Feb. 3



USA:

US bishops slam Holocaust denial


In the most pointed statement yet from a high-ranking Catholic official,
Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, the president of the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops, today is sharply criticizing the Holocaust
denial by a traditionalist bishop whose excommunication was lifted last
month by Pope Benedict XVI. George (above), clearly alarmed by the brewing
controversy and the damage to Catholic-Jewish relations, called the
statements by Bishop Richard Williamson "deeply offensive and utterly
false" and called the outrage from Jews and Catholics "understandable."

Signficantly, George also asserts that full reconciliation between the
Vatican and the four un-excommunicated bishops of the Society of Saint
Pius X, including Williamson, will require "their assent to all that the
Church professes, including the teachings of the Second Vatican Council."
That is important because the Second Vatican Council resulted in the
church's renunciation of anti-Semitism and led to a historic warming of
relations between Catholics and Jews.

Here's the full text of Cardinal George's statement:

"Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the personal penalty of excommunication
incurred by four schismatic bishops belonging to the Priestly Society of
Saint Pius X, founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. This gesture
on the part of the Holy Father was an act of mercy and personal concern
for the ordained and lay members of this Society and was meant to coincide
with the fiftieth commemoration of the convening of the Second Vatican
Council.

The Holy Fathers lifting of the excommunications is but a first step
toward receiving these four bishops, and the priests who serve under them,
back into full communion with the Catholic Church. If these bishops are to
exercise their ministry as true teachers and pastors of the Catholic
Church, they, like all Catholic bishops, will have to give their assent to
all that the Church professes, including the teachings of the Second
Vatican Council.

As is now widely known, one of the four bishops, Richard Williamson, has
recently made some deeply offensive and utterly false statements about the
Holocaust of the Second World War. Bishop Williamson has denied historical
facts about the Shoah, in which six million Jews were cruelly annihilated,
innocent victims of blind racial and religious hatred. These comments have
evoked understandable outrage from within the Jewish community and also
from among our own Catholic people. No Catholic, whether lay person,
priest or bishop can ever negate the memory of the Shoah, just as no
Catholic should ever tolerate expressions of anti-Semitism and religious
bigotry.

I make my own the words of the Holy Father spoken at the General Audience
on January 28, 2009: [May] the Shoah show both old and new generations
that only the arduous path of listening and dialogue, of love and
forgiveness, can lead peoples, cultures and religions of the world to the
longed-for goal of fraternity and peace, in truth. May violence never
again humiliate man's dignity. We Catholic bishops in the United States
are as committed as ever to building bonds of trust and mutual
understanding with our elder brothers and sisters, the Jewish people, so
that together with them we may be a blessing to the world."

(source: Boston Globe)






GERMANY:

Merkel joins Papal Holocaust row

The Pope says the Holocaust "should be a warning for all"


German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the Vatican's clarifications over
the readmission of a bishop who queries the Holocaust do not go far
enough.

"In my opinion these clarifications are not yet sufficient," Mrs Merkel
said.

A row erupted last month after Pope Benedict XVI lifted the
excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, who had said no Nazi gas
chambers existed.

Pope Benedict has distanced himself from those beliefs and expressed "full
and indisputable solidarity" with Jews.

"This should not be allowed to pass without consequences," Mrs Merkel said
at a news conference in Berlin.

"This is not just a matter, in my opinion, for the Christian, Catholic and
Jewish communities in Germany but the Pope and the Vatican should clarify
unambiguously that there can be no denial," she said.

Vatican 'unaware'

Last November, British-born Bishop Williamson angered Jewish leaders
across the world when he told Swedish TV: "I believe there were no gas
chambers [during World War II]."

He said he believed that up "300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration
camps but none of them by gas chambers".

He is one of four bishops, who are members of the Society of Pius X, whose
excommunication was lifted last month by the Pope.

The Society of St Pius X was founded by a French Archbishop, Marcel
Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the Second Vatican Council's
reforms on religious freedom and pluralism.

The Vatican says it was unaware of Bishop Williamson's views on the
Holocaust when the decision was made to readmit the group.

About six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

(source: BBC News)


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

Appeal filed in case of Nazi war-criminal suspect


In Berlin, a German prosecutor said Monday he has appealed a court ruling
that a Nazi war-criminal suspect is too ill to stand trial.

