April 30



POLAND/THE NETHERLANDS:

REMEMBERING THE 'DUTCH AUSCHWITZ'----The Story of Sobibor


There is little in Sobibor to remind one of the former Nazi concentration
camp where 34,000 Dutch Jews died. That is going to change, thanks in part
to help from the Netherlands.

Anyone who didn't know better would think they are in a typical Polish
hamlet, where clean washing flutters in the wind, farmers on old tractors
rumble by and lumbermen lug tree trunks. But Stara Kolonia Sobibr is not
typical, nor will it ever be.

During World War II this was the site of the German extermination camp
Sobibor, where 170,000 Jews, more than 34,000 of them Dutch, were
systematically murdered. It is a difficult place to reach, deep in the
forests of Poland's eastern border area, and easy to forget. But that is
going to change.

The Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia and Israel recently agreed on a major
'renovation' aimed at opening up the former camp to the outside world and
pulling it out of the shadow of the well-known Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in
southern Poland.

Uprising

"We must do right by the victims of Sobibor," State Secretary Jet
Bussemaker said last week during a working visit to Poland. "The camp is
unknown, even in the Netherlands, since virtually no one survived and
lived to tell."

Unlike at Auschwitz, there is nothing to see at Sobibor. The Germans
dismantled the camp in 1943 after an uprising in which 12 SS officers were
killed and several hundred Jews managed to escape. Fifty of them survived
the war. The Germans planted trees on the bare terrain.

As Bussemaker's delegation made its way to the edge of the young forest,
Jetje Manheim, chairman of the Sobibor Foundation, makes the invisible
visible. "Potato soup and raw oats were on the menu," she says. "Anyone
who was unable to supplement this ration did not have much hope of
survival."

The handful of houses that make up present day Stara Kolonia Sobibr,
adjoining the forest, are from after the war, except for a striking green
building with a view over the crumbling train platform where the
transports arrived. That was the camp commander's house. Now a Polish
family lives there.

Hill of Ashes

After the war the Polish were at a loss as to what to do with the
extermination camps the Germans had built on Polish soil. Auschwitz
quickly became a state museum, but smaller camps like Sobibor were left to
revert to nature. Poland was in ruins, there were other priorities.

And of course there was communism, with its own version of the historical
truth. "The camp guards in Sobibor were Ukrainian," says Janusz Kloc, the
local starosta (county leader). "But you could not say that out loud.
Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union then, a friendly nation."

In the 1970s an austere monument was built, a 'hill of ashes' at the place
where the bodies from the gas chambers were burnt on grates in the open
air. A plaque explains that "Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, Poles and
gypsies" were murdered here. The fact that it was mainly Jews was kept
silent. The Polish suffering could not be overshadowed by Jewish
suffering.

"This really shouldn't be," Bussemaker says, pointing to the hill of ashes
where she has just laid a wreath. "Somewhere here are all those ashes and
we are just merrily treading on it." It is one of the issues she hopes to
resolve with the renovation of the camp.

'Road to Heaven'

A great deal has already changed since the fall of communism. There are
new plaques -- and these ones do declare the victims to be Jews. And in
2003 a 'reflection lane' was opened, where survivors can place stones with
the names of murdered family members. The path roughly coincides with the
route to the gas chambers, dubbed the Himmelfahrtstrasse (road to heaven)
by the detainees.

"The reflection lane is unique in our country," says Marek Bem, director
of the regional museum of Wlodawa, the nearby town in whose territory
Sobibor falls. "In Poland we often remember collectively, victims are
anonymous. Here there is a story behind every name."

Jetje Manheim, herself a surviving relative, is happy with the attention
now being paid to the camp, but she is also concerned. The last thing she
wants is for Sobibor to become like Belzec, a former extermination camp to
the south, where a giant monument funded by American money was unveiled in
2004. "Holocaust architecture," Manheim calls it.

"Belzec is overwhelming," Manheim says. "You don't get the space for your
own thoughts there. Sobibor is much more intimate." She does see room for
improvement: the small museum in the hamlet does not have decent toilet
facilities or heating. And the texts are in Polish. "But beyond that
Sobibor can stay as it is."

Bem too hopes the good intentions of the various governments will not
degenerate into architectural bombast. "This is the truth," he says, with
a sweeping movement of his arm indicating the forest.

