June 12



GERMANY:

The day I held a sobbing WWII medic in my arms

Two-star general credits CNN's online reporting in preserving WWII legacy

CNN's Wayne Drash filed series of reports in recent months on slave camp
soldiers

350 U.S. soldiers were held at a Nazi slave labor camp in 1945

The Army had never recognized the men until last weekend


Editor's note: In our Behind the Scenes series, CNN correspondents and
producers share their experiences in covering news and analyze the stories
behind the events.


I'll never forget holding World War II medic Tony Acevedo in my arms. He
wept and convulsed for more than 10 minutes, his body constricting and
tightening in a way I'd never seen before. "I'm sorry," he said,
repeating, "I'm sorry. I want to say more, but I can't."

I held his hand and hugged him until he calmed. I had asked what I thought
was a simple question. "When I say the name Erwin Metz, what comes to your
mind?"

That's when the demons of 1945 took over.

Metz was one of the Nazi commanders who headed a slave labor camp known as
Berga an der Elster, where 350 U.S. soldiers -- 80 of whom had been
targeted for being Jewish -- were beaten, starved and forced to work in
tunnels at a secret V-2 rocket factory. They worked 10 to 12 hour days
with only 400 calories of food, mostly bread made from sawdust. More than
100 soldiers died at the camp or on a forced death march of more than 200
miles.

Other Berga survivors had described Metz: "A real bastard." "Butcher of
the Earth." They said he talked with a high-pitched lisp. Behind his back,
the soldiers called him Donald Duck.

But he wreaked hell on the men. He shot one soldier, Morton Goldstein,
through the head, execution-style, according to the survivors. Acevedo
described seeing Metz dump ice water on one emaciated soldier. The soldier
died of shock moments later.

Acevedo catalogued the atrocities in a diary he kept hidden in his pants,
using a Sheaffer fountain pen to record what he saw all around. When the
soldiers were on their forced death march, Acevedo asked to use his pen
for a tracheotomy to save a soldier named George Buddeski. Metz refused.
Flip through the pages of Acevedo's diary

"You're going to kill him then," Acevedo responded. Metz grabbed a rifle
from a guard and cracked the young medic across his face. Acevedo suffered
permanent nerve damage from the blow.

Buddeski died April 13, 1945, on the death march on what the soldiers call
Hell's Highway. The soldiers learned of another death that day: President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "Your Jew president has died," the Nazis said
mockingly.

There, in the middle of Germany, the American soldiers bowed their heads.
"We held a prayer service for the repose of his soul," Acevedo's diary
says. Amid the chaos and death all around them, these men -- these
soldiers who suffered so much -- took the time to stop and pray for their
president.

When CNN first reported Acevedo's story in November, I had no idea it
would lead to what I witnessed this weekend: The U.S. Army reversing
course on six decades of silence and recognizing the Berga soldiers for
what they went through.

Don't Miss
Army honors slave soldiers as 'national treasures'
In Depth: Scream Bloody Murder
Tony Acevedo's log (PDF)
Slave soldiers reunite after 64 years
It's always been a touchy subject for the Army. The U.S. government in
1948 commuted the death sentences of Metz and his superior, Hauptmann
Ludwig Merz. The men walked free in the 1950s, one of dozens of convicted
war criminals whose sentences were commuted as part of an effort to
bolster Germany, which was facing the threat of Soviet expansion.

In explaining its decision on the Berga commanders, the War Department
said, "Metz, though guilty of a generally cruel course of conduct toward
prisoners, was not directly responsible for the death of any prisoners
except one who was killed during the course of an attempt to escape."
Read the War Department's explanation for commuting their sentences

That prisoner was Goldstein, the one shot through the head.

When you read that document, it doesn't sit too easy. The government
excuses the killing of one soldier. Berga soldiers will tell you they were
never called to testify against Metz or Merz. They say they could've told
of many other atrocities.

When Metz and Merz were freed, the survivors felt the Army betrayed the
war ethos of "leave no soldier behind." They eventually got on with their
lives. Many went on to the top of their professions. They're all the most
patriotic Americans you'll ever meet.

As the survivors reached their 70s and 80s, many began wondering why the
government still refused to recognize them. It nagged them. It angered
some of them.

No ranking Pentagon official had described Berga as a "slave labor camp."

Heading into last weekend, the six Berga survivors present knew a two-star
general was being sent to meet with them. Many were skeptical: What can a
general do at this point to make us feel better? Surely, a two-star won't
call it a "slave labor camp" after all this time. Nah, he'll toe the
company line.

These were men who'd been disappointed before. They didn't want to set
expectations too high this time.

But there at the Rosen Centre Hotel in Orlando, Florida, something magical
transpired.

U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Vincent Boles did a sit-down interview with me, while
six Berga survivors -- Samuel Fahrer, 86; Morton Brooks, 83; Sidney
Lipson, 85; Peter Iosso, 83; Wallace Carden, 84; and Edward Slotkin, 84 --
watched.

"It wasn't a prison camp. It was a slave labor camp," Boles said.  Watch
the general set the record straight after six decades

I was stunned in that moment. I'll even admit I got choked up. I knew
history had just been made, the legacy of the Berga soldiers preserved for
all time. The men looked on stoically and I knew what they were thinking:
"Drash, pull yourself together! We got a two-star in our presence!"

I was thinking about all that transpired in the last eight months.

I thought about Bernard "Jack" Vogel and Izzy Cohen, who were forced to
stand without food and water for days, pushed to their deaths. Cohen was a
32-year-old father of two young children. I had met with his 90-year-old
wife, Florence, and their daughter, Nomi, months before.

Florence is a diminutive woman, the epitome of class and grace. She told
me a story I'll never forget. When Izzy left for war, he kissed his family
goodbye at a train station in California. He looked at her and said,
"Whatever happens happens." Those were the last words he ever spoke to
her.

When she was notified Izzy was a prisoner of war on March 16, 1945, one
relative shouted, "That's just like Izzy to take the easy way out of war."
Izzy Cohen died three weeks later, a victim of the Holocaust. Tears filled
Florence's eyes as she spoke. She changed the family name, so her son
would never be targeted as a Jew.

I thought about Martin Vogel, the brother of the man who died with Izzy.
Martin called one day in November, crying his eyes out. "Are you the one
who did the story on the medic, Tony Acevedo?" he said, struggling for
words. "My brother is the one who died in his arms."

Martin Vogel adored his older brother. They were best friends. He entered
the Army so he could be just like his brother. They were 19 and 17. He had
searched for decades for answers to Bernard's death. "A month doesn't go
by that it doesn't come up in the course of my own thoughts," he said.
"But to me, it's always there."

At the time his brother died such a horrific death, Martin Vogel was just
a few hundred miles away. He was guarding a POW camp inside Germany where
U.S. troops treated their Nazi captives under the Geneva Conventions. To
this day, Martin, now 82, can't speak about his brother without crying.

More than a dozen other families of Berga victims have reached out. I've
listened to each one and put them in touch with Acevedo for answers about
their loved ones.

I'm not the first to report on Berga. Authors Mitchell Geoffrey Bard,
Flint Whitlock and Roger Cohen have written books on it. The late Charles
Guggenheim made a documentary about Berga.

But what happened in recent months, I can only attribute to the power of
online media and the ease of access to communicate. You can scroll through
Acevedo's diary and read the War Department document explaining why Metz
and Merz were set free. Millions of you read the pieces, e-mailed them
around and rallied around these weathered war heroes. It took on a life of
its own.

Hundreds of you lobbied Rep. Joe Baca, D-California, and Rep. Spencer
Bachus, R-Alabama. The two congressmen then pressed Army Secretary Pete
Geren to recognize the soldiers.

It was humbling when Boles, the two-star general, told me that my
reporting and my colleagues on CNN television preserved the men's legacy,
culminating with the Army recognizing them. That feels mighty good.

It was even more humbling talking with the fellas. They all survived the
Battle of the Bulge, when a million young men went head-to-head on the
battlefield. It was an honor to see the six survivors present in Orlando
receive flags flown over the Pentagon in their honor; Samuel Fahrer was
awarded the Bronze Star, one of the nation's highest medals.

"Just as they never left their fallen comrades, we will never leave them,"
Boles said. "You were good soldiers and you were there for your nation."

I wished the other Berga survivors were there, especially Acevedo.


But Acevedo didn't make the trip. His wife is ill. If he was going to
leave her side, he felt the right thing would be to get honored in
Washington. A soldier with pride. A medic to the end.

My final message is to my generation and the next. Don't be so quick to
shove grandpa and grandma into a nursing home. Sit down with them. Listen
to them. Hear their stories. The greatest generation. They're cut from a
different cloth and we're losing them too fast.

(source:  Wayne Drash, CNN)




THE NETHERLANDS:

Childhood friend recalls tragic diarist Anne Frank


Anne Frank would have celebrated her 80th birthday this week

Frank, 15, died at Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland

Her diary is one of the world's mostly widely-read books

Like Frank, Eva Schloss and her family fled from Nazi persecution of the
Jews


She told stories, flirted outrageously with boys and was constantly
changing her hairstyle.

Anne Frank hid with her family in a secret room at her father Otto Frank's
office in Amsterdam.

It could be the description of almost any young girl growing up in
Europe. But this is how Eva Schloss remembers her childhood friend Anne
Frank, who had not died in a Nazi concentration camp, would have
celebrated her 80th birthday this week.

Schloss described Frank, whose account of hiding from Jewish persecution
in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam is one of the world's mostly widely-read books,
as a spunky young schoolgirl with a passion for storytelling that often
got her into trouble.

"She got her diary in 1942, so obviously her father knew she was
interested in writing and I know she told stories," said Schloss.

"She talked a lot and she was called Mrs Quack Quack. Very often she used
to write hundreds of lines [at school] of 'I'm not going to talk so much,'
and so on -- but obviously she had a lot to tell."

In some ways the two friends lived parallel lives -- but tragically they
had very different outcomes.  Watch more about Schloss' story

Schloss and Frank both came from Jewish families who fled to Holland to
escape the wave of anti-Semitism spreading across Europe as the Nazis rose
to power in Germany ahead of the Second World War.

But while Schloss was more of an introvert, Frank loved the limelight.
Schloss said: "I was actually quite shy and she was the center of
attention. We had steps where we sat, and she had a crowd of children
around her.

"She was a big flirt -- she loved boys. She was always showing us who was
her boyfriend at that particular time. She was always interested in her
clothes. Her style, she always changed it. Sometimes she had curls, then
she had straight hair."

Schloss says they were unaware of the full scale of what was going on
around them as war escalated across Europe, placing their lives in
increasing jeopardy.

"Our parents really protected us so there was no talk about the horrendous
things which happened.

"You couldn't go out anymore after 8 o'clock, but for a 11 to 12 year old
it didn't matter so much. Or not going to the cinema -- we were upset
about those little things which we couldn't do, but we really didn't
really take it seriously at that time."

Like Frank, Schloss was also forced into hiding when the Nazis took
control of Holland.

Frank hid with her family in a secret room at her father Otto Frank's
office. But Schloss and her family had to split up. Schloss stayed with
her mother while her father and brother hid elsewhere. She and her mother
moved around, staying in seven different hiding places over a two-year
period.

Eventually both families were betrayed and were sent to concentration
camps, where Frank died at the age of 15.

Schloss said: "My father and brother were betrayed by a Dutch nurse who
was a double agent, and all four of us were arrested and taken to the
headquarters to be interrogated.

"I didn't know anything, which was a good thing. So eventually they
realized this and they gave up torturing me. Within two days we were put
on a transport to Auschwitz."

Of her family, only Schloss and her mother survived Auschwitz, one of the
most notorious concentration camps, located in southern Poland.

Today Schloss, who has just celebrated her own 80th birthday, has a
husband, three daughters and five grandchildren.

Schloss says it took her decades to rebuild her life, with the help of
Frank's father Otto, who also survived incarceration in a concentration
camp.

She met Otto in August 1945, when he showed her Frank's diary.

Schloss said: "He read a few passages but he always burst into tears. It
took me 20 years. I was really unhappy, but it was Otto who came to our
apartment to talk to us, and he helped me a lot. He had lost everybody.

"Her book, she [Frank] made people aware of what happened. There are many
messages. She believed in the goodness of mankind.

"People always ask me, what she would have done. I guess we will never
know. But I guess she would have gone into politics -- she was a fighter.
It's a pity, but also -- maybe her diary would have never been published."

(source:  CNN)


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


Holocaust museum slaying exposes the hate within


When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum was being conceived and
built in the 1980s and 1990s, some critics questioned the need for such a
facility in this country. After all, there was no Holocaust here.

There are many reasons why that skepticism was misplaced. The museum in
Washington, D.C., was built so that new generations would learn of the
horrors of Nazi Germany, so that older ones would never forget them and so
that anti-Semites could not deny them. And it was built to honor the many
victims of the Holocaust and to research its causes.

Another answer was provided Wednesday when a deranged, 88-year-old
anti-Semitic gunman opened fire at the museum, killing a security guard
before being critically wounded himself, police said.

A burst of rage from a geriatric assassin hardly matches Adolf Hitler's
systematic slaughter of 11 million people, most of them Jews. But it is a
reminder of how pervasive hate remains in dark corners of America, where
the elections of the first African-American president and the first black
Republican Party chairman feed anger and paranoia on white supremacy
websites.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights law firm,
identified 926 hate groups in the USA in its most recent study this
spring.The numbers have been steadily edging up since 2000, when it
counted 602. The rise is driven, the group says, by the intense reaction
in some quarters to an influx of illegal immigrants.

The hate groups include neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan organizations and several
other categories. By the center's estimate, roughly 100,000 people
participate on a single Internet forum for white supremacists called
Stormfront.org.

This is, of course, a tiny fraction of the people involved in such groups
when bigotry was openly tolerated and segregation was imposed in Southern
states by force of law.

Even so, the shooting shows how bigotry continues to fester in the
shadows, only to emerge in a sudden act of violence. And it is reason to
be wary  more so now that the Internet gives formerly isolated racists,
whether individuals or small groups, a means to stoke one another's
smoldering anger. With the ready availability of weapons, even a single
person can do enormous harm.

There is something terribly self-reinforcing about someone killing at a
place designed to honor those who have died. It is almost as if the
accused killer, a convicted criminal named James von Brunn, who has spent
decades writing and publishing racist and anti-Semitic material and whose
hatred burned late in life, wanted to make a point that people like him
need to commit violence to get noticed.

(source:  Opinion, USA Today)





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


New York exhibit explores France under Nazi occupation


A landmark exhibition on Vichy France has opened at the New York Public
Library. Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life under
Nazi Occupation, guest-curated by award-winning historian Robert O.
Paxton, runs until July 25 at the library's headquarters at Fifth Avenue
and 42nd Street.

This rich and complex show explores one of the saddest chapters in the
history of France, the period between 1940 and 1944 when France succumbed
to the armies of the Third Reich.

Using rare journals, maps, letters and photos  including the original
manuscript of Irene Nemirovsky's bestselling novel Suite Francaise - the
exhibition probes some of the same issues that Paxton examined in his
groundbreaking 1972 book Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944.

Paxton, one of the first historians to broach the issue of French
collaboration with the Nazis, was awarded the French Legion dhonneur in
April.

Free public tours and a series of films made in France during the Nazi
occupation accompany the exhibition. Admission is free.

(source:  Los Angeles Times)

June 5



UKRAINE:

A holy mission to reveal the truth about Nazi death squads

Father Patrick Desbois has spent the past decade piecing together the
horrific story of the Nazis' secret death squads. Jonathan Brown meets a
man who's rewriting history

Father Patrick Desbois is a man desperately racing with death. By his own
calculations he has six, perhaps seven years at the outside in which to
complete his work: a task, which until the reaper renders it impossible
some time in the not-too-distant future, is at once unimaginably chilling
in nature and nightmarishly ambitious in scale. For the 53-year-old French
priest, with an easy laugh and shining eyes, has made it his holy mission
to recall for the world the slaughter enacted by the Nazi mobile death
squads, the feared Einsatzgruppen, which roamed and murdered Jews and
Gypsies with impunity in the remote villages of the former Soviet Union
between 1941 and 1944.

It was, until the intervention of Father Dubois, a largely overlooked
episode in one of the grimmest chapters of the Second World War. But for
the last 10 years the priest and his helpers have painstakingly gathered
the testimony of the survivors of this period, travelling to some of
Europe's most abject places where, without judging, they have listened as
a procession of elderly men and women recalled  often for the first time
how, a lifetime ago, they became teenage helpmates to the Nazi killing
machine.

Today these witnesses have grown old and infirm and many are already dead.
Living in countries where the average life expectancy for a man is little
more than 60 years, those who experienced first-hand the Nazi genocide in
Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Ossetia are steadily dying out. When they are
gone, Father Desbois fears, so too will the memory of what they saw  and
with it a truth which exists only in the conscience of Europe's poorest
people.

During the course of the last decade, Father Desbois and his team from
Yahad in Unum, a French organisation dedicated to Christian-Jewish
understanding, have recorded conversations with more than 1,000 witnesses
to the mass murders on Hitler's Eastern Front. So far they have discovered
some 850 unmarked graves  the majority of them previously unknown
including a site at Bodgdanivka which contained the remains of some 42,000
Jews.

The oral histories they have gathered, along with detailed ballistic
evidence, could soon change the face of the study of the Holocaust,
pushing the final death toll upwards by as much as 500,000 victims. They
are also, he hopes, providing irrefutable proof in the face of
increasingly vocal Holocaust deniers, emboldened by the disappearance of
the generation still able to recall the horrors of the Third Reich as they
actually happened.

Father Dubois was invited to Britain by the University of Manchester's
Centre for Jewish Studies where last week he addressed academics and spoke
at the city's Anglican Cathedral. Though largely unknown outside Jewish
circles in the UK, he is a hero in Israel and the United States. Last
year, in his native France, he was awarded the Legion d'Honneur by
President Nicolas Sarkozy, and sports the discreet red streamer proudly in
the buttonhole of his black priest's jacket. As he sits in the Victorian
splendour of Manchester's Palace Hotel, describing the detail of his
harrowing work, he displays a blistering sense of urgency at the looming
loss of the folk memory of the Nazi atrocities in the former Soviet Union.

"I am running against time," he says. "We have a maximum of six or seven
years if we take into account the age of the witnesses because they are so
old. Sometimes you arrive in the village and are told 'I'm sorry, Father,
but Madame Anna died just one month ago and she was the last witness. And
now nobody knows any more.' So I see time is short and we need to achieve
our goal as quickly as possible, which is why we must multiply our
energy," he says.

The reason for taking up this work is simple: to restore the dignity of
the uncounted and largely unmourned dead who were slaughtered and piled
into pits like animals, and to allow the Kaddish  the Jewish prayer of
mourning  to be recited over their final resting places. But there is
another reason too; to prevent a repeat of the Holocaust.

"You cannot leave Europe with thousands of unknown unmarked graves, or we
deny all our values," he says, his hands trembling slightly as he speaks.
"And what do we say to Cambodia or to Darfur if we do not bury correctly
the victims in our own continent? We are now 60 years after, and it is our
last chance to do it."

It is estimated that a minimum of 1.5 million Jews and Gypsies were killed
in Ukraine during the Second World War. The country was second only to
Poland for the number of Nazi murders on its soil. A further 500,000
perished in Belarus, while the exact numbers that perished in the vast
expanse of Russia, where the German army was encamped some 17 miles from
the Kremlin in the Moscow suburbs, or even in occupied Ossetia, can still
only be guessed at  until that is these territories, too, welcome in the
priest and his helpers to unlock the memories of survivors there too.

What made the slaughter in Eastern Europe so unimaginable is that it was
carried out not in the impersonal industrialised surrounding of the
concentration camps but by mobile units of individuals armed with
low-powered rifles. The policy laid down by Berlin was simple and based on
an evil economy to appease the army's concerns over dwindling resources:
"one bullet  one Jew; one Jew  one bullet".

The modus operandi of the Einsatzgruppen was as predictable as it was
murderous, explains Father Desbois. The mobile units were the precursors
of Heinrich Himmler's "Final Solution" policy. Composed primarily of
German SS and military personnel, they could draw on members of the
notorious German Gendarmerie, local police or even civilians  "anyone with
a carbine" explains the priest. Using the Soviet system of requisition
enacted on their behalf by compliant local mayors appointed by the Nazis,
the death squads were often staffed by gunmen plucked from everyday war
duties and left deeply traumatised by their actions. Their orders were to
kill those they were told were enemies of the Reich. Among the Jews,
Gypsies and communists were thousands of mentally and physically disabled
people, women and children.

Their approach was always the same, explains Father Desbois. First a
single uniformed officer, an expert in digging mass graves, would arrive
in a village. His initial stop would be the home of the local mayor, where
he would ask simply: "How many Jews?" Gauging who was and was not Jewish
in the Soviet Union was easy. Jews were considered one of the USSR's
national minorities and the information was recorded in official
documents. Having arrived at a figure and estimated the volume of the pit
required to hold the victims, the solider would order the mayor to round
up local teenagers, many of whom are now among Father Desbois's witnesses.
They would then be ordered to dig. Sometimes the pits were complex
structures, excavated deep into the ground with stairs to allow the soon
to be murdered to lie down "like sardines" before they were shot.
Sometimes they were little more than shallow holes. When the work was
complete, the call would go out to the regional headquarters seeking
gunmen from the surrounding countryside.

The day of the murders would have a chilling routine to it, says Father
Desbois. "They (the mobile units) would all gather together in the morning
of the killing and surround the village and then announce that the Jews
will be deported to Palestine. They are Soviets, so while an order like
this is not nice, it is not surprising to be deported," he explains. The
credulous victims would then begin to line up in the streets, assembling
in lines of five, carrying whatever belongings they could. Those less
credulous among them who refused to leave their homes were shot and their
bodies stacked up on horse-drawn carts. The "deportees" were ordered to
march to the waiting pit, strip and then, still five-a-breast, walk
straight into the bullets of the waiting gunmen.

Those who were left behind remember all too vividly what they saw, says
Father Desbois. "I met a witness who told me: I saw my neighbour. She was
in the line to wait and I was crying. She told me: 'Don't cry, we are
going to Palestine.' But I knew they were not going to Palestine because
early in the morning I was out with my cow and I saw the mass grave  I saw
it being dug by the children." As the victims were being mown down, the
Germans and their forced helpers set about the task of looting the
belongings of their victims. Clothes and jewellery were packed in boxes
while gold was prised from the mouths of the dead. The furniture was taken
from the now empty houses. The best was sent back to Germany while the
rest was sold off for cash. Meanwhile, the grim task of burial was being
completed by the same children who had dug the graves several days
earlier. Because of the "one bullet" policy, many of those inside the pits
were not dead. Children were dragged in by their falling parents or
propelled by the force of the advancing victims behind them. Others were
pushed in by gloved helpers. "In some cases there were Ukrainian girls,"
recalls Father Desbois. "I met one who was asked to walk on the corpses
between the shootings to make them flat. She said: 'The soldiers asked me
in the morning to come with my friends and between each of the shootings I
had to go down and walk on the corpses with my bare feet.'" Among the
victims were many friends and classmates, stripped naked and slaughtered
before her eyes. "They shot them and I had to walk on them like the
others," she recalled. Witnesses, little more than children, remembered
how the victims writhed "like flies and worms" as they died.

