in
prosecutions but instead was locked away. Today the so-called "Closet of
Shame" has become a major source of new prosecutions, including that of
Scheungraber.

Schrimm's prosecutors also recently discovered that Josef Mengele, Adolf
Eichmann and other infamous Nazis who fled to South America after World
War II carried a particular type of International Red Cross travel
document. Schrimm's agency is now combing through Immigration records in
Argentina and other South American nations looking for similar documents
and "people we don't know the names of yet."

The Ludwigsburg office, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in December,
has so far forwarded 7,394 investigations to Germany's courts for
prosecution.

Keeping up morale in the German office can be a challenge, particularly as
an increasing number of prosecutions fail as the accused or key witnesses
die.

"I have long talks with everyone that you can't measure your success by
the people you manage to jail," Schrimm said.

Still, the office will stay open, German state prosecutors have said.

These days, "the goal and satisfaction for us is to clarify what really
happened," said Schrimm, whose team has amassed a vast archive of
documentation on Nazi crimes. "Even victims say their interest is not that
an old person goes to prison but that the world knows what happened."

(source: Chicago Tribune)




BELGIUM:

Belgian far-Right leader resigns over Holocaust song


The leader of Belgium's far-Right National Front party, Michel Delacroix,
resigned on Thursday a few hours after he was shown on television singing
a song making light of the Holocaust.

Last Updated: 6:12PM GMT 06 Nov 2008

"Mr Delacroix, perfectly aware of what his actions would mean for him, has
decided to resign from his post as president of the National Front," the
party said in a statement, underlining that his act was "inadmissible."

In a video on public RTBF television's midday news Thursday, Delacroix was
seen singing a song to the tune of "l'eau vive" by Jewish singer Guy
Beart, but with the lyrics changed to tell the story of a Jewish woman
sent to the gas chamber in Dachau.

He was sitting on a sunny terrace with a few friends as he sang.

The broadcast brought a swift reaction from the main Belgian organisation
policing the fight against discrimination, which accused him of "Holocaust
denial" and "inciting racial hatred."

Contacted by AFP, Delacroix said: "I can't remember having sung it, even
if I have known the words for years."

The blind senator also raised some questions about whether the tape was
authentic, although he thought it was probably filmed in Spain eight years
ago.

"I can immediately see the bad taste in it, but even if there is something
real in it, (the performance) was in no way public," he said.

Delacroix also raised the possibility that it was made public as an act of
revenge, saying that he thought the tape might have been in a file for his
divorce which he said "finished badly for my ex-wife a few months ago".

He suggested that a former member of the National Front who was recently
ejected from the party might have been involved as well.

Unlike the relatively-strong Flemish far-right Vlaams Belang party, the
French-language National Front has been torn apart by in-fighting in
recent years and has a weak support base.

(source: The Telegraph)







AUSTRIA:

Chinese diplomat honored for saving Jews


A Chinese diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust has
been posthumously honored in the Austrian capital.

Feng Shan Ho was Chinese consul-general in Vienna from 1938-1940 and
issued visas to Austrian Jews, enabling them to escape the Nazis. He died
in San Francisco in 1997 at the age of 96, before his deeds were
recognized.

Shunqing Wang, the Chinese Embassy's charge d'affaires, was among those
who honored the diplomat Thursday.

U.S. ambassador David Girard-diCarlo says he was the kind of hero who
should always be remembered.

An estimated 65,000 Austrian Jews perished in the Holocaust.

(source: Associated Press)







USA:----film review

Well-intentioned Holocaust film bungles its message

There's nothing but the best of intentions in Mark Herman's Holocaust
film, an attempt to see the horror through the uncomprehending eyes of a
child.



THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS

DIRECTOR: Mark Herman

CAST: Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, Amber Beattie, David Thewlis, Vera
Farmiga

RUNNING TIME: 93 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for some mature

thematic material involving the Holocaust

GRADE: C


In "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas," adapted from the novel by John Boyne,
8-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the son of an SS officer (David
Thewlis as a thoroughly efficient and loyal Nazi) assigned to a
concentration camp in an isolated countryside.

With no playmates nearby, Bruno sneaks out of the yard to the nearby
"farm," where people dressed in soiled striped pajamas toil behind an
electrified fence. He strikes up a friendship with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon),
a gaunt but curious boy his own age who hides out by the fence.

The use of a British cast (or at least British accents, in the case of mom
Vera Farmiga) for the German family gives the film a feeling that is both
warmly familiar -- the period British drama in the cocoon of upper-class
privilege -- and skewed with alien details -- the swastika flags, the SS
insignias, the "Heil Hitler" salutes. The sense of normalcy slowly cracks
under the fatal reality represented by those details.