(source: Der Spiegel)





USA----CALIFORNIA:

Professor's comparison of Israelis to Nazis stirs furor

The UC Santa Barbara sociologist, who is Jewish, sent images from the
Holocaust and from Israel's Gaza offensive to students in his class. He
has drawn denunciation and support.


Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor's decision to
send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in
the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent
Gaza offensive.

The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has
triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism
from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members
have voiced support for him.


The uproar began in January when Robinson sent his message -- titled
"parallel images of Nazis and Israelis" -- to the 80 students in
his sociology of globalization class.

The e-mail contained more than two dozen photographs of Jewish victims of
the Nazis, including those of dead children, juxtaposed with nearly
identical images from the Gaza Strip. It also included an article critical
of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and a note from Robinson.

"Gaza is Israel's Warsaw -- a vast concentration camp that confined and
blockaded Palestinians," the professor wrote. "We are witness to a
slow-motion process of genocide."

Two Jewish students dropped the class, saying they felt intimidated by the
professor's message. They contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which
advised them to file formal complaints with the university.

In their letters, senior Rebecca Joseph and junior Tova Hausman accused
Robinson of violating the campus' faculty code of conduct by disseminating
personal, political material unrelated to his course.

"I was shocked," said Joseph, 22. "He overstepped his boundaries as a
professor. He has his own freedom of speech, but he doesn't have the
freedom to send his students his own opinion that is so strong."

Robinson, 50, who is Jewish, called the accusations and the campus
investigation an attack on academic freedom. He said his former students,
the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League had all confused his
criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism.

"That's like saying if I condemn the U.S. government for the invasion of
Iraq, I'm anti-American," he said. "It's the most absurd, baseless
argument."

Robinson said he regularly sends his students voluntary reading material
about current events for the global affairs course, and that no one raised
questions when he subsequently discussed his e-mail.

"The whole nature of academic freedom is to introduce students to
controversial material, to provoke students to think and make students
uncomfortable," said Robinson, a UC Santa Barbara professor for nine
years.

As the dispute over his e-mail plays out, UC Santa Barbara has become the
most recent U.S. university to confront campus unrest over issues related
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In recent years, Jewish and Muslim groups have quarreled repeatedly at UC
Irvine about the Holocaust and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
Professors and students at Columbia University have also argued over
issues of intimidation and academic freedom amid debates on the Mideast.

In Robinson's case, reaction has been strong -- on both sides.

Shortly after hearing from the two students in January, the Wiesenthal
Center produced a YouTube video titled "Jewish Students Under Siege from
Professor at UC Santa Barbara." The clip shows one of Robinson's former
students, her face obscured to protect her identity, reading from his
e-mail.

The head of the ADL's Santa Barbara region sent Robinson a letter in
February calling on him to repudiate his statements about Israel. Last
month, the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, in a meeting with
faculty members at the campus, urged the university to conduct an
investigation into Robinson. He was told that an inquiry was already
underway.

"You can criticize Israel; you can criticize the war in Gaza," Foxman
said. "But to compare what the Israelis are doing in defense of their
citizens to what the Nazis did to the Jews is clearly anti-Semitism."

Robinson's supporters say the professor is being maligned for exercising
his right to challenge his students to think critically about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Students on campus have formed a group, the Committee to Defend Academic
Freedom at UCSB, which is chronicling the saga on its website.

Letters of support also have arrived from academics across the country,
including one from California Scholars for Academic Freedom, which says it
represents 100 professors at 20 college campuses. The group argues that
the allegations have been raised against Robinson to "silence criticism of
Israeli policies and practices."

Some UC Santa Barbara faculty members also are speaking up for Robinson.
History professor Harold Marcuse, who attended the March meeting with the
ADL's Foxman, said the pictures e-mailed by Robinson were "well within the
bounds of appropriateness on campus. It's something I could have used in a
course."

Marcuse, who is Jewish and teaches about the Holocaust in his world
history and German history classes, said he would not have injected his
own views into such a message to students, but added: "I don't think Bill
Robinson's e-mail is anti-Semitic in any way. I think criticism of Israel
is OK."

One UC Santa Barbara official has already looked into the allegations
against Robinson, and a faculty committee is being formed to decide
whether to forward the case to UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang. A
university spokesman declined to comment on the case.