Sometimes some of those who were not dead would escape. More often they
would suffocate under the weight of the earth and bodies, but not before
they had endured further days of suffering, during which villagers watched
as the freshly dug earth heaved and fell under the agonized movements of
the victims below. It was as if the whole pit was breathing, according to
one onlooker.

"On the evening of the killing they would organise a party for the
shooters," says Father Desbois. There would be drinking, dancing and
prostitutes who travelled with the death squads as they moved from village
to village. The party was designed to ease the psychological guilt of the
killers, believes the priest, and bind the gunmen in the commonality of
their mass murder.

But while official records were kept detailing how many had been shot, it
is believed that up to 10 times that number were killed in Ukraine
unofficially. After the shootings each village would be declared
"Judenfrei"  free of Jews  putting them in good favour with the Nazi
authorities. Any Jews that escaped and returned were often killed to
prevent this status being lost. Many were forced into hiding in the
forests until the end of the war, only to emerge into the further terror
under Stalin. Others were not so lucky.

"In some villages they kept Jewish women to be sex slaves or forced
workers for the Gestapo," explains Father Desbois. "At the end of the war,
in many villages, they were pregnant, so they shot them just before
leaving the village. It is very difficult to find the mass graves of these
girls because no one wants to speak of that. All the village knew them
because they worked for the Gestapo so they saw them every time they went
to present their papers," he says.

Unlike the Holocaust in Central and Western Europe, where victims were
rounded up and deported, the genocide in Ukraine and Eastern Europe came
to the village squares, the gardens and farms of the survivors, and it was
among them that the bodies remained. Again, unlike Germany and Poland,
where the extermination camps stand testament to the atrocities that were
perpetrated within their walls, no symbols or memorials exist to the dead
Jews and Gypsies of the former USSR. Under Stalin, the victims, where they
were remembered, were considered to be fallen fellow-Soviets. All that
remains of this Holocaust by bullets are the cartridge cases discarded in
the dirt, each bearing a distinctive date and brand and each having
claimed the life of a human being.

It may seem strange that the task of remembering the millions of Jews and
Gypsies who died in Eastern Europe should fall to a Roman Catholic priest.
Father Desbois is neither a historian, nor an archaeologist. He is
certainly not a politician. It was through his family's wartime
experiences that he became involved in his present mission. The Desbois
family resisted the German occupation, hiding partisans on their farm in
eastern France. His grandfather (and other relatives) were imprisoned,
eventually being sent to the Ukraine, witnessing the horrors at Rawa-Ruska
where thousands of Jews died. He eventually told his grandson what he had
seen, as a way of downplaying his own suffering. It was during a visit to
the site of his grandfather's wartime incarceration that Father Desbois
posed the local mayor a simple question: "Where are the bodies of the
Jews?" The politician said he did not know  an answer the priest found
impossible to believe. Returning the next year, there was a new mayor, who
this time took the inquisitive Frenchmen out in to the forest where 100
villagers were waiting to tell him of the horrors they had seen played out
there among the birch trees.

The symbol of his authority is, he says, his clerical collar. Arriving
unannounced, he knocks on doors and listens  offering no comment or
judgment on actions which may have haunted a life for 60 years. Often, at
the end of a gruelling testimony he may pray with the witnesses, though he
does not offer absolution through confession. It is simply an opportunity
for someone to talk while another listens.

"These people, they may have seen on one day the killings of over 1,000
persons, and sometimes they say to me: "all my life I dreamt of finding
someone to tell them.'"

He recalls a recent interview in Brest, Belarus, when an elderly man was
describing how he would rest at night from packing away the belongings of
the slaughtered Jews as the German soldiers raped the surviving women. "At
the end of the interview I said: 'Of course you have spoken a lot of times
about that before?' He said: "No, it is the first time that I have spoken.
Who would be interested in all that?' These were poor people and no one
has ever paid any attention to them," he says.

Even today, conditions in the villages of the former Soviet Union are
harsh. There are often no roads; no running water and the weather is
bitterly cold. It is also an occasionally violent part of the world and
the priest, who has been shot at in the past, makes his five journeys a
year to the former killing fields in the company of armed bodyguards.
After enduring the horrors of the Nazis and Stalin during their lives, the
villagers have never posed themselves the kind of questions of guilt and
complicity that so often bedevil the conscience of the wealthier and more
privileged, believes Father Desbois.

As a former mathematics teacher in West Africa who became a priest after
working with Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta, he is not inured to
suffering. But he dismisses inquiries about how he or others "feel" in
relation to the atrocities as "typical Western questions". Under the
totalitarian regimes of the 20th century people simply had no choice  they
co-operated or they died. This leaves him free to concentrate on the task
in hand  logging the dead.

"My questions are who killed the Jews? Where are the corpses and how do we
establish evidence? I am completely concentrating on my goal and I try to
avoid the other questions or I might miss my goal," he says."

With the backing of the French government and Pope Benedict, Father
Desbois has become of the leading figures in the world of Jewish-Christian
relations. But he sees his role simply. "I am a very practical person and
I want to stay at this level. I am not an important person. I am only
doing some duty that has to be done. To bury the people is not an
important role  it is a simple role," he says. As for those who question
the existence of the Holocaust, whether they are politicians or within his
own church, he sees them as the direct inheritors of Himmler and Heydrich.
They are, he says, the "deniers of the inferno".

And at the heart of the unimaginable continent-wide tragedy can be found
individual human suffering and a timeless story and its still unanswered
questions dating back to the murder of Abel.

He says: "I don't work for millions. I am the disciple of Mother Teresa.
Everybody asked her: 'How can you stand in Calcutta with 13 million poor
people?' And she answered: 'I never saw 13 million, I only saw one.' It is
the same for me... it is people. I try to think really concretely of these
people not as a millions or just mathematics  I am looking for the tombs
of Isaac, Rebecca and Dora," he says. "We cannot build a safe Europe and a
modern world and ask people to keep silent. Otherwise we justify the next
genocide. It is the ultimate victory to Hitler if we don't bury the
victims."

(source:  The Independent)

June 5


POLAND:

Auschwitz camp to get $5.9M restoration

The European Union is giving $5.9 million to help fund structural repairs
to the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, an official says.

Rafal Pioro, the conservation department head for Auschwitz, confirmed the
EU has agreed to provide funds to help preserve the World War II site that
has become a tourist destination, The Scotsman reported Friday.

The former Nazi death camp near Oswiecim, Poland, draws nearly 1 million
tourists annually.

The site consists of dark brick administrative buildings now housing
exhibits of hair, clothes and eyeglasses taken from prisoners, and the
main camp with remains of the gas chambers and crematoriums facing the
railroad tracks where prisoners were brought in. Officials say the camp
has fallen into disrepair since the war, while museum officials have
struggled with their preservation efforts, the Scotsman said.

Pioro warned the final costs for the entire preservation project for the
Auschwitz camp will far exceed the EU donation.

The Scotsman said structural repairs at the historic site will begin this
August.

(source:  United Press International)












GERMANY:

VISIT TO BUCHENWALD----'Obama in the Historic Steps of His Family'


US President Barack Obama visits the former concentration camp Buchenwald
on Friday. Memorial site director Volkhard Knigge told SPIEGEL ONLINE that
the visit has symbolic importance far beyond the borders of Germany.


SPIEGEL ONLINE: In geo-political terms, Barack Obama's visit to Germany
seems to be little more than a stopover. What is the significance of the
US president's visit to Buchenwald?

Volkhard Knigge: One cannot see Barack Obama's speech in Cairo and his
visit to Buchenwald as two completely separate events. In Cairo, the
president attempted to initiate a new, real dialogue between the West and
the Muslim world. In this context, the visit to Buchenwald signifies that
this dialogue is meant very seriously, but that it should not be
misinterpreted as appeasement of anti-Semitism, racism and dictatorships.
With his visit, Obama is also acknowledging the self-critical culture of
remembrance in Germany. It underscores the fact that these sites of 20th
century crimes against humanity continue to convey an essential message.
This is especially true of Buchenwald, because it was also a center of
European resistance to the Nazis and to occupation.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Obama is also walking in the historic steps of his family.
His great-uncle Charles Payne, who was 20 at the time, was among the US
troops that reached Ohrdruf, one of the Buchenwald satellite camps. What
did Payne and the other soldiers find when they arrived here on April 6,
1945?


Knigge: Payne and the other soldiers saw a camp full of murdered people.
The parade ground was covered with bodies of inmates who had been shot and
stacks of corpses were still burning. There were bodies in many of the
camp's buildings, and there were also some open mass graves.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The satellite camp had not been in existence for very long
at the time.

Knigge: Ohrdruf was established in November 1944, about 30 kilometers (19
miles) west of the main camp, with the sole purpose of building an
underground headquarters for Hitler and his government. There was
absolutely no consideration for human life. It was one of the most
horrific satellite camps in the Buchenwald system. In the short period
leading up to its liberation in April 1945, more than 10,000 of the camp's
30,000 inmates lost their lives.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Ohrdruf was the very first camp reached by the Western
Allies. This must have made it all the more shocking for the liberators.

Knigge: Obama's great-uncle was one of the soldiers who, as a
representative of the Western world, first came into direct contact with
Nazi atrocities. They were certainly aware of the Nazi extermination
camps, since the Red Army had already liberated camps in the East. But
there is a big difference between hearing about such crimes and standing
in front of the bodies. The shock was so great that General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Western Allied forces, quickly
rushed to Ohrdruf. It was so great that politicians, church
representatives and other delegations traveled to Ohrdruf from everywhere
to witness the Nazi crimes firsthand.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is this why Buchenwald played such an important role in
shaping the American view of Nazi Germany?

Knigge: Buchenwald made the horror visible. This place reawakened the
world's conscience. It also made it clear to American soldiers, once
again, why it was necessary to wage this war. Later on, the photos and
documentary films that were made here helped shape our historical memory,
particularly after 1990 when East Germany came to an end and the West
gained unrestricted access to Buchenwald once again. To this day, every
major historical exhibition in the United States begins with images from
Ohrdruf and Buchenwald.


SPIEGEL ONLINE: Did the Americans ever view Buchenwald as a sign of
triumph over the Nazis?

Knigge: No, never as a sign of triumph, but as irrefutable, material proof
of Nazi crimes, and of everything Nazism was -- a racist social system
with an extreme compulsion to conquer and exterminate.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What will Barack Obama see in Buchenwald?

Knigge: The president finds it important to visit the key sites of crimes
and the places that represent all of Buchenwald's victims. We will go to
the parade ground, where the memorial to all groups of victims at
Buchenwald was built in 1995. It was there that every inmate had to begin
and end his day. From the parade ground, we will go to the Small Camp,
once the most hellish place at Buchenwald, where thousands were squeezed
into horrible barracks, and where 903 children were saved, hidden by the
resistance movement under the eyes of the SS. The US president will also
visit the former crematorium, but without the public. It is one of the
most extreme pieces of material proof of Nazi atrocities and the technical
efficiency with which these crimes were committed. And it is the
representative monument to all those who, as the prisoners would say, went
through the smoke.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Eli Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who was
liberated from the Buchenwald Camp as an adolescent, will accompany Obama.
Holocaust survivors Bertrand Herz and Floral Barrier will likewise greet
the president. When they were liberated, the inmates swore an oath to
destroy Nazism and support the creation of a new world of peace. Will
Obama hear this oath?

Knigge: He knows about the oath. The Buchenwald survivors see Obama's
visit as a very special and unexpected acknowledgement. What counts for
them is his family history, which is directly related to the liberation
and the safeguarding of their survival after surviving Buchenwald. And
what counts for them is Obama the politician, who they see as being
closely tied to their legacy, the legacy that is articulated in this oath.
It is an oath that signifies a complete commitment to indivisible human
dignity and human rights as the basis of any civilization.


Interview conducted by Philip Wittrock.

(source:  Spiegel Online)


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

At a Holocaust Site, Obama Calls Denial 'Hateful'


President Obama traveled to the former concentration camp of Buchenwald
Friday, laid a single white rose at a memorial to the dead and, returning
emotionally to a theme he addressed in a major speech in Cairo on
Thursday, criticized those who denied the Holocaust.

"To this day there are those who insist that the Holocaust never happened,
a denial of fact and truth that is baseless and ignorant and hateful," the
President said, echoing his words in Cairo in an address that reached for
what he called a new beginning in the relationship between the United
States and the Muslim world.

By visiting Buchenwald on Friday, he also underscored what he termed in
Cairo America's "unbreakable" bond with Israel. Mr. Obama has been pushing
hard during this trip for a two-state solution in the Middle East, and the
administration has angered some in Israel by taking a tough stand against
Israel's expanding existing settlements.

In his visit to the former concentration camp, Mr. Obama said the site was
the "ultimate rebuke" to those who deny or seek to minimize the Holocaust.

"These sights have not lost their horror with the passage of time."

"More than half a century later, our grief and our outrage over what
happened have not diminished. I will not forget what I have seen here
today."

The camp where 56,000 people died also bears a particular significance for
Germans, embodying the contradiction of a civilized societys descent into
organized barbarism. The camp sits just a few miles outside the city of
Weimar, one of the country's leading cultural centers and home to the
great German writers Goethe and Schiller.

With his hands behind his back and a thoughtful expression on his face,
Mr. Obama walked through the former concentration camp, flanked by
Chancellor Angela Merkel and Elie Wiesel, a Nobel peace prize winner,
writer and Holocaust survivor, who survived a death march from Auschwitz
to Buchenwald and was at the camp when it was liberated in April 1945.

Mr. Wiesel spoke movingly about the death of his father a few months
before the liberation of the camp, calling the visit "a way of coming and
visit my father's grave. But he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in
the sky, which has become in those years the largest cemetery of the
Jewish people."

Mr. Obama claims a personal connection to the concentration camp. His
great-uncle, Charles Payne, helped liberate a sub-camp of Buchenwald
called Ohrdruf.

Mrs. Merkel, who like Mr. Wiesel and Mr. Obama laid a long-stemmed white
rose in memory of the dead, spoke of the German responsibility "to do
everything possible that something like that never happens again."

She added, "I bow before all the victims."

Earlier the two leaders met for talks in Dresden, where President Obama
declared that "the moment is now" to press for a Middle East settlement.
He put Israelis and Palestinians on notice that it was up to them to make
difficult compromises.

President Obama said he was dispatching his top Middle East envoy, George
Mitchell, to the region next week to follow up on issues raised during the
Cairo speech. Time was of the essence, he said, for Israelis and the
Palestinians to step up their efforts.

"The moment is now for us to act on what we all know to be the truth,
which is that each side is going to have to make some difficult
compromises," Mr. Obama said. "We have to reject violence. The
Palestinians have to get serious about creating a security environment
that is required for Israel to feel confident. Israelis are going to have
to take some difficult steps."

"Ultimately, the United States can't force peace upon the parties," he
added, "but what we've tried to do is to clear away some of the
misunderstandings so we can at least begin to have frank dialogue."

On other issues, the two leaders said they would work closely on trying to
persuade Iran to abandon what the West fears is a nuclear program to build
an atomic bomb but which Tehran says is for civilian purposes.

But there was no indication of major progress on Washingtons desire for
Europeans to accept prisoners from Guantnamo Bay as Mr. Obama moves to
redeem a pledge to close the detention center in Cuba.

"I don't anticipate its going to be resolved in the next two or three
months," Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama's one-day visit to Germany is laden with symbolism. Dresden, in
the former East Germany, is for many Germans, a symbol of the suffering of
civilians. Germans perished in large numbers when the British and American
air forces fire-bombed the city in February 1945, only months before the
end of World War II. Military experts still debate whether the onslaught
was necessary with the German Army already in retreat.

The bombing destroyed the baroque Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady,
which the president visited Friday. The church was not rebuilt until after
the fall of Communism. Some $218 million, more than half of it private
donations, was spent on reconstructing it, and the new church was
consecrated in 2005.

Mrs. Merkel suggested Friday that the city symbolized the progress Germany
has made since the collapse of the former East Germany.

The meeting between her and Mr. Obama renewed speculation about how
friendly they really were beyond the diplomatic smiles and handshakes.

But Mr. Obama dismissed the suggestion that his relationship with
Chancellor Merkel was strained. Asked by a German television reporter
about it, he playfully admonished the press.

"Stop it, all of you," Mr. Obama said. "We have more than enough problems
out there without manufacturing problems."

He smiled and looked over to his German counterpart, saying: "It is a
great pleasure to be with my friend once again, who I always seek out for
intelligent analysis and straight talk."

Indeed, Mr. Obama said on Friday: "Germany is a close friend and a
critical partner to the United States, and I believe that friendship is
going to be essential not only for our two countries but for the world if
we are to make progress on some of the critical issues that we face,
whether it's national security issues or economic issues or issues that
affect the globe like climate change."

Specifically, he alluded to the global financial crisis, which created
major differences between the United States and Germany. Mr. Obama said it
was "going to be very important to coordinate between Europe and the
United States as we move to strengthen our financial regulatory systems."

"We affirmed that we are not going to engage in protectionism. And, as all
of us do, we have to make sure we keep our borders open and that companies
can move back and forth between the United States and Europe in providing
goods and services to our respective countries."

(source:  New York Times)

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




Seminary closed by Nazis graduates rabbis once again


Two Orthodox rabbis were ordained by the reestablished Hildesheimer
Rabbinical Seminary in Berlin this week, for the first time since the
seminary was closed by the Nazis in 1938.

At a ceremony broadcast live on German television, Zsolt Balla and Avraham
Radbil became the first rabbis to graduate from the seminary, which
historians consider the cradle of Modern Orthodoxy.

"Sixty years ago, who would have thought that we'd be standing here
today?" said Charlotte Knobloch, chairwoman of the Central Council of Jews
in Germany, at Tuesday's ordination ceremony, which took place in Munich's
Ohel Jacob synagogue. "I myself wouldn't have thought it would be possible
... It's a small miracle."

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble said it was a "moving" and
"magical" event. "In the very city where the Nazis' reign of terror
started, we are able to celebrate that Jewish life thrives again in
Germany," he said in his speech, which also surveyed the history of the
legendary seminary.

Rabbi Azaria Hildesheimer, whose great-grandfather founded the original
seminary in 1869, also addressed the new rabbis.

Balla, 28, was born in Budapest and came to the German capital in 2003 to
study at Yeshivas Beis Zion, which is sponsored by the Ronald Lauder
Foundation and a part of the new seminary. He will lead outreach programs
for the yeshiva in Berlin and serve as a "weekend rabbi" in Leipzig,
Germany, the same city where his fellow graduate lived after emigrating
from his native Ukraine at the age of 12. Radbil, 25, who later this year
will also conclude his psychology studies, will become Rabbi Yaron
Engelmayer's assistant in Cologne.

The new Hildesheimer seminary, founded in 2005 and supervised by Dean
Rabbi Chanoch Ehrentreu, the former head of London's Orthodox rabbinical
court, comprises three years of full-time study focusing on Talmud and
religious law. The seven students currently enrolled there are also tasked
with preparing Shabbat programming for small Jewish communities, writing
articles for Jewish newspapers and giving lectures.

While the seminary's ordination is recognized by the Conference of
European Rabbis and the Orthodox Rabbinical Conference of Germany, critics
said it is absurd for the new program to compare itself with the original,
which was known for producing influential and erudite scholars.

Radbil and Balla are not the first rabbis to be ordained in post-Holocaust
Germany, however. The Abraham Geiger College, a Potsdam-based Reform
seminary, ordained three rabbis in 2006, and Chabad-Lubavitch says its
Yeshiva Gedola Berlin has ordained 16 students. Unlike Hildesheimer's
graduates, however, Chabad graduates are not specifically trained to serve
the German community.

(source:  Ha'aretz)




ISRAEL:

Photos of French Holocaust victims added to Yad Vashem

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority,
signed a cooperation agreement with Memorial de la Shoah in Paris
yesterday that provides the Israeli institution with photographs of many
of France's Holocaust victims.

The agreement will enable Yad Vashem and the French Shoah Memorial - the
largest research and information center in Europe dealing with the history
of the Jews' genocide - to gather documents jointly and exchange copies of
documents accumulated in each other's archives over the past 50 years. The
document exchanges will enable each institution to increase its
collection.

Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev and Shoah Memorial director Jacques Fredj
signed the agreement.

Pursuant to the agreement, Yad Vashem has already received some 7,000
photographs of Jews who were murdered in Auschwitz. This doubles the
number of pictures of French Jewish Holocaust victims in the institution's
archives and will enable it to attach a photograph to many Holocaust
victims' Pages of Testimony.

The photographs have been scanned and are now available online in the
Holocaust victims' database on Yad Vashem's Internet site.

Yad Vashem's database contains 78,000 names of French Holocaust victims,
including many gathered by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, a member of the
committee that runs the Fondation pour la Memoire de la Shoah. Some 26,000
of the victims have had Pages of Testimony filled in by relatives.
However, the institution previously had photographs of only about 6,000 of
them.

(source:  Ha'aretz)





SLOVENIA/AUSTRIA:

Slovenian, Austrian Presidents Mark Nazi Camp Anniversary

The presidents of Slovenia and Austria, Danilo Tuerk and Heinz Fischer,
laid wreaths on Friday at a memorial to internees from the Mauthausen
concentration camp who were brought to the Ljubelj mountain pass by the
Nazis to build a tunnel between Slovenia and Austria.

(source:  STA - Slovenska Tiskovna Agencija)






ENGLAND:

Nazi souvenirs on sale in London ahead of D-Day anniversary


Nazi souvenirs glorifying an infamous Panzer commander who massacred
scores of British soldiers are being sold in London in time for the 65th
anniversary of D-Day.

They include a grossly offensive T-Shirt showing SS-Hauptsturmfhrer
Michael Wittmann climbing into his Tiger tank in June 1944.

At the time the ruthless Nazi had just destroyed as many as 15 British
tanks and 13 armoured personnel carriers in less than half an hour.

The PanzerAce fan club, based in north west London, is selling the 13.99
shirts along with a long list of other momentoes to a fighting force known
for committing some of the most heinous crimes in military history.

As well as Britain, all are being distributed across European countries
including Germany and France , with local police fearing neo-Nazis may try
to wear the T-shirts during the June 6th D-Day anniversary commemorations
on Saturday.

A spokesman for police in the French city of Caen - objective of British
troops on D-Day - said: "We consider such souvenirs to be grossly
inflammatory and will move to arrest anyone caught wearing them in
public."

The PanzerAce souvenirs also include CDs of Panzer and Waffen SS marching
songs, as well as pint glasses commemorating such barbarous divisions as
Das Reich ("The Empire") and Totenkopf ("Death's Head").

Das Reich atrocities included the murders of 642 French civilians in the
village of Oradour-sur-Glane on June 10th 1944.

Wittman was a member of the notorious Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, which
was also found guilty of numerous war crimes during the Nuremburg Trials
at the end of the Second World War.

Yet PanzerAce sales literature describes Wittman as a matchless warrior,
who like many others in the Waffen-SS has been posthumously tarred with
the sweeping brush wielded at the Nuremburg court.

The Fan Club is run by Rick Joshua, a self-styled amateur historian who
describes himself as The 'Panzerkommandant' (Panzer Commander).

He and his French girlfriend Caroline Godart live together in a suburban
house in West Drayton, greater London.

Joshua, who also collects stamps and likes watching rugby, is obsessed
with the Waffen SS, and Wittmann in particular.

