May 20



GERMANY:

THE DARK CONTINENT----Hitler's European Holocaust Helpers


The Germans are responsible for the industrial-scale mass murder of 6
million Jews. But the collusion of other European countries in the
Holocaust has received surprisingly little attention until recently. The
trial of John Demjanjuk is set to throw a spotlight on Hitler's foreign
helpers.

He's been here before, in this country of perpetrators. He saw this
country collapse. He was 25 at the time and his Christian name was Ivan,
not John; not yet.

Ivan Demjanjuk served as a guard in Flossenbrg concentration camp until
shortly before the end of World War II. He had been transferred there from
the SS death camp in Sobibor in present-day Poland. He was Ukrainian, and
he was a Travniki, one of the 5,000 men who helped Germany's Nazi regime
commit the crime of the millennium -- the murder of all the Jews in
Europe, the "Final Solution."

He was part of it, if only a very minor cog in the vast machinery of
murder. Ivan Demjanjuk stayed in post-war Germany for seven years before
he emigrated to the US in 1952 with his wife and daughter on board the
General Haan. Once he arrived, he changed his name to John. His time as a
supposed DP or "displaced person," as the Anglo-American victors called
people made homeless by the war, was over.

DP Demjanjuk had lived in the southern German towns of Landshut and
Regensburg where he worked for the US Army. He moved to Ulm, Ellwangen,
Bad Reichenhall, and finally to Feldafing on Lake Starnberg. Feldafing
belongs to the area covered by the Munich district court, which is why
Demjanjuk has been sitting in Munich's Stadelheim prison since he was
deported from the US last week. His cell measures 24 square meters, which
is extraordinarily spacious by usual prison standards.

Last Big Nazi Trial in Germany

He faces charges of aiding and abetting the murder of at least 29,000 Jews
in Sobibor. The trial could start in late summer, provided Demjanjuk, now
almost 90, is deemed fit to stand trial. Witnesses will be called to
testify, but none of them will be able to identify him. The only evidence
lies in the files, but that evidence is strong. Twice, in 1949 and 1979,
former Travniki Ignat Danilchenko, who is now dead, stated that Demjanjuk
had been an "experienced and efficient guard" who had driven Jews into the
gas chambers -- "that was daily work."

Demjanjuk has denied this charge throughout. He says he was never in
Flossenbrg or in Sobibor, never pushed people into the gas chambers. The
ex-American has adopted the same tactic of denial as many other defendants
who stood trial for war crimes after 1945.

But it's already clear that this last big Nazi trial in Germany will be a
deeply extraordinary one because it will for the first time put the
foreign perpetrators in the spotlight of world publicity. They are men who
have until now received surprisingly little attention -- Ukrainian
gendarmes and Latvian auxiliary police, Romanian soldiers or Hungarian
railway workers. Polish farmers, Dutch land registry officials, French
mayors, Norwegian ministers, Italian soldiers -- they all took part in
Germany's Holocaust.

Experts such as Dieter Pohl of the German Institute for Contemporary
History estimate that more than 200,000 non-Germans -- about as many as
Germans and Austrians -- "prepared, carried out and assisted in acts of
murder." And often they were every bit as cold-blooded as Hitler's
henchmen.

Just for example, on June 27, 1941, a colonel in the staff of the
Germany's Northern Army Group in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas passed a
petrol station surrounded by a crowd of people. There were shouts of bravo
and clapping, mothers raised their children to give them a better view.
The officer stepped closer and later wrote down what he had seen. "On the
concrete courtyard there was blonde man aged around 25, of medium height,
who was taking a rest and supporting himself on a wooden club which was as
thick as an arm and went up to his chest. At his feet lay 15, 20 people
who were dead or dying. Water poured from a hose and washed the blood into
a drain."

The soldier continued: "Just a few paces behind this man stood around 20
men who -- guarded by several armed civilians -- awaited their gruesome
execution in silent submission. Beckoned with a curt wave, the next one
stepped up silently and was () beaten to death with the wooden club, and
every blow met with enthusiastic cheers from the audience."

