May 4

POLAND:

Poland sends prisoners to Auschwitz


Poland is to send prisoners to Auschwitz in the hope that a visit to
Nazi Germany's most infamous death camp will turn them into model
citizens.

A spokesman from the Auschwitz museum said they had agreed to a request
from the authorities in southern Poland for prisoners to visit the camp
as "an element of their rehabilitation programme".

The convicts will get a guided tour of the camp, in which an estimated
1. 5 million people perished, and attend a course on Auschwitz's history
and the crimes the Third Reich perpetrated against millions of people
across Europe.

Give prison officers bonuses to rehabilitate criminals, says Jonathan
Aitken.

"It's going to be shock therapy for them," said Major Luiza Salapa from
the prison service, explaining that by learning in graphic detail about
the horrors of the camp the convicts might move away from the criminal
behaviour that brought them to prison.

"They'll learn that a terrible system was created through the acceptance
of violence and oppression."

Materials given to prison guards extol the visits saying that they should
help "shape the prisoners' moral outlook towards the community and stop
them displaying contempt and intolerance."

In particular the authorities would like prisoners to learn about the fate
of the gipsies, which Hitler's regime targeted for annihilation.

With a reasonable presence in southern Poland, gipsies are often the
focus of discrimination and suffer occasional racist abuse and attacks.

But some prison experts have questioned the value of the visits,
suggesting that even the horrors of the Holocaust may make little
impression on hardened criminals.

(source: The Telegraph)





GERMANY:

GERMAN POLICE HAVE DOUBTS----Is 'Dr Death' Aribert Heim Really Dead?


In February, German and US media reported they had found evidence that
Aribert Heim, the Nazi war criminal known as "Dr. Death," had died in
Egypt of cancer in 1992. But German police who have reviewed the documents
have their doubts, SPIEGEL has learned.


German police have their doubts about whether Aribert Heim, the Nazi war
criminal reported in February to have died of cancer in 1992, is really
dead.

Specialists of the regional criminal police force in the south-western
state of Baden-Wrttemberg have examined documents found by journalists in
an old briefcase in Cairo and don't believe that the papers constitute
"evidence of the death" of Heim, SPIEGEL has learned.

New information from the police's own sources in Germany and abroad as
well as inconsistencies in the claims that he died in Egypt have led
German police to continue "investigating in all directions," a police
source told SPIEGEL.

Journalists for German public broadcaster ZDF and the New York Times
reported in February that Heim had died of cancer in 1992. They had found
a briefcase containing Heim's personal documents and the son of the doctor
who treated Heim for cancer had confirmed the death.

German investigators are now sure that Heim had more helpers than
previously assumed in his decades-long flight from authorities. He
received money through bank transfers from the US and Switzerland and via
couriers who handed him cash and letters.

He is believed to have been tricked out of a large sum of money at one
point when he tried to buy real estate in Egypt via intermediaries.

Heim was an Austrian medical doctor in the SS and is alleged to have
killed hundreds of concentration camp inmates during World War II by
conducting experiments such as injecting toxic compounds into their
hearts.

Heim had topped the most wanted list of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in
Jerusalem but in their annual report released last month, the Nazi hunters
attached a question mark to his name following the reports of his death.

The Wiesenthal Center's report said: "New evidence suggests that he may
have died in Cairo in 1992, but serious doubts regarding these findings
and the fact that there is no corpse to examine raises doubts as to the
veracity of this information."

Heim was arrested by US troops in 1945 and held for more than two and a
half years, but for unknown reasons he was never prosecuted.

He worked as a gynaecologist in Germany until 1962, when it was reported
he fled after receiving a tip-off about his impending arrest.

Meanwhile German prosecutors are still waiting for the US to deport John
Demjanjuk, accused of having helped murder 29,000 Jews as a guard in the
Sobibor death camp in 1943.

Demjanjuk is waging a legal battle to stop his deportation to stand trial
in Germany.

(source: Spiegel)





ISRAEL:

Salamo Arouch, Who Boxed for His Life in Auschwitz, Is Dead at 86


Salamo Arouch, a Greek-born Jewish boxer who survived the Auschwitz death
camp in World War II by winning fight after fight against fellow
prisoners, to the delight of Nazi guards who had placed their bets on him,
died in Israel on April 26. He was 86.


His family announced the death to the newspaper Haaretz; no immediate
cause was given, but they said he had never recovered from a stroke 15
years ago.

Mr. Arouch's literal fight for survival was the basis for the 1989 movie
"Triumph of the Spirit," directed by Robert M. Young, with Willem Dafoe
playing the 5-foot-6, 135-pound boxer, who won hundreds of matches over
two years at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in southern Poland.

By the age of 22, with a 24-0 record, Mr. Arouch had won the amateur
junior middleweight championships for Greece and the Balkans, according to
boxrec.com, an online boxing encyclopedia. Because of his fancy footwork,
he was known as "the Ballet Dancer."

The titles meant nothing when, in May 1943, the Germans marched into Mr.
Arouch's hometown, Thessalonica, in northern Greece, and began rounding up
its 47,000 Jews. About 2,000 would survive.

On May 15, 1943, after days crammed in a box car, Mr. Arouch - along with
his parents, three younger sisters and his brother - arrived at Auschwitz.

His mother and sisters were immediately taken to the gas chambers.

"My family and I arrived at Auschwitz at 6 in the evening," Mr. Arouch
told The New York Times in 1989. "I was standing all night until the next
day, naked. The Nazis cleaned us with water, disinfected us, shaved our
heads and put numbers on our forearms." His number: 136954.

Soon after, a camp commandant drove up in a large car, stepped out and
asked if any of the prisoners were boxers or wrestlers. Mr. Arouch raised
his hand.

"The commander did not believe me because of my height," Mr. Arouch
recalled.

The commander, he said, drew a ring in the dirt; another prisoner was
brought forth; and in the third round the other prisoner went down for the
count.

It was the first of more than 200 fights that Mr. Arouch would win, with
only two draws, he said.

They were "like cockfights," he said, staged every Wednesday and Sunday
night in a smoke-filled warehouse, with the guards drinking and placing
their bets.

"The loser would be badly weakened," Mr. Arouch told People magazine in
1990, "and the Nazis shot the weak."

As a winner, Mr. Arouch was spared slave labor; he worked as a clerk.

His father, a laborer, grew weak and was sent to the gas chamber.

His brother refused to pull gold teeth from the dead and was shot to
death.

Salamon (he later dropped the "n") Arouch was born in Thessalonica in
1923, into a Sephardic Jewish family in which most of the men were
fishermen or stevedores. As a teenager, he worked as a stevedore.

He won his first amateur fight when he was 14.

After Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 1945, Mr. Arouch began
searching for relatives in other liberated camps.

While searching Bergen-Belsen, he met Marta Yechiel, a teenager from his
hometown. They were relocated to Palestine, married and eventually had
four children and 12 grandchildren.

Mr. Arouch fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He later ran a shipping
and moving company in Tel Aviv.

When "Triumph of the Spirit" was filmed on location at Auschwitz, Mr.
Arouch returned there as a consultant.

"It was a terrible experience," he told People magazine, recounting the
moment he found the rubble of demolished crematoria. "In my mind I saw my
parents."

(source: New York Times)