As a student in the 1990s he frequently produced papers defending the
elite Nazi units, writing: "To simply cast them aside as criminals is as
much an insult to one's own intelligence as it is to the many brave men
who perished wearing the colours of the Waffen-SS."

"Many of those who joined had been members of a lost generation, young men
in a Germany that had been subjected to systematic humiliation by the
Allied powers."

In numerous recent web postings about Wittmann, Joshua pays particular
attention to Nazi victories against the British.

Wittman's record-breaking attack on Villers-Bocage, in Normandy, northern
France , decimated the ranks of the 4th County of London Yeomanry , part
of the 7th Armoured Division.

Glorying in the slaughter perpetrated by Wittmann, Joshua writes: "In what
was one of the most astonishing feats of arms during the war, he had more
or less single-handedly prevented the British advance."

It turned Wittmann into a national hero in Adolf Hitler's Germany , with
the Fuhrer summoning him to Berlin a few days later to personally present
him with the Swords to his Knights Cross medal.

Wittmann was finally killed on August 8th 1944 after being ambushed by a
British and Canadian force.

The Sherman tank shells which destroyed Wittmann's Panzer were fired by
20-year-old Joe Ekins, a gunner in the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry.

Now 85, Mr Ekins lives in Rushden, Northamptonshire.

Wittmann is buried in the Soldatenfriedhof (military cemetery) at La Cambe
in Normandy, near Bayeux.

Prince Charles, Prime Minister Gordon Brown, American President Barack
Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy will all be in Normandy on
Saturday to commemorate the sacrifice of thousands of Allied troops who
poured into Nazi-occupied France on June 6th 1944, heralding final victory
in the Second World War.

Defending the Nazi souvenirs, Mr Joshua said: "They are of great
historical interest."

(source:  Daily Mail)

June 3



ENGLAND:

Nazi-Looted Pissarro Painting Goes to Auction

A painting stolen by the Nazis was finally restored to its rightful owner
after almost 70 years, only to now hit auction block.

After claiming a Camille Pissarro painting stolen from her family in 1938,
Gisela Bermann-Fischer recovered Le Quai Malaquais, Printemps (1903) in
2007. Curiously, she is now auctioning the painting at Christies
Impressionist and modern art sale in London on June 23. It is expected to
garner between 900,000 and 1.5 million ($1.452.46 million).

Bermann-Fischer says it cost her at least 500,000 Swiss francs ($466,000)
in lawyers fees to get the painting back.

(source:  Artinfo)




GERMANY:

German court: Jewish forced workers due pensions

In Berlin, a German federal court ruled Wednesday that two Jews who were
forced by the Nazis to work in ghettos have a right to a pension for their
labor, setting the stage for thousands of others to receive payments.

The Federal Social Affairs Court in Kassel ruled that the two qualified
for pensions because, although they did not receive financial compensation
for their work, they received food and other items  meaning the German
government was responsible for them.

The two plaintiffs, whose names were not released by the court, did
cleaning and washing in a ghetto in Poland.

The ruling sets a precedent for some 70,000 people forced by the Nazis to
work in ghettos, or their descendants, to make claims.

Most would be able to claim payments of euro150 ($213) per month,
backdated to July 1, 1997. The payments could add up to more than euro1
billion, according to estimates, which would come out of Germany's federal
pension program.

The Jewish Claims Conference, which administers compensation payments,
applauded the court's decision.

"The verdict of the Federal Social Affairs Court speaks to the spirit of
the law, and provides many Holocaust survivors whose claims for pensions
have been refused a little justice," said a spokesman for the conference
in Germany, Georg Heuberger.

(source:  Associated Press)

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


NAZI JET FIGHTER----The Story of Hitler's 'Miracle Weapon'


At the very end of World War II, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler still hoped
that state-of-the-art technology could turn the tide in his favor. One of
those projects, the Messerschmitt jet fighter, found a home in a remote
corner of eastern Germany. But it was too late.

It took four and a half years, but finally, on March 20, 1944, World War
II -- and more specifically, the armaments industry -- came to a remote
corner of eastern Germany called the Lausitz. As the Allies flew an
ever-increasing number of air raids over Germany's industrial and urban
centers, large weapons factories in Nazi Germany began an exhaustive
search for suitable places to relocate -- sites as inconspicuous and
isolated as possible. Indeed, by 1943, Hermann Gring, commander of the
Luftwaffe, had already forged plans to relocate the aviation industry to
areas the Allies were unlikely to bomb.

It took a year, but then Junkers, an airplane and engine manufacturer from
Dessau, moved into a factory belonging to the Moras Brothers textile
company in Zittau, which today is located near Germany's border with
Poland and the Czech Republic.

Disguised as a company called Zittwerke AG, it was far from
run-of-the-mill as far as armaments factories go. Zittau was to be where
the world's first production-ready jet engine would be completed, the same
engine that was to power Hitler's secret weapon, the Messerschmitt Me 262
jet fighter.

Jrgen Ulderup from Junkers' Dessau production site was tasked with taking
over as plant manager in Zittau. He immediately set up a network of
manufacturing plants throughout the region, all top secret. Key to getting
the project off the ground was his demand that 18 long-established textile
producers make space in their factories for armaments production. Some
companies had to turn over their factories in their entirety. It proved a
further blow for the region's textile industry, already largely crippled
and converted to the war economy.

Core of the Enterprise

But winning the war took priority, and the remote corner of Nazi Germany
now began producing components for the clandestine jet engine. Ulderup
hired over 2,500 employees and put them to work in the Zittwerke plants,
under the direction of aviation industry experts. They worked in the Moras
factory, the Haebler Brothers textile company in Zittau, the Rudolf Breuer
mechanical weaving mill in Reichenau, the Kreutziger & Henke company in
Leutersdorf, the Ebersbach spinning and weaving mill, and at 13 other
factories located in regional towns and villages.

But the core of the enterprise was to be found on the grounds of a former
World War I prisoner of war camp in the present-day Polish town of Porajw
-- a camp which had been converted for use by the German armed forces. The
factory, guarded by the 17th SS "Totenkopf" battalion, simply moved into
several half-finished barracks.

Deep in the heart of the compound, behind several rows of barbed wire,
was the administration building where a detachment from the Gross-Rosen
concentration camp was housed. Along with prisoners of war and the
so-called "Eastern workers" -- forced labor from countries such as the
Ukraine -- over 850 concentration camp prisoners did most of the work in
the Zittwerke factories.

Not long after Junkers had settled in, the sound of industry filled the
Neisse River Valley day and night. Rumors of a "miracle weapon" circulated
among the local population, but no one knew exactly what the factory
produced. It wasn't until final assembly that the object in question could
be recognized for what it was: a special turbojet engine for a new type of
jet fighter.

Shiny New Me 262s

Technicians had already tested the engines. A Messerschmitt plane, the Me
262-V 1, powered with a Junkers Jumo 004A-0 jet engine, took to the air as
early as March 2, 1943. The test proved successful. And before long, the
Zwittau factories mastered all aspects of the jet engine's production,
from pre-assembly to shipment.

The factories were well connected to the Third Reich's rail network, with
covered freight cars lugging the completed engines -- once they had passed
inspection -- to the south. There, in the forests surrounding the Bavarian
towns of Regensburg and Augsburg, workers installed the new engines into
the jets. A converted Autobahn nearby served as a runway from which the
shiny new Me 262s took off for their test flights. Only then would they be
loaded onto freight trains for delivery to the Luftwaffe.

The Nazis had high hopes for the new jets. By the beginning of 1945, with
the Russians closing from the east and the US and Britain marching in from
the west, it was clear that Germany faced a catastrophic defeat, but the
Nazi leadership refused to give up hope. On February 28, 1945, Propaganda
Minister Joseph Goebbels announced to the nation that Germany's "miracle
weapon" would soon turn the tide of the war.

For Zittau, however, indications were mounting that it would be too late.
The day before the Goebbels speech, the city of Grlitz just north of
Zittau had been declared part of the front. Workers in the jet engine
factories could already hear the thunder of enemy guns.

Hectic Evacuation

It wasn't long before the hectic evacuation got underway. A Wehrmacht
counterattack near the present-day Polish town of Luba on March 7 and 8,
1945 managed to push back the Red Army. But after heavy losses on both
sides, the Soviets halted the German advance, such as it was, and the
factories ceased production.

Given the importance of the jet engine project, it didn't take long for
evacuation of both workers and factory machinery to get underway. In early
March, two special trains carrying the most vital elements of the
production chain made their way from Zittau to the west, one on the 6th
and another on the 10th. They ultimately ended up in the town of
Nordhausen, located in the state of Thuringia, some 100 kilometers west of
Leipzig.

Luftwaffe soldiers, who had guarded the Zittwerke's various factory
locations producing jet engines for the Me 262, also boarded the train in
Zittau. Two trains with over 500 people left directly from the factory
premises for Halberstadt in Saxony-Anhalt. A final train, belonging to the
Wehrmacht, left on April 30, just days before the end of the war,
presumably carrying the last of the military units.
everyday.

Mass Grave

But the Nazis didn't evacuate everything. Inside the remaining restricted
military area, the forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners
remained. Many of them died. A factory doctor issued 70 handwritten death
certificates in April and the beginning of May. The causes of death listed
were primarily "acute heart failure with asthenia," "pulmonary
tuberculosis," "pneumonia," or "scurvy."

The role Zittwerke plant manager Jrgen Ulderup played in the deaths
remains something of a mystery. According to his own reports, Ulderup fled
by bicycle from Zittau to Osnabrck in western Germany in the last days of
the war, with a backpack crammed full of copper bars. His driver, along
with his company car, had long since disappeared, according to the former
Nazi plant manager.

Today only a mass grave in Zittau's women's cemetery provides a reminder
that the so-called "miracle weapon" was produced locally. A well-kept lawn
covers the area behind the cemetery wall, where civilian victims of World
War II are buried. They include the prisoners and forced laborers who
sweated away in Nazi Germany's final attempt to turn the tide of onrushing
World War II destruction.

(source:  Spiegel)



IRAN:

Iran's president: Holocaust still 'big deception'


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday once again called the
Holocaust a "big deception" in his latest denunciations of Israel and its
allies.

The comments come amid a fierce election campaign in which his firebrand
style, including regular denunciations of Israel and the West, has come
under attack from his challengers.

Ahmadinejad's main pro-reform rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, said the
president's constant questioning of the Holocaust has undermined Iran's
international standing.

With just over a week until the June 12 elections, Ahmadinejad has
unabashedly kept up his rhetoric and told a gathering of international
scholars Wednesday that Israel uses the "big deception of the Holocaust"
to sway allies in the West.

In April at the U.N.'s conference against racism in Geneva, the Iranian
president accused the West of using the Holocaust as a "pretext" for
aggression against Palestinians, provoking walkouts by delegates including
every European Union country in attendance.

The United States and eight other Western countries had already boycotted
the event that started on the eve of Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day,
because of concerns Muslim countries would drown out all other issues with
calls to denounce Israel and restrict free speech when it comes to
criticizing Islam.

The Iranian president repeated his previous anti-Israel comments in
September, calling the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II a
"fake" and saying that Israel is perpetrating a holocaust on the
Palestinian people.

Ahmadinejad, known for virulent anti-Israeli rhetoric, said in 2005 that
Israel should be "wiped off the map" and later called the Holocaust a
"myth." Most recently, he described the Jewish state as a "germ of
corruption."

(source:  Associated Press)

May 26





HUNGARY:

Hungary to outlaw Holocaust denial


Holocaust denial and public incitement of racial hatred will be illegal
under constitutional changes proposed by Hungary's Socialist minority
administration.

The proposed legislation is being drafted for publication within weeks.

The government, preoccupied with the recession that has hit Eastern Europe
hard and made Hungary the host of some of the worst neo-Nazi rabble in
Europe, has planned the legal reform in response to public outrage at
recent provocations.

Education Minister Istvn Hiller has called for legislation to make
Holocaust denial a punishable offense. Interior Minister Tibor Draskovics
has proposed constitutional amendments to outlaw racist agitation
promoting hatred against any ethnic or religious minority. The amendments
would bypass the Constitutional Court that has blocked several previous
legislative attempts.

The amendments come on the heels of a demonstration provocatively staged
to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day by several neo-Nazi
organizations in the Castle district of Buda, the last foothold of the
German-Hungarian defenders of this city against the Soviet invasion at the
close of World War II.

The participants at the meeting included a 60-member uniformed "battalion"
of the banned Hungarian Guard organization. The paramilitary movement is
modeled on the murderous wartime Nazi Arrow Cross. Speakers addressing the
demonstration stated that the Holocaust was a myth.

Hungary as well as its post-Communist Eastern European neighbors has
witnessed since the onset of the global recession an intensification of
right-wing violence described by Draskovics as political terrorism.

(source:  JTA)






UKRAINE:

French priest tracks WWII killing of Jews


A French priest has been investigating the mass executions of Jews shot
during World War II in eastern Europe and thinks the death estimates have
been low.

The Rev. Patrick Desbois recently published "Holocaust By Bullets," which
describes his research so far, The Times of London reported Friday. He
began his work five years ago after visiting the remains of a camp in
Ukraine where his grandfather was held as a prisoner of war and learning
that 7,500 Jews were executed there.

Desbois spoke Monday at the University of Manchester in England.

No one knows exactly how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, though
estimates have run to nearly 6 million. Desbois said those estimates may
have to be revised upward because those killed by the Einsatzgruppen,
units assigned to carry out executions, were undercounted compared with
those killed in the death camps.

"Every village was a crime scene and each case was different because the
heads of the killing squads had to take in all the different factors --
the geography, the transport available, the proximity of partisans --
before organizing the most efficient massacre," Desbois said.

(source:  United Press International)






AUSTRIA:

Holocaust-survivor attackers released from detention


The two 16-year old Upper Austrian teenage boys who attacked French and
Italian Holocaust survivors earlier this month were released from
preventive detention yesterday (Mon).

The Wels public prosecutors office confirmed the news today. An office
spokesman added the court had imposed certain conditions on the boys. They
are to have no contact with the other three boys who were reportedly
involved in the attacks, they are banned from visiting the former Nazi
concentration camp at Ebensee where the attacks occurred, and one boy must
undergo counselling.

The public prosecutor did not object to the courts decision to release the
boys, so the decision is lewgally binding.

Three of the six boys in question shot at the Holocaust survivors with
so-called "softguns" and two others joined them in shouting Nazi slogans
at the survivors on 9 May. The two boys released yesterday were put into
preventive detention on 13 May.

The news of the boys release came on the heels of a report about neo-Nazi
behaviour at a Salzburg discotheque.

The Austrian media reported yesterday that some people had occasionally
been seen there wearing neo-Nazi uniforms and displaying other neo-Nazi
regalia.

The media reported today that Upper Austrian police were investigating an
alleged neo-Nazi event in Gmunden district.

The police said they were looking for a German band that had played the
music of Third Reich songs sung by some 100 people at a district night
spot.

The proprietor reportedly told police the neo-Nazis had arrived on the
scene after midnight and claimed he had called police a short time later.
Residents of nearby apartments called police to complain about noise
coming from the establishment.

By the time the police had arrived at the establishment, however, most
guests had already left and most of those remaining there were too drunk
to be questioned.

The police found a small trailer the German band had used and gave their
German counterparts its license number in the hope they can track band
members down.

Meanwhile, police in Vcklamarkt in Upper Austrias Vcklabruck district have
said the defacement of a monument to Nazi euthanasia victims in the town
last Friday night had evidently not been the work of right-wing extremists
since a number of other instances of vandalism not linked to political
motives had also occurred in the town that night.

(source:  Austrian Times)

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)

May 15



GERMANY:

LEGENDS OF A MASS GRAVE----The Village and the Nazi Labor Camp


Jamlitz is a quiet German village like many others. But there is one
difference: It was also the site of a brutal Nazi labor camp. Hundreds of
corpses are thought to be buried in the soil here. But the search for the
mass grave has yet to unearth more than stories of wartime horror.

"Go ahead and write that we country bumpkins don't think much of this talk
of graves," said Heinrich Keritz, a Jamlitz local in his mid-50s, leaning
against the barbed wire fence holding a telescope. "All our taxes are
being used and, in the end, nothing will be found." Keritz looked angrily
at the piles of earth, meter-high weeds and the backhoe.

Heinrich Keritz is the stereotype of a morose backwoodsman. To understand
him, one has to know the story of his village. Jamlitz is a small town
with some 600 residents on the border of the Spreewald forest south of
Berlin. Tucked between rapeseed fields and a spruce forest, the village
only rarely sees an urban tourist. Jamlitz residents don't like the flurry
of publicity. The only feature setting this village apart from any other
is its proximity to the "camp."

That is how Jamlitz locals refer to the Lieberose camp, a satellite of the
Nazis' Sachenhausen concentration camp. At the end of 1943, some prisoners
from Sachsenhausen were transported to Jamlitz and forced to build a
training area for the SS division "Kurmark." There were more deaths in the
Jamlitz barracks than in similar labor camps. Every day, dozens of
prisoners were killed or died from exhaustion. Only 400 of a total 8,000
prisoners survived the war.

An Elusive Grave

Sixty years have now passed since the horrific crimes in the camp. But the
stories live on in Jamlitz -- about bones hidden in the forest, about
haggard camp victims, about people on a death march begging for water,
about SS men spending nights drinking and shooting. In 1971 builders
working in the neighboring settlement of Staakow stumbled upon remains of
nearly 600 prisoners from Lieberose, victims of a mass shooting in the
final days of the camp. The Stasi, the former East German secret police,
spent months interviewing people to try to identify those responsible for
the crimes. But the investigations were soon shelved.

Interest in the camp resurfaced in the mid 1990s. Many suspected that
victims from the mass shooting still lie buried in the ground. According
to old camp plans, the graves may lie in the center of Jamlitz. There are
thought to be remains from some 700 people, but there's no list of names.
"All we have to go on are numbers," said Gnter Morsch, director of the
Sachsenhausen Memorial Foundation and the author of a detailed report
about Jamlitz. Dozens of suspected sites were dug up in the years until
2004, but no evidence was found. The air force flew over the settlement
with their radar detection devices -- also without uncovering any sign of
the graves.

The list of suspected sites was eventually whittled down to just one
location, but the land owner blocked excavation work for more than a
decade. Last autumn an agreement was reached with a Brandenburg state
court, and Jamlitz's history was stirred up again. A team of archeologists
from the local authority dug up the soil, layer by layer, uncovering some
500 square meters of the overgrown land around an abandoned house.

But Heinrich Keritz turned out to be right, at least for the time being --
no human remains were found. The dig was completed on Tuesday, but the
search for traces of the murdered camp prisoners will continue.

"We cannot stop the search there, not after the findings of the latest
excavations," Brandenburg Interior Minister Jrg Schnbohm said on Thursday.
Some relics from the concentration camp were indeed found: cooking
equipment, glasses, canteen porcelain, building materials. These findings
"lead to the possibility that the victims do not lie far away," said
Schnbohm. "We were possibly never so near to the grave."

The results of the search are important for the Jewish community,
historians and the state of Brandenburg. However, they won't affect the
dark history of the village, nor change the facts of what happened during
the war right on residents' doorsteps. Before the first barracks were
built, Jewish prisoners were housed in a local guesthouse. Some families
put up the families of SS men; others hid people who had managed to escape
from the camp.

"People who live here know about the camp," said Christa Wiernowolski, a
woman living next door to the excavation site. When she and her husband
built their home in Jamlitz, both felt ill at ease. "It was clear what
sort of land our house was standing on," she said. When her husband dug a
hole to erect a fence, he stumbled upon two old SS steel helmets.
Neighbors found some teeth while digging in their garden.

Christa Wiernowolski was a young woman when she first heard stories of the
emaciated people driven through the villages and beaten on the streets.
The 56-year-old teacher speaks openly about the barracks. Her family
always talked about the camp, and the wife and baby of one SS soldier even
lived in her parents' attic during the war.

Today Jamlitz has a documentation site with information boards. But
eyewitness accounts and historical facts have long been merged with
fiction in the village. In the local bar people speculate that the corpses
are buried meters below the foundations of houses near the latest
excavation site. The state of Brandenburg shares this suspicion. The
government, according to Schnbohm, plans to dig up two neighboring plots
of land.

"But most people here don't want to talk about the camp," said Christa
Wiernowolski. "They simply want their peace and quiet." When the local
council held a meeting to inform people about the excavations, not a
single Jamlitz resident showed up.

(source:  Spiegel)



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




Nazi war crimes trial 'could be last of its kind'


Expert: Trial of Nazi war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk could be last of
its kind

Leading Nazis prosecuted at Nuremberg but many lesser Nazis escaped
justice

Struggle to prosecute Nazis influenced creation of International Criminal
Court

ICC has remit to probe war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity


The forthcoming trial in Germany of John Demjanjuk could be the last
occasion on which a Nazi war crimes suspect faces prosecution.

But the legacy of decades-old efforts to bring the perpetrators of World
War II atrocities to justice means that those who commit similar offences
in the 21st century will not be able to hide from their past so easily,
according to a leading war crimes prosecutor.

Many leading Nazis such as Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer
were prosecuted by the main allies -- the U.S., the Soviet Union and the
UK -- shortly after the end of the war at the Nuremberg Trials.

South African judge Richard Goldstone, formerly the chief U.N. prosecutor
for war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, told CNN that Nuremberg had been
the "first attempt of any importance to hold war criminals accountable"
and had laid the foundations for the development of modern humanitarian
law.

Yet many lower-ranking servants of the Nazi regime and its allies were
able to escape punishment for their crimes, assuming new identities,
fleeing Europe or even finding employment with Soviet or western security
agencies as determination to bring them to justice waned with the advent
of the Cold War, according to Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center.

"These murderers walked into small cities and killed men, women and
children and walked away without a trace," Hier told CNN.

"The sad thing is that had the world wanted to prosecute Nazi war
criminals after Nuremberg, and had (countries) put up the budget and the
resources then every one of these elusive criminals would have been
brought to justice."

But Goldstone said that the creation in 2002 of the International Criminal
Court marked a "very important step forward" to ensure that future
atrocities would not be so quickly forgotten.

While previous tribunals investigating crimes in Rwanda and Yugoslavia
were ad hoc creations set up by the U.N. Security Council, the ICC is a
permanent institution with a specific remit to investigate and prosecute
cases of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Goldstone said that developments in humanitarian law and the evolution of
international justice meant that modern institutions were more
sophisticated and fairer than Nuremberg had been, recognizing the rights
of victims to representation but also ensuring a fair trial for
defendants.

"Modern international law requires trials that are a lot fairer than the
trials that were put on at Nuremberg," he said.

The jurisdiction of the ICC is currently recognized by 108 countries --
though not by the U.S., Russia or China. But Goldstone said the court was
"moving quickly" towards universal ratification and said U.S. President
Barack Obama's new administration was likely to be more cooperative and
friendlier to the ICC than predecessor George W. Bush had been in office.

"I'd love to see the day when there is universal ratification because when
that happens there will be nowhere for war criminals to run to," he said.

Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old native Ukrainian deported from the U.S. this
week, is alleged to have been a guard at the Sobibor death camp in
Nazi-occupied Poland and is accused of being an accessory to the murder of
more than 29,000 people.

Hier said Demjanjuk's extradition marked the culmination of greater
efforts in the U.S. since the late 1970s to send suspected war criminals
to face trial.

