Nov. 27



USA:

Artifact linked to Adolf Hitler is found----Authorities in Seattle arrest
a Romanian man who they say was trying to sell the stolen gold bookmark
reportedly given to Hitler by longtime mistress Eva Braun.


Authorities have recovered a stolen 18-carat gold bookmark that
reportedly was given to Adolf Hitler by his longtime mistress, Eva Braun.

Christian Popescu, a Romanian national, was arrested Tuesday outside a
coffee shop in Bellevue, Wash., after trying to sell the bookmark to an
undercover agent for $100,000, according to papers filed in U.S. District
Court.

Federal prosecutors said the bookmark was among several items taken in an
auction house heist in Madrid six years ago. At the time, some antiquities
experts questioned its authenticity.

The bookmark is engraved with a portrait of Hitler as well as an imperial
eagle and swastika, and its inscription indicates that Braun gave it to
Hitler to console him after German forces surrendered at Stalingrad.

"My Adolf, don't worry," it reads, adding that the loss was "only an
inconvenience that will not break your certainty of victory. My love for
you will be eternal, as our Reich will be eternal. Always yours, Eva.
3-2-43."

Regardless of its authenticity, federal agents said its theft broke the
law.

"Artifacts of historical significance are not souvenirs for illegal sale
to the highest bidder," Leigh Winchell, special agent in charge of the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Seattle, said in a
statement.

Popescu made an initial appearance in federal court Wednesday, where he
was represented by a public defender who left without speaking to
reporters.

The operation began when federal investigators learned a man was trying to
sell the bookmark in the Seattle area. An informant contacted Popescu, who
confirmed he had the bookmark and provided pictures, authorities said.
Popescu told the informant he wanted $150,000 for it.

Spanish authorities estimated the bookmark was worth $13,000 to $17,000,
according to court documents.

Investigators set up a meeting with Popescu at a coffee shop in Bellevue,
where the Romanian man showed an undercover agent the bookmark, court
documents said. He was arrested in the parking lot as the agent paid him
$100,000, authorities said.

Popescu is being held on one count of sale or receipt of stolen goods. A
detention hearing is set for Monday.

U.S. Atty. Jeffrey Sullivan said agents were still investigating how the
bookmark arrived in Seattle. Five people were detained in Tuesday's
operation, but only Popescu was arrested and charged, he said.

In 2002, three thieves walked into the Duran Subastas auction house in
Madrid during work hours and stole the bookmark along with several pieces
of jewelry.

(source: Associated Press)




GERMANY:

Dutch entertainer suing over allegation he sang for SS guards at Dachau
concentration camp


A 104-year-old Dutch-born entertainer who made his name performing in
Hitler's Germany began a lawsuit Thursday to clear himself of allegations
he sang for SS guards at the Dachau concentration camp.

Johannes Heesters acknowledges he visited the camp outside Munich in 1941,
but brought a civil suit to have a German author and documentary filmmaker
retract statements that he entertained SS troops while there.

"It never happened," Heesters said in a lengthy statement explaining his
connections to Nazi-era Germany on his Web site.

Heesters' attorney, Gunter Fette, told the three-judge panel his client
had been ordered to go to the camp by the Nazis in an attempt to deceive
the public about what was really going on inside.

"It is well known that sort of thing happened, where people were brought
in to give a positive picture prominent people who could then go and tell
their impressions to others," Fette said.

But the author, Volker Kuehn, maintained Heesters was there to perform for
the troops, basing the assertion on a 1990 interview he did with former
Dachau inmate Viktor Matejka, a political prisoner who became Vienna's
Councilor for Cultural Affairs after the war. Kuehn died in 1993.

Kuehn played the interview for the court, in which he asks Matejka how he
knew that Heesters sang for the SS.

"He said: 'Well, I pulled the curtain for him, I was there, I saw him
singing, I saw him acting and performing for the SS,'" Kuehn said,
explaining the footage, which was not audible in the courtroom.

Fette disputed Matejka's recollection, saying the former prisoner was
nearly 90 when he talked with Kuehn. When he made statements in the late
1970s about Heesters' visit to the camp, after an SS officer's photos of
the day surfaced, Matejka never mentioned a performance, Fette told the
court.

