Feb. 19





ARGENTINA:

Argentina expels Holocaust- denying bishop


Argentina has given a Roman Catholic bishop 10 days to leave the country
or be expelled after he caused an international uproar by denying the
extent of the Holocaust, the government said on Thursday.

Bishop Richard Williamson, an ultra-traditionalist who headed a seminary
near Buenos Aires until earlier this month, has said he believes there
were no gas chambers and that no more than 300,000 Jews died in Germany's
Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million figure that is widely
accepted.

The Vatican ordered him to retract his comments and the British-born
Williamson responded that needed more time to review the evidence.

"The interior minister ... orders Richard Nelson Williamson to leave the
country within 10 days or be expelled," Argentina's government said in a
statement.

Williamson's views were anti-Semitic and "deeply offended Argentine
society," the government said. Argentina is home to one of the world's
largest Jewish communities outside of Israel.

At the seminary outside Buenos Aires, in the rural town of La Reja, two
clergymen told Reuters that Williamson had already left the sprawling,
tree-lined compound.

"It's very sad but there you have it," said a bespectacled, young
Frenchman who identified himself as Juan de Dios, or Juan of God.

Neither he nor priest Alvaro Calderon was willing to say if Williamson had
left for good.

Pope Benedict angered Jewish leaders and many Catholics last month when he
lifted excommunications on Williamson and three other traditionalists to
try to heal a 20-year-old schism within the Church that began in 1988 when
they were ordained without Vatican permission.

Williamson, who belongs to the ultra-traditional Society of Saint Pius X,
was removed earlier this month as head of the seminary in La Reja.

World Jewish organizations and German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticized
the pope for rehabilitating Williamson. The pope, who is German-born, has
tried to heal wounds by meeting Jewish leaders and ordering Williamson to
recant his views.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and state prosecutors in the
southern city of Regensburg are investigating Williamson for incitement.

German neo-Nazi websites and blogs have published pieces supporting
Williamson's stand.

Argentine Jewish groups applauded the government's decision. Aldo Donzis,
head of the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations, said denying
the Holocaust was "unacceptable."

Rabbi Daniel Goldman, a child of Holocaust survivors who sought government
action against Williamson, told the Jewish News Agency that "actions such
as these clearly show that our people and our leadership refuse to live
alongside a lie."

A leader of Germany's Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, said
on Sunday it was "almost ridiculous" that Williamson has said he needs
time to review evidence about whether the Holocaust took place.

(source: Reuters)





GERMANY:

Prosecutor slams delay in Demjanjuk Holocaust case


Germany's war crimes prosecutor issued an impassioned warning Thursday
against any further delay in bringing 88-year-old John Demjanjuk to trial
for allegedly helping kill 29,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp.

Kurt Schrimm, who heads Germany's national office on war crimes in
Ludwigsburg, said his staff have already set out a compelling case against
Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born man who now lives in the US state of Ohio.
Schrimm rejected claims by local German prosecutors that the case was
incomplete.

Demjanjuk was acquitted in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court of charges
that he was a guard at the Treblinka death camp.

The Germans say they have proof that he served the Nazis from April to
July 1943 at a different extermination camp, Sobibor, operating diesel
engines that were used to gas inmates to death.

'The evidence we have sent to Munich suffices,' Schrimm told Deutsche
Presse-Agentur dpa.

He said a failure to try Demjanjuk would prompt fresh criticism of the
German justice authorities.

Schrimm's unit does not have the powers to prosecute Demjanjuk itself.
Insted it sent the file to prosecutors in Munich last November. Munich is
the German city where Demjanjuk lived as a displaced person till he
emigrated to the United States in 1952.

The Schrimm team found a Sobibor witness and obtained expert evidence that
Demjanjuk's Nazi identity card was genuine and had not been tampered with
by Soviet authorities. Schrimm then hoped Munich would apply quickly for
Demjanjuk's extradition.

However Munich has initiated a new forensic study at the Bavarian police
laboratories into the SS identity card, which links Demjanjuk to the
so-called Trawniki group of Ukrainian and Baltic 'volunteers' who were
recruited to do some of the Nazis' dirty work.

'The card has been thoroughly checked by three US experts. It is genuine
without a shadow of a doubt,' said Schrimm, who also criticized Munich for
asking Ukraine, Poland, Israel and the United States for any extra
evidence they might have.

'We sent sent 17 binders of evidence to Munich,' he said. 'It was the
result of comprehensive research. Every known document connected to the
name Demjanjuk is already in there as an original or a copy.'