Dortmund Prosecutor Ulrich Maass said he asked a state court in Cologne to
review the medical dismissal of attempts to try 87-year-old Heinrich Boere
for the wartime killings of three Dutch civilians in the Netherlands.

Maass said he will argue that despite Boere's old age and poor health, he
should be made to answer for his crimes. "We have to try. This is the last
chance that I have," Maass said.

He brought murder charges against Boere in April for the World War II
killings of three men in the Netherlands when he was a member of a Waffen
SS death squad that targeted civilians in reprisal killings for resistance
attacks.

Boere fled to Germany after the war and was sentenced to death in absentia
by a Dutch court in 1949. The sentence was later commuted to life
imprisonment, but German courts have blocked attempts to extradite him or
enforce the verdict here.

Recently, Boere was No. 6 on the Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted
suspected Nazi war criminals.

Maass reopened the case with his own investigation in 2006.

In January, an Aachen state court said Boere was too ill to stand trial,
citing a thorough two-day medical exam.

The son of a Dutch man and German woman, Boere was 18 when he joined the
Waffen SS _ the fanatical military organization faithful to Adolf Hitler's
ideology _ at the end of 1940, only months after the Netherlands had
fallen to the Nazi blitzkrieg.

After taking part in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, he returned to
the Netherlands and joined a group of mostly Dutch volunteers given the
job of killing their countrymen in reprisal attacks.

The unit is suspected of 54 killings, and Boere admitted after the war
while in an Allied prison camp that he had taken part in three slayings,
according to Dutch court documents.

Teun de Groot is the son of one of those Dutch victims.

De Groot said he realizes it is unlikely Boere would spend time in jail,
even if the Cologne court were to order the suspect's trial and he was
convicted. But de Groot said it is important to pursue the case while
Boere is still alive.

"The most important thing is to have a verdict," he said.

(source: Associated Press)




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


Revealed: women's role in Nazi crimes


A new book published this week in Germany has said that women played as
great a role in Nazi atrocities as the men.


In Nazi art, films and magazines, women were always portrayed as the
fairer sex, fighting on the home-front as their menfolk fought on the
battlefields.

Adolf Hitler awarded them gold crosses for rearing children and honoured
their role as wives and mothers - a soft image that was rarely questioned
after the war.

But a new book by the historian Kathrin Kompisch has revealed a very
different reality.

"Apart from a few particularly cruel examples, the participation of women
in the crimes of the Nazis has been blended out of the collective
conscious of the Germans for a long time," she wrote in the book, Female
Perpetrators: Women under National Socialism.

Many women were in fact used as assistants to the doctors who sterilised
and murdered disabled people and as guards in the concentration camps -
like the character played by Kate Winslet in her Oscar nominated role in
the film The Reader.

"The history of National Socialism has long been reduced to one that
blamed men for everything," said Ms Kompisch. "This was and is the popular
picture."

The true picture was very different.

"Women typed the statistics of the murdered victims of the SS Action
Squads in the east, operated the radios which called up for more bullets,
were invariably the secretaries - and sometimes much more - in all the
Gestapo posts," she said. "And at the end of the war they tried to
diminish their responsibility by saying they were just cogs in the
all-male machine which gave the orders."

Analysing pre and post-war statistics, Ms Kompisch found there were more
government, private sector and military jobs to be had for women under
Hitler than in peacetime.

The high-testosterone, all-male hierarchy of the Nazi state blocked out
women from leadership positions from the very start, but the regime
actively encouraged female participation in enforcing the Nazi terror at
grassroots levels.

Most "Blockwaerts" - apartment house snoops who reported on un-Nazi
activities to the party - were women, who denounced their neighbours to
the Gestapo if they suspected them of being ideologically unsound or
Jewish.

The surviving files of the Gestapo in the city of Duesseldorf noted that
women "try to change the power balance of the household by denouncing
their husbands as spies or Communists or anti-Nazis." "Lower-middle or
working-class urban women tended to be the ones who filed reports with the
Gestapo, and such reports were most likely to lead to the persecution of
the denounced party if he was a member of a group considered racially
inferior, like the Poles," said Ms Kompisch.

Some 3,200 women served in the concentration camps. Female guards were
generally low-to-middle class and had little or no work experience,
although SS records show that some were matrons, hairdressers, tram
conductors or retired teachers.

(source: The Telegraph)