Orgy of Murder Like a Lithuanian National Ceremony

When all lay dead on the ground, the blonde murderer climbed on the heap
of corpses and played the accordion. His audience sang the Lithuanian
anthem as if the orgy of murder had been a national ceremony.

How could something like that happen? For a long time now, this question
hasn't just been directed at the Germans, whose central responsibility for
the horror is undisputed -- but also at the perpetrators in all countries.

What led Romanian dictator Ion Antonescu and his generals, soldiers, civil
servants and farmers to murder 200,000 Jews (and possibly twice that many)
"of their own accord," as historian Armin Heinen puts it. Why did Baltic
death squadrons commit murder on German orders in Latvia, Lithuania,
Belarus and Ukraine? And why did German Einsatzgruppen -- paramilitary
"intervention groups" operated by the SS -- have such an easy time
encouraging the non-Jewish population to wage pogroms between Warsaw and
Minsk?

It's completely undisputed that the Holocaust would never have happened
without Hitler, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler and the many, many other
Germans. But it's also certain "that the Germans on their own wouldn't
have been able to carry out the murder of millions of European Jews," says
Hamburg-based historian Michael Wild.

It's a perception that many survivors never doubted. When the Association
of Surviving Lithuanian Jews convened in Munich in 1947, they passed a
resolution that bore an unmistakable title: "On the guilt of a large part
of the Lithuanian population for the murder of Lithuania's Jews."

In the Third Reich with its well-functioning bureaucracy, there were
comprehensive registers of the Jewish population. But in the territories
conquered by the German army, Hitler's henchmen needed information of the
type supplied in the Netherlands by registry offices whose staff went to a
lot of trouble to compile a precise "Register of Jews."

And how would the SS and police have been able to track down Jews in the
cities of Eastern Europe with their broad mix of ethnic groups if they
hadn't had the support of the local population? Not many Germans would
have been able "to recognize a Jew in a crowd," recalls Thomas Blatt, a
survivor of Sobibor who wants to testify as a witness at Demjanjuk's
trial.

At the time, Blatt was a blonde-haired boy and tried to pass for a
Christian child in his Polish home town of Izbica. He didn't wear a yellow
star and tried to appear self-confident when he ran into uniformed people.
But he was betrayed a number of times -- the Germans paid for information
on the whereabouts of Jews -- and he always escaped with a lot of luck.

Denunciation Was Common

Denunciation was so common in Poland that there was a special term for
paid informants "Szmalcowniki" (previously a term for a fence). In many
cases, the denouncers knew their victims. And while the French, Dutch or
Belgians could submit to the illusion that the Jews deported to the east
from Paris, Rotterdam or Brussels would be all right in the end, the
people in Eastern Europe learned through the grapevine what lay in store
for the Jews in Auschwitz or Treblinka.

For sure, many counter-examples can easily be found. A senior officer in
Einsatzgruppe C, responsible for the murder of more than 100,000 people,
complained that the Ukrainians lacked "pronounced anti-Semitism based on
racial or ideological reasons." The officer wrote that "there is a lack of
leadership and of spiritual impetus for the pursuit of Jews."

Historian Feliks Tych estimates that some 125,000 Poles rescued Jews
without being paid for their services. It's clear that the perpetrators
always made up a small minority of their respective population. But the
Germans relied on that minority. The SS, police and the army lacked the
manpower to search the vast areas where the Nazi leadership planned to
kill all people of Jewish origin. Across the 4,000 kilometers stretching
from Brittany in western France to the Caucasus, the Nazis were bent on
hunting down their victims, deporting them to extermination camps or to
local murder sites, preventing escapes, digging mass graves and then
carrying out their bloody handiwork.

Of course only Hitler and his entourage or the army could have stopped the
Holocaust. But this doesn't invalidate the argument that without the
foreign helpers, countless thousands or even millions of the approximately
six million murdered Jews would have survived.