'There is an adequate case there to bring to trial.'

Schrimm said eastern European nations were generally slow to respond to
calls for assistance in inquiries.

'The world can't wait. Demjanjuk is old. Every day counts now,' he said.

Eli Rosenbaum, head of the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI), has
a vital interest in seeing Demjanjuk brought to justice.

The acquittal on the Treblinka charges was a serious setback to the OSI,
which helped compile the case that he was a Treblinka guard remembered by
the nickname 'Ivan the Terrible.' That claim will not be part of the
German case.

But the OSI did find enough evidence of SS membership to have Demjanjuk
formally stripped of his US citizenship in 2008.

In Munich Thursday, a prosecutions spokesman defended the re-examination
of the evidence. He said it was not in the interest of the Munich
prosecutions department to risk another acquittal.

'We are used to doing a proper job, and aim to avoid evidentiary problems
cropping up at trial that might have been avoided in advance,' he said. He
also defended the bid to find any further Sobibor survivors in Israel as
witnesses.

The identity card indicating Demjanjuk was in the SS paramilitary group
which worked in the death camps was a key to his conviction by an Israeli
court in 1988, which was overturned on appeal.

The certificate contains the Ukrainian's photograph, an SS service number
and notes about his service at two Nazi sites.

Claims that the abbreviation SS might have been added later or the
photograph might have been switched are ruled out by Schrimm's experts,
who say both those elements are demonstrably original.

(source: Monsters & Critics)





FRANCE:

French Holocaust role recognised


Between 1942 and 1944, some 76,000 French Jews were deported France's
highest court has recognised the state's "responsibility" for the
deportation of Jews in World War II.

The Council of State said the state had permitted or facilitated
deportations that led to anti-Semitic persecution without being coerced by
the occupiers.

But the council also found reparations had since been made "as much as was
possible, for all the losses suffered".

Correspondents say the ruling is the clearest such recognition of the
French state's role in the Holocaust.

Between 1942 and 1944 some 76,000 Jews were deported from France by the
Vichy government in collaboration with the German occupying army.

In 1995, former French President Jacques Chirac officially recognised the
French state's responsibility in the deportation of French Jews, putting
an end to decades of ambiguity by successive governments.

"These dark hours forever sully our history and are an insult to our past
and our traditions," he said. "Yes, the criminal folly of the occupiers
was seconded by the French, by the French state."

Previous administrations had always blamed either Nazi Germany or the
Vichy government, absolving the French state of responsibility.

Compensation claim

The Council of State's pronouncement on Monday came after the Paris
administrative court sought its opinion on a case brought by the daughter
of a deportee killed at Auschwitz, who is seeking reparations from the
French state.

She is also asking for material and moral damages for her own personal
suffering during and after the German occupation.

The reparations required called for individual compensation for victims,
as well as a solemn recognition of the state's responsibility and of the
loss and damages collectively suffered

French Council of State

In its judgement, the council said it believed the responsibility of the
state was evident because it had "permitted or facilitated the deportation
from France of persons who had been victims of anti-Semitic persecution".

The state's actions were not the result of "direct constraints put upon it
by the occupying force", it added.

The council cited "arrests, internments and displacement to transit camps"
carried out by the French authorities, which it said were "the first stage
of the deportation of these people to camps in which most of them were
exterminated".

However, the court also said that it did not believe the government should
be liable for any further compensation claims.

"The reparations required called for individual compensation for victims,
as well as a solemn recognition of the state's responsibility and of the
loss and damages collectively suffered," it explained.

"The various measures taken since the end of World War II, both in terms
of compensation as well as symbolic reparation, have repaired, as much as
was possible, all the losses suffered."

In 2007, a Bordeaux appeal court overturned a ruling ordering the state
railway operator, SNCF, to compensate the family of deportees.

(source: BBC News)





USA----WISCONSIN:

Names of child victims sought for Holocaust event


Community members are requested to submit names of children - relatives or
friends of Milwaukeeans - who perished in the Holocaust. The child victims
will be remembered at the community-wide Yom HaShoah commemoration, held
on Sunday, April 19.

Requested information includes name and age and, if possible, the
birthplace, any known information, a photo and the location of death.

Anyone who has such information is asked to send it to Dorene Paley,
Director of Community Services at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish
Community Center, 6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Milwaukee, WI 53217.

The one-and-a-half million children who died in the Shoah will be
remembered this year and in future years at the community-wide
commemorative event. This year it is scheduled to be held at the JCC.

(source: Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle)