April 17



USA:

Nazi war crimes suspect granted emergency stay

NEW: Attorney general's representatives said court has no jurisdiction

Immigration agents picked up John Demjanjuk at Cleveland, Ohio, home

Demjanjuk, 89, has been fighting charges of Nazi war crimes for 20-plus
years

German authorities accuse Demjanjuk of involvement in killings at Nazi
death camp


Nazi war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk was granted an emergency stay
Tuesday to block an imminent deportation to Germany.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents remove John Demjanjuk from his
home Tuesday.

The Justice Department would not immediately comment, saying officials
needed to see the court's order granting the stay.

The stay was granted by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in
Cincinnati, Ohio.

"Upon due consideration of the motion for a stay and the opposition by the
attorney general, we conclude that a stay of removal is warranted," the
court wrote.

Representatives of Attorney General Eric Holder argued late Tuesday in
response to the emergency motion filed by Demjanjuk's attorney that the
Circuit Court did not have jurisdiction over the case. But the court acted
anyway.

"Because it is our understanding that the government may remove the
petitioner later today, we are compelled to rule on the motion for a stay
prior to addressing the jurisdictional concerns raised by the government,"
the court wrote.

Demjanjuk had been taken into custody at his home near Cleveland, Ohio,
earlier in the day by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

German authorities have accused Demjanjuk, 89, of involvement in killings
at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland, during World War II. He has
denied the allegations.

His deportation would close a chapter in one of the longest-running
pursuits of an alleged Holocaust perpetrator. It also would set the stage
for what likely would prove to be an extraordinary German war crimes
trial.

On Friday, a federal immigration board rejected an emergency appeal for a
stay of Demjanjuk's deportation. His attorney, John Broadley, had argued
that deporting his client would constitute torture because of his health
problems.

The lawyer said Demjanjuk suffers from pre-leukemia, kidney problems,
spinal problems and "a couple of types of gout."

"Looking at what's going on in Cleveland ... is truly appalling," Broadley
said in a statement shortly after Demjanjuk was taken into custody.

"You have an 89-year-old man with various physical ailments, and you have
eight guys from [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement] trying to stuff him
into a wheelchair to send him to Germany. This looks like something taking
place in Germany and not in the United States."

Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center found irony in Broadley's
argument for his client.

"He wants to plead the sense of fairness that he regularly denied all of
the victims at Sobibor," Hier said.

He called Demjanjuk's comparison of his planned deportation to torture
"preposterous coming from a person that served the [Nazi organization] SS
in a death camp. It is a preposterous argument and insulting to the
survivors of the Holocaust."

Hier said that 250,000 Jews were killed at the camp and that none of the
guards who worked there was blameless.

"You were there for one job: kill the Jews," he said. "And that's what
they did full time."

He called the evidence against Demjanjuk "overwhelming.

German authorities issued an arrest warrant for Demjanjuk on March 10,
accusing him of being an accessory to 29,000 counts of murder as a guard
at Sobibor from March to September 1943.

The warrant was issued after the authorities concluded an identification
card provided by the U.S. Office of Special Investigations was genuine.

Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker, has been fighting charges of Nazi war
crimes for more than two decades.

He previously was extradited from the United States to Israel, where he
was convicted in 1986 of being "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the
notorious Treblinka extermination camp. The Israeli courts overturned his
conviction on appeal, and he returned to the United States.

The United States filed new charges against him in 1999, again alleging
that he had been a concentration camp guard. He was stripped of U.S.
citizenship and has been awaiting deportation since 2005 after fighting
his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian, has said he saw action in the Soviet army and
later was a prisoner of war held by the Germans.

(source: CNN)





GERMANY:

'HELL ON EARTH'
German Bishop Links Nazi Crimes to Atheism


In an Easter sermon that has drawn widespread criticism, the Catholic
bishop of Augsburg has linked the crimes committed under Nazi and
Communist regimes to atheism. Atheist groups have reacted with fury and
accuse the cleric of rewriting history.