In the killing fields of Eastern Europe, there were up to 10 local helpers
for every German policeman. The ratio is similar in the extermination
camps. Not in Auschwitz, which was run almost entirely by Germans, but in
Belzec (600,000 killed), Treblinka (900,000 deaths) or in Demjanjuk's
Sobibor. There, a handful of SS members were assisted by some 120 Travniki
men.

Without them, the Germans would never have managed to kill 250,000 Jews in
Sobibor, says former prisoner Blatt. It was the Travniki who guarded the
camp, drove all the Jews from the railway wagons and trucks after their
arrival in the camp, and who beat them into the gas chambers.

Was the Holocaust a European Project?

Such a stupefying number of victims raises disturbing questions, and
Berlin historian Gtz Aly already started asking them a few years ago: was
the so-called Final Solution in fact a "European project that cannot be
explained solely by the special circumstances of German history"?

Many Foreign Perpetrators Acted Voluntarily

There is no final verdict yet on the European dimension of the Holocaust.
The French and Italians started late -- when most of the perpetrators were
already dead -- to deal comprehensively with this part of their history.
Others, such as the Ukrainians and Lithuanians, are still dragging their
feet; or they have only just begun, like Romania, Hungary and Poland.

Since 1945 the countries invaded and ravaged by Hitler's armies have seen
themselves as victims -- which they doubtless were, with their vast
numbers of dead. That makes it all the more painful to concede that many
compatriots aided the German perpetrators.

In Latvia, local assistance was greater than anywhere else. According to
the American historian Raul Hilberg, the Latvians had the highest
proportion of Nazi helpers. The Danes are at the other end of the scale.
When the deportation of Denmark's Jews was about to begin in 1943, large
parts of the population helped Jews to escape to Sweden or hid them. Some
98 percent of Denmark's 7,500 Jews survived World War II. By contrast,
only nine percent of the Dutch Jews survived.

Does the Holocaust represent the low point not only of German history, but
of European history as well, as historian Aly argues?

There is evidence challenging the widely-held notion that foreign
perpetrators were forced to help the Germans commit murder. It's true that
local helpers risked their lives by refusing to assist the German
occupiers. That applied to the police units and civil servants in occupied
Western Europe as much as it did to newly-formed auxiliary police in the
east. But it's also true that in many places people volunteered to serve
the Germans or participated in crimes without being forced to.

There is also the often-repeated claim that the governments of countries
allied with Hitler had no choice but to hand over Jewish citizens to the
Germans. That's not true either. The Balkan countries in particular
quickly understood how important the "solution to the Jewish Question" was
to Hitler and his diplomats -- and they tried to extract the highest
possible price for their complicity.

There's also reason to doubt the assumption that the helpers were
pathological sadists. If that were true, they should be easy to identify,
for example within the group of 50 Lithuanians who served under the
command of SS Obersturmbannfhrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Joachim Hamann. The
men would drive around the villages up to five times a week to murder
Jews, and ended up killing 60,000 people. It only took a few crates of
Vodka to get them in the mood. In the evenings the troop would return to
Kaunas and boast of their crimes in the mess hall.

None of the Lithuanians had been criminals before. They were "totally and
utterly normal," believes historian Knut Stang. Almost everywhere after
the war, the murderers returned to their ordinary lives as if nothing had
happened. Demjanjuk too was a law-abiding citizen. In Cleveland, Ohio,
where he lived, he was regarded as good colleague and a friendly neighbor.

It's the same as with the German perpetrators. There's no identifiable
type of killer -- that's a particularly disturbing conclusion reached by
historians. The murderers included Catholics and Protestants, hot-blooded
southern Europeans and cool Balts, obsessive right-wing extremists or
unfeeling bureaucrats, refined academics or violent rednecks.

Among them was Viktor Arajs (1910-1988), a learned lawyer from a Latvian
farming family who commanded a unit of more than 1,000 men that murdered
its way around Eastern Europe on behalf of the Nazis. Or the Romanian
Generaru, son of a general and commander of the ghetto in Bersad in
Ukraine, who had one of his victims tied to a motorbike and dragged to
death.

