May 13


GERMANY:

INTERVIEW WITH SOBIBOR SURVIVOR THOMAS BLATT----'Demjanjuk Should Confess'


Suspected Nazi guard John Demjanjuk has been deported to Munich to face
charges of being an accessory to the murder of 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor
death camp. Holocaust survivor Thomas Blatt talks to SPIEGEL about what
happened at Sobibor and why Demjanjuk should tell what he knows.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Blatt, you traveled here from California to give testimony in
Munich against John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk is accused of having participated
in the murder of at least 29,000 people in the Sobibor death camp. What
will you tell the judge?

Thomas Blatt: What the Ukrainian guards in Sobibor did. We were more
afraid of them than of the Germans, and I was there at the same time as
Demjanjuk.

SPIEGEL: What do you accuse him of?

Blatt: He helped the death factory to function. Without the around 100
Ukrainians who were there, the Germans would never have managed to kill
250,000 Jews. The SS group was made up of only 30 Germans, and of those
half were always on vacation or sick. We saw more Ukrainians than Germans
at Sobibor, and we were terrified of them.

SPIEGEL: By "Ukrainians" you mean the foreign helpers who were trained by
the SS at the Trawniki camp. Among them were many Ukrainians. Why were you
especially afraid of them?

Blatt: They mistreated us, they shot old and sick new arrivals who
couldn't walk anymore. And they were the ones who drove the naked people
into the gas chambers with their bayonets. I often had to work just a few
meters away. If someone didn't want to go on, they hit them and they fired
shots. I can still hear today their shouts of "idi siuda," "come here."

SPIEGEL: But the part of the death camp with the gas chambers was blocked
off and you weren't able to go there.

Blatt: I myself saw them driving the Jews to the entrance of the death
zone, the so-called Himmelfahrtsstrasse ("Ascension Road").

SPIEGEL: Did you see Trawniki men murdering prisoners with your own eyes?

Blatt: Yes. I was there when the Ukrainians shot Polish Jews who had tried
to escape. And I remember endless cruelties. One time we were in the woods
to cut trees. The Ukrainians wanted us to sing. But they wanted to hear
Russian songs, and only the Polish Jews could sing them, not the Dutch
Jews. They tormented them so much that some of them hung themselves at
night in the barracks.

SPIEGEL: Weren't the guards acting under the Germans' orders?

Blatt: Many of them were sadists, the abuses weren't something they were
ordered to do. Or they wanted to show off in front of the Germans. They
would only leave us alone for a while if they got money or gold from us.

SPIEGEL: And where did you get these things?

Blatt: Sometimes I had to burn the murdered people's belongings, which
they'd discarded before going to the gas chambers. Sometimes there were
gold coins hidden in them, and they were left in the ashes. Others I found
while sorting the things. The Ukrainians wanted the money to pay
prostitutes.

SPIEGEL: In the camp?

Blatt: No, in the villages around there. One of the women told me that
later.

SPIEGEL: And none of the guards showed anything like compassion?

Blatt: There was one, named Klatt. He was the only one who didn't hit us.

SPIEGEL: Guards like Demjanjuk were recruited by the SS from captured Red
Army soldiers, millions of whom died miserably in the German camps. Did
these men have a choice, if they wanted to save their own lives?

Blatt: It's true that the SS demanded they commit murder in order to live.
But many other prisoners didn't get involved with the Germans. And the
guards at Sobibor could also have deserted. Some of them did in fact run
away.

SPIEGEL: Do you remember your arrival in Sobibor?

Blatt: Yes, it was in April 1943. I was brought there by truck with my
family from my hometown of Izbica. We lived just 70 kilometers (43 miles)
from Sobibor and we knew what happened there. And yet we hoped that this
wouldn't mean our deaths. I suppose it's human nature to keep hoping up to
the last minute. Only my father said: We'll die in any case. And I
remember a man next to me peering through a hole in the truck's side and
saying in Yiddish, "It's black with Ukrainians." He meant the color of the
uniforms. The Ukrainians escorted us into the camp.