An Office of Special Investigations was established in 1979 to hunt for
war criminals on U.S. soil, while legislation allowed even suspects who
had acquired U.S. citizenship to be extradited for lying on their
naturalization papers about their Nazi pasts.

But he said Demjanjuk's trial could be the last of its kind -- and not
just because of the age of suspected war criminals still at large.

"You can't just have a trial with documents. You have to have living
witnesses," Hier said. "Most of those witnesses are very old, most of them
are well into their 80s and beyond and they have to be in sufficient good
health that they can be questioned and travel to take part in the trial."

But Hier said it was very important that former Nazis were pursued to the
grave, living out their final years with the fear that their past crimes
could still catch up with them.

"(Nazi hunter) Simon Wiesenthal talked about two kinds of justice. There
is the justice of handcuffs and putting someone on trial. But there is
also a psychological fear of a knock on the door," he said.

"Every Nazi war criminal should live every night of his life with the
possibility that in his case there will yet be a knock on the door."

(source:  CNN)















USA//CONNECTICUT:

A History of Infamy, Sold Off in Little Pieces


The items were sometimes delicate, often minimalist and always haunting:
a monogrammed silver matchbox; a gold locket with a butterfly design; a
letter-opener, its sturdy handle embellished with an eagle and a swastika.
Up for auction here on Thursday, the relics fetched record prices and even
spurred bidding wars, purely because of their  history: They are believed
to be among items owned by Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.

While the recession may mean that many Americans have been wrestling their
overworked credit cards back into their wallets and cutting back on
expenses large and small, some collectors have been paying record prices
for historic artifacts. At Alexander Autographs, a small auctioneer that
expected to generate about $800,000 in sales at its two-day auction, sales
reached nearly $600,000 on Wednesday. By Thursday, they were edging toward
$1 million.

A Congressional document signed by Thomas Jefferson, expected to fetch
$15,000 to $17,000, sold for $34,000. Seven documents signed by John Adams
surpassed their estimated sales prices.

But Bill Panagopulos, the company's owner, said buyers were once again
feeling more comfortable buying items that once belonged to historys
villains, too.

"When the towers came down, they wanted George Washington. They wanted
solid leaders," he said. "You couldn't give the bad guys away."

By Thursday's auction, those sentiments had clearly changed. The most
interest - and higher prices - went to the Nazi-related items once owned
by the collector John Lattimer: $4,000 for Brauns compact; $4,250 for
Hitler's teacup and saucer, with a rose and chestnut print; and $3,000 for
his dessert plate.

"This market didn't take the beating that the art market has taken, that
the rare furniture market has taken, that jewelry has taken," said Bill
Panagopulos, the company's owner.

As he spoke, a half-dozen workers fielded bids and munched on doughnuts
and sandwiches in a nondescript office near downtown. The room buzzed with
the steady rings of phones and the squawks of his two parrots.

The collectors who bought these items included Chuck Spielman, 66, a
Vietnam veteran and retired commercial real estate executive based in San
Diego. He was outbid on Hitler's dessert plate and his holiday card. But
he spent about $5,000 on Holocaust-related items, including stamps and
currency used in Jewish ghettos and photos of concentration camps, as well
as artifacts connected to Hiroshima.

He is building a memorial room for World War II veterans at a space where
he also restores classic cars.

"I never thought as a Jew that I would collect anything Nazi," Mr.
Spielman said. "But that is history. That's part of what went on during
the war. I figured it would be important for me to assemble that together
just so people wouldn't forget what happened."

That's not to say that the recession has spared the historical auction
business entirely. Alexander Autographs, originally planning to hold its
auction in February, delayed it several times. The better known auction
houses, like Christie's and Sotheby's, have faced disappointing sales
compared to recent years.

But there appear to be a steady number of military veterans and dealers
still eager to buy. Ray Zyla, owner of Mohawk Arms in Bouckville, N.Y.,
said sales were "solid" at his most recent auction in November, as buyers
continued to purchase items like Imperial Prussian helmets and German
daggers. "In the past year, and ever since our economic crunch, there
hasn't been any slowdown," he said.

He finds that veterans like to purchase these types of military items
especially German ones - "because they are trophies from the enemy that we
beat," he said, "and a lot of the veterans take pride in what we did."

Still, during the Alexander Autographs auction on Thursday, Mr.
Panagopulos looked disturbed when he pointed out that the infamous Nazi
doctor Josef Mengeles signature fetched $5,500, which was "unfortunately
almost bringing in as much as George Washington."

He sarcastically referred to the SS leader Heinrich Himmler, whose love
letter was auctioned off for $1,800, as a "charmer."

He also described as "awful" a so-called racial purity letter, a court
document that denied German nationality to a family deemed to have
considerable Polish ancestry. That sold for $2,000.

But he finds that in the recession, collectors are searching for more
secure investments. "They have nothing else left to buy," he said. "Stocks
are tanking. Real estate, while you can buy it, you have to hold it."

Mr. Panagopulos pointed out that Dr. Lattimer's pieces have better
retained their value because he was a respected collector.

Evan Lattimer, the daughter of Dr. Lattimer, said her family was selling
the items now because her father had died; she did not factor the
recession into her decision.

"It ought to go to someone who knows about it and appreciates it," she
said.

But even among the frenzied bidding, the history of the items stayed in
the minds of workers at Alexander Autographs.

As a pair of "Deaths Head" cufflinks owned by Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was
executed as a war criminal, prompted a flurry of bids and ultimately sold
for $950, the room fell strangely silent. As the bidding closed, Mr.
Panagopulos tried to add some levity.

"I don't think you can wear them in polite company," he said.

(source:  New York Times)

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)

May 12




GERMANY:

TUSSAUDS TRIAL----Hitler 'Assassin' Fined 900 Euros


The original wax figure of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler at Madame Tussauds
in Berlin had a short life. Just minutes after the museum opened its
doors, a man ripped off the Fuhrer's head. Now, a Berlin court has had its
say in the case.

The attack made headlines around the world. "At last, an assassination
attempt on Hitler that succeeded," the writer and SPIEGEL columnist Henryk
M. Broder joked at the time. And on Tuesday in Berlin, the "assassin" has
had his day in court.

Last July, just minutes after a branch of wax figure museum Madame
Tussauds opened in the German capital, a 41-year-old former policeman
leapt over the table at which Hitler was sitting. He shouted "No more
war!" and beheaded the doll by twisting it's beeswax head from it's
fiberglass body. The left hand of the figure, worth around 200,000
($274,000) in total, also broke off.

Police briefly detained the man, known only as Frank L., on suspicion of
damaging property and causing injury -- he lightly wounded one of the two
security guards who tried to stop him -- and he was eventually fined
1,800.

After the attack L., who told The Times of London that he left the police
when he realized he had more affinity with the left-wing punk and squatter
scene in Berlin, was hailed by many Germans as a hero. There had already
been an intense debate about the appropriateness of a wax figure of Hitler
so close to memorials for those who died under his regime.

Additionally L. also objected to the fine, making a trial necessary. Which
is why he was in court in Berlin again today.

In explanation, the accused said he had come up with the plan to attack
the wax Hitler last year while drinking with friends. The fact that the
figure was part of a display which also included former Chancellor, Willy
Brandt, made the group particularly indignant, as did the "blatantly
positive" depiction of Hitler as an energetic, strong willed man.

"I virtually swore to my friends that I would. I didn't want to lose
face," L. said in court, news agencies reported.

The next morning the single father of an eight year old, had to queue for
some time to get into Madame Tussauds. And as German press agency, DPA,
reports, L. told the court that he almost lost his nerve several times.
But when he thought of his mother and the fact that she grew up in a
post-war wasteland he regained his focus.

But L. also showed remorse, saying he wouldn't ever do the same again. He
also apologized to the security guard because, he said, he had never meant
to hurt anyone.

In the end, the court ruled that the currently unemployed man would only
have to pay roughly half of the original fine: 900.

And after everything, L. believes he did win some sort of victory. In the
intervening months Hitler's figure has been repaired. However he now sits
apart at Madame Tussauds, a broken man trapped behind glass -- to prevent
any further attacks -- in a version of the bunker where the original spent
his last days. His hair is dishevelled, his tie askew and next to him sits
a sign that informs visitors about the millions of victims of the Nazi
regime.

(source: SPIEGEL online)






GLOBAL:

What is anti-Semitism?----A UCSB professor's controversial e-mail
underscores the need to define a sensitive subject.


William I. Robinson, a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara,
probably shouldn't have been surprised when he found himself in the news
earlier this month. He had, after all, forwarded an e-mail to his students
that juxtaposed images of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza
Strip offensive with Jewish victims of the Nazis. The e-mail included
graphic photographs of dead Jewish children from the 1940s alongside
similar photos from Gaza. In a cover note, Robinson called the images
"parallel" and compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto.

The outcry built slowly. First, a few students complained; then, organized
groups became involved. Two national Jewish leaders accused Robinson (who
is himself Jewish) of anti-Semitism, and the university's Academic Senate
opened an investigation and is considering disciplinary proceedings.
Articles about the controversy have been published all over the world and
have given rise to fundamental questions:

Is it ever acceptable to compare Israelis to Nazis? When does criticism of
Israel become anti-Semitism? And who should make these calls? Below, The
Times asks and answers a few questions to help frame the debate.

Let's start with an easy question. What is anti-Semitism?

Actually, that's not easy at all; scholars, philosophers and policymakers
have debated the question since the 19th century. The U.S. State
Department has defined the term simply but vaguely: "Anti-Semitism is
discrimination against or hatred toward Jews."

So how do we recognize it?

That was easier in the bad old days. Who could mistake the violent attacks
on Jews across Europe during the First Crusade in 1096? Or the expulsion
of Jews from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492? Demonization of Jews,
forced conversions, ghettoization, pogroms and the Holocaust -- all were
manifestations of classic European anti-Semitism. So were Shakespeare's
Shylock and Dickens' Fagin (described as "shriveled" and "repulsive," and
referred to simply as "the Jew" more than 200 times in "Oliver Twist").

But today, determining what is or is not anti-Semitism is generally a more
nuanced business, at least in the West. Is it anti-Semitic or merely
factual to say that Hollywood is controlled largely by Jews? (Remember:
Most of the big studio chiefs are Jewish.) Or to note (as some critics of
the Iraq war did) that many of the neoconservatives who helped devise the
war's intellectual rationale were Jewish -- and possibly harbored a dual
loyalty to Israel? Or to point to the existence of a powerful "Israel
lobby" that wields substantial influence on Capitol Hill?

So it's a minefield, right?

In 2004, the European Union Monitoring Centre Centre on Racism and
Xenophobia tried to bring some rationality to the debate by drawing up a
"working definition" of anti-Semitism. Here are some of the examples of
anti-Semitic behavior it singled out: Calling for the killing or harming
of Jews in the name of an extremist ideology; making dehumanizing or
demonizing stereotypical allegations about Jews; accusing the Jews as a
people of being responsible for wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish
person or group; trafficking in Jewish conspiracy theories; denying the
Holocaust; and accusing Jews of being more loyal to Israel than to their
own nations.

The organization also noted that anti-Semitism "could also target the
state of Israel."

Does that mean it is anti-Semitic to criticize Israel?

To criticize Israeli policies? Of course not. Even Abraham Foxman, the
outspoken national director of the Anti-Defamation League, acknowledges
that there's nothing wrong with criticizing, say, Israel's recent
offensive in Gaza. Alan Dershowitz, the vehemently pro-Israel Harvard Law
School professor, agrees that it would be "absurd" to equate criticism of
Israel with anti-Semitism.

So if it's OK to criticize Israel's policies, what's the big deal?
Professor Robinson objected to the Gaza offensive, and he made that clear.

Yes, he made it clear, but it's how he did so that got him in trouble,
according to his critics. There are acceptable ways to criticize Israel,
while others cross the line into anti-Semitism, says Daniel Goldhagen,
author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners." For instance, if a person
repeatedly singles out Israel for attack without subjecting other
countries to similar scrutiny, that's questionable, Goldhagen says. Or if
he opposes Zionism -- and therefore, Israel's right to exist as an
explicitly Jewish state -- altogether.

Another way to cross the line, according to the EUMC, Foxman, Dershowitz,
the State Department and others, is to compare Israelis to Nazis. "Any
comparison between Israeli efforts to defend its citizens from terrorism
on the one hand, and the Nazi Holocaust on the other hand, is obscene and
ignorant," Dershowitz wrote in December.

The Anti-Defamation League's website notes that comparing the victims of
Nazi crimes to those who carried them out "serves to diminish the
significance and uniqueness of the Holocaust" and is "an act of blatant
hostility toward Jews and Jewish history." As Foxman puts it: "The moment
you compare the Jews to those who consciously and systematically
determined to wipe them off the face of the Earth -- that's
anti-Semitism."

Is that a reasonable line to draw?

Robinson certainly doesn't think so. He says that the charge of
anti-Semitism is a smoke screen designed to intimidate Israel's critics.
"Israel and its supporters intentionally use it to quash debate about the
country's policies," he says. "It's a political ploy."

How does Robinson defend forwarding the offending e-mail?

He doesn't think it needs defending. He says he's teaching a
controversial, provocative subject, and that it's his job to challenge
students to examine their assumptions as he puts contemporary events into
historical context.

And does he meet the Goldhagen test? Does he criticize other nations for
their transgressions?

He says he tells his students that there can be no double standard when it
comes to human rights, and that the targeting of one Iranian or
Palestinian or Jew or Rwandan is equally condemnable. "But at the same
time," he adds, "it's unreasonable to suggest that each time I critique
one state for a human rights violation that I must also, in the name of
balance, run off a litany of all the other human rights violations in the
world."

Where does Robinson draw the line between what's acceptable and what's
not?

It's fine, he says, to criticize Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe for driving his
country to the brink of collapse, but it would be unacceptable to say that
he has done so because he is a biologically inferior black African.
Similarly, it is acceptable to argue that Israel's offensive in Gaza was
wrong -- but it would be anti-Semitic to criticize Israel on the grounds
that Jews are dirty, greedy or sinister.

What does Robinson say to the idea that comparing Israelis to Nazis is
simply out of bounds?

First, he defends the comparison of Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto. He says
that, like the ghetto, Gaza is sealed off. As in the ghetto, the delivery
of food and medical supplies is controlled by the hostile power outside,
so that poverty and malnutrition are building. As in the ghetto, he says,
rebellions are put down with disproportionate force. According to
Robinson, it may not be an exact comparison, but it's hardly ridiculous.

Moreover, Robinson insists that such analogies are essential to
understanding history. Would it be wrong, he asked, to compare the
apartheid regime in South Africa to the Jim Crow laws in the American
South, even if the situations were not identical? As for whether it's OK
to compare contemporary figures to the Nazis, he notes that President
George H.W. Bush once likened Saddam Hussein to Hitler and that Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has compared Iran to Nazi Germany.

But those are not cases where victims are compared to their persecutors.

Robinson says that comparing victims to their persecutors shouldn't be
off-limits. In fact, that's the very irony that makes the analogy so
important. "I'm saying that the people who suffered the most nightmarish
crime of the 20th century are now using tactics and practices that are
eerily similar to what was done to them," he says. But he acknowledges
that the analogy has its limits: "Extermination," he says. "Obviously
that's the key difference."

So what's the bottom line?

The Foxmans and Dershowitzes say that comparing Israelis to Nazis is, in
the final analysis, anti-Semitic because it is so demonstrably untrue and
so patently disingenuous. Even Israel's fiercest critics, they argue,
ought to concede that the country's actions have been taken in its own
defense -- even if one believes that defense was misguided or
disproportionately violent or even criminal. Further, they say that the
number of Palestinian deaths during the 60-year conflict can't begin to
compare to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. To suggest a
moral equivalency is anti-Semitic because it's so absurd.

Robinson's bottom line is this: Whether you accept the analogy or find it
"absurd," the real principle at stake is that of open debate and academic
freedom. A professor engaging in a controversial conversation with his
students may not be shut down by the defenders of a particular ideology.
Deeply held beliefs are there to be challenged; that's how critical
thinking is developed.

You be the judge.

(source:  Editorial, Los Angeles Times; Nicholas Goldberg is deputy editor
of The Times' editorial pages)






ISRAEL:

In Holocaust memorial visitors book, Benedict quotes passage reminding
hope arises from misery


Pope Benedict XVI signed the visitors book at the Yad Vashem Holocaust
memorial Monday with a passage from the Book of Lamentations, the Biblical
poems traditionally read to commemorate the fall of the temple in
Jerusalem.

"His mercies are not spent," Benedict wrote.

The pope was at Yad Vashem to honor the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazi
regime and he said the Scriptures are a reminder that "this God lives,
even though we sometimes find it difficult to grasp his mysterious and
inscrutable ways."

The pope noted that the Book of Lamentations is full of significance to
both Jews and Christians.

The passage he chose to quote from reminds that even from deep misery,
hope arises.

The full passage reads: "The favors of the Lord are not exhausted, his
mercies are not spent. They are renewed each morning, so great is his
faithfulness."

(source:  Associated Press)

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



BENEDICT DISAPPOINTS----The Double Silence of the Pope


In the past, Pope Benedict XVI's speeches have gotten him in trouble.
Visiting the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem on Monday, it was what he
didn't say that irked his audience. Israel is disappointed, as are Jews in
Germany.

In the Nazi extermination camps, prisoners scratched their names onto
stones and scribbled them on pieces of paper or wood, and then buried
them. They knew that they would not survive. But they wanted their names
to live on.

It is for the same reason that the names of those murdered in the
Holocaust are preserved at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Pope Benedict XVI, who visited the Hall of Remembrance there on Monday,
added his own words of remembrance. "I have come to stand in silence
before this monument, erected to honor the memory of the millions of Jews
killed in the horrific tragedy of the Shoah. They lost their lives, but
they will never lose their names."

The pope's speech, though, fell flat. Immediately following his visit, the
Yad Vashem Council released a statement expressing disappointment with the
pope's comments at the monument. "He did not mention that it was the Nazis
who did the murdering, nor a word of his personal participation in the
feelings of pain and sorrow," said Yad Vashem Council Chairman Rabbi
Yisrael Meir Lau immediately after the speech. "Even the phrase '6
million' wasn't there. Not to mention that he didn't say 'I apologize.'"

Criticism didn't just come from Israel, either. In Germany, the Central
Council of Jews in Germany blasted the pope for failing to more clearly
distance himself from the Society of St. Pius X and the Holocaust denial
of SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson. "What should one think of a public call
to fight against anti-Semitism when he himself doesn't act and doesn't
take consequences," said Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central
Council. Council President Charlotte Knobloch said "I expected clearer
words from the pope at Yad Vashem."

No Mention of Williamson

The pope was taken to the Hall of Remembrance shortly after 5 p.m. It is a
dark room, with a low, concrete ceiling. The "Ankor" girls' choir sang the
Song of a Martyr, and a rabbi chanted El Maleh Rahamim, the traditional
Jewish prayer of mourning. A letter written by Elchanan Elkes, the head of
the Kovno (Lithuania) Ghetto's Jewish Council, to his children was read
out loud. Then Benedict XVI was led to six Holocaust survivors. He took
their hands and listened to their stories. He did so in the same friendly
and benevolent manner in which he has conducted every meeting during his
trip to Israel. Then he was asked to step up to the podium, where he
joined Israeli President Simon Peres, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, and
Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the chairman of the Yad Vashem Council.

In the wake of the Shoah, it is the duty of future generations not to
forget the names and to repeat them again and again. This is a core
concept of Jewish theology, which the pope embraced when he said: "May
their suffering never be denied, belittled or forgotten!" In contrast to
the Central Council in Germany, many read the words as a radical rejection
of Holocaust denier Williamson and his SSPX, as well as a benevolent
exhortation to be vigilant so that tragedies like the Holocaust will not
be repeated. The pope did not, however, mention Williamson by name.

Sacred scripture, he continued, "teaches us the importance of names in
conferring upon someone a unique mission or a special gift." Then he
mentioned the pool in the memorial, which reflects the faces of the
murdered children. "One cannot help but recall how each of them bears a
name," he said. "I can only imagine the joyful expectation of their
parents as they anxiously awaited the birth of their children. What name
shall we give this child? Who could have imagined that they would be
condemned to such a deplorable fate! As we stand here in silence, their
cry still echoes in our hearts. It is a cry raised against every act of
injustice and violence. It is a perpetual reproach against the spilling of
innocent blood. It is the cry of Abel rising from the earth to the
Almighty."

No Sparks

They were powerful sentences, appearing in a manuscript that had been
released in advance. Benedict remained true to his manuscript, reading it,
word for word, in a quiet voice. But at the same time, he rattled off the
sentences as if unaware of the impact of his words, swallowing and
mumbling important words, as if he were reading a manuscript meant for
someone else or, even more distressingly, as if he were unaware of what he
was reading. It was not a powerful moment. There were no sparks.

It was the first and last time that a pope from Germany who had
consciously experienced the war and the Nazi years would speak at Yad
Vashem. And it was a pope who has said that he became a priest because he
wanted to do something against injustice and untruth. Many had expected
Benedict to speak as a German, as he did at the Auschwitz memorial. But
instead he confined himself to an abstract invocation of the dead, in the
tradition of Biblical elegies.

He came as a pilgrim and, at the same time, as the leader of a global
church, believing that there was no room for Joseph Ratzinger the man, for
his life and his memories. The German pope chose silence where some,
especially in Israel, would have preferred more discourse. The criticism
on Monday evening was sharp.

The pope never mentioned the culprits, or the German words engraved into
the floor of the Hall of Remembrance at his feet: Buchenwald, Auschwitz,
Majdanek, Theresienstadt. He said nothing about the church's position on
the Holocaust, or about its history of anti-Semitism, which made the Shoah
possible in the first place. Instead, he confined himself to mentioning
the "deep compassion" of the Catholic Church for the victims. His next
sentence could be interpreted by the malicious -- who are not in short
supply -- as a qualification of the uniqueness of the Shoah: "Similarly,
she draws close to all those who today are subjected to persecution on
account of race, color, condition of life or religion."

Preferring to Remain Silent

When Pope John Paul II spoke at Yad Vashem in 2000, he promised that
"never again" would the church permit the persecution of Jews. His
successor has renewed the promise, but in a far more generalized form: "As
Bishop of Rome and Successor of the Apostle Peter, I reaffirm -- like my
predecessors -- that the Church is committed to praying and working
tirelessly to ensure that hatred will never reign in the hearts of men
again."

At the end of his address, Benedict said that he was grateful to God for
the opportunity "to stand here in silence: a silence to remember, a
silence to pray, a silence to hope." His speech ended with a sentence from
one of the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament: "It is good to
hope in silence for the saving help of the Lord" (Lam 3:22-26).

After the ceremony, the pope walked over to the girls' choir for a group
photo. As everyone smiled for the camera, a few old people sat in their
chairs on the other side of the room, looking forlorn: Avraham Ashkenazi,
Ruth Bondy, Israela Hargil, Gita Kalderon, Dan Landsberg and Ed Mosberg --
the six survivors. There was no group photo for them.

The pope had already left Yad Vashem for his next appointment, as an
elderly woman stood in the Hall of Remembrance. Her name is Lea Schnapp, a
journalist from Jerusalem who watched her 12-year-old sister walk into a
gas chamber. "Entire family was burned," she says in her broken German.
She was one of about 1,000 children, between the ages of 12 and 16, being
held in Block 8 at Auschwitz. "Twenty-five survived," she says. She is
unwilling to pass judgment on the pope's speech. She says: "I am
one-sided. This is a festival. But no one can understand."