Anti-Semitism Was Rife Across Europe

And anti-Semitism? In the 1930s, anti-Semitism grew across Europe because
the upheaval after World War I and the global economic crisis had
unsettled people. In Eastern Europe, the tendency to regard Jews as
scapegoats and to try and exclude them from the job market was especially
strong. In Hungary, Jews were banned from public office at the end of the
1930s and were forbidden to work in a large number of professions. Romania
voluntarily adopted Nazi Germany's racist and anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws.
In Poland, many universities restricted access for Jewish students.

The extent of the hatred of Jews is also reflected in the fact that after
the end of the war in 1945, mobs in Poland killed at least 600, and
possibly even thousands of Holocaust survivors. However, excessive
nationalism appears to have been the more important factor, at least in
Eastern Europe. Many there dreamed of a nation state devoid of minorities.
In this sense, the Jews were simply one of several groups that people
wanted to rid themselves of. As World War II raged, the Croats didn't just
murder Jews but also killed a far larger number of Serbs. Poles and
Lithuanians killed each other. Romania liquidated Roma and Ukrainians.

It's hard to determine what motivated people to kill. Often nationalism or
anti-Semitism were just excuses. During the war, no one had to go hungry
in Germany, but living conditions in Eastern Europe were squalid. "For the
Germans, 300 Jews meant 300 enemies of humanity. For the Lithuanians they
meant 300 pairs of trousers and 300 pairs of boots," says one eyewitness.
That was greed on a personal level. But it also featured on a collective
level. In France, 96 percent of aryanized companies remained in French
hands. The Hungarian government used the assets seized from Jews to extend
its pension system and reduce inflation.

Jews Were Scapegoats for Soviet Crimes

Imaginary revenge also played a part. Pogroms in Poland by local people
against Jews in 1941 were based on the assumption that the Jews formed
some sort of base for Soviet rule, because communists of Jewish descent
had for a time been over-represented in some areas of the Soviet
bureaucracy. As a result, many people blamed Jews for the crimes committed
during the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941.
Stalin's secret police the NKWD had actual and presumed opponents of the
regime in the Baltic States, eastern Poland and Ukraine shot or deported
to Gulags. As the German troops advanced, the Soviets left behind a deeply
traumatized society between the Baltic and the Carpathians -- and many
fresh mass graves.

Hitler hadn't worked out all the details of the Holocaust from the start,
instead assuming he would be able to drive out all Jews from his sphere of
influence after a quick victory over the Soviet Union. But the German
advance into the Soviet Union started faltering in autumn 1941, which
raised the problem of what to do with the people crammed into ghettos,
especially in Poland. Many Gauleiter, SS officers and top administrators
called for their territory to be made "judenfrei" ("free of Jews" -- which
meant liquidating them. The construction of extermination camps began,
first in Belzec, then Sobibor, then Treblinka.

Brief Holocaust Training Course

It was a gigantic killing program in which most of Poland's Jews, 1.75
million, were murdered. The SS preferred to recruit its helpers among
Ukrainians or ethnic Germans in prisoner-of-war camps where Red Army
soldiers like Demjanjuk faced the choice of killing for the Germans or
starving to death. Later, increasing numbers of volunteers from western
Ukraine and Galicia joined the unit. The men had to sign a declaration
that they had never belonged to a communist group and had no Jewish
ancestry. Then they were taken to Travniki in the district of Lublin in
south-eastern Poland where they were trained for their deadly profession
on the site of a former sugar factory. In mid-1943 some 3,700 men were
stationed in Travniki. Training for the Holocaust took several weeks. The
SS men showed the new recruits how to carry out raids and how to guard
prisoners, often using live subjects. Then the unit would drive to a
nearby town and beat Jewish residents out of their homes. Executions were
carried out in a nearby forest, probably to make sure that the recruits
were loyal.