It's a lesson film, and there's nothing wrong with that. The history of
the Holocaust needs to be revisited every generation. It's a simplistic
perspective and a purely emotional response, but there is something quite
powerful in seeing it through the eyes of a naive observer who cannot
comprehend the truth of a concentration camp because it is simply too
inhuman to imagine.

But it's also troubling the way Herman privileges Bruno's experience over
that of Shmuel and the nameless prisoners in the camp, by virtue of this
emotional identification. By the climax, which will tie your stomach in
knots, Herman has turned Bruno into the innocent caught up in the
nightmare and Jews into extras in his story.

That's not the point Herman is trying make, of course, but it's the
inadvertent, appalling outcome of his storytelling. Herman's intentions
are admirable, but his results are unsettling in the worst ways.

(source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

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


The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: A Failed Holocaust Fable

When the full extent of the Holocaust became generally known after the end
of World War II, the thought that its horror was too monstrous to write
about in the conventional fictional forms slipped into the conversations
of literary intellectuals. Fiction implies maneuver heroic activity,
moral preachment, even softening sentiment, all of which gestures seem
trivial and inappropriate in the context of unprecedented, and in some
sense inexplicable, evil. Putting the point simply, it is impossible to
think of a novel, play or film that conveys the full effect of the Nazi
genocide. The works that abide Anne Frank's diary, Primo Levi's
recollections of the death camps, Schindler's List are all starkly
factual.

And their looming presence in our minds renders a movie like The Boy in
the Striped Pajamas ludicrous. It concerns an eight-year-old boy named
Bruno (Asa Butterfield) whose career soldier father (David Thewlis) is
placed in command of a concentration camp early in the war. The child is
unaware of the camp's function. He thinks it is some kind of farm. All he
knows is that he has no friends and no worthwhile activities to divert
him. He isn't even allowed to go to school; he and his sister are tutored
at home by a Nazi functionary, while their mother (Vera Farmiga)
ditheringly denies what she must know is taking place in the camp.
Eventually Bruno wanders through the woods, encounters the barbed wire and
Shmuel, an inmate of his own age. He wonders why the boy always wears
"pajamas" (actually, of course, the striped prison uniform), thinks
perhaps the numbers sewn on this garb are part of some fun game his pal is
playing. His misapprehension is reinforced by a movie about camp life his
father has produced, showing its inmates singing and dancing and repairing
to a caf for light refreshment after the day's work is done.


Striped Pajamas, written and directed by Mark Herman, requires everyone in
it to remain unconscious to every clue - and there are many- about what is
happening in the family's backyard. Even when the gas chambers are fired
up, smoke blackening the sky and stench filling their nostrils, they
insist the camp is just burning some old clothes. The largest silence is
Shmuel's, who never forthrightly explains his desperate circumstances to
Bruno. Maybe he doesn't want to shock his new friend. More likely his true
imprisonment is in the desperate manipulations of this movie, its need to
keep everyone in a state of ignorance or denial until Shmuel sneaks Bruno
into the camp and toward a supposedly suspenseful, potentially tragic, but
totally improbable ending.

I don't think I've seen - at least since equally offensive concentration
camp fable, Life Is Beautiful - a movie so reliant on human stupidity to
achieve its effect, so totally dishonest in its insistence on that quality
(which it presents as innocence) to achieve its narrative goals. Bruno and
Shmuel may be only eight years old, but that is well past the age of
reason, and they are caught up in situation that would force anyone to
acquire a shrewdness well in advance of their years. I don't know if a
movie as simpleminded and emotionally shameless as this one definitively
proves that fiction is not a suitable vehicle for the consideration of
crimes as vast as the Holocaust. But it will do until the next historical
travesty comes along.

(source: Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine)





UKRAINE:

Donetsk Jews Commemorate 75,000 Holocaust Victims


In the industrial Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, many people gathered
for a commemorative ceremony to honor the memory of innocent victims of
the Holocaust. This day marks the 67th anniversary of the Nazis
commencing their mass campaign to destroy the civilian population in the
Donetsk Region.

In their honor and to demonstrate that such a tragedy should never again
occur in the world, residents gathered at the Shurf 4-4 Bis Mine, which
horrifically became a mass grave for 75,000 persons murdered by occupying
Nazi forces.

The event involved pupils and teachers from the Ohr Avner Chabad Day
School and from the Municipal School # 8, which is located not far from
the site of this massive human catastrophe. This school has taken on the
task of taking care of this particular site, where a memorial now stands
today. The ceremony was also attended by government representatives,
veterans, and many others who could not remain indifferent to the memory
of this great tragedy.

Participants underlined the need to remember the events of these terrible
war years and to make every effort so that they may never again repeat
themselves. They lit candles in the memory of the deceased, as children
read poems and representatives of public organizations took turns speaking
to the crowd.

Apart from the Jewish community of Donetsk - a member of the Federation of
Jewish Communities of Ukraine - other organizers include the Donetsk
branch of the Ukraine-Israel Society and the Chesed-Tzdaka Charity Fund,
with support from municipal and regional authorities.