"This same witness who believes he remembered in 1990 ... in 1977 had no
memory, said nothing about it," Fette said.

Fette said further that the photo album does not show any pictures of
Heesters performing.

But Kuehn said after the hearing that he remembers being "astonished" by
how good Matejka's memory was during the 1990 interview, and that he even
spoke with Matejka at length about precise details of events in the 1920s.

"I think it is absurd that the memory of someone who was 88 or 89 is being
questioned by a man who is 104 - it's laughable," Kuehn said. "It leaves
me
speechless."

Born Dec. 5, 1903, in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, Heesters moved to
Germany in 1935 two years after the Nazis came to power.

He was never accused of being a propagandist or anything other than an
actor willing to perform for the Nazis, however, and the Allies allowed
him to continue his career after the war.

But in his native country which was occupied by Germany for most of the
war - some view him as irredeemable.

In February, when he took the stage in the Netherlands for the first time
in four decades, several dozen people protested outside the theater in
Amersfoort.

Heesters' previous attempt to perform in the Netherlands in 1964, saw him
booed off the stage in Amsterdam when he tried to appear as Nazi-hating
Captain von Trapp in "The Sound of Music."

Heesters said it gave him a "heavy heart" to know he was "not wanted in my
homeland."

"What did I do wrong? Sure, I acted in films in the Third Reich,
entertainment films, which distracted countless people inside and outside
Germany from daily life during war," he wrote.

"Sure, I wanted to make my career and I remember well at the time how many
people in the Netherlands were proud that I made a career in the huge
neighboring country ... But apart from my career and the fact that,
through no fault of my own, Adolf Hitler was one of the fans of my art
what have I done?"

Heesters, who has Austrian citizenship and lives in Bavaria, is performing
nightly in Hamburg and did not attend the hearing.

He is asking Kuehn to retract his statements and pledge not to repeat
them. Presiding Judge Michael Mauck said the court would issue its
decision December 16.

(source: Associated Press)




ISRAEL:

Battle for Holocaust Assets Roils Israel


The global quest to ferret out money and property left behind by Jews
killed in the Holocaust is now targeting Israel, and investigators say
it's proving at least as difficult in the Jewish state as it did in
Europe.

Many big banks and the government itself have resisted efforts to claim
hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for bank deposits, land,
corporate shares, art and other assets that investigators say once
belonged to Jews killed by the Nazis and their allies.

"I cannot say that the Israeli establishment has been, or is, happy about
the return of properties," says Avraham Roet, the recently retired
chairman of the Company for Location & Restitution of Holocaust Victims
Assets Ltd. The private firm, often referred to simply as the Company, was
created by the Israeli parliament after its investigators identified up to
9,000 bank accounts suspected of belonging to Holocaust victims.

Thousands of European Jews deposited or invested tidy sums here during the
decades before World War II, often without visiting what was then
British-controlled Palestine. After many were killed in the Holocaust,
their substantial assets went unclaimed, passing into the hands of the
government of the newly created nation of Israel and some of its largest
banks.

While some Israeli institutions have challenged the validity of the
Company's claims, they are generally loath to say much about any of this
in public. Mr. Roet and others say the institutions privately argue they
should be treated more gently than their European counterparts because
they are in a different position than banks and governments that actively
assisted the Nazis. They also say any assets once owned by Holocaust
victims that were subsumed over the years served a public good because
they went toward building a Jewish homeland.

"They said, 'We are not really cheating the survivors. It's all within the
Jewish community, within Israel. It's not the same as it being held by the
Swiss,'" Michael Bazyler, an expert on Holocaust assets from the Chapman
University School of Law in California, says Israeli bankers told him in
2006. "That was sort of their excuse. And I'm saying, 'Wait a second. It's
not your money.'"

Mr. Roet, whose two sisters died in a concentration camp near Auschwitz,
Poland, started investigating and targeting some of Israel's most powerful
institutions after his firm opened last year. The 80-year-old stepped down
from the Company's top job in August but remained a director and its most
public face.