She prefers to remain silent.

(source:  SPIEGEL online)

May 12



GERMANY:

Demjanjuk deported to Germany


Nazi war crimes suspect John Demjanjuk was deported to Germany on
Monday evening after he was removed from his Cleveland, Ohio-area home in
the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers earlier
in the day.

An ambulance transported him to an airstrip at the Cleveland airport. The
plane carrying Demjanjuk departed at 7:13 p.m.

Demjanjuk, 89, is wanted by German authorities for his alleged involvement
during World War II in killings at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland.

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

The Supreme Court last Thursday denied a stay of deportation for
Demjanjuk. Justice John Paul Stevens without comment refused to intervene
in the planned transfer from the United States.

Federal courts have all rejected his appeals, and the order from Stevens
cleared the way for the Justice Department to move ahead with the
deportation.

Demjanjuk's lawyers had asked the high court to consider their claims that
he is too ill and frail to be sent overseas. They also raised human rights
and other legal issues in their last-minute appeal.

A German court last Wednesday had also ruled against a request for a
stay. Officials in Berlin have issued an arrest warrant charging
Demjanjuk with being an accessory to the murder of about 29,000 civilians
at Sobibor in 1943.

The native Ukrainian has long claimed he was a prisoner of war, not a
death camp guard.

Immigration officers previously entered Demjanjuk's Cleveland-area home
April 14, and carried him out in his wheelchair to a waiting van. He was
held for a few hours and then returned to his residence after a federal
appeals court ruled temporarily in his favor.

Demjanjuk had appealed unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court last year.

He was once accused by the United States and Israel of being a notoriously
brutal S.S. guard at the Treblinka camp known as "Ivan the Terrible."
After appeals, that allegation was eventually dropped by both countries,
but later other allegations were made against him.

(source:  CNN)

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



Demjanjuk's health a key issue for any trial


John Demjanjuk, the retired Ohio autoworker deported to Germany, was set
to arrive Tuesday to face a warrant accusing him of being a guard at a
Nazi death camp where 29,000 Jews and others were killed.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk says he was a Red Army soldier who was
captured by the Nazis, spent the rest of the war as their prisoner and
never hurt anyone.

There are Nazi-era documents that suggest otherwise  including a photo ID
identifying Demjanjuk as a guard at the Sobibor death camp and saying he
was trained at an SS facility for Nazi guards at Trawniki. Both sites were
in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Still, the key to the 89-year-old Demjanjuk's fate may not lie with the
evidence but rather on a German court's decision about whether he is
medically fit to stand trial. In any case, Demjanjuk, who has been without
a country since the U.S. stripped him of his citizenship in 2002, is
likely to spend the rest of his life in Germany, either in jail or in a
home for the elderly.

One of his German lawyers, Guenter Maull, told AP Television News on
Monday that after the plane carrying him from Cleveland, Ohio, to Munich
lands, he will be taken to the Stadelheim prison and meet a judge who will
read the lengthy arrest warrant.

"As far as I know the warrant is 21 pages long," Maull said.

Demjanjuk is not expected to say anything.

"On the issues of him saying something or not, I will put pressure on him
not to say anything, because we need to talk in peace first and digest
everything that is in the arrest warrant," Maull said.

As for his health, a doctor will examine Demjanjuk and a decision will be
taken as to whether he should remain at Stadelheim or be sent to an area
hospital.

"If he is sick they first have to try to cure him. If he is incurably sick
they have to find a place for him to live," Maull said, adding that were
Demjanjuk to be deemed unfit for trial, it is likely the German government
would have to pick up the cost for his care.

Dramatic photos last month showed Demjanjuk (pronounced dem-YAHN'-yuk)
wincing in apparent pain as he was removed by immigration agents from his
home in Seven Hills, Ohio. However, images taken only days earlier and
released by the U.S. government showed him entering his car unaided
outside a medical office.

Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said Monday that his father is dying
of leukemic bone marrow disease.

"It is not a question if he is sick but how sick he is, there are enough
diagnoses confirming his illness, the only question is how fast his
sickness is progressing," Maull told AP Television News.

On Monday evening, Demjanjuk arrived in an ambulance at Cleveland Burke
Lakefront Airport after spending several hours with U.S. immigration
officials at a downtown federal building. He was carried in a wheelchair
onto a jet that departed for Germany.

The deportation came four days after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to
consider Demjanjuk's request to block deportation and about 3 1/2 years
after he was last ordered deported.

Earlier Monday, John Demjanjuk Jr. said an appeal in a U.S. court would go
ahead even if his father isn't in the country.

"Given the history of this case and not a shred of evidence that he ever
hurt one person let alone murdered anyone anywhere, this is inhuman even
if the courts have said it is lawful," Demjanjuk Jr. said.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, a founder of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal
Center, said Demjanjuk deserves to be punished and that this will probably
be the last trial of someone accused of Nazi war crimes.

"His work at the Sobibor death camp was to push men, women and children
into the gas chamber," Hier said in a statement. "He had no mercy, no pity
and no remorse for the families whose lives he was destroying."

The center was established to locate and help bring to justice Nazi war
criminals.

Throughout three decades of court action in the U.S. and Israel, Demjanjuk
has insisted he was an innocent victim.

Among the documents obtained by the Munich prosecutors is an SS identity
card that features a photo of a young, round-faced Demjanjuk along with
his height and weight, and says he worked at Sobibor.

German prosecutors also have a transfer roster that lists Demjanjuk by his
name and birthday and also says he was at Sobibor, and statements from
former guards who remembered him being there.

The case dates to 1977 when the Justice Department moved to revoke
Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship, alleging he hid his past as a Nazi death
camp guard.

Demjanjuk had been tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was
the notorious "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp in Poland.
He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, a
conviction overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

A U.S. judge revoked his citizenship in 2002 based on U.S. Justice
Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other
Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps.

An immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland
or Ukraine. Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.

(source:  Associated Press)






ISRAEL:

Pope at Yad Vashem / Benedict's speech showed verbal indifference and
banality


Pope John Paul II was received in Israel with enthusiasm that sometimes
bordered on the excitement generally reserved for pop stars. He radiated
warmth. Pope Benedict XVI, in contrast, comes across as restrained, almost
cold.

In the best-case scenario, Benedict will leave behind indifference, not
hostility. The speech he gave yesterday at Yad Vashem was surprising
mainly because one would have expected the Vatican's cardinals to prepare
a more intelligent text for their boss. Someday, maybe in 500 years, when
the Vatican archive is opened to researchers examining the preparations
for this visit, we will be able to learn from early drafts how the final
speech came to appear so forced.

There is nothing easier than expressing real horror when talking about the
Holocaust, than identifying with its suffering, pain and grief. If that is
not done, it is a sign that there was a deliberate decision not to do so.
No church bell would cease to ring had the pontiff said something about
Christian anti-Semitism, even if he fell short of explicitly saying that
without it, the Nazis would not have won the support of the German people.
What he said about the Holocaust sounded too calculated, too diplomatic
and professional - he advised "compassion," a prescription that is to
priests what aspirin is to general practitioners.

Yad Vashem officials rushed to express "disappointment" at Benedict's
failure to mention the Germans, and naturally they attributed that
omission to his own background. The truth is that the Israeli culture of
memory has itself struggled hard with the question of whether and how to
identify the murderers.

Sometimes this identity is not mentioned at all, as in the "El maleh
rachamim" funeral prayer recited before the pope's address. Yesterday,
President Shimon Peres referred to the genocide as "Hitler's Holocaust," a
highly problematic term he would do well not to use again. The intention,
of course, is to avoid insulting the German people as a whole. Yad Vashem
ceremonies generally use the term "the Nazi Germans and their helpers."
How simple and fitting it would have been had the Vatican adopted that
terminology, just as it inserted the Hebrew term "Shoah" into the pope's
text, a tribute to the Israeli view of the destruction of the Jews.

Benedict is aware of the historical responsibility that rests on his
shoulders as both a German and a Christian. He supports annulling the
statute of limitations on prosecuting Nazi criminals in Germany and has
visited Yad Vashem once before. On more than one occasion, he has
expressed empathy for Jews and for Israel.

But in last night's speech, he inexplicably said Jews "were killed," as if
it had been an unfortunate accident. On the surface, this may seem
unimportant: Israelis often use the same term, and they do not need the
pope to tell them about the Holocaust, which today is a universal code for
absolute evil.

But the word the pope used is significant because someone in the Holy See
decided to write "were killed" instead of "murdered" or "destroyed." The
impression is that the cardinals argued among themselves over whether
Israelis "deserve" for the pope to say "were murdered" and decided they
only deserve "were killed." It sounded petty. Even the recurring use of
the term "tragedy" seemed like an attempt to avoid saying the real thing.

The verbal stinginess Benedict displayed last night also diminishes the
impact of anything he might say about Palestinian suffering. Had he said
what he needed to on the Holocaust, he could have said more to condemn
Israel's systematic violation of the human rights of residents of the West
Bank and Gaza.

The Yad Vashem speech emphasized the Holocaust's universal lessons, which
are obviously important. Israel has yet to learn to do this sufficiently
well. The legacy of the Holocaust obligates every person to fight racism
and protect human rights. It obligates every soldier to refuse a patently
illegal order.

But Benedict chose to phrase even the universal lessons of the Holocaust
in abstract terms. These may still have a place in the lecture hall of a
German theology professor, but in the Internet age, they are little more
than empty banalities.

(source:  Ha'aretz)

May 10



RUSSIA:

Russia Moves to Prosecute WWII Deniers at Home and Abroad


As Russia celebrated the 64th anniversary of the end of the Great
Patriotic War on May 9th, its government was preparing to introduce
legislation to aggressively prosecute those who would downplay the Soviet
triumph over Germany.

Most Russians agree.  According to a survey by the VTSIOM pollster, 60
percent of Russians believe that denying the Soviet Victory in World War
II is an act deserving of criminal proceedings.  Communist Party
supporters and respondents over 60 were most likely to back the idea,
while younger Russians and self-described democrats were more likely to
hold the opposite view.  The poll was conducted during April in 42
regions.

In his video blog, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev spoke against the
distortion of history and decried whitewashing the tragedy and
significance of the war.

We are all the more often encountering what are called historical
falsehoods, he said. Also such attempts are becoming tougher, more
malicious and aggressive.

As the Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper reported earlier, legislators were
planning to introduce draft legislation to counteract historical
whitewashing, both in Russia and the former Soviet Republics.  Russian
officials have been angered by attempts to remove Soviet-era monuments and
honor anti-Soviet resistance movements in Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine and
other former Soviet states.

The bill is titled On countering the rehabilitation of nazism, nazi
criminals and their supporters on the territory of independent states the
former Republics of the USSR.  Both Russians and foreigners could be
charged under the draft law, and would face sentences of three to five
years and fines up to 500 thousand rubles ($15,500 or 11,400).

The law would also give Russia the power to create a special tribunal to
monitor the development of pro-nazi policies in the countries of the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).  The tribunal would hand down
evaluations on foreign politicians, parties and civic organizations
suspected of revisionism.

A foreign national found by the tribunal to have taken part in
rehabilitating nazism would be barred from entering Russia, and tried
under Russian laws if they were discovered on Russian soil.  Russian
organizations and media outlets would be issued a warning from the
Prosecutor-Generals office.  After several warnings, the organization
could be closed by a court order.

The bill proposes several means of responding to former Soviet Republics
that allow themselves to question the outcomes of the Second World War.
Russia may expel ambassadors, launch a partial of full blockade of
transport and information communication, sever diplomatic ties, and make
recommendations to the Russian business community and public organization
on cutting ties with the offending country.

Foreign organizations found guilty by the tribunal would be banned on
Russian soil.

The idea for such a comprehensive law was first proposed by Sergey Shoigu,
the head of Russias Ministry of Emergency Situations, in February.
Shoigus suggestion has had a wide resonance with the public, and has been
backed by Yury Chaika, the Russian Prosecutor General, and other public
figures.

Two of Russias liberal democratic parties, Yabloko and Right Cause, have
called for expanding the legislation to include rehabilitating Stalinism
and whitewashing Stalins repressions as a criminal act.  The idea is
ironically fitting as Russias government has itself been criticized for
downplaying Stalin-era terrors, and reconstructing a public image of a
glorious Soviet past.

(source:  The Other Russia)






GERMANY:

Son says US has ordered Demjanjuk to surrender


Immigration agents served suspected Nazi guard John Demjanjuk on Friday
with a notice to surrender to an immigration office in Cleveland, his son
said  the latest volley in a more than 30-year legal battle over
Demjanjuk's citizenship.

Demjanjuk, of Seven Hills in suburban Cleveland, faces deportation to
Germany. An arrest warrant in Munich accuses him of 29,000 counts of
accessory to murder at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World
War II.

The notice was served one day after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to
hear the 89-year-old suspect's appeal to stop the deportation.

Demjanjuk Jr. did not say how his father would respond or whether the
government set a deadline for surrender.

Anyone subject to a deportation order would be considered a fugitive by
federal authorities if he or she failed to surrender by the stated time,
according to Julie Myers, assistant secretary of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement during the latter part of the Bush administration.

Khaalid Walls, a spokesman for the immigration agency, said ICE was
working with Germany on the deportation but would not comment on a
timetable.

A Cleveland immigration attorney not connected to the case, David Leopold,
predicted Demjanjuk would surrender by Monday, with agents determined to
get him on a plane to Germany promptly so they would not have to keep him
in custody. The order gives Demjanjuk a chance to avoid a repeat of the
spectacle last month when he was carried from his house in a wheelchair as
his wife sobbed, Leopold said.

In Germany, Demjanjuk lawyer Ulrich Busch challenged the Munich arrest
warrant on Friday, citing 1979 testimony given by a Sobibor camp guard who
says he does not remember Demjanjuk from either Sobibor or a training camp
where he is also alleged to have served.

The hope is that if the arrest warrant is deemed invalid, then there will
be no reason to deport Demjanjuk, his son said.

A separate attempt to block the deportation in Germany failed this week,
when a Berlin court ruled the decision lies with U.S. authorities. That
decision has been appealed.

Busch, who could not immediately be reached for comment, conceded
Thursday, that there was nothing that could be done on the German side to
force the U.S. not to deport Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, says he was never a death camp guard and
maintains he was held by the Germans as a Soviet prisoner of war.

The new motion in Germany to block deportation cites testimony given by a
Sobibor camp guard that Demjanjuk Jr. said he found in U.S. prosecutors'
case files.

In the seven-page typewritten statement, dated 1979, the guard, Mikhail
Razgonyayev, said he did not remember Demjanjuk from either Sobibor or the
Trawniki training camp where he is also alleged to have served.

Razgonyayev, a Soviet soldier taken prisoner by the Germans who then went
to work for them, maintains further in the testimony that guards who did
not participate in the killings were threatened by their German overseers
with being sent to concentration camps themselves.

"Under these circumstances, I find it hard to imagine upon which basis the
arrest warrant of the court was issued," Busch argues in the written
filing.

It was not clear when there might be a ruling on the motion, and the court
was closed by the time the AP received it.

Justice John Paul Stevens refused Thursday, without comment, to step into
Demjanjuk's case.

Demjanjuk Jr. said Friday there were no plans to appeal to any of the
other eight U.S. Supreme Court justices. He said such a move might be seen
as a delay tactic, a claim made by the U.S. government about other
Demjanjuk appeals.

On April 14, immigration officers went to Demjanjuk's one-story brick home
and carried him out in a wheelchair to take him for a deportation flight
to Germany.

Within hours and while Demjanjuk was still in an immigration office at a
federal building in Cleveland, his attorney won from an appeals court a
stay of deportation that lasted until May 1.

The fight over that appeal featured dueling videos.

The family's showed Demjanjuk moaning in apparent pain while an
immigration officer examined him at home to check on his fitness to
travel.

A government surveillance video showed him walking slowly but without
assistance. The government said its video proved Demjanjuk was fit to
travel.

Demjanjuk was tried in Israel after accusations surfaced that he was the
notorious Nazi guard "Ivan the Terrible" in Poland at the Treblinka death
camp.

He was found guilty in 1988 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, a
conviction later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.

A U.S. judge revoked his citizenship in 2002 because of U.S. Justice
Department evidence showing he concealed his service at Sobibor and other
Nazi-run death and forced-labor camps.

An immigration judge ruled in 2005 he could be deported to Germany, Poland
or Ukraine. Munich prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for him in March.

(source:  Associated Press)

May 8


USA/GERMANY:

Demjanjuk loses appeal to avoid war crimes trial in Germany

Justice Stevens denies the retired autoworker's bid to avoid deportation.
The alleged 'Nazi persecutor' had argued that the flight from Cleveland
would amount to torture because of his ill health.


John Demjanjuk, who allegedly aided in the murder of 29,000 Jews at a
German-run death camp in Poland, was denied an emergency appeal by a
Supreme Court justice Thursday, all but clearing the way for him to be
sent to Germany to stand trial for war crimes.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who handles emergency appeals from Ohio, denied
Demjanjuk's appeal without comment. His lawyer could ask another justice
to intervene, but the result is not likely to change.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was a Soviet soldier who was captured by the
Germans during World War II and then allegedly volunteered to work in the
Sobibor death camp.

Lawyers for Demjanjuk argued that the chronically ill 89-year-old retired
autoworker would suffer "severe pain and suffering" akin to torture if he
was flown from Cleveland to Munich. As their legal basis for the claim,
they cited the Convention Against Torture. The treaty forbids the United
States from returning a person to another country where he would be "in
danger of being subjected to torture."

U.S. officials dismissed the claim as frivolous. They referred to
Demjanjuk as "a Nazi persecutor" who "grasps for a last straw to delay
this matter further so that he can continue to enjoy his life in America
until his dying day." Demjanjuk's lawyers said their client had multiple
ailments, including a spinal condition, that made travel extremely
painful.


The legal battle over his medical condition was fought with dueling
videos.

In one, cited by his family, Demjanjuk is shown with his head back and
mouth agape, gasping for air and moaning in pain, as he is carried out of
his home in April. He was returned home hours later after an appeals court
in Cincinnati agreed to consider an emergency appeal.

Secretly recorded videos later showed him walking slowly from his car into
a store. He then returned and, with some help, got back into the car.

Last Friday, after reviewing evidence of his medical condition, the
appeals court agreed that Demjanjuk could be deported. The U.S. government
"will transport [him in] an aircraft equipped as a medical air ambulance,"
the judges said.

The government's legal battle with Demjanjuk has stretched over 32 years.
The Justice Department moved to revoke his citizenship in 1977, saying he
lied when he entered this country by concealing his role as a guard at
Nazi death camps.

In 1986, he was sent to Israel, tried, convicted and sentenced to death
for being "Ivan the Terrible," a notoriously cruel guard who ran the gas
chambers at the Treblinka death camp, also in Poland. But evidence from
Soviet files indicated that another man, Ivan Marchenko, was Ivan the
Terrible. Demjanjuk's conviction was overturned in 1993, and he returned
to the United States.

In 2001, authorities charged him with having been a guard at Sobibor, and
another round of deportation proceedings began.

Though he has lost his appeals in this country, his lawyers are also
seeking an order in Germany that would block his deportation to that
country.

Laura Sweeney, a Justice Department spokeswoman, refused to say how
quickly the government would move to deport Demjanjuk if his final legal
appeal was denied.

"We will continue to work with the government of Germany to effect the
removal of Mr. Demjanjuk," she said.

(source:  Los Angeles Times)

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


Demjanjuk is number two on a list of 10 most-wanted war criminals compiled
by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Here are details about the 10 accused.

1. ARIBERT HEIM

-- Heim, known as Dr Death, is still top of the list, although German
television station ZDF and the New York Times reported this year that he
had died in Cairo in 1992, aged 78.

Heim killed hundreds at the Mounthausen concentration camp in Austria with
injections of poison and removed organs from victims without anaesthetic.
Captured by U.S. forces near the end of World War Two but released in
1947, he worked as a doctor in West Germany until coming to the attention
of war crimes investigators. He fled in 1962.

2. IVAN DEMJANJUK - United States:

-- Accused in 1977 of being the infamous "Ivan the Terrible", a Treblinka
extermination camp guard, he was extradited to Israel and sentenced to
death, then freed on subsequent evidence.

Returning to the United States in 1993, his citizenship was revoked in
2002 after a U.S. court convicted him of working at three other camps.
German prosecutors, who issued an arrest warrant for him in March, suspect
him of helping in the deaths of 29,000 Jews at the the Sobibor death camp.

The extradition was halted by an appeals court this week.

3. DR. SANDOR KEPIRO - Hungary:

-- Serbia's war crimes prosecutor in Sept. 2008 requested an investigation
into the Hungarian suspected of committing genocide against Jews and Serbs
in World War Two.

Prosecutors said Kepiro is suspected of taking part in a raid by Hungarian
forces in Jan. 1942 in northern Serbia "when, in an attempt to destroy
members of the Jewish and Serbian national groups, they killed at least
2,000 of them".

Sentenced to 10 years in jail in 1944; both that verdict, and his
acquittal later the same year, came when Hungary was under fascist rule
and an ally of Nazi Germany. In 2007 a Hungarian court ruled the then
93-year-old could not be investigated as his murder conviction had been
overturned.

4. MILIVOJ ASNER - Austria:

-- Alleged to have been a senior security official during the 1941-45 rule
of Croatia's pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, Asner says he ordered wartime
deportations of Jews and Serbs to their homelands, not to death camps in
Croatia.

Asner moved to Austria when a Nazi-tracking group found him living in
Croatia in 2005. Austria previously rejected a Croatian extradition
request on grounds that Asner's physical and mental condition was fragile.

5. SOEREN KAM - Germany:

-- The Danish-born former SS member is accused of helping Nazi forces in
Denmark, and of the 1943 murder of anti-Nazi Danish journalist Carl Henrik
Clemmensen in Copenhagen.

Kam fled to Germany after the war, obtaining German citizenship in 1956.
Following his 2006 arrest, a German court delayed a decision on his
extradition to Denmark.

6. HEINRICH BOERE - Germany:

-- Accused of killing three Dutch civilians in 1944 as a member of an SS
hit squad that targeted anti-Nazi resistance fighters, Boere confessed
after being captured by U.S. forces.

Escaping to Germany, he was sentenced to death in absentia in Holland in
1949. After refusing a 1980 Dutch extradition request, a German court
indicted him in April 2008.

Boere was due to be tried in Aachen early in 2009 in what would have been
one of Germany's last Nazi war crimes trials, but in January the court
there said a medical examination had found his health was too poor for him
to stand trial.

7. KAROLY ZENTAI - Australia:

-- Zentai is accused of killing Jewish teenager Peter Balazs in Budapest.
At the time Zentai was a 23-year-old warrant officer in the pro-Nazi
Hungarian military, but argues he left Budapest with his regiment the day
before the murder in 1944. He emigrated to Australia in the early 1950s
and was arrested by Federal Police in July 2005. A Perth Federal Court
judge last month upheld that Zentai was eligible for extradition to
Hungary to face justice.

8. MIKHAIL GORSHKOW - Estonia:

-- Alleged to have been an interrogator for the Gestapo, he is accused of
helping kill about 3,000 men, women and children in the Slutsk ghetto in
Minsk, Belarus. Estonian-born Gorshkow became a U.S. citizen in 1953 but
was denaturalised in 2002 and is under investigation in Estonia.

