Nov. 9




GERMANY:

Germany marks pogrom that led to Holocaust

Kristallnacht is considered beginning of Nazi campaign against Jews

Two-day Nazi pogrom left 91 Jews dead, damaged more than 1,000 synagogues

More than 7,500 Jewish businesses were looted during Kristallnact

Estimated 30,000 Jewish men, boys sent to concentration camps during


Germans and Israelis on Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of
Kristallnacht, the Nazi-incited riots that began their campaign to
destroy European Jewry, with ceremonies, concerts and vows to honor the
victims with renewed vigilance.

Chancellor Angela Merkel recalled the Nov. 9, 1938 riots in which more
than 91 German Jews were killed and more than 1,000 synagogues damaged,
telling Germans that the lessons of the nation's past were crucial in
confronting a current increase of xenophobia and racism.

The riots are seen by many as the first step leading to the Nazis'
systematic murder of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

"We must not be silent," Merkel told the nation at a ceremony in Germany's
newly renovated largest synagogue. "Anti-Semitism and racism are a threat
to our basic values -- those of democracy and respect for diversity and
human rights."

At Israel's weekly Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said
Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, was "the turning point toward
the inevitable destruction of a greater portion of the Jewish people in
Europe between 1939-1945," adding that Israel "will never forgive or
forget" the crimes of the Nazi regime.

Israeli President Shimon Peres issued a statement on Sunday calling the
Holocaust the "worst disaster that ever happened to us."

Some 30,000 Jewish men and boys were arrested and sent to concentration
camps during the pogrom that left the streets littered with shards of
glass -- giving it the pogrom its name.

Germany's southern neighbor Austria -- where Kristallnacht claimed 30
Jewish lives -- also commemorated the day, while German-born Pope Benedict
XVI called for prayers for Kristallnacht's victims in "profound solidarity
with the Jewish world."

Benedict served briefly in the Hitler Youth corps, as a young man in
Germany called Joseph Ratzinger.

At Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial, survivors, their
descendants, academics and the German and Austrian ambassadors to Israel
took part in a ceremony that also included a rare musical rendition of a
work of the German-Jewish composer Robert Kahn, whose music was outlawed
by the Nazis.

Yad Vashem also presented a new online exhibit, "It Came From Within ...
70 Years Since Kristallnacht," marking the event with images, historical
information, and pages of testimony about some of the Jews who died during
Kristallnacht.

Charlotte Knobloch, head of Germany's Central Council of Jews, who
survived Kristallnacht as a girl in Munich, Germany, told the gathering in
Berlin's Rykestrasse Synagogue that Germans must fight against far-right
extremism in all its forms.

"One must be sensitive to the quiet and less quiet signals of
anti-democratic developments in our country," said Knobloch, who lived
through Kristallnacht as a girl in Munich.


The synagogue, a red brick temple built in 1904, also survived
Kristallnacht because of its location nestled in an inner courtyard of a
densely populated neighborhood. It reopened last year after two years of
painstaking renovation.

A memorial concert in Berlin later Sunday and events in other communities
across the country were also being held to mark the anniversary.

(source: CNN)



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Jewish artifacts believed to be from Kristallnacht

An Israeli writer believes the objects in an old dump near Berlin are
related to the infamous 1938 pogrom considered by many to be the start of
the Holocaust.



Sometimes serendipity makes history. In this case, it may have uncovered
history.

This year, Israeli writer Yaron Svoray came to Germany to research the
underground operation that whisked Nazi officials to South America to
escape justice after World War II. Svoray was chatting with a local about
his project when the man mentioned that a nearby plot of land had served
as a dump during the Third Reich.

The man said items looted during the pogrom known as Kristallnacht, or
"Night of Broken Glass," were disposed of there.

Thousands of Jewish homes, shops and synagogues were ransacked and burned
that night 70 years ago today in an orgy of hatred considered by many to
be the start of the Holocaust.

Svoray's investigative instincts were immediately aroused. On return
trips, he examined old maps to confirm the dump's location here in
Klandorf, about 40 miles north of Berlin. In May, he went to the site, now
thick with tall grasses, picked a spot at random and dug.

"We just pointed to one heap and said, 'Let's start,' " Svoray recalled.
"Within an hour I had a [metal] swastika in my hand and Jewish porcelain
and a bottle with a Star of David, which could have been a Jewish wine
bottle."

Historians in Israel judged the finds to be authentic prewar pieces,
enhancing the possibility that Svoray may have stumbled on a trove of
Nazi-era artifacts, including rare physical evidence of Kristallnacht.