Earlier this year, he went after Bank Leumi Le-Israel B.M., Israel's
second-largest financial institution, claiming it owed more than $34
million, a figure derived from a government-approved formula for fixing
the value of roughly 1,300 accounts once held at the bank.

Last year, on the same day Bank Leumi, the Company's biggest private
target so far, announced that it had hired a retired Israeli Supreme Court
justice to scrutinize each of those accounts, the bank's directors said
they would give about $4.79 million to the Company. Although insistent
that it owed nothing, the bank said the payment was being made "out of
public sentiment and as a gesture of goodwill." The bank disputes many of
Mr. Roet's claims and says it owes little.

While most of the Company's focus has been on bank accounts, it says it
has also located about $86.7 million worth of real estate that had
belonged to Holocaust victims and more than 1,000 stolen works of art in
the Israeli Museum that had been recovered by the Allies from the Nazis.
Museum officials have published a complete catalog on their Web site and
the Company's Web site. They also sponsored a special exhibition earlier
this year titled, "Orphaned Art: Looted Art from the Holocaust in the
Israel Museum."

The Company has sweeping powers allowing it access to government and
business records to find lost assets and lay claim to them. It then tries
to locate heirs -- whose names it is forbidden by law to publicly disclose
-- for any money it recovers. When it can't find heirs, it transfers the
money to needy Holocaust survivors living in Israel. Recovered proceeds
also fund the company's operations.

Run out of a suite of offices in a glass-and-steel tower four stories
above a hardwood-flooring store in this suburb of Tel Aviv, the Company
has so far recovered assets valued at just over $183.9 million. That
includes about $44.7 million from the government.

Mr. Roet estimates conservatively that there's $500 million of victim's
assets in Israel. That's based on those already recovered and claims
either already made or being prepared. He believes that figure could reach
as much as $1 billion when the quest is over, especially if land values
continue to rise in Israel's urban centers.


Avraham Roet
By comparison, a 2001 settlement between Jewish groups and Austria's
government and private sector totaled about $360 million. A 1998
settlement between Jewish groups and a collection of Swiss banks reached
$1.25 billion.

As in Europe, it's impossible to know how much was really lost in Israel.
The Nazis and their surrogates tried to hide their genocide. There is no
reliable registry of the dead nor of their international assets. Those who
survived didn't typically hold onto the sort of records that can buttress
a claim.

In the 1990s and earlier this decade, Jewish groups threatened or took
legal action against European governments and businesses. The U.S. got
involved, threatening reluctant European companies with sanctions.

Under intense international pressure, deals were reached across the
Continent. Settlements were often based on fragmentary evidence and
statistical estimates of what banks and institutions owed. After hammering
out a total price tag, the targeted institutions funded settlement pools
or agreed to specific procedures for paying claims. Heirs with verified
accounts or other documented assets typically got top priority. The
remaining cash was designated for other victims of Nazi persecution,
including refugees and slave laborers.

The European cases led Israeli scholars in 2000 to publish research
showing heirs had been having difficulty recovering assets in the Jewish
state. The revelations led to a parliamentary investigation, and, in 2006,
the law creating the Company.

The Israeli law sets up a process similar to the one in Europe. Verified
heirs are supposed to get paid first, with needy Holocaust survivors
getting the rest. But there's a crucial difference from earlier
settlements: The Company must target each institution over each asset that
it allegedly held. As with Bank Leumi, this gives the targeted
institutions a chance to fight claims case-by-case, then shekel-by-shekel
within each case.

Company investigators have traveled to Poland, Latvia and Lithuania to dig
up school report cards, birth records and marriage documents to try to
make their cases. They also check Holocaust archives in Israel, Germany
and elsewhere to try to prove account holders died in the tragedy.

Making matters more complex, many of the dormant bank accounts the Company
has tried to recover have been transferred from one institution to another
or from a bank to the government, and, in some cases, back again.

Some of the contested accounts have even been paid out to heirs. These
cases get at a particularly contentious issue between the Company and the
banks. The heirs may have gotten the face value of the accounts, but the
law provides a formula to calculate what the account should be worth when
factors such as inflation, currency revaluations and accrued interest are
taken into account.