At first the Travniki were used to guard property and to prevent supply
depots from being plundered. Then their German masters sent them to clear
ghettos in Lviv and Lublin, where they were remorseless in rounding up
their Jewish victims. Finally they were put to work in eight-hour shifts
in the extermination camp. "Everyone jumped in where he was needed,"
recalled one SS officer. Everything worked "like clockwork."

Historians estimate that a third of the Travniki absconded despite the
punishment that entailed if they were caught. Some were executed for
disobedience. And the others? Why didn't they try to get out of the
killing machine? Why didn't Demjanjuk? Die he allow himself to be
corrupted by the feeling of "having attained total power over others," as
historian Pohl argues. Was it the prospect of loot? In Belzec and Sobibor
the Travniki engaged in brisk bartering with the inhabitants of
surrounding villages and paid with items they had seized from the
prisoners.

Perhaps there was something else, something even more disturbing that many
people have deep in their psyche: following orders from authorities even
if they ran counter to their conscience. Total and utter obedience.

Germany Relied on Outside Help in the Monstrous Murder Project

Germany's troops didn't have the whole of continental Europe under the gun
to the same extent. Outside the Third Reich and the occupied territories
the Germans needed the help of foreign governments in their monstrous
murder project -- in the west as well as the south and southeast of
Europe. Their support was strongest among the Slovaks and Croats whom
Hitler had given their own states. The Croatian Ustasha fascists set up
their own concentration camps where Jews were killed "through typhoid,
hunger, shooting, torture, drowning, stabbing and hammer blows to the
head," says historian Hilberg. The majority of Croatian Jews were killed
by Croats.

Anti-Semitism wasn't so deep-rooted in Italy and was ordered by the state
out of consideration for the Germans. An Italian military commander in
Mostar (in today's Bosnia) refused to chase Jews from their homes because
he said such operations "weren't in keeping with the honor of the Italian
army." That wasn't the only the only such case. But it's clear that Benito
Mussolini's puppet government of 1943 eagerly took part in persecuting
Jews. More than 9,000 Italian Jews were deported to their deaths.

Some 29,000 Jews from Belgium were murdered, many after being denounced in
return for cash. Denunciations also happened in the Netherlands and
France. Local authorities obediently paved the way for the deportation of
Jews and later said they hadn't suspected what fate the Jews faced. That
excuse was used by henchmen, opportunists and pen-pushing bureaucrats -- a
category of perpetrator that was denied for a long time after the war in
France as the country sought to build a myth that the entire French people
had been involved in the heroic resistance.

France was divided into two parts. Hitler's troops had occupied three
fifths of the country but the southern part of the country remained
unoccupied until November 1942 and was ruled by a right-wing government
based in Vichy that collaborated with the Germans.

How Many Were Betrayed?

The first major roundup of Jews took place in mid-July 1942 in occupied
Paris when almost 13,000 Jews who had no French passport where taken from
their homes by French policemen. At least two thirds of the Jews deported
from France were foreigners. The remaining third consisted of naturalized
French citizens and children born in France to stateless Jews. Police
"repeatedly expressed the desire" that the children should be deported as
well, one SS officer noted in July 1942. Almost all deportations ended in
Auschwitz.

In total almost 76,000 Jews were deported from France and only 3 percent
of them survived the Holocaust. It's unknown how many of them were
betrayed by the local population. In the Netherlands there's a figure that
gives an indication of the extent of denunciation. The country had an
authority that hunted Jews on behalf of the Nazis and that listed the
property of Jews who had gone into hiding or already been deported. The
"Household goods registry office" paid 7.50 guilders for every Jew who
could be located -- that's about 40 in today's money. Dutch journalist Ad
van Liempt has analyzed historical records and estimated that between
March and June 1943 alone, more than 6,800 Jews were tracked down in this
way, and that at least 54 people had taken part in this hunt once or even
several times. "Most of them made this their main occupation for months,"
he says.

The head of the unit was a car mechanic called Wim Henneicke who evidently
had good connections in the Amsterdam underworld. He built up an extensive
network of informants who told him where Jews were hiding. Some 100,000
Jews from the Netherlands were murdered in concentration camps, a far
greater proportion than in Belgium or France.