(source: The Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS)






CANADA:

Federal Court shuns former Nazi collaborator


The Federal Court Monday upheld the government's decision to revoke the
Canadian citizenship of a former Nazi collaborator, saying he had been a
member of a wartime unit that was "the very epitome of brutal." Justice
Michael L. Phelan ruled that the federal Cabinet had "clear justification"
for stripping Helmut Oberlander of his citizenship in 2007 for
misrepresenting his past when he entered Canada following the Second World
War.

The government's decision was reasonable and Mr. Oberlander, who is in his
eighties and lives in Waterloo, Ont., contributed to the commission of war
crimes by serving as an interpreter for German forces, the judge wrote.
"Basically we're pleased with the court's ruling in this matter," said
Chris Girouard, a department of Justice spokesman. "With the decision, the
government may now take further steps towards removing Mr. Oberlander from
Canada."

He stopped short of saying how the government would proceed but said once
someone is stripped of their citizenship they are considered a foreign
national and can be brought before the Immigration and Refugee Board to be
ordered deported.

Mr. Oberlander has 30 days to appeal the court ruling.

Canadian Jewish groups issued statements yesterday urging Ottawa to begin
deportation proceedings against Mr. Oberlander but one of his supporters
said the government should drop the case.

"He was not involved in any war crimes," said Tony Bergmeier, National
President of the German Canadian Congress.

Mr. Bergmeier said Mr. Oberlander was a teenager when German forces came
to his town in Ukraine. Because he spoke German, Russian and Ukrainian,
the Germans wanted his help, he said.

"Any army going into a foreign territory, like the Canadians in
Afghanistan, I am sure they all have local interpreters and this is what
had happened at the time. This was a 17-year-old boy who was drafted to be
an interpreter," said Mr. Bergmeier.

The court recognized that Mr. Oberlander had said he had worked with the
German forces out of fear but still found he had participated in war
crimes as a member of Einsatzkommando 10A, part of a special police task
force that operated "mobile killing units" and executed over two million
people, mostly civilians, including Jews, Communists, Roma, the disabled
and others, the court said.

Mr. Oberlander surrendered to American troops and was held at a British
POW camp before coming to Canada in 1954. Canadian authorities caught up
to him in 1995.

The government's initial attempt to take away his citizenship was set
aside by the court in 2004 but last year Ottawa revoked his citizenship
again, along with that of another alleged former Nazi collaborator, Jacob
Fast. Yesterday's ruling upheld that decision.

While the court ruled there was no evidence Mr. Oberlander personally
participated in atrocities, it said he had been a member of
Einsatzkommando 10A.

"What is at issue here is whether a person who hid his involvement in a
Nazi death squad and therefore gained the benefits of Canadian citizenship
on which he launched a productive life, should be deprived of his
ill-gotten citizenship," the judge wrote in his 42-page decision.

"While Oberlander's personal circumstances may be personally compelling,
and the factors of time and good works are on his side; the importance of
preserving the integrity of Canadian citizenship from deceit and a
recognition of Canada's obligation to ensure that there is no safe haven
for those involved in horrendous historical events inclines me to reject
any exercise of discretion to grant a judicial review in this instance."

The Canadian Jewish Congress and B'nai Brith Canada both applauded the
court ruling and called for his deportation from Canada.

"Oberlander's presence in this country has been a continued insult to the
privilege of Canadian citizenship," said Keith Landy, chair of the CJC's
War Criminals Committee.

Said B'nai Brith's Frank Dimant: "Canada must demonstrate that it will not
allow itself to be a safe haven for those complicit in Nazi-era atrocities
or modern-day war crimes."

After trying without success to prosecute war criminals, the Canadian
government changed tactics in the late 1980s and began taking away their
citizenship on the grounds they had lied to immigration authorities.
Ottawa has revoked citizenship of more than 50 Canadians since 1977.

Liberal MP Andrew Telegdi said the process used to strip Mr. Oberlander's
citizenship was flawed. Mr. Telegdi, the MP for Kitchener-Waterloo,
chaired a House of Commons committee that issued a 2005 report on
citizenship revocation.

The report recommended that such cases should be proven beyond a
reasonable doubt in a criminal court and that all decisions about revoking
citizenship should be left to a trial judge. He said the Conservative
policy, in which Cabinet ministers make the decision, was "totally the
wrong way to do it.

(source: National Post)






ISRAEL:

Rethinking prosecution of Holocaust denial

It may now be timely to rethink the merits of criminalizing Holocaust
denial.