SPIEGEL: How did you survive the "selection," the notorious process
whereby new arrivals were chosen for execution?

Blatt: There was no selection at Sobibor, the Jews were supposed to die
without any exceptions.

SPIEGEL: Then how did you escape death?

Blatt: I pushed to the front as an SS man inspected our group to look for
craftsmen. I hadn't learned any craft. I was 15 years old, small and thin.
Maybe the SS man, the commandant Karl Frenzel, noticed my strong will. He
said, "Come out, you, little one." So I was saved for the time being.
Later I found out that they'd shot Dutch Jews among the work prisoners a
few days before. I was supposed to fill the gap.

'I Want the Truth'

SPIEGEL: What happened to your family?

Blatt: An SS man beat my father with a club, and then I lost sight of him.
I'd said to my mother, "And yesterday I wasn't allowed to drink the rest
of the milk, because you absolutely wanted to save some for today." That
strange remark of mine still haunts me today -- it was the last thing I
said to her. My 10-year-old brother stayed at my mother's side. They were
all murdered in the gas chambers.

SPIEGEL: What was your survival strategy?

Blatt: I knew that the Germans liked it when you were clean and healthy. I
tried to look strong when I walked, and to keep a smile on my face. I
watched out that my pants didn't get wrinkled when I slept and that they
kept their creases. And I was curious, I always went around and looked for
possibilities to escape.

SPIEGEL: What were your tasks in the camp?

Blatt: I had to sort the victims' belongings, shirts with shirts and shoes
with shoes. A few times I also had to cut the women's hair before they
went into the gas chamber. They were already naked. Sobibor was a factory
-- the time from arrival to the corpses being burnt was usually just a few
hours.

SPIEGEL: Did people know what would happen to them?

Blatt: The Dutch especially were completely unsuspecting. When a transport
arrived, usually an SS man would hold a speech. He apologized for the
arduous journey and said that for hygienic reasons, everyone needed to
shower first. Then later they would work somewhere. Some of the Jews
applauded. They couldn't imagine what was in store for them.

SPIEGEL: You were among the organizers of the uprising in Sobibor on
October 14, 1943. How did that happen?

Blatt: It was in particular the Jewish Red Army soldiers from Minsk, who
had been brought to Sobibor as work prisoners, who helped. They needed
only two weeks to plan the uprising.

SPIEGEL: What was the plan for the uprising?

Blatt: We wanted to draw the SS people into an ambush individually and
then kill them. To do it, we relied on the men's greed and their
punctuality. And it worked. We told an officer named Josef Wolf that
someone was keeping a nice leather coat for him. We told him to come at a
certain time, and he did so, and the prisoners killed him. We killed a
dozen SS men and an unknown number of guards. The Germans and the guards
were slow in realizing what was happening.

SPIEGEL: And how did you escape afterward?

Blatt: I wanted to climb through a hole someone had made with an ax in the
barbed wire fence. But when the guard in the tower started shooting at us,
some of the others started to climb the fence. The fence toppled over and
my coat got caught in the barbed wire. That saved my life. The ones who
ran ahead of me were blown to pieces in the minefield on the other side of
the fence. I slipped out of my coat and ran away. More than 300 prisoners
escaped, of whom around 50 survived the war.

SPIEGEL: And how did you get through the remaining year and a half until
the end of the war?

Blatt: Freedom was difficult. If I had been a Christian boy, I'd have had
a better chance. People would have taken care of me. But where could I go?
There was no Jewish community anymore in my hometown of Izbica, and the
Polish farmers saw us mainly as Christ's murderers. A farmer hid me and
some others at first, in exchange for money we'd taken with us from
Sobibor. Later he tried to shoot us. I still have the bullet in my jaw.
After that I hid in the woods or in abandoned buildings.