Svoray, the son of Holocaust survivors, has organized a traditional Jewish
service at the dump site to mark and mourn the brutality of the Nov. 9,
1938, pogrom.

But beyond remembrance, his goal is to prod the German government into
action. Since he went public with his discoveries last month, Svoray said,
nothing has been done to protect the site from looters, and authorities
have shown no interest in investigating further.

"There is enough stuff here to warrant an initial search," Svoray said by
telephone from Israel recently. "And the initial search cannot be done by
neo-Nazis after drinking beer on a Friday night and then putting it up for
sale on EBay."

The dump site sprawls across several acres, an uneven terrain of wooded
copses and bushy ravines. Wooden watchtowers jut out from the overgrowth,
lookouts for hunters who come in search of wild boar and deer.

For Svoray, an author whose book on neo-Nazism was turned into a TV movie
in the U.S. in the 1990s, knowledge of the dump site came as a surprise.

Not so for some residents of Klandorf, a quiet village of about 200 people
where unfamiliar cars can attract curious stares from behind curtained
windows.

Arno Gielsdorf, a burly, friendly mechanic whose family has lived here for
150 years, owns some of the land that the dump site occupies. He has
always known of its existence.

"My father told me that [at the time] the population from the town would
scavenge what was useful," said Gielsdorf, 49, adding that his
grandparents went out there "almost every day," picking up silver
utensils, tankards and other reusable scraps.

That is, until the day authorities abruptly barred people from the dump.

It was November 1938.

"For several days we didn't know what was happening," Gielsdorf said his
father, who died in 2001, told him. "At this time of the Reichspogrom
[Kristallnacht], it was forbidden to go there and take out what you
wanted."

The refuse pit in use then was 25 feet deep. But when residents were
finally allowed back in, "it was covered with regular garbage, so that
nobody could get to the items beneath," Gielsdorf said.

If physical evidence of what happened the night of Nov. 9 was indeed
brought here, from Berlin or beyond, there may have been plenty of it.

Rampaging Germans smashed the windows of Jewish houses and businesses,
giving Kristallnacht its name. Temples were desecrated, their furnishings
tossed into the streets or set ablaze. Inspired by Adolf Hitler's
fanatical fascism, rioters pulled Jews from their homes, destroyed their
belongings and beat some of them senseless, in a campaign of violence that
the Nazis said was spontaneous but was in fact cultivated and encouraged
by the regime.

At least 91 Jews were killed, and 30,000 were arrested and sent to camps
in Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Dachau.

"It's really the turning point of the intensification of the violence
against Jews in Nazi Germany," said Ann Millin, a historian at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Positively identifying any finds as property plundered from Jews on
Kristallnacht and not simply thrown out or confiscated at some other date
would be difficult.

Svoray said, "If someone says, will you find a piece of paper saying,
'Save me,' . . . from the 9th of November? I think not."

But "if someone says I can't start a dig until I know it's Kristallnacht,
that's nonsense," he added. "You have enough evidence to make a serious
undertaking."

Exposed and half-buried artifacts are certainly not hard to find.

On a recent visit by a foreign reporter, after a day of heavy rain, one
small patch of the dump site was littered with jagged shards of porcelain,
a delicate pink floral pattern still visible on one piece. Bottles made of
colored glass, which might once have held perfume or a tonic, were strewn
about.

Within minutes of scraping at a small mound of dirt, Ako Hintzen, a
bodyguard who travels with Svoray in Germany, unearthed an old bottle with
the raised inscription "Apotheke Zander," a pharmacy. Another large bottle
bore the name "Josef" and a worn-away surname, plus the word "Berlin" and
the charming figure of a cat.

The items Svoray found last spring, including the bottle with the Star of
David, were taken to the Ghetto Fighters' House museum in Israel, which
documents Jewish resistance to the Nazis. Museum officials examined the
pieces and pronounced them genuine prewar objects, although lab results of
some kind would be more conclusive, said Simcha Stein, the museum's
director.

"I was so excited," Stein said. "It was like a scream [from the past] in
front of my eyes."

He acknowledged the problems in trying to determine the artifacts'
provenance.

"To tell you that this part of the bottle was taken from this Jewish
table, from this street, from this family -- I can't tell you that. But
that's not important," Stein said. "What is important is that it can be
another way to bring the Holocaust story" to life and to the attention of
a new generation of young people.