9. ALGIMANTAS DAILIDE - Germany:

-- Dailide volunteered for Lithuania's Nazi-backed secret police, the
Saugumas, but said he was only a humble clerk.

Entering the United States in 1950, he worked as a real estate agent. In
March 2006 Lithuania convicted the then 86-year-old of handing over Jews
attempting to flee from the Vilnius ghetto. They were subsequently
murdered. A Lithuanian court sentenced him to five years in jail, but
suspended his sentence due to his health.

10. HARRY MANNIL - Venezuela:

-- The Caracas-based auto sales millionaire and member of Venezuelan high
society is accused of arresting Jews and communists who were later
executed by the Nazis while serving in Estonia's political police force
during the Nazi occupation.

Cleared of the accusations by Estonia, he remains on a U.S. watch list
barring him from entering the United States.

(sources: Reuters/Simon Wiesenthal Center/BBC)



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

SUPREME COURT DENIES CERTIORARI----Alleged Nazi Guard Demjanjuk Hits Legal
Brick Wall



Alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk may have exhausted his legal
options in the US. The Supreme Court refused to take his case on Thursday,
opening the way for his immediate deportation for trial in Germany.


It has been a legalistic marathon, with all manner of twists and turns.
But now it looks like the last barrier to the deportation of the alleged
death camp guard John Demjanjuk from the US to Germany has been removed.
On Thursday, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens rejected a request
from Demjanjuk's lawyers to block the deportation.

Stevens made little comment on the case. The Demjanjuk request reached his
chambers on Wednesday, with additional information being sent in on
Thursday morning from Demjanjuk's defense attorney John Broadley. Just
hours later, Stevens announced his ruling.

In theory, Demjanjuk would have the possibility to turn to other Supreme
Court justices. But Broadley said his client would refrain from following
that route. "That wouldn't get us anywhere," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
"We're not going to do that." He said that all legal avenues had been
exhausted. "We have done everything we could," he said.

An American court stripped Demjanjuk of his US citizenship in 2001 in a
case related to similar accusations of war crimes allegedly committed by
the 89-year-old former auto worker who lives in Cleveland, Ohio. That case
likewise reached the end of the road when the Supreme Court decided not to
grant certiorari in May 2008.

The case once again began making its way through the American legal system
after public prosecutors in Munich issued a warrant for Demjanjuk's
arrest. They accuse Demjanjuk, who was born in Ukraine, of having been a
guard at the Sobibor death camp -- and of having been accessory to 29,000
murders while there. The arrest warrant immediately raised the possibility
that he would be deported to Germany to stand trial.

Demjanjuk's attorneys have said that their client is too old and infirm to
travel to Germany and stand trial and that a deportation would amount to
"torture." The American court system, however, showed little sympathy for
this line of argumentation. Broadley himself has already begun preparing
for the next chapter of the legal battle -- in Germany. His first aim is
that of ensuring that his client is given suitable medical checkups to
ascertain his ability to stand trial.

Demjanjuk's son John, for his part, still hopes that Germany will withdraw
its permission for his father's entry. On Wednesday, however, such a
request filed by Demjanjuk's German lawyer Ulrich Busch with a Berlin
court was rejected. Busch has filed an appeal.

"The case is ongoing in Berlin," John Demjanjuk told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It's
not over yet."

Indeed, a separate case is also still being considered by an appellate
court in Cincinnati. That case, however, has little bearing on Demjanjuk's
deportation. And should he be deported, he will never again be allowed
back into the United States -- all ongoing court cases would be moot.

It remains unclear when Demjanjuk might be deported. A spokeswoman for the
US Attorney General confirmed that no timeframe has been announced. It is
likely, however, that it is merely a matter of ironing out the few
remaining details. A Cincinnati court has ruled that Demjanjuk can only be
flown to Germany in an air ambulance -- which must be chartered by the
Attorney General's office.

(source:  Spiegel Online)





USA----NEW YORK:

ICE returns second painting stolen during Holocaust


The widely publicized return of a painting by U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement ( ICE ) two weeks ago led to the recovery of another work of
art belonging to the late Jewish art dealer Dr. Max Stern. Today, at the
Leo Baeck Institute for the study of the history and culture of
German-speaking Jewry, ICE and the U.S. Attorney's Office returned a
depiction of St. Jerome back to the university beneficiaries of Stern's
estate.

An ICE investigation revealed the late 16th century oil painting was
forcibly sold by the Nazis through Lempertz Auction House in 1937. The St.
Jerome painting by famed Italian artist Ludovico Carracci ( 1555 - 1619 ),
was in the private collection of prominent Manhattan art dealer Richard L.
Feigen. Feigen unwittingly bought the painting, valued at $55,324, when it
was reoffered by Lempertz in 2000.

The ICE repatriation on April 21, 2009, of another painting from the 1937
forced sale of Stern property, "Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe,"
garnered extensive media coverage. News accounts of that ceremony led
Feigen to take a second look at the St. Jerome painting. When he realized
that it was an exact match with the one lost in 1937, Feigen immediately
made the information known.

Stern consigned more than 200 paintings to the Lempertz in Cologne,
Germany, after the Nazi regime forced him out of business. The proceeds
from these coerced sales were never forwarded to Stern, who fled Germany
to avoid further persecution and eventually settled in Canada.

"When we returned the "Bagpiper" two weeks ago, we made a plea for art
dealers everywhere to return all paintings stolen in the Holocaust," said
Peter J. Smith, special agent in charge of the ICE Office of
Investigations in New York. "ICE and the US Attorney's Office are grateful
for the cooperation of art dealer Richard Feigen in the recovery of the
Carracci and hope that his leadership will encourage his peers in the
trade to take a good look at their own works."

"On Holocaust Remembrance Day, we had the honor of returning a painting
stolen by the Nazis to the estate of Dr. Max Stern. Today, thanks to
Richard Feigen's selfless action upon hearing about that event, we have
the honor of returning another painting stolen by the Nazis to Dr. Stern's
estate. Our Office and ICE are committed to the goal of repatriating all
surviving works of art stolen by the Nazis," said Lev L. Dassin, acting US
Attorney. "Each work of art recovered is an act of remembrance, a measure
of redemption, and a commitment to justice."

"Our research has determined that there are numerous German auction houses
that have regularly offered tainted property in the post-war period", said
Clarence Epstein, head of the Max Stern Art Restitution Project at
Concordia University. "Such decisions to offer works with problematic
ownership histories into the international art market is clearly
backfiring."

"The depiction of the hermit St. Jerome may have been utilized by
prominent artists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and passed through Italian
and French aristocratic families before I acquired it for my own
collection," said Richard Feigen of Richard L. Feigen & Co. "It was as a
result of the news on the "Bagpiper" that I made the connection between
the painting and its forced sale in 1937. There was then no question in my
mind as to how to proceed."

Stern and his wife started a foundation that supports universities and
museums across North America and Israel. The Max Stern Art Restitution
Project directly benefits Concordia University and McGill University in
Montreal and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Dr. Clarence Epstein,
director of special projects and cultural affairs at Concordia University,
accepted the portrait on behalf of the executors of the estate.

ICE, the largest investigative agency of the Department of Homeland
Security, handles investigations into cultural artifacts that show up on
the world market.

ICE is represented by Senior Special Agent Bonnie Goldblatt in the
Department of State, Office of Holocaust Art Recovery Working Group. The
group is a representation of U.S. experts in the area of Holocaust looted
art in the government and private sector.

For more about ICE's cultural heritage investigations, please go to:
http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/factsheets/index.htm.

(source:  Media Newswire)





USA----GEORGIA:

Commission on the Holocaust presents art exhibit from Georgia students


The Marcus Jewish Community Center is exhibiting the artwork of
the Holocaust Art and Writing contest on the theme of What Are the Lessons
of the Holocaust? The exhibit runs through May in the Fine Family Art
Gallery.

This year marks the fourteenth year for the contest, held in cooperation
with the Georgia Department of Education. The contest encouraged Georgias
middle and high school students may submit artwork and writing entries
about the lessons of the Holocaust.

The Marcus Jewish Community Center is located at 5342 Tilly Mill Road,
Dunwoody, GA, 30338.

The Georgia Commission on the Holocaust is administratively attached to
the Secretary of States Office. The Commission uses the lessons of the
Holocaust to raise cultural awareness, promote acceptance of diversity in
hope to eradicate hatred and prejudice, and provide quality Holocaust and
Diversity Education programs for teachers and students of Georgias schools
as well as for the general public throughout the State of Georgia.

(source:  The Daily Citizen)






GERMANY:

Claims conference to Holocaust survivors: Criticize us and lose aid


Ahead of a potentially messy libel case, the world's richest Holocaust
restitution organization, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against
Germany, has offered to give Israeli survivors money in exchange for their
public support and a vow to refrain from criticism, Haaretz has learned.

The survivors, represented by the Centre of Organizations of Holocaust
Survivors in Israel - an umbrella group - refused the offer of the
U.S.-based Claims Conference, calling it an "insulting bribe meant to
silence legitimate criticism." Some are demanding that the Centre break
ties with the Claims Conference.

An advocate of the Claims Conference said the offer was made because of
"irresponsible and damaging behavior" by people from the Centre of
Organizations.

The dispute erupted after the Claims Conference offered a no-interest,
12-month loan of $200,000 to the Centre of Organizations in an internal,
unsigned contract, obtained by Haaretz. The loan, intended "to prevent the
Centre's economic collapse," is conditioned on the Centre "aligning
itself" with the Claims Conference and refraining from voicing any
criticism.

The Claims Conference represents world Jewry in negotiating compensation
for victims of Nazi persecution and their heirs. It also administers
compensation money and funds institutions providing social welfare to
Holocaust survivors, including the Centre of Organizations. Israel is home
to some 250,000 Holocaust survivors, many of them poor.

The final clause in the proposed contract stated that, should the umbrella
group take the money and then criticize the Claims Conference, it would be
required to repay the debt immediately, and the Claims Conference would
halt future funding.

The Claims Conference gives $50 million annually to the Centre's Welfare
Fund, an independent body. A spokesperson for the Claims Conference said
the final clause does not pertain to this annual funding.

Representatives from the 51 groups that make up the Centre of
Organizations met to discuss the proposal on Wednesday. "We were
outraged," one representative told Haaretz. Another said: "It's obviously
an attempt by the Claims Conference to prepare for their libel suit
against journalist Guy Meroz."

Last year the Claims Conference sued Meroz over his documentary "Musar
Hashilumim" ("The Morality of Payments"), which aired in May 2008, and
accused the organization's leaders of withholding funds from survivors
until after they had passed away. The case has not yet reached the court.

"Welfare organizations in Israel are on the brink of bankruptcy and the
Claims Conference is trying to take advantage of this," a source said.
"It's worse than offering a bribe: It's a dictatorial attempt to silence
opposition."

But Mordechai Hareli, a representative of the Centre of Organizations,
said the offer "cannot be defined as a bribe." Hareli, who called Meroz's
film "sensationalistic," added: "I highly value the Claims Conference's
work from 1951 until today. I don't know where we and this country would
be now without the Claims Conference. But that doesn't entitle them to
trample us."

He added that had the authorities in Israel "properly taken care" of
Holocaust survivors, then "survivors would not have to beg the Claims
Conference in the first place."

The Claims Conference said the Centre of Organizations is asking for
funding to cover "operational costs," not welfare projects. The Claims
Conference called this funding request "highly unusual" but said it was
considering agreeing anyway, considering the absence of other funders.

A Centre of Organizations board member countered by saying the Claims
Conference had funded operational costs for years, before pulling the plug
two years ago. "Now it's conditioned on servility," he said.

A source close to the Claims Conference's leadership said: "People from
the Centre of Organizations have recently lashed out at the Claims
Conference, damaging both bodies. It's unthinkable for the Claims
Conference to be expected to fund a body which behaves like this without
making sure it acts responsibly for the common goal of helping survivors."

Head of the Centre of Organizations, Noah Flug, declined to comment.

(source: Ha'aretz)





SERBIA:

Serbia's Nazi Past and the Holocaust of Jews

Chetnik commander Draza Mihailovich collaborated with Nazis in World War
II and assisted in the destruction of Jews in the Holocaust.



In conjunction with the war in former Yugoslavia, Serbia has undertaken a
campaign to persuade the Jewish community of Serbian friendship for Jews.
This same campaign portrays Croats as a common threat to both Jews and
Serbs, in an attempt to gain Jewish sympathy and support at a time when
most nations have isolated Serbia as a Balkan pariah.

However, even as Serbia courts Jewish public opinion, their propagandists
conceal a history of well-ingrained antisemitism, which continues unabated
in 1992. To make their case, Serbs portray themselves as victims in the
Second World War, but conceal the systematic genocide that Serbs had
committed against several peoples including the Jews. Thus Serbs have
usurped as propaganda the Holocaust that occurred in neighbouring Croatia
and Bosnia, but do not give an honest accounting of the Holocaust as it
occurred in Serbia.

During four centuries of Ottoman rule in the Balkans, the Jewish
communities of Serbia enjoyed religious tolerance, internal autonomy, and
equality before the law, that ended with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire
and the emergence of the Serbian state. Soon after a Serbian insurrection
against Turkish rule in 1804, Jews were expelled from the interior of
Serbia and prohibited from residing outside of Belgrade. In 1856 and 1861,
Jews were further prohibited from travel for the purpose of trade. In
official correspondence from the late 19th century, British diplomats
detailed the cruel treatment of the Jews of Serbia, which they attributed
to religious fanaticism, commercial rivalries, and the belief that Jews
were the secret agents of the Turks. Article 23 of the Serbian
constitution granted equality to every citizen but Article 132 forbade
Jews the right of domicile. The Treaty of Berlin 1878, which formally
established the Serbian state, accorded political and civil equality to
the Jews of Serbia, but the Serbian Parliament resisted abolishing
restrictive decrees for another 11 years. Although the legal status of the
Jewish community subsequently improved, the view of Jews as an alien
presence persisted.

Although Serbian historians contend that the persecution of the Jews of
Serbia was entirely the responsibility of Germans and began only with the
German occupation, this is self- serving fiction. Fully six months before
the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, Serbia had issued legislation restricting
Jewish participation in the economy and university enrolment. One year
later on 22 October 1941, the rabidly antisemitic "Grand Anti-Masonic
Exhibit" opened in occupied Belgrade, funded by the city of Belgrade. The
central theme was an alleged Jewish- Communist-Masonic plot for world
domination. Newspapers such as Obnova (Renewal) and Nasa Borba (Our
Struggle) praised this exhibit, proclaiming that Jews were the ancient
enemies of the Serbian people and that Serbs should not wait for the
Germans to begin the extermination of the Jews. A few months later,
Serbian authorities issued postage stamps commemorating the opening of
this popular exhibit. These stamps, which juxtaposed Jewish and Serbian
symbols (but did not contain Nazi symbols), portrayed Judaism as the
source of world evil and advocated the humiliation and violent subjugation
of Jews.

Serbia as well as neighboring Croatia was under Axis occupation during the
Second World War. Although the efficient destruction of Serbian Jewry in
the first two years of German occupation has been well documented by
respected sources, the extent to which Serbia actively collaborated in
that destruction has been less recognized. The Serbian government under
General Milan Nedic worked closely with local Naziofficials in making
Belgrade the first "Judenfrei" city of Europe. As late as 19 September
1943, Nedic made an official visit to Adolf Hitler, Serbs in Berlin
advanced the idea that the Serbs were the "Ubermenchen" (master race) of
the Slavs.

Although the Serbian version of history portrays wartime Serbia as a
helpless, occupied territory, Serbian newspapers of the period offer a
portrait of intensive collaboration. In November 1941, Mihajlo Olcan, a
minister in Nedic's government boasted that "Serbia has been allowed what
no other occupied country has been allowed and that is to establish law
and order with its own armed forces". Indeed, with Nazi blessings, Nedic
established the Serbian State Guard, numbering about 20,000, compared to
the 3,400 German police in Serbia. Recruiting advertisements for the Serb
police force specified that "applicants must have no Jewish or Gypsy
blood". Nedic's second in command was Dimitrije Ljotic, founder of the
Serbian Fascist Party and the principal Fascist ideologist of Serbia.
Ljotic organized the Serbian Volunteers Corps, whose primary function was
rounding up Jews, Gypsies, and partisans for execution. Serbian citizens
and police received cash bounties for the capture and delivery of Jews.

The Serbian Orthodox Church openly collaborated with the Nazis, and many
priests publicly defended the persecution of the Jews. On 13 August 1941,
approximately 500 distinguished Serbs signed "An Appeal to the Serbian
Nation", which called for loyalty to the occupying Nazis. The first three
signers were bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church. On 30 January 1942,
Metropolitan Josif, the acting head of the Holy Synod of the Serbian
Orthodox Church, officially prohibited conversions of Jews to Serbian
Orthodoxy, thereby blocking a means of saving Jewish lives. At a public
rally, after the government minister Olcan "thanked God that the
enormously powerful fist of Germany had not come down upon the head of the
Serbian nation" but instead "upon the heads of the Jews in our midst", the
speaker of these words was then blessed by a high-ranking Serbian Orthodox
priest.

A most striking example of Serbian antisemitism combined with historical
revisionism is the case of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (1880-1956), revered
as one of the most influential church leaders and ideologists after Saint
Sava, founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church. To Serbs, Bishop Velimirovic
was a martyr who survived torture in the Dachau prison camp. In truth he
was brought to Dachau (as were other prominent European clergy), because
the Nazis believed he could be useful for propaganda. There he spent
approximately two months as an "Ehrenhaftling" (honour prisoner) in a
special section, dining on the same food as the German officers, living in
private quarters, and making excursions into town under German escort.
From Dachau, this venerated priest endorsed the Holocaust:

"Europe is presently the main battlefield of the Jew and his father, the
devil, against the heavenly Father and his only begotten Son... (Jews)
first need to become legally equal with Christians in order to repress
Christianity next, turn Christians into atheist, and step on their necks.
All the modern European slogans have been made up by Jews, the crucifiers
of Christ: democracy, strikes, socialism atheism, tolerance of all
religions, pacifism, universal revolution, capitalism and communism... All
this has been done with the intention to eliminate Christ... You should
think about this, my Serbian brethren, and correspondingly correct your
thoughts, desires and acts." (Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic: Addresses to the
Serbian People--Through the Prison Window. Himmelsthur, Germany: Serbian
Orthodox Eparchy for Western Europe, 1985, pp. 161-162).

Despite Serbian claims to the contrary, Germans were not alone in killing
the Jews of Serbia. The long concealed Historical Archives in Belgrade
reveal that Banjica, a concentration camp located in Belgrade, was
primarily staffed by Serbs. Funding for the conversion of the former
barracks of the Serbian 18th infantry division to a concentration, came
from the municipal budget of Belgrade. The camp was divided into German
and Serbian sections. From Banjica there survive death lists written
entirely in Serbian in the
Cyrillic alphabet. At least 23,697 victims passed through the Serbian
section of this camp. Many were Jews, including at least 798 children, of
whom at least 120 were shot by Serbian guards. The use of mobile gassing
vans by Nazis in Serbia for the extermination of Jewish women and children
has been well documented. It is less appreciated, however, that a Serbian
business firm had contracted with the Gestapo to purchase these same
victims cloths, which sometimes contained hidden money or jewelry in the
linings. In August 1942, following the virtual liquidation of Serbia's
Jews, Nedic's government attempted to claim all Jewish property for the
Serbian state. In the same month, Dr. Harald Turner; the chief of the Nazi
civil administration of Serbia, boasted that Serbia was the only country
in which the "Jewish question" was solved. Turner himself attributed this
"success" to Serbian help. Thus, 94 percent of Serbia's 16,000 Jews were
exterminated, with the considerable cooperation of the Serbian government,
the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Serbian State Guard, the Serbian police
and the Serbian
public.

Today, many Serbs proudly cite the Chetniks as a resistance force and even
claim that the Chetniks were somehow allied with the United States during
the Second World War, but this is simply historical revisionism. According
to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Chetnik resistance against the Nazis
came to a complete stop as early as the end of 1941. Thereafter, the
Chetnik resistance actively collaborated with the both Nazis and Fascists,
and for this reason Jewish fighters found it necessary to abandon the
Chetniks, in favour of Tito's Partisans. In reality, the Chetniks,
dedicated primarily to the restoration of the Serbian throne and
territorial expansion of the Serbian state, were the moral counterpart of
Croatia's Ustatsha. Both were quintessentially genocidal; the Chetniks
committed systematic genocide against Muslims, who, for nearly all of 500
years had lived peacefully with the Sephardic Jewish community. Under
explicit orders from their leader Draze Mihajlovic, the Chetniks attempted
to depopulate Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Croatia of all non- Serbs
and in the process, massacred most of the 86,000 to 103,000 Muslims who
perished during the war.

For years, the Serbian dominated Belgrade government has supported and
trained PLO terrorists. Immediately after the murder of Leon Klinghoffer
aboard the Achille Lauro in 1985, the terrorist mastermind Abu Abbas was
welcomed in Belgrade. Since the late 1980's, Abu-Nidal has maintained a
large terrorist infrastructure in Yugoslavia, in coordination with Libyan,
Iraqi, and Yugoslav intelligence services. During the 1991 Persian Gulf
War, as Iraqi missiles landed in Israel, Belgrade supported its ally Iraq.
Support of anti-Israel terrorism may be a consequence of support for
nonaligned Arab states, rather than an expression of anti-Jewish
sentiment.

Although the Jewish community of Serbia is not currently experiencing
persecution, overt expressions of Serbian antisemitism do surface in such
mainstream institutions as the Serbian Orthodox Church and the official
news media. The 15 January 1992 issue of the official publication of the
Serbian Orthodox Church, Pravoslavlje (Orthodoxy), carried an article
entitled, "Jews Crucify Christ Again." In this polemic, "treacherous" and
"surreptitious" Israeli politicians were said to be constrained from
expressing their "pathological" hatred of Christians openly because "they
know that Christian countries gave them the state." Allegedly, nuns are so
frequently beaten in Israel, that one nun was actually "happy, because
they only spit in her face." Only weeks later, when Russia extended
diplomatic recognition to the former Yugoslav republics of Croatia and
Slovenia, the official Yugoslav (Serbian perspective) news agency Tanjug
blamed "a Jewish conspiracy" against Serbia, hauntingly reminiscent of the
theme of the 1941 anti-Masonic exhibit.