However, in contrast with France, Dutch collaborators were quickly
punished after the war. Some 16,000 were put on trial by 1951, and most of
them were convicted.

Demjanjuk is a different category of perpetrator. He's not a collaborator
or head-hunter, not a policeman of the sort that contributed to the
Holocaust far away from the actual killing. He was at the scene,
prosecutors say in their detailed arrest warrant.

The Terrible World of the Holocaust Helpers

In the coming days doctors will decide will decide whether and for how
long Hitler's last henchman from Sobibor can be put on trial. The German
government wants him to face trial. "We owe that to the victims of the
Holocaust," says Vice Chancellor Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Those who suffered in the camps under Travniki men like Demjanjuk don't
feel any desire for revenge when they talk about him today. American
psychoanalyst Jack Terry, who was imprisoned in Flossenbrg concentration
camp while Demjanjuk was a guard there, says it would suffice if Demjanjuk
"had to sit in his cell for even just one day."

And Sobibor survivor Thomas Blatt says he "doesn't care if he has to go to
prison, the trial is important to me. I want the truth."

Demjanjuk could provide information about Sobibor -- and about the
terrible world of the Holocaust helpers.

(source: Spiegel Online)

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

German prince fights for return of Nazi-seized land


In Potsdam, a German aristocrat, who is fighting for the return of
property seized from his grandfather by the Nazis, has pledged to continue
despite legal setbacks.

Prince Friedrich zu Solms-Baruth, 45, is the 5th Prince of Solms- Baruth,
and grandson of Prince zu Solms-Baruth III.

He says his grandfather's land and property in the eastern state of
Brandenburg was seized by the Nazi's after an abortive bomb plot to
assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. a claim dismissed by a court in the town
of Potsdam late last year.

'We will appeal as many time as required and, if necessary, take the case
to the European Court of Human Rights,' zu Solms-Baruth said, adding that
it was 'an issue of human rights and democracy.'

In its December ruling, Potsdam Administrative Court recognized that zu
Solms-Baruth's grandfather was persecuted by the Nazis, but argued this
had not been the reason his land and property were expropriated.

That had come about as part of land reform, the court ruled.

The properties in question had belonged to the prince's family since the
16th century. Today they are administered by the Brandenburg state, and by
municipalities in and around the town of Baruth.

Solms-Baruth says his grandfather was arrested a day after the failed
attempt on Hitler's life on July 20 1944.

'He had frequently discussed the plot with many of those involved ... and
provided two of his castles as secret meeting points for the plotters to
discuss strategy,' zu Solms-Baruth said.

The prince said that by rejecting his claim, the court had 'forgotten that
under the Third Reich, opposition to (head of the Nazi SS Heinrich)
Himmler meant certain death.'

'Himmler was responsible for millions of murders, a number that would have
included my grandfather had he not surrendered his property,' zu
Solms-Baruth added.

The prince said he was frightened by what he considered an unwillingness
to learn from history.

'The Nazis sought to provide a veneer of legality to their crimes, a
process which appears to have had success to this day,' he said.

Experts testifying in last year's court case included leading British
historian Anthony Beevor and Germany's Institute of Contemporary History.

They told the court that torture suffered by the prince's grandfather
before he surrendered ownership of his property meant that it had been
'illegally lost.'

After his 1944 arrest, Prince zu Solm-Baruth III was held in solitary
confinement in a notorious Gestapo prison in Berlin.

After incessant interrogation he signed a notarised declaration in which
he waived all rights to ownership to his companies and estates and
accepted banishment from them under pain of death.

His castles were ransacked and family members kicked out. Subsequently,
his life was spared but the Baruth and Klitschdorf properties were taken
from him.

In 1945, the prince went to start a new life on a farm he owned in the
then South West Africa, where he died shortly afterwards.

A settlement was reached in 2003 between zu Solm-Baruth's father and the
German government, regarding the bulk of the family estates.