That is something Svoray too would like to see. But it will take the
resources of the German government to make it happen: to secure the site,
which he identifies as the first priority, and then to mount an
excavation.

"I'm convinced that this is a worthwhile historical, academic endeavor.
There is no downside to it," Svoray said. "I will not rest until this
becomes a proper historical investigation."

(source: Los Angeles Times)




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NET CLOSES ON 'IVAN THE TERRIBLE'----Alleged Nazi Mass Murderer Could Face
Trial in Germany



Ivan John Demjanjuk, 88, has for years been suspected of involvement in
the murder of thousands of Jews during World War II. Now German
prosecutors believe they may finally be able to bring him to justice.

A suspected Nazi mass murderer, accused of complicity in the deaths of
tens of thousands of Jews, could soon find himself hauled before the
courts in Germany.

Ivan John Demjanjuk's alleged role as a World War II death camp guard has
for years made him one of the most hotly pursued targets of German
investigators. And now Nazi hunter Kurt Schrimm, who heads up the world's
largest investigation center for such atrocities in Ludwigsburg, Germany
believes he has finally pinned him down.

Following painstaking research across three continents, Schrimm and his
colleagues believe they have enough material to request the extradition of
88-year-old Demjanjuk, who now lives in the state of Ohio in the United
States.

Public investigator Schrimm on Monday handed documentation for preliminary
proceedings against the 88-year-old, remembered by those he allegedly
tortured as "Ivan the Terrible," over to the Public Prosecutor's Office in
Munich.

"In our opinion, a charge can be brought," said the veteran Nazi hunter,
whose pursuit of Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk saw him and his team trawl
through archives in Israel, the US and Germany.

The charges against the elderly man are enough to send a shiver down the
spine of even the most conflict-hardened.

It is alleged he trained as a guard in the SS camp Trawniki close to the
Polish city of Lublin. From the end of March to the middle of September
1943, prosecutors claim he served in the death camp Sobibor in south-east
Poland. Between May 1942 and October 1943, some 250,000 people were
executed there.

It is alleged Demjanjuk personally has the blood of tens of thousands of
these victims on his hands.

Prosecutors claim he was involved in the deaths of at least 29,000 Jews,
most of whom were women, children and elderly men. The majority were
killed on the day of their arrival at the camp.

And 1,900 of his victims were allegedly German Jews, which is vitally
important to increasing the chances of charging him in Germany.

Schrimm's recent research has made it possible to find out the complete
names and dates of birth of the guard's victims, he claims.

The oldest victim, who was sent to his death on April 23, 1943, in the gas
chambers, was a 99-year-old Jewish man from Holland.

According to Schrimm, among those on the trains to the camps were babies
and small children, who were immediately gassed after their arrival in
Sobibor.

"US Has a Strong Interest to Get Rid of Demjanjuk"

It is not the first time investigators have tried to prosecute Demjanjuk.
He was handed over to Israel by the United States after his suspected
involvement in the Holocaust emerged. He was then put on trial in 1988 --
and sentenced to death.

During the 17-month trial, five survivors of the concentration camp
Treblinka in Poland came forward and remembered him as a notorious guard
who went by the nickname of "Ivan the Terrible."

But because Demjanjuk's identity as the cruel guard could be not
confirmed, the death sentence against him was quashed by Israel's highest
court in 1993. Since then he has lived in the US.

It is now up to the German authorities to request his extradition from the
US.

Schrimm believes the United States government has a strong interest in
handing him over. Demjanjuk, who currently lives in Ohio, was born in
Ukraine and became a US citizen in 1952. But after his trial in Israel,
legal proceedings brought against him in relation to his alleged
activities as a guard in the Sobibor camp led him to be stripped of his US
citizenship in May 2008.

"The USA has a strong interest to get rid of Demjanjuk," Schrimm said.
"The Ukraine and other states don't want to take him in. This is a great
chance to hand Demjanjuk over and call him to account for his
actrocities."

The last big trial against a Nazi henchman in Germany was 16 years ago. A
senior SS officer, Josef Schwammberger, was jailed for life for murder and
for acting as an accessory to murder in 650 deaths. He died in prison in
2004.

(source: Der Spiegel)





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LITHUANIA:

Here's a petition to Lithuanian President Adamkus demanding that he
immediately stop the distortion and trivialization of the Holocaust in
Lithuania, please do so now...


http://www.wiesenthal.com/siteapps/advocacy/
ActionItem.aspx?c=fwLYKnN8LzH&b=4724837