The essential strategy of Serbian propaganda is to portray the spiritual
kinship between Jews and Serbs as victims of the Holocaust and endangered
by Croats. This concept is disseminated through the Serbian-Jewish
Friendship Society, founded in Belgrade in 1988 and supported by the
Serbian government. In January and February 1992, Dr. Klara Mandic, the
secretary-general and principal voice of this organization, syndicated a
chilling article in the North American Jewish press. This article alleged
that Ankica Konjuh, an elderly Jewish woman, was tortured and murdered by
"Croat extremists" in September 1991. However, even as she released this
story to the press, Dr. Mandic knew that Ankica Konjuh was neither a Jew
nor could have been killed by Croats. Bona-fide witnesses have testified
that Ankica Konjuh, a 67 year-old Croat, was one of 240 civilians
massacred by Serbian forces after the last Croat defenders were driven
from the region. Moreover on 23 December 1991, the Federation of Jewish
Communities of Yugoslavia met in Belgrade and demanded in writing that Dr.
Mandic cease and desist misrepresenting Ankica Konjuh as the first Jewish
victim of the war. Nevertheless, in late February 1992, when Dr. Mandic
lectured at the Hillel House of George Washington University in
Washington, D.C., she provided the rabbi with a copy of that misleading
article, delivered without further comment. It is noteworthy that this
speaking engagement was part of a tour arranged by Wise Communications, a
Washington-based public relations firm representing the Serbian oil
company Jugopetrol, a thinly veiled proxy for the Communist Belgrade
government. Beginning with the proposition that antisemitism has never
existed in Serbia, Dr. Mandic portrayed Croatia as preparing to repeat the
Holocaust. She claimed to be a "Jewish leader," although Jews are
distinctly absent from her constituency. Less than half a dozen Jews are
actual members of her society of several thousand. She introduced herself
as an "eyewitness" speaking on behalf of Croatian Jews, although since the
war began, she has had no contact with any of the nine Jewish communities
of Croatia. When Dr. Mandic was asked to comment on Serbian (Yugoslav
Army) shelling of the synagogue of Dubrovnik, the second oldest surviving
synagogue in Europe, she denied that the synagogue had ever been damaged
at all. Meanwhile, the attack has been well documented by the Jewish
community of Dubrovnik and the World Monument Fund.

Jewish sensitivity to the Holocaust is similarly exploited by the
Jewish-Serbian Friendship Society of America (Granada Hills, California),
an offshoot of Dr. Mandic's organization. Its newsletter equates the
Jewish and Serbian positions during World War II, both as victims of
Croats, but fails to mention Serbian complicity in the Holocaust, Serbian
collaboration with the Nazis, and Serbian genocide against Croats,
Gypsies, and Muslims. It warns of an imminent Holocaust being initiated in
Croatia. A contrasting portrayal of Croatia, however, emerges from a
spectrum of Croatian Jews, American Jews who have visited Croatia, and
international Jewish agencies monitoring events on site. All concur that
there is no state-sponsored antisemitism in Croatia; the rights of the
Jewish minority are respected; and antisemitic incidents are virtually
unknown. Thus, only a few dozen of the 2,000 Jews of Croatia have chosen
to emigrate to Israel since the war began.

Serbia of today and Germany in World War II offer striking parallels. In
1991, Vojislav Seselj, a member of the Serbian Parliament and leader of
the Serbian irregulars who call themselves Chetniks, declared, "We want no
one else on our territory and we will fight for our true borders. The
Croats must either move or die." Croats in Serbian conquered regions are
forced to wear red-and-white armbands, analogous to the yellow armbands
worn by Jews in Serbia during the Holocaust. The stated purpose of the
expulsion of
Muslims and Croats from captured regions is "ethnic cleansing." The
indigenous non-Serbian populations of the invaded territories are being
driven from their homes, exterminated, or imprisoned in concentration
camps, to create regions of Serbian ethnic purity. Jewish community
centres, synagogues, and cemeteries have been damaged and destroyed by
characteristically indiscriminate Serbian artillery attacks. To all of
this, the Jewish-Serbian Friendship Society has remained conspicuously
silent.

Belgrade has promoted the myth of Serbian kinship with the Jews as fellow
victims of Nazi oppression, while concealing the true extent of Serbian
collaboration with the Nazis. It is ironic that Serbia is now seeking
Jewish support for a war in which both the idealogy and methodology so
tragically echo nazism. The European Community, the Helsinki Commission,
the United Nations, and the United States have all condemned Serbia as the
aggressor. Western diplomats have characterized the current Serbian regime
as "a lying, terrorist criminal organization." Serbia, however, claims to
be the victim and campaigns for Jewish sympathy and support, exploiting
the powerful symbolism of the Holocaust. Serbia's professed solicitude for
the Jewish people must be reexamined.

(source:  Dr. Philip J. Cohen, Palluxo)

May 7



GERMANY/USA:

High court denies deportation stay for accused Nazi guard

The Supreme Court on Thursday denied a stay of  deportation for alleged
Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, who faces a war crimes prosecution
in Germany.

Justice John Paul Stevens without comment refused to intervene in the
planned transfer from the United States.

Federal courts have all rejected his appeals, and the order from Stevens
clears the way for the Justice Department to move ahead with the
deportation. No date for the transfer has been set.

Demjanjuk's lawyers had asked the high court to consider their claims
that he is too ill and frail to be sent overseas. They also raised human
rights and other legal issues in their last-minute appeal.

A German court Wednesday had also ruled against a request for a stay.

Officials in Berlin have issued an arrest warrant charging the 89-year-old
Ohio resident with being an accessory to the murder of about 29,000
civilians at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland in 1943.

The native Ukrainian has long claimed he was a prisoner of war, not a
death camp guard.

Immigration officers entered his Cleveland-area home April 14, and
carried him out in his wheelchair to a waiting van. He was held for a few
hours and then returned to his residence after a federal appeals court
ruled temporarily in his favor.

Demjanjuk appealed unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court last year.

He was once accused by the United States and Israel of being a
notoriously brutal S.S. guard at the Treblinka camp known as "Ivan the
Terrible."

After appeals, that allegation was eventually dropped by both countries,
but later other allegations were made against him.

The case is Demjanjuk v. Holder (08A978).

(source:  CNN)


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


US court rejects Demjanjuk plea ---- John Demjanjuk denies the charges
against him


A US Supreme Court judge has rejected a bid by alleged Nazi death camp
guard John Demjanjuk to block his deportation to Germany for trial.

The 89-year-old Ohio resident had argued that he was too ill to be moved.

But Justice John Paul Stevens turned down his request to intervene in the
case.

Mr Demjanjuk denies charges of being a guard at the Sobibor death camp in
World War II and an accessory in the deaths of 29,000 Jews.

He says he was captured by the Germans in his native Ukraine during the
war and kept as a prisoner of war.

  DEMJANJUK CASE TIMELINE
1952: Gains entry into the US, claiming he spent most of the war as a
German prisoner
1977: First charged with war crimes, accused of being "Ivan the Terrible"
1981: Stripped of US citizenship
1986: Extradited to Israel
1993: Israeli Supreme Court overturns conviction, ruling that he is not
Ivan the Terrible
2002: Loses US citizenship after a judge said there was proof he worked at
Nazi camps
2005: A judge rules in favour of deportation to his native Ukraine
2009: Germany issues an arrest warrant for him; US immigration agents
seize him at his home but later release him


In March, German prosecutors filed charges against Mr Demjanjuk and issued
a warrant for his arrest.

US federal agents briefly removed him from his home in April, but a stay
of deportation was granted after his family said he was too ill to be
moved.

A three-judge panel from the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio then
ruled that the removal could go ahead, saying it was satisfied that Mr
Demjanjuk would be provided with adequate care.

Mr Demjanjuk could now appeal against Justice Stevens' ruling to the full
Supreme Court or ask another justice for a stay, media reports said.

Lawyers for Mr Demjanjuk have also launched an appeal in Germany, arguing
that it should retract its extradition request on humanitarian grounds.

Camp guard

Mr Demjanjuk arrived in the US in 1952 as a refugee, settling in
Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in the car industry.

In 1988 he was sentenced to death in Israel for crimes against humanity
after Holocaust survivors identified him as the notorious "Ivan the
Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka death camp.

But Israel's highest court later overturned his sentence, after documents
from the former Soviet Union indicated that "Ivan the Terrible" had
probably been a different man.

Mr Demjanjuk returned to the US, but in 2002 had his US citizenship
stripped because of his failure to disclose his work at Nazi camps when he
first arrived as a refugee.

In 2005, a US immigration judge ruled that he could be deported to
Germany, Poland or Ukraine.

(source:  BBC News)

May 7



GERMANY:

Germany refuses to halt Demjanjuk transfer


A German court Wednesday rejected an effort by suspected Nazi war
criminal John Demjanjuk to block his expected transfer from the
United States to Germany.

The ruling came as Demjanjuk's lawyers formally asked the U.S. Supreme
Court to halt the deportation.

The Administrative Court in Berlin ruled that Demjanjuk lacks a basis for
legal protection and declared his motion for a stay to be inadmissible.

"Even without the agreement of the Federal (German) Government, he could
be deported from the USA," the court said. "Following his arrival in
Germany the return of the petitioner (to the USA) would be out of the
question because the Federal Republic has the obligation to arrest the
defendant on the basis of the arrest order already in effect."

Demjanjuk was charged in Munich, Germany, in March with assisting in about
29,000 murders while serving as an SS guard in the Sobibor death camp in
Poland in 1943.

In the United States, Demjanjuk's effort to avoid being sent to Germany
has repeatedly been turned down by federal courts, and he now appears to
be down to his final appeal.

His lawyers formally filed an emergency motion for a stay of deportation
with Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. The attorneys also asked for
the court to then consider the health issues and other arguments that have
been rejected by the lower courts.

Demjanjuk's attorney, John Broadley, has argued that deporting him would
constitute torture because of his health problems. Broadley has said
Demjanjuk suffers from pre-leukemia, kidney problems, spinal problems and
"a couple of types of gout."

Justice Department lawyers have said that videos show Demjanjuk's
condition is not as bad as Broadley has portrayed it.

The case dates back to the late 1970s, when the Justice Department accused
Demjanjuk of being a Nazi guard known as "Ivan the Terrible." Demjanjuk's
U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1981, and he was extradited to Israel in
1986.

He was convicted in an Israeli court in 1988 and sentenced to death, but
that conviction was overturned in 1993 amid evidence that someone else was
Ivan the Terrible.

A federal court restored Demjanjuk's citizenship, ruling the government
withheld evidence supporting his case. But his citizenship was revoked
again in 2002 after a federal judge ruled he entered the United States
illegally in 1952 by hiding his past as a Nazi guard.

Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian, denies any role in the Holocaust. He says he saw
action in the Soviet army and later was a prisoner of war held by the
Germans.

(source:  CNN)

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)

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)

April 29



USA----NEW YORK:

Exhibition Review
Sorrow, Pity, Celebration: France Under the Nazis
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
When the young French soldier Louis Althusser was taken prisoner of war by
the Nazis in 1940, he tossed scraps of paper out of the train that was
carrying him away, asking whoever found them to send them to his uncle in
Paris. The last word from French soil, reads one. The train that shakes my
handwriting is still rolling, and I believe that we are headed for
Germany.

So they were, and Althusser, who would later become one of Frances most
renowned Marxists, spent the entire war in a prison camp.

In this he may have been lucky, sequestered from the confusions,
qualifications, animosities, compromises, accommodations, betrayals and
resistance of other French writers, who watched  some cheering, some
fearing  as the Germans rolled over Frances defenses in the spring of that
year. The victors turned the nation into a Nazi fief and made Vichy less
well known for its water than for being the center of Marshal Philippe
Ptains collaborationist regime.

One of the astonishing things about the exhibition Between Collaboration
and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation, at the New
York Public Library, is that it feels as if we were looking at scores of
relics tossed from speeding trains, each of them heading in a different
direction, each expressing different hopes and expectations.

There is a postcard from the man who would later become the prophet of the
avant-garde French novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who informs his father how
much he is enjoying the companionship of his countrymen during forced
labor in Germany. There is a 1940 letter from the philosopher Henri
Bergson, who had been prepared to convert to Roman Catholicism but, out of
solidarity with his people, signed the new French governments register as
a Jew. I have seen this coming for several years now, he writes. We have
touched the bottom of the abyss. At least we will now know where the evil
comes from.

Some writers celebrated that evil. The Prix Goncourt winner Henri Braud
cheered the new regime in editorials for the right-wing weekly Gringoire.
His fellow travelers sampled the high life of the German Institute in
Paris, directed by Karl Epting. One photo here from 1941 shows the
Parisian reception for a performance of Wagners Tristan und Isolde in
which Winifred, the composers daughter-in-law (and a friend of Hitler),
can be glimpsed, along with the startlingly young German conductor Herbert
von Karajan.

Some writers simply went along with the dominant power for the ride, if
not the ideology  Jean Cocteau, it is suggested here, was among them.
Others put out clandestine magazines (over 1,000 have been catalogued) or
even established an underground publishing house, trying to counter the
more glossy lures of Signal, a Hachette-published weekly that celebrated
the coming of a new era.

Some, like Jean-Paul Sartre, made their way through the morass with
cunning and swiftness; the premiere of Sartres No Exit in occupied Paris
had discordant resonance for those who found other kinds of hellish
visions in their surroundings. Some, like Irne Nmirovsky, whose manuscript
of Suite Franaise is on display, stayed blind to the full extent of what
was happening until it was too late. Nmirovsky took the opposite path of
Bergson; though Jewish, she converted to Roman Catholicism for protection,
which didnt prevent the French police from delivering her up to the Nazis
as a Jew. And a few  very few  like Andr Malraux joined the underground
armed forces to fight the Germans.

In other words, the responses were as complicated, mistaken, courageous,
baleful and banal as the responses of many others in that crucial time,
and that complexity is part of the exhibitions point. The show was
conceived by Olivier Corpet, the director of the Institut Mmoires de
ldition Contemporaine, who presented it with the curator Claire Paulhan in
Caen, France, in 2008 as a display of a growing archive of war material.

That show has been reshaped here by Robert O. Paxton, an emeritus
professor of social science at Columbia, whose 1972 book, Vichy France,
outlined how avidly collaborationist that regime really was. Objects from
the French archives are included, along with selections from the librarys
collections and private loans.

At the center of the exhibition space, newsreels of the period taken from
the 1969 Max Ophls film, The Sorrow and the Pity, form a depressing loop.
And screenings of films produced in France during the Nazi occupation,
including Marcel Carns classic Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of
Paradise), will be shown at the New York Public Library for the Performing
Arts at Lincoln Center every Tuesday in June. A companion book, by the
French curators, is also being published.

But there is so much material here and it is so nuanced in presentation
that it can be difficult to clarify the different stands writers took and
why. The exhibition can sometimes overwhelm with detail, particularly
because so much concerns unfamiliar literary figures.

A sense of disorder is partly the welcome price of seeing so much. We
learn, for example, that France became the food basket of the German
armies, creating drastic shortages. Paper was so hard to find that it was
rationed to reward collaborationists. The avant-gardist Jacques Audiberti
wrote his novel Monorail on fragments of wallpaper supplied by his father,
a builder, though you suspect that he might have also liked the subtle
provocation of the medium.

There is also something discomfiting about seeing the well-worn card file
of books banned by the Nazis in France  cards that must have often been
consulted by the library that kept it on hand, beginning in 1940. But it
is more unsettling to read the associated manifesto that French publishers
readily agreed to:

In order to organize a common existence free of difficulties between the
German Occupation army and the French population, and thereby to establish
normal relations between the German and French peoples, the French editors
undertake the responsibility to organize intellectual production.

Particularly noted in this manifesto are books by political refugees or
Jewish writers who, betraying the hospitality that France extended to
them, unscrupulously pushed for war, from which they hoped to draw profit
for their egotistical purposes.

The exhibition explains the French defeat as a military failure: the
nation mistakenly rushed a third of its forces into Belgium and southwest
Netherlands, believing the Germans would attack as they did in 1914; that
left the supposedly invulnerable Maginot line permeable.

But the exhibition also shows that a strong current of thought welcomed
this defeat as an opportunity. The poet Paul Valry in one notebook here
excitedly foresees something extremely new. Alfred Fabre-Luce, a
conservative journalist, declares in his journal: We are at the threshold
of a new era.

Major schisms between the left-wing Popular Front and the political right
characterized the 1930s in France, but among many there was also a belief
that Frances Third Republic was doomed and dissolute.

In contrast, a spirit of renewal and redemption was perceived beneath the
Nazi ideology. Ptain was cheered after the armistice was signed, which
Hitler staged in the same railway car in which Germany submitted to France
in 1918. Ptain promised a national revolution enshrining Work, Family,
Fatherland.

It mattered little that France had assured Britain it would make no
separate peace with Hitler. Besides, German dominance was unavoidable:
what hope did England have?

In fact, we now know many people felt similarly in Britain in 1940. Had
Churchill not prevailed, it is likely that acquiescence, along with
Germanys reassurance of autonomy, would have ended the war in Western
Europe. The moral muddiness of Vichys waters would have spread their
intoxicating delusions.

That lure cannot be overestimated, which is one reason that those who saw
clearly deserve more distinctive celebration than they get here. The
Communists had been ideologically opposed to Nazism  but they had also
shown themselves willing to shift stands when Moscow aligned itself with
Hitler. Moral clarity was even rarer among those who chose not to leave
France or did not have to flee in fear.

The aftermath of the occupation, the exhibition shows, posed its own moral
challenges, marked by denunciations and purges. Philippe Burrins book
France Under the Germans suggests that 10,000 to 20,000 women were
punished for having sexual liaisons with the occupiers; more than 50,000
children were said to have been born as a result of those relationships.
There were trials, executions and murders.

This is one reason the Communist Party became so powerful in postwar
France. After the Hitler-Stalin pact disintegrated, the partys opposition
to Hitler was unswerving, beyond question.

This is not, though, a tale of heroism or far-ranging insight. Though Mr.
Paxton shows that poets were, as a group, particularly resistant to the
collaborationist lure, for the most part, the touted visionary powers of
writers left all too much in darkness.

"Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi
Occupation" runs through July 25 at the New York Public Library, Fifth
Avenue and 42nd Street; (212) 930-0800, nypl.org.

(source:  New York Times)




POLAND:

Message in a bottle from the Holocaust
On September 9, 1944 seven young men buried a message in a bottle at the
Auschwitz death camp.


Near the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland, workers
found a message in a bottle written by prisoners. Written in pencil and
sealed in a bottle, the message was dated September 9, 1944 and bears the
names, camp numbers and hometowns of seven young detainees hailing from
Poland and France. Officials of the museum at the site said that the
bottle had been buried in a concrete wall in a school that slave laborers
were forced to repair.

The note reads "All of them are between the ages of 18 and 20, in
reference to the young men who left a trace of their existence in a place
where 1.1 million people were exterminated." The victims were largely Jews
from throughout Europe, but also Gypsies and non-Jewish Poles.

6 of the prisoners were from Poland and one was from France. The note
gives the names as: Bronislaw Jankowiak, Stanislaw Dubla, Jan Jasik,
Waclaw Sobczak, Karol Czekalski, Waldemar Bialobrzeski and Albert Veissid.

Albert Veissid, one of the young men mentioned in the letter, is alive and
now resides in France. Two of the others definitely survived the
Holocaust. Karol Czekalski remained in contact with the museum at
Auschwitz until the 1960s but has not been heard from since. It is not
known whether Czekalski or Wachaw Sobczak - the other survivor - are still
alive.

(source:  EnergyPublisher)





AUSTRIA:

Austrian Holocaust denier sentenced to five years in jail


Notorious Austrian Holocaust denier Gerd Honsik was sentenced to five
years in prison Monday by a Vienna court that found him guilty of
spreading National Socialist ideology.

While living in Spain from the early 1990s to evade a previous Austrian
prison sentence, the neo-Nazi had continued to publish National Socialist
ideology in a magazine and other venues.

"He is one of the ideological leaders of the neo-Nazi scene," prosecutor
Stefan Apostol said Friday, alleging that Honsik had also passed out his
publications at schools.

Both the prosecution and the defendant plan to appeal the verdict and
sentence, Austrian press agency APA reported.

The 67-year-old defendant said he rejects "the doctrine which demonizes
National Socialism," but claimed he was not a National Socialist himself.

Honsik, who wrote the book Acquittal for Hitler? in 1988, defended himself
by arguing that he did not deny the existence of all the gas chambers in
Nazi concentration camps.

After his lawyer, Herbert Schaller, pointed out that it was not Honsik but
"fine and righteous foreigners" who had first denied the existence of gas
chambers, the prosecutor said he would consider whether to also indict
Schaller under Austria's law banning National Socialist activities.

In 1992, an Austrian court passed an 18-month prison term against Honsik
for denying the crimes committed by Hitler's regime. Before starting his
sentence, Honsik fled to Spain, but he was eventually extradited in 2007.

Another prominent Holocaust denier, the British writer David Irving,
received a sentence of two years in prison and one year of probation from
Austrian courts in 2006.

(source: DPA)

April 21




GERMANY:

Adolf Eichmann and the hunt for monsters----The capture and trial of the
Nazi war criminal carries timely lessons in justice.


On May 23, 1960, then- Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion stood at
the podium in the Knesset and solemnly said: "A short time ago one of the
most notorious Nazi war criminals, Adolf Eichmann, was discovered by the
Israeli security services. Adolf Eichmann is already under arrest in
Israel and will shortly be placed on trial."

The announcement shocked Israelis and the world alike. It should have. No
country was known to be actively pursuing war criminals. Such an operation
-- locating and seizing Eichmann in Argentina -- seemed beyond the ability
of an inexperienced, ragtag spy agency such as the Mossad. And such a
trial, on the part of a hardly disinterested young nation, would be
audacity itself.

The truth is, without luck, individual bravery and the willingness of
Israel to jeopardize its international standing, the operational manager
of the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" would never have been
brought to justice.

More than any other event, the groundbreaking gamble of Eichmann's
capture, trial and execution made real the injunction to "never forget."
It also set the stage -- as a model and a cautionary tale -- for what
remains a controversial proposition: How shall we deal with history's
monsters?


In May 1945, with the Third Reich on the verge of surrender, SS Lt. Col.
Adolf Eichmann headed into the mountains of Austria. In the postwar chaos,
under an assumed identity, he would escape a pair of Allied POW camps, lie
low in the forests of northern Germany and then follow the Nazi "ratlines"
to Argentina where, with his wife and three sons, he started a new life
hidden in plain sight.

For most of this time, only Simon Wiesenthal and fellow concentration camp
survivor Tuviah Friedman were dedicated to searching for him. The West
Germans, the only government with the clear mandate to arrest and try
Eichmann, had shown little interest in stirring up the crimes of the past.
The Americans, focused on the rise of the Cold War, were also not
interested. "We are not in the business of apprehending war criminals,"
noted an internal CIA memorandum in 1953. Even the Israelis, burdened with
the day-to-day survival of their new nation, had invested few resources
into hunting down those responsible for the Holocaust.

In the end, it wasn't Wiesenthal and Friedman who found him. Pure
happenstance started a cascade of events that led to Eichmann's arrest.

In a Buenos Aires suburb, Sylvia Hermann brought home a young man she'd
met named Nick Eichmann. He bragged of his father's exploits in the
Wehrmacht and casually condemned the Jews. Lothar Hermann, her half-Jewish
German emigre father, wondered: Could he be the son of that Eichmann?

Lothar alerted Fritz Bauer, one of the few West German prosecutors seeking
former Nazis, about his suspicions, and then he and his daughter launched
an amateur investigation. Bauer -- worried that his own government would
not pursue the leads or, worse, that someone within it would alert
Eichmann that he'd been discovered -- passed the tip to the Israelis.

The Mossad first bungled the investigation, but Bauer persisted,
presenting it with yet another secret source placing Eichmann in
Argentina. The operation would require the Mossad, small and inexperienced
at the time, to operate halfway around the world in a country known for
its support for Nazi Germany. Its agents would have to succeed in three
operations: capturing Eichmann, detaining him for an indeterminate period,
then secreting him out of the country. All the while, they would be
violating Argentine sovereignty, risking prison.