For example, suppose a European Jew who would later perish in the
Holocaust opened a bank account in 1936 with the equivalent of $1,000. If
heirs eventually identified the account and recovered the money this year
from the bank or government custodians, Mr. Roet says they most likely got
only the face value of the original investment, or minimal interest on top
of it. But the legally mandated formula the Company uses calculates the
"lost value" in that account over the years. Under that formula, the
$1,000 deposit in 1936 would be valued today at the equivalent of about
$23,000.

And Mr. Roet says the banks -- even those that have already paid out at
face value -- still owe the difference for that legally defined lost
value. Without any of the international pressure that European firms
faced, however, many Israeli institutions are offering stiff resistance.

Of the $34 million from 1,300 disputed accounts Mr. Roet says Bank Leumi
owes, the bank accepts responsibility for only three of those accounts.
They are worth just about $2,200, at face value.

Aviram Cohen, a Bank Leumi spokesman, says the bank's own investigation
shows 600 accounts identified by Mr. Roet belonged to people who couldn't
be Holocaust victims, since there was activity in the accounts after the
war. Bank Leumi says it doesn't owe anything for almost all of the
remainder of the accounts, because they've been transferred out of the
bank over the years. The bank dismisses the idea that it must pay for the
lost value of an account for the years it held one.

In earlier public statements, bank officials have rejected the idea of
lost value enshrined in the law, calling the basis for claims an "alleged
liability" stemming "from a conceptual revaluation" of deposits.

The Company's lawyer, Nadav Haetzni, acknowledged that about 100 of the
1,300 cases were submitted to the bank by mistake. They involved Holocaust
survivors, rather than confirmed victims, he says. However, Mr. Haetzni
also says the error was quickly corrected, that the accounts in question
had little value and that the sum of the claims against Bank Leumi won't
be materially diminished.

In addition, he says the Company recently slapped a second round of claims
against Bank Leumi seeking an additional $31.5 million.

On the issue of lost value, Mr. Haetzni said the law is clear. It appears
the dispute is headed for the Israeli courts.

From the beginning, Israeli banks have had an uneasy relationship with
those campaigning to recover dormant accounts. After a nearly five-year
parliamentary investigation, lawmakers identified up to 9,000 bank
accounts investigators suspected belonged to victims.

Banks implicated in the report rejected 2005 findings as speculative. So
lawmakers established the Company in 2006.

A $3.15 million claim the Company has prepared against Mizrahi Tafahot
Bank Ltd. grew out of a faded banker's memo that drew attention during the
Knesset hearings. Dated Oct. 29, 1939, eight weeks after the Nazis blitzed
Poland, the document pledges deposits held by European Jews, mostly in
Poland, as collateral on a loan from another bank.

"The depositors cannot claim their deposits now because they are abroad or
we foresee that they won't claim the money for other reasons," the memo
reads in Hebrew. A representative of Mizrahi Bank declined to comment.

Mr. Roet has proved to be a dogged adversary. He was chosen as the
Company's chairman because he had led a group that helped secure a series
of Holocaust settlements in the Netherlands valued at more than $300
million.

After the arrest of his two sisters in 1943 and their deportation to
Auschwitz, he shuttled among more than a dozen Christian homes, finishing
out the war pretending to be the son of a Catholic couple on a dairy farm
in southern Holland. "I learned to milk cows," he says.

He came to Israel alone in 1946 at age 17, then went on to build
successful businesses, including one importing raw materials for Israel's
booming pharmaceutical industry. But he has dedicated his retirement to
Holocaust victims.

Last year, Mr. Roet began assembling his team. Accountants, archivists and
self-styled gumshoes occupy workspaces that offer few hints about the task
at hand. Holocaust-related records are hidden behind the covers of blue
and red binders shelved near a Homer Simpson poster.

Although the parliamentary findings made banks natural targets when the
Company opened, there were few clues about land in Israel purchased by
those who were later killed in the Holocaust. Jewish academics documented
a more than threefold increase in Jewish land purchases in British
Palestine from 1914 to 1940. Parcels were sold in Europe by traveling
Zionist salesman.