SPIEGEL: According to documents, Demjanjuk was no longer at Sobibor when
the uprising took place -- he had already been sent back to the Trawniki
training camp and then was assigned to the Flossenbrg concentration camp
in Bavaria. His family and his lawyers argue that, at 89 years old, he's
too old and sick to stand trial.

Blatt: Now people only see the old man. They don't see the man who forced
people into the gas chambers.

SPIEGEL: Do you have concrete memories of Demjanjuk?

Blatt: No, after 66 years I can't even remember my father's face. But I'm
certain that Demjanjuk was just like the other Ukrainian guards.

SPIEGEL: What would you consider a fair punishment?

Blatt: I don't care if he goes to prison or not -- the trial is what
matters to me. I want the truth. The world should find out how it was at
Sobibor. He should confess, because he knows so much. He's the last living
perpetrator from Sobibor.

(source: Spiegel Online)


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

Demjanjuk's is 1 of 3 active cases


Accused Nazi guard John Demjanjuk spent his first night in a
Munich prison, but he may not be the last major criminal suspect from
World War II to stand trial, Germany's chief Nazi hunter said Wednesday.
"We're investigating two men right now like Demjanjuk," said senior public
prosecutor Kurt Schrimm, in a phone interview.

Schrimm, chief of the German bureau that investigates former Nazis, said
he is preparing similar charges against Ivan Kalymon of Michigan, a
Lithuanian, for alleged actions as a policeman during the war, and Josias
Kumpf, a former Wisconsin resident who was deported to Austria in March
because of suspected crimes.

Schrimm said Germany is on the right track to pursue such cases from 60
years ago.

"The criticism that not enough was done was certainly once true, but not
anymore," he said. "I doubt any country anywhere has done so much to
uncover and make amends for the things it did in the past."

Demjanjuk, 89, a retired Ohio autoworker, was extradited to Munich this
week. He allegedly was a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland
while 29,000 prisoners were murdered. A German judge in Munich on Tuesday
read him the 21-page warrant accusing him of acting as an accessory to
each of the killings.

Anton Winkley, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors, said Wednesday that
Demjanjuk "did fine" overnight in Germany's Stadelheim prison and is fit
enough to remain in custody, despite his family's claims of ill health.

Prosecutors said it could still take up to two weeks to determine whether
Demjanjuk is healthy enough to stand trial.

Demjanjuk's lawyer, Guenther Maull, told the Associated Press that a
Munich court had rejected his challenge to the arrest.

As the World War II generation heads toward its 90s, such cases have grown
increasingly difficult to prosecute, as victims and witnesses age and
memories fade.

"It's a past for which you can never get closure. And that isn't even
something to work toward," said Helgard Kramer, a professor at the Free
University of Berlin.

Charlotte Knobloch, president of the German Jewish Council, agreed, "It's
not about revenge; it's about justice."

Every generation has had a "new and different debate about it," she added.

Sabine Hegmann, 26, an art student from Frankfurt, said, "Since I can
remember, I've been aware of what happened then. I've been to more than a
few concentration camps."

She said some Germans "play down" the reality of that period because it
sometimes can be too personal.

"Often when I visit family, I see pictures of my grandfather in a Nazi
uniform," she said.

(source: USA Today)



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


Germans have to live with Nazi past a bit longer


More than six decades after World War Two and the Holocaust, and just when
it is starting to take a more assertive role on the world stage, Germany
has been confronted by its Nazi past - again.

Retired U.S. auto worker John Demjanjuk, 89, has been deported to Germany
and prosecutors in Munich want to put him on trial for assisting to murder
at least 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in 1943. With most
Nazi criminals dead, it is likely to be the last big Nazi war crime trial
in Germany.

The case raises a number of questions which affect the way Germans look at
themselves and relate to the world around them. The deafening silence from
politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, says a lot about how intent Germans are on
viewing the case as a purely legal matter.