The issue recently made headlines when German-born Australian Frederic
Toben was arrested in transit at Heathrow airport and detained until the
British courts decide whether he is to be extradited to Germany to face
prosecution as a Holocaust denier. Toben is a veteran in this field,
having participated in Ahmadinejad's Holocaust "conference" and having
already served seven months in a German prison as a denier. Although
Australia has no statutes outlawing Holocaust denial, the courts there
have ordered Toben to stop publishing anti-Semitic material on his website
such as the description of the Holocaust as "the world's filthiest blood
libel" because it breaches the Racial Discrimination Act. Toben has
refused to adhere to the court order, and if found in contempt is likely
to face severe penalties on his return to Australia.

I don't support unfettered freedom of speech, and have always favored
legislation designed to prosecute those inciting racial or religious
hatred. There is no such thing as "innocent" Holocaust denial. Even if it
purports to be a historical review, it is simply a vile body of lies
created with the object of accusing the Jews of fabricating a story to
exploit sympathy and thereby obtain favored treatment.

But in drawing the fine distinction between incitement to hatred and
Holocaust revisionism, I now think that employing measures involving
police action or criminal prosecution to deal with Holocaust deniers does
more harm than good. There is of course the exception: in Germany and
Austria, where this most obscene atrocity was incubated, criminalizing
Holocaust deniers is entirely justified.

Fortunately, Holocaust deniers in civilized society are virtually all
regarded as cranks and charlatans, probably because the Holocaust is the
most comprehensively documented genocide of all times.

THE OTHER factor is that the level of Holocaust memorialization throughout
the democratic world has transcended our greatest expectations. In the
immediate post-war decades, Holocaust memorials were almost all undertaken
by Jews mourning their murdered kinsmen. However today, virtually every
democratic government has institutionalized Holocaust commemoration, and
in many cases invested major resources to incorporate Holocaust studies
into their schools' curricula. Some have even set aside an annual
Holocaust commemoration day. Museums, the movie industry and the media
relate to the subject continuously. There is no doubt that despite the
frenzied efforts of anti-Semites, in Western countries efforts are going
forward to ensure that youngsters are made aware of the Nazi objective,
and the need to be prepared to confront new genocidal initiatives.

As a consequence, Holocaust denial in the democratic world has effectively
been marginalized. In fact, the more sophisticated Western anti-Semites
tend to distance themselves from Holocaust deniers, realizing that such
association only discredits them. Beyond his own Islamic arena, even
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad undermined his campaign to delegitimize
Israel when he began challenging the veracity of the Holocaust. Today it
is far more effective to try and simply distort, trivialize or minimize
the extent of the Holocaust rather than flatly denying it.

HOLOCAUST AWARENESS has reached such levels that many of us wish that at
least some of the concern and effort invested in commemorating the murder
of our six million kinsmen could be extended to the six million living in
the Jewish state who today face the same hatred. It is especially painful
to observe that many of those in the Western world who claim to be
profoundly affected by the Holocaust are at the forefront of activities
designed to demonize Israel.

It is even more bizarre that the most determined foes of Israel and the
Jewish people employ Holocaust inversion (rather than denial) as a
rationale for undermining the Jewish state. Again and again we witness our
enemies accusing Israelis of behaving like Nazis. The Arabs are the
greatest purveyors of this libel, and it is highlighted in the books,
movies, media and caricatures which circulate freely throughout many
"moderate" Islamic countries like Egypt as well as the radical states.

What makes this even more bizarre is that the same Islamic countries that
have absorbed Holocaust denial as a central component of their hatred of
Jews now have the gall to cite Holocaust criminalization as a precedent
for seeking to make any disapproval of Islam, Islamic practice or even
Sharia law grounds for criminal prosecution. Resolutions to this effect
have already been passed by the UN General Assembly.

These developments emphasize the need to rethink the prosecution of
Holocaust deniers. By criminalizing those promoting such views, we not
only transform them into martyrs posing as champions of free speech, but
also enable them to insinuate that "the Jews" are preventing them from
demonstrating the truth of their warped and evil doctrines.

Aside from the abundance of evidence refuting Holocaust denial, the
climate today in the democratic world enables us to dismiss anyone who
promotes this noxious falsification. Besides, there is no question that
the media and educational facilities are far more effective in
neutralizing these pathological cranks than the police and courts.

This was exemplified in the extraordinary 2000 libel suit in London
against Deborah Lipstadt by Holocaust denier David Irving. Lipstadt won
the case in a stunning defense and utterly discredited Irving, who was
exposed as an incompetent academic and raving anti-Semite. This contrasted
to the outcome of his criminal prosecution in Vienna, where he was jailed
but where the media subsequently glorified him as a martyr on behalf of
free speech.

Today in democratic countries we face infinitely greater threats than from
those promoting the insane proposition that the Holocaust was a fantasy.
Prosecuting the deniers in court transforms them into victims and diverts
us from confronting anti-Semitism, which is still the primary challenge
facing us.

(source: Opinion, Isi Leibler, Jerusalem Post)