The prince is now fighting for the rest of the estate still being held by
Brandenburg state and associated cities, including forested areas said to
be worth more than 7 million euros (9.4 million dollars) alone.

Zu Solm-Baruth says there are also important principles at stake.

'If Germany were allowed to uphold Nazi crimes, it would fly in the face
of the Nuremburg Trials, and set a dangerous precedent,' he said.

(source: Monsterandcritics)






GLOBAL:

Bringing War Criminals to Justice Can Keep Nations on the Right Road


Bringing war criminals to justice can have a positive effect in unifying a
nation, legitimizing its government, and keeping it on the right path, a
legal scholar says.

The trial of Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann by Israel inspired German
youth to question their elders roles in World War II and "helped
importantly in making Germany the free, peaceful and democratic nation it
is today," writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law
at Andover, in the second installment of a three part posting. (See
velvelonnationalaffairs.com).

Even though many former Nazis served as post-war German officials,
vigorous prosecutions weeded many out, ensuring a democratic Germany. One
German prosecutor Fritz Bauer persevered in looking for Eichmann in the
face of the disinterest of various countries that included the U.S. and
Western Germany, Velvel writes.

In a discussion of points from the new book "Hunting Eichmann" (Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt) by Neal Bascomb, Velvel points out that former Nazi
officials made up one-third of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauers
cabinet, much of the civil service, foreign ministry and judiciary, as
well as one quarter of the Bundestag (legislature).

"The German government had no interest in catching Eichmann or in seeing
him brought for trial as this might have caused all the German Kurt
Waldheims to be revealed..." Velvel writes.

(Waldheim was Secretary General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981
and president of Austria from 1986 through 1992. When his role as an
intelligence officer for the German army during WWII was eventually
revealed, Waldheim said that at the time of his service he had no
knowledge of Nazi war crimes.)

When David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, heard that Eichmann
was living in Argentina he dispatched his secret services to bring him to
trial in Israel, where he was found guilty and executed in 1962. Eichman
was captured in 1960 outside his Buenos Aires home where he lived under an
assumed name.

Quoting Bascomb, Velvel writes that "The trial had a profound impact on
Israel. It unified the country in a way it had not been unified since the
1948 war. It educated the Israeli public, particularly the young, on the
true nature of the Holocaust. After 16 years of silence, it allowed
survivors to openly share their experiences. The trial also reinforced to
Israelis that a sovereign state for Jews was essential for their
survival."

Ben-Gurion knew that it was necessary not to allow the world, particularly
the Israelis, and "especially the young, to forget what the Nazis had
done, and to remind the world to be on guard against future repetitions,"
Velvel said.

In Germany, prosecutor Bauer and his colleagues arrested numerous former
Nazis implicated in the Holocaust atrocities, including several of
Eichmanns deputies. Right up to his death in 1968, Bascomb notes, the
Hesse attorney general "cracked down on German fascist groups and
campaigned vigorously to unseat former Nazis from power..."

One of the lessons in Hunting Eichmann, Velvel writes, is that "much that
was valuable occurred when something was done which several nations had no
desire to see done---neither Germany, nor the US, nor even Israel had had
much of an interest in catching and trying Eichmann and, in some
instances, as (author) Bascomb discusses, had resisted or declined efforts
to pursue him because leaders or officials of the nations had thought
pursuit, trial and punishment of Eichmann would not fit national
interests. History has shown, I believe, that the leaders and officials
who thought this, who resisted or declined efforts to bring this evildoer
to justice, were wrong."

As will be developed in the third segment of the posting, there are
parallels between the reluctance to prosecute Eichmann and that of U.S.
officials today as they weigh the consequences of prosecuting Bush
administration officials for their roles in the torture and execution of
Arab and Muslim prisoners during the Bush presidency.

"The Holocaust is lodged deeply in much of the world's memory now, as is
the idea that the Eichmannesque justification, the Naziesque
justification, that one was just following orders is not permissible, is
no justification, when people do evil," Velvel writes. As shall be
developed, President Obama's position of excusing CIA interrogators from
prosecution of their crimes against prisoners because they were "following
orders" appears certain to be thought of in this context.