Robinson has hired an attorney, and the student committee supporting him
has scheduled a May 14 campus forum on the matter. Joseph and Hausman, the
students who filed the original complaints, said they plan to attend. So
do Hausman's parents from Los Angeles and Rabbi Aron Hier, director of
campus outreach for the Wiesenthal Center.

"I just want to bring awareness," said Hausman, 20. "I want people to know
that educators shouldn't be sending out something that is so disturbing."

(source: Los Angeles Times)




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



FDR pushed to get Jews to safety in 1930s
Enlarge 1938 FDR Library photo

Historian Richard Breitman says President Franklin D. Roosevelt "tried to
carry out some humanitarian steps" while considering politics.


Newly uncovered documents reveal that President Franklin D. Roosevelt
worked quietly in the late 1930s to find havens for European Jews,
contradicting the view that he ignored their plight in the years leading
up to the Holocaust.

Roosevelt was "a master politician who tried to carry out some
humanitarian steps while juggling political and military considerations,"
writes historian Richard Breitman, co-editor of Refugees and Rescue: The
Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald (1935-1945) released today. The
book draws on papers at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.

McDonald was chairman of Roosevelt's advisory committee on refugees. He
met Adolf Hitler in 1933 and was convinced the Nazi planned to exterminate
Europe's Jews, prompting him to sound warnings. He later was the first
U.S. ambassador to Israel.

Despite FDR's popularity with Jewish Americans, the influential 1984 book
The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust argued that he did
little to save their European brethren.

Breitman says McDonald's papers soften that view, showing that in 1938,
Roosevelt:

Cut red tape that kept immigration quotas from being filled, allowing
entry for 27,370 Germans most of them Jews.

Hoped to resettle millions of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe to
other countries, mostly in Latin America. He called an international
conference to line up money and support.

Promised to ask Congress for $150 million to help resettle refugees if
Britain allowed more Jews into Palestine and private funds could be
raised.

Roosevelt's efforts, including the conference in vian, France, failed.
Most countries refused to admit Jews amid a depression and anti-Semitism,
Breitman says. Opposition also was strong at the State Department and in
Congress, which voted in 1939 not to let in 20,000 German Jewish children.

Breitman says Roosevelt is unfairly criticized for not supporting the bill
and refusing to admit 900 Jewish refugees on the St. Louis, which sailed
from Germany 70 years ago this month. Cuba, the U.S. and Canada turned
away those on the "voyage of the damned," and the ship returned to Europe.
Hundreds of passengers died in the Holocaust.

Roosevelt "made a decision to go for big results," Breitman says, adding
that the president viewed letting in small numbers of Jews as "a gesture,
not a solution" to the larger refugee problem.

In 1940, after the start of World War II in Europe, Roosevelt's priorities
turned to national security, Breitman writes.

Rafael Medoff, director of the Wyman Institute, which studies America's
response to the Holocaust, says the book won't absolve Roosevelt. He says
FDR failed to take "concrete steps" such as giving Jewish refugees
temporary haven in U.S. territories such as the Virgin Islands.

"Instead, sadly, the president who claimed to be a humanitarian and
champion of the little man refrained from taking such lifesaving steps,"
he says.

Deborah Lipstadt, a Holocaust studies professor at Emory University in
Atlanta, says the book will force historians to rethink their conclusions.
"This is consensus-changing," she says. "He may deserve a lot more credit
than he is getting."

(source: USA Today)


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


Demjanjuk Sues German Government


He has used almost every legal means to try to avoid being deported to
Germany. Now alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk is filing suit
against the German government in his bid to stay in the US.

The alleged war criminal John Demjanjuk has used almost every legal means
to avoid being deported from the US to Germany, where prosecutors accuse
him of having been a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp. Now his
lawyer Ulrich Busch has filed suit against the German government.

On Thursday Busch sent a fax to the administrative court in Berlin with
the suit: Demjanjuk, "44131 Seven Hills, Ohio, USA" versus "Federal
Republic of Germany, represented by the Federal Justice Ministry." Busch
wants to ensure that the Berlin government withdraws its agreement to
accept Demjanjuk in Germany.

The 89-year-old retired auto worker, who is accused of being an accessory
to the murders of Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland
in 1943, lost his last appeal to keep his US citizenship, which had been
removed in 2002, in May 2008. However, it was only when the Bavarian state
court issued a warrant and the German government issued him with travel
papers that the way was cleared for his deportation. Busch is also playing
for time. He has asked the Berlin Administrative Court judge to
temporarily suspend the German government's declaration that they would
allow Demjanjuk to enter the country -- until a ruling is made.