Demjanjuks health poses one problem. While his family says he is is too
frail to stand trial, some Germans argue it will not do their justice
system any good to have a sick old man in the dock and that he could even
end up winning sympathy - a potentially embarrassing outcome.

Others simply ask what purpose his trial would serve. Born in Ukraine,
Demjanjuk was a prisoner of war who, his defenders say, was forced to
become a death camp guard. He played his part in the enormous horror of
the Holocaust but many Germans are all too aware that other major war
criminals have escaped justice. Some fled to live in exile and others
received light sentences.

It is surprisingly difficult to pin down figures of the number of Germans
tried or convicted of war crimes since 1945 but most experts agree with
the Simon Wiesenthal Center that the number of criminals brought to
justice is way below the total of those involved in the Holocaust.

Some reports say that of an estimated 200,000 Germans and Austrians
involved in the Holocaust, about 106,000 were investigated by German
prosecutors and of those, only 6,500 were convicted.

Although a series of war crimes did take place, thousands of war criminals
either escaped prosecution or got away with light sentences and a 1968 law
made it easier for defendants to argue that they had only been following
orders.

Nazi hunters in Ludwigsburg are still looking for war criminals and
Germans have done a good deal more than other countries, especially
Austria, to confront its past but many experts say it is the knowledge of
the failure to punish Nazis soon after 1945 that has led to cases like
Demjanjuk drawing so much attention now.

To survivors and their families, it is a matter of principle that people
like Demjanjuk are brought to justice, however old they are. Germanys
Central Council of Jews spelled this out, saying all living Nazi war
criminals can have no mercy, regardless of their age.

In many ways, Germany has moved on from its past. It has sent soldiers on
combat missions abroad and is getting more involved in world diplomacy.
Young people here want to be part of a more self-confident state at the
heart of Europe. There is relatively little public debate about the
Demjanjuk case, just a weary resignation that it is happening.

But while people like Demjanjuk live, there will be no escape from the
past for Germans.

(source: Reuters)






AUSTRALIA:

Holocaust denier sentenced to three months


A Holocaust denier in Australia has been sentenced to three months in
jail for distributing anti-Semitic materials on the Internet.

Frederick Toben under a 2002 court order was forbidden from circulating
anti-Semitic material on the Web site of the Adelaide Institute, the Daily
Telegraph reported Wednesday.

Toben, 65, was said to have breached the court order 24 out of an alleged
28 times, the newspaper reported.

Toben said he has no regrets over publishing the materials.

"I've mentally prepared myself to go inside for a few weeks or months," he
was quoted by the newspaper as saying. "If you believe in something and
you want to have that freedom to express your opinions then you should be
prepared for sacrifices."

Toben's lawyer said he will seek to have his client serve the sentence
under house arrest.

Toben was arrested in Britain last year. He faces charges in Germany of
publishing materials that deny the Holocaust. He faces up to five years in
a German jail.

(source: UPI)









GLOBAL:

Holocaust Deniers Gather on Facebook


Two bloggers, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Brian Cuban of The Cuban
Revolution, have been hammering the social-networking site Facebook in
recent days for refusing to delete the accounts of groups like Holohoax
and Holocaust: A Series of Lies, which act as forums for Holocaust
deniers.

On Tuesday, in a post headlined Facebook Remains Stubbornly Proud Of
Position On Holocaust Denial, Mr. Arrington wrote:

Facebook is apparently done talking about Holocaust denial for now. A
couple of groups that got more out of hand than the rest were taken down,
but the companys policy of permitting the groups on the site remains.

As ABC News reported on Tuesday, Facebook has removed some groups, but
stopped short of an outright ban on helping Holocaust deniers to network:

Facebook said it disabled two other controversial groups, "Based on the
facts? There was no Holocaust" and "Holocaust is a Holohoax."

But despite stating that the company finds "Holocaust denial repugnant and
ignorant," it has decided to let three groups continue to exist.