(Author Lawrence Velvel is dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School
of Law, purposefully dedicated to providing a quality, affordable legal
education to minorities, students from households of modest means, and
immigrants; Global Research)




ISRAEL:

Survey: 40 percent of Israeli Arabs reject Holocaust


Some 40 percent of Israeli Arabs believe the Holocaust never happened,
according to a new survey.

The figure is up from 28 percent in 2006, according to an annual
University of Haifa poll of Jewish-Arab relations released Sunday.

The poll also found that 41 percent of Israeli Arabs believe the country
should exist as a Jewish and democratic state, down from 65.5 percent in
2003. In addition, some 53.7 percent believe that Israel has a right to
exist as an independent country, down from 81 percent in 2003.

The survey polled 700 Arab-Israeli and Druse men and women.

(source: JTA)




CANADA:

Paintings stolen by Nazis arrive at Montreal fine arts museum


It's been a long trip for the "Girl from the Sabine Mountains" to the
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Claimed by the Nazis as the result of a forced sale in pre-Second World
War Germany, the painting has now been returned to the estate of its
rightful owner following a groundbreaking court case in the United States.
It was unveiled Wednesday along with six other recovered canvases
originally belonging to renowned art collector Max Stern.

It stands as a testament to the efforts of authorities who hope to
eventually restore Stern's entire collection.

"With the U.S. legal precedent, we not only have the museums and
institutions that have been collaborating thus far as part of the team, we
have law enforcement," said Clarence Epstein, special projects director at
Concordia University.

"Law enforcement connected with a judgment that is going to have
reverberations internationally (and that) makes this day all the more
special."

The painting was transported illegally to Germany from the U.S. in 2005
during negotiations with a German baroness whose family had the canvas for
70 years.

The court ruled that the original forced sale to a member of Adolf
Hitler's regime was tantamount to theft.

Concordia and McGill universities in Montreal and Hebrew University in
Jerusalem led the effort to recover Stern's paintings.

Stern, who fled to England in 1937 after the Nazis forced him to liquidate
his art gallery, moved to Canada and became an art dealer after the Second
World War.

Stern, who died childless in 1987, bequeathed his estate to the
universities.

The universities set up the Max Stern Art Restoration Project five years
ago and have since located about two dozen of the 400 works in Stern's
original collection.

Major international auction houses like Sotheby's and Christie's have
helped find some of the works and mediate their return.

The Nazis are believed to have stolen between 250,000 and 600,000 works of
art during Hitler's reign.

Heather Monroe-Blum, principal of McGill University, described Wednesday's
display as a "moving experience" and said Stern's story is not only one of
horror and oppression during the Holocaust.

"It also speaks to human dignity, moral obligation and the search for
justice," she said.

"It is the story of singular dedication, of displacement, of patience and
industriousness, of remembrance and public responsibility."

She noted that even though Stern had been forced to flee with nothing, he
eventually built a rich legacy as one of Canada's most important art
dealers.

Among the other works on display was the 1595 painting of St. Jerome by
Ludovico Carracci.

It was recently returned by Manhattan art dealer Richard Feigen, who had
it hanging in his living room, after he read about the recovery of a Dutch
Old Master painting also owned by Stern.

The Old Master - "Portrait of a Musician Holding Bagpipes" - was also on
display.

"I realized I had to give it back," Feigen said. "It didn't belong to me
and the auction house should not have recycled it."

Feigen said he asked the German auction house where he bought the painting
if it originally came from a Jewish gallery before the war and was assured
it did not.

Stern's gallery was not listed with the art loss registry until four years
after he made the purchase.

Feigen, who paid more than $50,000 for the painting, said collectors
should be aware of the problem of looted paintings.

He said returning the artwork is a small step toward righting the wrongs
of that dark period in history.

"We can't restore 6 million lives but at least we can restitute some of
the art they collected," he said.

(source: Canadian Pres)