A Catholic German bishop has come under fire for his remarks condemning
atheists. In a sermon given on Easter Sunday, the bishop of Augsburg,
Walter Mixa, warned of rising atheism in Germany. "Wherever God is denied
or fought against, there people and their dignity will soon be denied and
held in disregard," he said in the sermon. He also said that "a society
without God is hell on earth" and quoted the Russian author Fyodor
Dostoyevsky: "If God does not exist, everything is permitted."

Most controversially, he linked the Nazi and Communist crimes to atheism.
"In the last century, the godless regimes of Nazism and Communism, with
their penal camps, their secret police and their mass murder, proved in a
terrible way the inhumanity of atheism in practice." Christians and the
Church were always the subject of "special persecution" under these
systems, he said.

However, critics accuse Mixa of rewriting history. The bishop's claim that
humanity automatically arises from religious faith is "totally untenable,"
Rudolf Ladwig, president of the Germany-based International League of
Non-Religious and Atheists (IBKA), told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Mixa's words are
part of a "long-term strategy by the Church to exculpate, in a
historically inaccurate way, the history of its own institution as relates
to fascism."

The Nazi dictatorship targeted Communists, Social Democrats, liberals,
trade unionists, Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, the disabled and
others, Ladwig said. "It was by no means the dictatorship of a dedicated
atheist movement. Resistance from within the churches came only from
individuals."

The philosopher Michael Schmidt-Salomon, head of the humanist non-profit
group the Giordano Bruno Foundation, also sharply criticized Mixa. "If you
bear in mind that during the Nazi era it was precisely the Jews who were
accused of being godless, then one sees how perfidious Mixa's reasoning
is," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. He points out that freethinker associations
were disbanded by the Nazis and avowed atheists were persecuted.

Mixa's claim that the Nazi regime was "godless" is "a massive distortion
of history," Schmidt-Salomon said. Nazi ideology -- including its
anti-Semitism -- was based largely on Christian traditions, he said,
explaining that evidence for that can be found in Hitler's "Mein Kampf"
and elsewhere. "The majority of the Nazi elite saw themselves as
Christians," says Schmidt-Salomon.

Although the Nazi movement included a wide variety of currents of
religious thought, ranging from nihilism to neo-paganism to Teutonic
mythology to Hinduism, atheism played no significant political role for
the Nazis. Avowed atheists were not welcome in the Nazi party or the SS.

The relationship of the Catholic Church to the Nazis was also an
ambivalent one. Individual members of the clergy openly confronted the
regime, which in some cases resulted in their persecution and murder.
Others voluntarily collaborated with the dictatorship, while most simply
did nothing. A systematic persecution of Christians did not take place in
the Third Reich -- let alone the "special persecution of Christians and
the Church" which Mixa spoke of.

Both the diocese of Augsburg and the German Bishops' Conference declined
to comment on the sermon and the criticism when contacted by SPIEGEL
ONLINE.

The Easter sermon was not the first time that Mixa has made comparisons to
Nazism for rhetorical purposes. In February, the bishop compared the
number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust with the number of abortions
performed over the past decades, according to a newspaper report. The
bishop's spokesman also responded to criticism of Mixa from Germany's
leading Green Party politician, Claudia Roth, who called the bishop a
"crazy ber-fundamentalist," by comparing her words to Nazi propaganda.

Mixa has also courted controversy on other issues. In 2007, he criticized
a proposal to expand daycare in Germany by saying it would turn women into
"breeding machines." Later that same year, he was criticized by the Jewish
community in Germany when he compared the situation of the Palestinians to
the Warsaw Ghetto.

According to the Federal Statistical Office, approximately one-third of
all Germans do not belong to an organized religion. A 2005 survey
conducted by AP-Ipsos showed that only 22 percent of Germans have no doubt
about the existence of God, while some 23 percent of Germans identify
themselves either as atheists or agnostics.

(source: Spiegel Online)