"We have spent considerable time internally discussing the issues of
Holocaust denial and have come to the conclusion that the mere statement
of denying the holocaust is not a violation of our terms," Brian Schnitt,
a Facebook spokesman, told ABCNews.com in an e-mail.

Schnitt said, however, that in countries where it is illegal to deny the
Holocaust, such as Germany, France and Austria, Facebook has decided to
ban all Holocaust denial groups.

On Sunday Mr. Cuban wrote in an open letter to Facebooks chief executive,
Mark Zuckerberg, on his blog:

By allowing these groups whether they number 1 or 1,000, Facebook is not
promoting open discussion of a controversial issue. It is promoting and
encouraging hatred towards ethnic and religious groups, nothing more.

By claiming open discussion as the rationale for allowing these groups to
exist, Facebook is playing games with semantics. Facebook is taking form
over substance to protect their imaginary subjective corporate line in the
sand they have drawn.

Mr. Cuban has also posted on his blog an e-mail exchange he had with
employees of Facebook on this issue last year. One of the replies he got
from someone on Facebook's "User Operations" team read, in part:

We take our Terms of Use policy very seriously, and react quickly to take
down groups that violate these terms. Specifically, we are sensitive to
groups that threaten violence towards people and these groups are taken
down. We also remove groups that express hatred towards individuals and
groups that are sponsored by recognized terrorist organizations. We do
not, however, take down groups that speak out against countries, political
entities, or ideas. The goal of these policies is to strike a very
delicate balance between giving Facebook users the freedom to express
their opinions and beliefs, while also ensuring that individuals and
groups of people do not feel threatened or endangered.

In an e-mail interview with a blogger for CNET, Mr. Schnitt, the Facebook
spokesman, framed the matter in terms of free speech:

The bottom line is that, of course, we abhor Nazi ideals and find
Holocaust denial repulsive and ignorant. However, we believe people have a
right to discuss these ideas and we want Facebook to be a place where
ideas, even controversial ideas, can be discussed.

Mr. Arrington, who has also ridiculed Facebook for allowing Holocaust
deniers to post their opinions on the site, but not allowing some
photographs showing women breast-feeding, urged Facebook to take a more
black-and-white approach to the issue:

Sure, we can't shut down the dark places on the Internet where people are
free to hate Jews and post pictures of breast feeding mothers. But
Facebook can take a stand and say it won't happen in their back yard.
Holocaust denial is hate speech, and it cannot be given a place to take
root.

This isn't a slippery slope, Facebook. It's evil. Pure evil. Dont plant a
flag on the wrong side of the line. Stand firm against racial and
religious hatred, even if you don't have to. You'll look back in fifty
years and be proud that you did.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz noted that "Facebook was founded by Mark
Zuckerberg, a Jewish former Harvard University student."

Mr. Schnitt told ABC that while some employees of the social-networking
service came from families marked by the Holocaust, that was not
influencing their decision:

Many of us at Facebook have direct personal connection to the Holocaust,
through parents who were forced to flee Europe or relatives who could not
escape. We believe in Facebooks mission that giving people tools to make
the world more open is a better way to combat ignorance or deception than
censorship, though we recognize that others, including those at the
company, disagree.

One unexpected result of the public calls to shut down these groups is
that the tiny Facebook group "Holocaust: A Series of Lies" has gotten
slightly less tiny in recent days. On Tuesday, ABC reported that when a
25-year-old student from Portland, Ore. heard that the social networking
site was under pressure to ban Holocaust denial groups, he decided to join
one. A visit to the group today, which had 39 members yesterday but has
now swollen to 44, shows that the student interviewed by ABC, Abbas
Hodroj, posted a message yesterday linking to the ABC Web site and saying,
"Hey guys, we are getting the word out there." What exactly that "word" is
though is not clear. Of the 21 comments posted on the group's discussion
wall though, 19 have been posted in the last week and at least half of
those take the group to task.