It is developments in the US that have prompted the suit. The US Justice
Department had made a statement to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals not
to deport Demjanjuk until April 30. The Cincinnati court had halted
Demjanuk's deportation at the last moment -- after deportation officers
had already carried him out of his home on April 14 to be put on a private
plane to Munich.

The same court now had to decide if Demjanjuk would be at risk of
"torture" if he goes to Germany. His American lawyers argued that forcing
a man who is this ill to undergo a trial amounts to torture.

However the Cincinnati court ruled Friday to deny Demjanjuk a stay of
deportation -- meaning officials could soon be calling at the
89-year-old's door again.

The deportation case began in March when the Munich prosecutor's office
issued a warrant for Demjanuk's arrest on charges of being an accessory to
the murder of 29,000 people. This is the number of Jews who were killed
during Demjanjuk's alleged time as a guard at the Sobibor concentration
camp.

The case has since become a bitter legal battle with both the Demjanjuk
family and the US authorities using images to back up their cases. The
family released videos of Demjanjuk in terrible pain being examined by a
doctor. The US Justice Department countered with secret video footage (all
videos are available on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Web site) of
the accused, showing him briskly walking from a clinic to a car and
getting in without any assistance.

Deportation officers have given sworn affidavits that Demjanjuk had been
bright and animated in their offices. The family has claimed that the
authorities only filmed him when he looked in good health and that they
never took images when he was being transported in a wheelchair even
though they were present.

The US Justice Department is increasingly irritated by the wrangling. It
argues that Demjanjuk is making a mockery of it and of justice, writing
that "he is, quite obviously, a vigorous man, particularly for his age."
The officials even use political arguments in their letter to the judges
in Cincinnati. Demjanjuk, they write, "is seeking, in effect, to show the
world that, even if the United States has the will to carry out
statutorily mandated removal of one who helped carry out lethal Nazi
crimes of persecution, our legal system is so full of loopholes and
pitfalls that such an individual may succeed in obtaining the only thing
he really wants -- to die in America."

Berlin 'Bypassed' Client's Rights

If the judges of the federal appellate court decide against Demjanjuk, his
only remaining option is the Supreme Court. But it could refuse to hear
the case at all, without having to give reasons.

Demjanjuk's German lawyer Busch is therefore trying to move the legal
tug-of-war to Germany. In remarks to SPIEGEL, Busch accused the German
authorities of "circumventing the law" in consenting to the deportation of
Demjanjuk. "For such cases we have the instrument of extradition," he
said. In the case of an extradition, there would have to have been an
examination beforehand, including by the German side, as to whether
Demjanjuk was fit enough to be transported and to be held in custody.

According to Busch, the German government wanted to save itself from that
obligation by deciding not to apply for extradition and instead agreeing
to deportation. Berlin bypassed his client's rights in this way, he said.

Moreover, Busch complained that Germany had deprived Demjanjuk of any
possibility of returning to the US and to his family. Even if he was
acquitted after a trial or was not even fit to be tried, he could never
return to the US after being deported and so could not be reunited with
his family, without whom he is "not capable of living," in the words of
Busch. Germany had accepted that and so violated the right of presumption
of innocence.

As it happens, the US wants to eject Demjanjuk from the country in any
case. In 2002, a court ruled that his US citizenship should be revoked.
Appellate courts have repeatedly upheld that ruling. "There is plenty of
evidence that Demjanjuk participated in genocide," says former prosecutor
Jonathan Drimmer.

Busch now argues that Demjanjuk would -- despite the court rulings -- have
remained in the US until the end of his life, if the Germans had not
declared they were prepared to take him. Moreover, Busch says, Demjanjuk
is so ill that he could not be adequately cared for in a prison hospital.
He needs nurses who can speak Ukrainian, as that is the only language that
he really has a command of, Busch say, explaining that Demjanjuk is an
"old, sick man."

Whether Busch's suit will be successful is uncertain. The administrative
court might not even accept such a complaint. Busch has already appealed
to Munich District Court against the warrant against Demjanjuk. The court
rejected his petition two weeks ago. Busch is now appealing against that
decision.

(source: Der Spiegel)