Across Israel, the Company so far has title to about 480 individual
parcels, 300 of which were handed over by the government. They are in some
of Israel's hottest areas, including trendy Tel Aviv. The Company values
the lands it holds so far at about $86.7 million.

Laying claim to land is also proving difficult. Company staff identified
the land of one victim in a fertile plain near the edge of a northern
Israeli town called Kiryat Atta. But when they arrived to survey it, they
found a cemetery had been built there.

Investigators discovered another lot in one of Israel's most affluent
enclaves, a hilltop neighborhood of Haifa overlooking the sea. A 10-room
home in the neighborhood can list for more than $4 million. The owner of a
villa adjacent to the plot simply expanded onto the unused property.

"He has a Jacuzzi in there," says Noa Blecher, who is the Company's top
real-estate sleuth. Mr. Roet says the Company is taking the hot-tub owner
to court.

Based on evidence uncovered thus far, Mr. Roet believes there are scores
of still-hidden parcels across the nation.

While the quest for assets is under way, so is the hunt for heirs. While
trying to piece together records in Europe and listing recovered assets on
its Web site, the Company has reached into the country's Holocaust legacy
to seek out victims' families.

The Company's Elinor Kritoru appears regularly on an Israeli radio show
called Hipoos Krovim, which means "searching for relatives" in Hebrew. It
first aired in 1945, broadcasting the pleas of Holocaust survivors looking
for lost loved ones. It later went off the air, but returned in 2000 as a
more generic reunion show.

Ms. Kritoru's appearances echo bygone broadcasts, as she calls out the
names of the dead.

"We're looking for the heirs of Yitzhak Meir Abeliov, from Bialystock,
Poland," she said earlier this year. "We'd be very happy to find the
descendents of David Tishanski....We're also looking for heirs of Lazar
Abeleff from Kononov, Ukraine."

(source: Wall Stree Journal, Nov. 12)





ENGLAND:

'Holocaust denier' free from jail


An Australian historian has been freed from prison in London after the
German authorities abandoned efforts to have him extradited from the UK.

Dr Gerald Toben was held last month at Heathrow Airport on a European
arrest warrant.

The revisionist historian was accused of publishing anti-Semitic material
on the internet.

The German authorities have now dropped an appeal to the High Court after
Britain refused to hand him over.

The case against him is now closed and Mr Toben is waiting to get his
passport back from the British authorities.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and offenders can face up to five
years in jail. It is not a crime in Britain.

'Over the moon'

Earlier in November, a judge in London ruled that the warrant used to
arrest Mr Toben while he was in transit from the US to Dubai was invalid
because it did not provide enough detail.

He was granted bail following that ruling, but had to remain in Britain
until the case was heard in the High Court.

Mr Toben was not released from custody at Wandsworth Prison until Thursday
because he was asked to pay a 100,000 security first.

But his lawyer, Kevin Lowry-Mullins, said the appeal lodged by the German
authorities had now been withdrawn and he had signed a consent order with
the German government to end the case.

Mr Lowry-Mullins said his client was "over the moon".

Lawyers acting for the German government had argued Mr Toben, the
64-year-old founder of the controversial Adelaide Institute, should be
extradited to face trial for posting revisionist claims on the internet
about the Holocaust.

One of Mr Toben's supporters, Lady Michele Renouf, an Australian-born,
British-based socialite, said: "He is very relieved, but he is also being
very cautious given the kind of extraordinary treatment he has received."

She said he would not be commenting directly on the case, adding: "He
needs to take care until he is in a safer place - after all, this warrant
should never have been entertained in the first place."

(source: BBC News)


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



Beyond camps and forced labour: current international research on
survivors of Nazi persecution.


Third international multidisciplinary conference to be held at the
Imperial War Museum London, 7-9 January 2009

Further information and a registration form are now available at:
http://www.iwm.org.uk/conferenceBCFL

Around 100 speakers from all over the world will present and discuss
the latest results of their research on all groups of survivors of
Nazi persecution. These include - but are not limited to - Jews,
Gypsies, Slavonic peoples, homosexuals, Soviet prisoners of war,
political dissidents, members of underground movements, the disabled,
the so-called 'racially impure', and forced labourers.