(source: New York Times)






CZECH REPUBLIC:

Czech pig farm on Nazi Gypsy death camp


A Czech Cabinet minister said he will try to collect money to pay for the
removal of a pig farm from the site of a Nazi camp for Gypsies in World
War II.

Michael Kocab, Czech minister for minorities and human rights, Wednesday
said he will urge companies to help form a foundation to provide $35
million to relocate the large pig farm at the southern Bohemian town of
Lety, Prague Radio said.

In the Lety concentration camp, established by the Nazis in 1942, hundreds
of Czech Gypsies, including 241 children, were killed.

Addressing a commemoration at Lety, Kocab said he would like to transform
the camp site to a memorial.

In the 1970s, communist authorities of the former Czechoslovakia built the
large pig farm at Lety.

The European Parliament and Czech Gypsy rights groups have been
unsuccessful for years in urging Prague to relocate the farm. Czech
government officials argued they were short of money, the radio said.

(source: United Press International)





USA:

Henry T. King Jr., 89, a prosecutor at Nuremberg


Henry T. King Jr., one of the last Nuremberg war crimes prosecutors and
an influential voice since World War II in international efforts to bring
war criminals to justice, died Saturday at his home in Cleveland. He was
89.

The cause was cancer, said his son, Dave.

King was "one of a handful of uniquely credible veterans in his field, one
of the last voices of Nuremberg," John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St.
John's University and an expert on the trials, said Monday. "He influenced
students and lecture audiences, international diplomats and even heads of
state."

"Nuremberg left a lifelong imprint on Henry King," Barrett continued, "and
through the next 60 years of his life, he spoke and wrote constantly about
the value that came out of Nuremberg."

King, along with Whitney Harris and Benjamin Ferencz, both of whom
survive, were the last three of about 200 American prosecutors who helped
bring dozens of Nazi leaders to trial from 1945 to 1949.

Half a century later, the three joined forces to help shape the creation
of the International Criminal Court. When delegates from 131 nations met
in Rome to establish the criminal court in 1998, their original draft
placed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide under the court's
jurisdiction. The delegates did not include wars of aggression as war
crimes, as opposed to those fought in self-defense or authorized by the
United Nations. The three prosecutors traveled to Rome and lobbied to
reshape the draft.

"They used their moral authority; they were persistent, and ultimately the
delegates included a reference to the crime of war of aggression in the
court's statute," said Michael Scharf, the director of the International
Law Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

The ICC is the first permanent international criminal court in history.
(The United States has not ratified the ICC treaty.)

The court is currently seeking to prosecute the president of Sudan, Omar
Hassan al-Bashir, for crimes against humanity in Darfur and is considering
other cases.

For the past 25 years, King was a law professor at Case Western Reserve,
teaching courses on international law and war crimes. He was a member of
the American Bar Association's Task Force on War Crimes in the former
Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and he was a senior adviser to the Robert H.
Jackson Center in Jamestown, N.Y. The center brings together war crimes
experts, promoting the legacy of Justice Robert H. Jackson of the Supreme
Court, who in 1945 was appointed by President Harry Truman as chief
prosecutor for the Nuremberg trials.

"Three generations of scholars and practitioners of international criminal
law have been mentored by King," Scharf said.

Henry Thomas King Jr. was born in Meriden, Conn., on May 27, 1919, the son
of Henry and Stella King. Besides his son, King is survived by his
daughter, Suzanne Wagner; three grandchildren; and two
great-grandchildren. His wife of 50 years, the former Betty May Scranton,
died in 1993.

King graduated from Yale in 1941. A heart murmur kept him out of the
military in World War II. He received his law degree from Yale in 1943.
Soon after, while he was working at a New York law firm, he became bored.
He traveled to the Pentagon in 1946 and was accepted as a member of the
Nuremberg prosecution.

(source: New York Times)