Ben-Gurion approved the mission that is now part of spy legend. What is
less known is the outpouring of protest that followed Israeli officials'
announcement of the capture and their intention to try Eichmann
themselves. The Argentines protested to the United Nations, and the
Security Council condemned Israel for its activities. There was an
international uproar about the right of Israel to create a special
tribunal to prosecute Eichmann, a German national whose crimes were
committed before Israel was even a state.

Once again, Ben-Gurion forged ahead, seeing the capture and trial of the
Nazi war criminal as a way to remind a younger generation of Israelis, and
the world, that they must remain vigilant lest history repeat itself.

The gamble paid off. The testimony of survivors, and Eichmann's inadequate
defense that he was merely following orders, sealed his fate. The Nazis'
crimes against the Jewish people were exposed in horrifying, exhaustive
detail in newspapers and on radio and television. For the world, justice
was served, and Ben-Gurion's searing reminder still resonates today.

And yet, half a century later, the controversies provoked by Eichmann's
capture and trial are a long way from solution. Who will be investigated
for war crimes and crimes against humanity? By what law and in what
jurisdiction? And who will bring them to account?

Events mostly prove the imperfection of the systems we've devised. "Dr.
Death," the Nazi physician Aribert Heim, died a free man in Egypt, age 78.
In Cambodia, it has taken 30 years for aging Khmer Rouge cadres to face
judgment for their actions in the infamous killing fields. Sudan's
president, Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, indicted last month by the fledgling
International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Darfur, is
famously defiant. He is unlikely ever to stand trial.

But even this imperfect justice is more than the world had available in
the 15 years after the end of World War II.

Slow and flawed as they are, these tribunals increase the odds against the
monsters. They need our support. Because without them, those seeking
justice for future Eichmanns will face the same almost impossible odds
that those pursuing the architect of the Holocaust barely managed to
surmount.

(source:  Opinion; Neal Bascomb is the author of the just published
"Hunting Eichmann: How a Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased
Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi."-- Los Angeles Times)

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


NAZI TOURS IN MUNICH----'Turn Left at Gestapo Headquarters'


Foreign tourists flock to the Third Reich walking tours in Munich. Even
now, 64 years after World War II ended, visitors from abroad still only
seem to associate Germany with two things -- beer and Hitler. The
country's image seems to be changing far more slowly than it would prefer.

Three tour guides are standing next to each other on Munich's central
Marienplatz square, and one could almost feel sorry for two of them: the
man with the spectacles and the Spanish woman. But Jeff Cox, the third, is
doing very well.

It's Easter, the sun is shining on the neo-Gothic faade of Munich's town
hall, and the city is full of tourists. Ideal conditions. Cox and the
other two have been waiting for customers. Each of them is offering a
different tour.

These days, city tours are tailor-made for certain target groups. The
Spanish guide has a sign that says "El centro en espanol!". The man with
the spectacles has a board offering a "Walk Around the Old Town." The
tourists walk past them. Not a single customer shows any interest in them.

Jeff Cox doesn't have a sign. Just a blue folder containing photos. He
doesn't even have to hold the folder up. You have to step up close to read
what Cox is offering. "Third Reich Tour. Munich Walk Tours in English."

The Third Reich in Munich. That means Hitler, Gring, the Gestapo, the SS.
Hitler in the city where everything started. The "Capital of the
Movement." Cox is pleased. He's got 18 tourists standing in front of him.
British, American, an Indian family. Each one of them has paid 12
($15.50). When it comes to city tours, Hitler is a surefire bet. Nazis
always sell.

Cox speaks beautifully clear English. He would have made a good history
teacher. He's an affable Londoner who tries to get his listeners
interested rather than boring them with dry lectures. He's been a city
guide for 10 years.

He's just been talking about Hitler's time in the Austrian town of Linz,
then his time in Vienna. Later on he'll take the group to the legendary
Hofbruhaus beer hall where Hitler held several speeches. Then to the
corner of Brienner and Trkenstrasse. That's where the Gestapo headquarters
was. The tour ends on Knigsplatz square, where the Nazi party staged its
early rallies.

"Who knows what Adolf Hitler was almost called?" says Cox. "Schicklgruber;
his father was called Alois Schicklgruber but changed his name."

Alan Stark has read seven biographies of Adolf Hitler. He listens
attentively to Cox, even though he knows most of it. Stark has blond hair
and lives in California, he likes to wear running shoes in his free time,
and he's interested in German history. When Stark says German history, he
really means Adolf Hitler.

Stark is in Germany for six days. It's really only four days if you
subtract the travel time. So he and his wife have to focus on what's
essential.

Day one: Nuremberg, the site of the Nazi party rallies. Day two:
Berchtesgaden, Obersalzberg, the site of Hitler's mountain retreat. Day
three: Munich, Third Reich tour. Day four: the highlight point, Bayreuth.
"Parsifal," five hours of Wagner.

"I'm really no Nazi," says Stark. "I'm just interested in Germany."

Stark would make a lot of Germans sad. But tourists who come to Munich,
Berlin or Heidelberg have a pretty preconceived notion of this country:
Beer and Hitler.

If Germans think the world now sees them differently, they may well be
suffering from a misconception. Despite 60 years of the Federal Republic,
despite the Soccer World Cup in 2006,when Germans wore wigs in their
national colors of black, red and gold and played host to the whole world.

The Nazi story is over, and a colourful, easygoing patriotism has dawned.
Or so they thought.

Adolf Hitler Beer Tables

Cox has led the group into the Hofbruhaus. Some waiters are standing
between the large wooden tables of the vaulted hall. They know the score.
The Hitler tours are here every day. "There on the right, that's where
Adolf Hitler stood," says Cox. The group takes photos of a beer table.

"This is where Hitler presented the Nazi party's first party manifesto."
Stark walks along the rows of tables and takes pictures. He'll be taking a
lot of beer table images back to San Francisco.

The Starks will show their friends a Germany that is alien to most
Germans. The world is changing: An African American is the most powerful
man in the world, a white man is the best rapper, and Britain has the
world's most famous chef. But Germany remains the land of Adolf Hitler
beer tables.

"In Britain schools virtually only teach German history from 1933 to
1945," says Cox. He tries to change that image of Germany in his tours, he
says. Germany is changing, Cox tells his listeners. He also talks about
the resistance of siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl and the White Rose and
how some people in Munich refused to say "Heil Hitler" instead of "Gr
Gott," the standard phrase used to greet someone.

But his group is clearly more interested in his descriptions of where the
SS was founded and where Hitler drank his beer. After all, the tourists
want to hear about the Nazis, and not about the new Germany.

The tour is over a little after noon. Three American women walk up to Cox
and ask him to recommend a good caf. Cox tells them to try the district of
Schwabing.

"Where is Schwabing?"

"That's easy," says Cox. "You walk straight on up to the traffic lights.
Then turn left at Gestapo headquarters."

(source:  Spiegel)




USA:

New photo: Nazis dig up mass grave of U.S. soldiers


New photo surfaces of Nazi slave labor camp where U.S. soldiers held
during WWII

Photo donated to U.S. Holocaust museum by family of U.S. war crimes
photographer

"People have to see these. This is something that's history," Jim Martin
says

Today marks the anniversary of the liberation of the soldiers held at the
camp



The photograph is a jarring image that shows Nazi Party members, shovels
in hand, digging up graves of American soldiers held as slaves by Nazi
Germany during World War II.

Members of the Nazi Party are forced to dig up mass graves of U.S.
soldiers while American GIs look on.

While the men dig up the site, U.S. soldiers investigating war crimes
stand over them. Two crosses with helmets placed atop them -- the sign of
a fallen soldier -- are visible. Two Germans are knee deep in mud.
Another, with a handlebar mustache, has the look of a defeated man. The
bodies of 22 American soldiers were found in at least seven graves,
according to the photographer.

On the back of the photo is written, "Nazi Party members digging up
American bodies at Berga."

Berga an der Elster was a slave labor camp where 350 U.S. soldiers were
beaten, starved, and forced to work in tunnels for the German government.
The soldiers were singled out for "looking like Jews" or "sounding like
Jews," or dubbed as undesirables, according to survivors. More than 100
soldiers perished at the camp or on a forced death march.

It was on this day six decades ago, April 23, 1945, when most of the slave
labor camp soldiers were liberated by advancing U.S. troops. The emaciated
soldiers, many weighing just 80 pounds, had been forced by Nazi commanders
to march more than 150 miles before their rescue.  Watch survivor break
down in tears over liberation

The new photograph was likely taken in May or June 1945 when U.S. war
crimes investigators combed Berga. It was donated earlier this month to
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by Jim Martin and his family, whose
father, Elmore "Bud" Martin, is believed to have snapped the picture as
part of the war crimes investigation team.

The photo and dozens of others sat for years in Jim Martin's closet. Some
of the photos, including graphic images of American corpses, were placed
on record at the National Archives years ago.  See shocking photos of the
slave camp

But the image of Nazi Party members digging up graves doesn't appear to be
part of that collection. Martin said he was proud to hand over the photos.

"People have to see these. This is something that's history and it belongs
with something that's historical to tell that story. It doesn't belong in
my closet."

"To be honest, I'm kind of sorry I haven't done it sooner. We didn't
realize what it was."

Elmore Martin, who won a Silver Star for his valor in capturing images
during the war, was 28 when he shot the photographs. Before the war, he
worked as a photographer for the St. Paul Dispatch and Pioneer Press.
Martin's son said his dad, who died several years ago, struggled to keep a
job when he returned home. "I now see where it all started," he said.

What Elmore Martin and the war crimes soldiers seen in the photo couldn't
have known that day was how the case would evolve.

The two Berga commanders -- Erwin Metz and his superior, Hauptmann Ludwig
Merz -- were tried for war crimes and initially sentenced to die by
hanging. But the U.S. government commuted their death sentences in 1948,
and both men were eventually released in the 1950s. One other Berga
commander, Lt. Willy Hack, was executed, but not by the United States. He
died by hanging, justice carried out by the Soviets.

Jim Martin said his father would have been upset at the freeing of the
Berga commanders after the atrocities he documented. "He knew it happened
and to see that these people were released would be pretty devastating."

Efraim Zuroff, who has spent nearly 30 years hunting Nazis responsible for
the Holocaust, said the U.S. government commuted the sentences and freed
hundreds of war criminals like those at Berga after the war, as the Cold
War began to intensify.

"They were more concerned about keeping out Communists than admitting
victims of the Nazis," he said. "The realities out there were very
conducive of letting these people off the hook."

How should Americans feel six decades later that the government freed the
Nazi commanders responsible for atrocities against U.S. soldiers?

"We're supposed to feel very pissed off about that, to be perfectly
honest, and that feeling is very justified," Zuroff said.

The German government has since made reparations to the soldiers held at
Berga. Zuroff said now it's time for the U.S. government to do "the right
thing."

"To apologize," he said.

The Army said it is trying to figure out the best way to honor the Berga
soldiers. There are about 20 known survivors still living.

"The U.S. Army honors the service and sacrifice of all veterans who have
fought our nation's wars. The Army is working to identify the most
dignified and personal way to honor the soldiers held at the Nazi slave
camp, known as Berga," Army spokesman Lt. Col. Willie Harris said in a
written statement.

The Army refused to answer further questions about the Berga case.  Listen
in as an elderly man learns about his brother's death at the camp

Survivors have long wanted to know why the sentences of the commanders
were commuted. In a letter dated June 11, 1948, to an attorney whose
nephew died at Berga, the U.S. War Department said the sentences of Metz
and Merz were commuted because they were "underlings."

The letter goes on to say that Metz "though guilty of a generally cruel
course of conduct toward prisoners was not directly responsible for the
death of any prisoners, except one who was killed during the course of an
attempt to escape." That soldier was Morton Goldstein.

Survivors say Goldstein tried to escape but was captured. They say Metz
stood him against a wall, walked up to him and shot him, execution-style,
through the head. As his body lay on the ground, guards riddled him with
bullets, according to survivors.

The soldiers who survived were not called to testify at the war crimes
trial against Metz and Merz, instead prosecutors relied on about a dozen
soldiers' statements gathered through the course of the investigation. At
the trial, Metz blamed any deaths at the camp on U.S. medics.

"They bore the sole responsibility for the medical care," Metz told the
court, according to the book "Given Up for Dead," by Flint Whitlock,
citing trial transcripts. "I ask you: Who must bear the responsibility?
The answer is obvious: The U.S. medics."

Those comments don't sit well with Berga survivors. "He was terrible,
absolutely terrible. He lied," said Tony Acevedo, a U.S. medic who
catalogued the deaths in a diary at the camp. "Everybody hated his guts."

"Even the German guards were scared of him."  Flip through Acevedo's diary
from the slave camp

Berga survivors say they await any recognition from the Army that may
come, especially after all these years.

Morton Brooks, 83, said he constantly thinks about the day he was
liberated. He was rail thin and had walked by political prisoners shot in
the head during the forced death march. In the final hours before his
rescue, his attitude was, "Let them kill us," he said.

"I think all the time that I'm a survivor of this and I'm still around,"
said Brooks. "To me, it just amazes me. I don't know how I got through."


Jim Martin said he's still trying to process his father's role as a
forgotten American war hero, armed not with a gun, but a camera.

"The worst part is I'm just finding it out," he said.

(source:  CNN)



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


Painting, sold under Nazis, returned to owner's estate--
Art dealer Max Stern was forced to liquidate his gallery in 1937

Stern died in 1987 with no heirs

His art restoration project benefits three universities

"Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe" was returned Tuesday



An oil painting was returned Tuesday to the estate of a Jewish art dealer
who was forced to consign the painting and other artwork under Nazi
Germany before fleeing the country.

The painting, "Portrait of a Musician Playing a Bagpipe," was done in
1632 by an unknown painter from the Northern Netherlandish school,
according to a statement from the U.S. attorney's office in southern New
York.

It was owned by Max Stern, an art dealer who had a gallery in Dusseldorf,
Germany, until 1937, when the Nazis' Reich Chamber for Fine Arts ordered
him to liquidate the gallery and its inventory, the statement said.

Stern, who died in 1987, left no heirs. He and his wife had founded the
Max Stern Art Restitution Project, which directly benefits Concordia
University and McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, according to a statement from U.S Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.

The painting was returned Tuesday -- Holocaust Remembrance Day -- to
Clarence Epstein of Concordia University on behalf of the executors of the
estate, said Lou Martinez of the immigration agency.

It was returned in a ceremony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New
York, he said.

The painting had been owned by Philip Mould Ltd., a London, England,
gallery, when Lawrence Steigrad, a New York art dealer, bought it in 2008,
the New York attorney's office said.

Neither had any idea of the painting's past. Philip Mould Ltd. had
purchased the painting the year before from Lempertz Auction House. The
same auction house sold the painting in 1937 after Stern was forced to
liquidate, without receiving any proceeds from the sale, the New York
attorney's office said.

Immigration agents used information from a Holocaust claims office in the
New York state Banking Department to look into Steigrad's gallery.

The art dealer "confirmed the painting was in his possession." and he
eventually allowed agents to seize the painting, the attorney's office
said.

(source:  CNN)



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

Nazi victim: Can people without a soul be punished?


For 65 years, Elisabeth Mann has carried with her the pain only a
Holocaust survivor can know.

The only one in her Hungarian Jewish family to make it out of the Nazi
death camps, life for a long time felt like punishment.

Branded in her mind are the images of, for example, a pile of babies set
ablaze, snarling dogs and the laughter of an SS officer pointing to the
black smoke of incinerated bodies that filled the sky. And on her heavy
heart is the anguish, including the blame she feels for her brother Laci's
death.

He was 13 and not feeling well when the family arrived by cattle car at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.

"I told him to go with my mother because mothers are the people who take
care of sick children," she cried, while sitting in her Los Angeles,
California, home.

"I didn't know that with my advice I killed my brother because all the
mothers and all the children were taken to the gas chamber right away."

Given the horrors she's lived and witnessed, one might think Mann, now in
her 80s, would be among those demanding that Nazi  war criminals be
brought to justice. And yet she's uncomfortable with the ongoing attempts
to deport to Germany for trial John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old Cleveland,
Ohio, man allegedly linked to mass killings at Sobibor, a death camp in
Poland.

Demjanjuk insists it wasn't him. The pursuit of him -- and of suspects
like him -- isn't one Mann supports.

She said she never wanted revenge, because "I did not want to be like
them."

Mann doesn't think going after war criminals now is worth the cost and
energy, nor does she think the legal process will make a difference to
such men who've already lived a full life.

"What is punishment for a person who is capable to do such horror, such
horrible things to living people?" Mann, an artist, wondered aloud. "I
cannot imagine that that person has a soul or conscience or heart. ... He
simply wouldn't feel it. ... What kind of punishment could you give to a
person like that?"

Her argument doesn't work for Efraim Zuroff, who has spent nearly 30 years
hunting Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, a systematic effort that
wiped out 6 million Jews, or two-thirds of European Jewry.

"It has to be clear to everybody that the Holocaust was not a natural
disaster. ... It was created by man, against man," he said from Jerusalem,
Israel, where he coordinates Nazi war crimes research for the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization. "When
responsibility can be determined, people have to be held accountable."

On Monday, the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, the center released
its latest status report on Nazi war criminal investigations and
prosecutions. Demjanjuk tops the list of the 10 most wanted.

Others on the list include Sandor Kepiro, a former Hungarian officer who
allegedly helped kill 1,200 people in Novi Sad, Serbia, as well as Milivoj
Asner, a onetime Croatian police chief, now believed to be living in
Austria, who allegedly persecuted and deported to the Nazi camps hundreds
of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies.

In a written statement about the report, Zuroff said that since the start
of 2001, there have been 76 convictions, at least 48 indictments, and
hundreds of investigations have been launched.

Central to these actions has been a project Zuroff has helped oversee
called Operation: Last Chance, a push -- started in 2002 -- to support
worldwide government efforts to pursue aging Nazi war crime suspects.

While some countries have stepped up, including the U.S., Germany, Serbia
and Spain, others, such as Australia, Austria and Ukraine, have shown a
"lack of political will" and have failed to act, the statement says.

"The easiest thing in the world is to just forget," Zuroff, 60, said by
phone. "The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the
murderers. ... We don't think people deserve a prize for reaching an old
age."

Mann's own children couldn't agree more. Like Zuroff, they think pursuing
Nazi war criminals is the least that can be done to honor victims.

"I'm definitely in favor of going after these folks, regardless of their
age," said Mann's daughter, Nancy. "A lot of people suffered, and are
still suffering, because of the crimes that were done in the past."

Thomas, Mann's son, said that going after Nazi war criminals "sends a
message to our society and the world that it's not OK to do these things,"
and that it helps bring awareness "to people who don't know about the
Holocaust, and there are lots of them."

He told the story of a college freshman in Southern California who stood
up during a presentation his mother was giving and said she'd never heard
of the Holocaust.

"That really brings it home," Thomas said. By pursuing suspected Nazi
criminals, the process "reminds people that this did happen" and shows
that "people do care that this happened."

(source:  CNN)


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


Holocaust Museum Lets Local Voices Memorialize


Barbara Steiner survived life as a child in the Warsaw ghetto and three
Nazi death camps, emerging against dreadful odds without family or
belongings but with a powerful story to tell. Yet for decades
she was quiet about her trauma, concentrating on a new life raising her
children in this placid suburb northwest of Chicago.


In 1977, Skokie, home to many Holocaust survivors, drew national attention
when a group of neo-Nazis tried to march there.

Thirty-two years ago this summer, however, that peace was shattered when a
group of American neo-Nazis threatened to march through the village, a
destination carefully picked for its psychological punch: at the time,
Skokie was home to many thousands of Jews like Ms. Steiner who were
Holocaust survivors or their relatives.

The threatened march put Skokie at the bulls-eye of a national debate
about free speech and democratic ideals. And although the march never
materialized here, it prompted a movement among the death camp survivors
that manifested itself in an urge to speak up and teach the lessons of
their lives.

And so they organized a group and got to work.

All those decades of effort came to fruition this weekend in the form of
the $45 million Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, in the
very village the neo-Nazis had hoped to horrify. The museum was shaped by
what may be the last generation of Holocaust survivors to have such
influence over their own stories.

"It's a dream come true and more," Ms. Steiner said, preparing for the
public opening on Sunday morning, at which former President Bill Clinton
was scheduled to give a keynote address.

"Magnificent is the only word for something so beautiful," she said.

The 66,000 square feet of exhibit space asks universal questions about
human rights, as many Holocaust memorials do. But unlike similar
institutions, the Skokie museum is almost totally anchored in the local,
brought to life with the personal pictures, documents, clothing,
testimonies and other artifacts of the buildings own neighbors.

And several of the Holocaust survivors are working as docents and other
staff members, weaving their first-person stories into the history,
exploring issues of genocide around the world. They are candid about how
their sense of tranquillity was shattered by the threat of having to
encounter the swastika on Skokies streets, decades after their desperate
escapes from the Nazis.

"The rightful place for this is here, because of the march," said Samuel
R. Harris, the president of the museum and learning center, whose parents
and siblings were killed at the Treblinka death camp. "You must know what
fear the swastika brings to a survivor. The fear is immense, more than
you can write. I felt, what can I do? Very simple solution: education.

The museum's co-curator, Yitzchak Mais, former director of the Yad Vashem
museum in Jerusalem, explained its significance as filling a largely
unexplored niche.

"These are your neighbors from the Midwest," Mr. Mais said. "You'll
realize that you walked on the street with them, shopped with them at the
grocery, sat with them at the movie theater."

"You've lived with the witnesses," he went on. "It removes the distance.
This didn't happen a thousand miles away. It's about right here, and
that's very clear."

Long before the group of survivors, officially called the Holocaust
Memorial Foundation of Illinois, had a sparkling new building complete
with art galleries and a childrens wing, it did its work out of a modest
storefront on Main Street in a residential neighborhood next to a pub.

Without large donors or the attention of designers and architects, they
cobbled together a modest but poignant exhibit that welcomed busloads of
schoolchildren and anyone else who wanted to hear their stories. There
were about 20 or 30 members, Ms. Steiner recalls. (Of that original group,
she said, only three are alive today.)

They worked with little fanfare until an epiphany of sorts. It was time to
do some repairs to the storefront. What if they skipped the repair work
and instead put their energy into fund-raising for a whole new center?

"They began to dream," said Richard S. Hirschhaut, the museum's executive
director. "And this is an organization that had an annual budget at its
high point of $200,000."

But, as Mr. Hirschhaut said, it was a group known for its luck and pluck.
"They started asking, 'What if we could do more, reach more people? And
how do we do it?"  he said. "It was an easy sell for newcomers who have
fallen in love with the survivors, who adore and respect them, to go
forward."

One such relative newcomer to the group was J. B. Pritzker of Chicago, the
philanthropist scion of the Hyatt hotel chain and other investments, who
said he had become enchanted by the survivors, adopting their dream as his
own.

Approached to be the capital campaign chairman about 10 years ago, Mr.
Pritzker, the managing partner of a private investment firm, accepted. He
brought the group from having essentially nothing in the bank to where it
is today, several tens of millions of dollars later.

Ms. Steiner, a former bookkeeper at Sears and other department stores,
remembers the planning stages.

"When they were talking about millions, I said, 'Wait! You're talking
about millions! You're kidding, right? How are we able to do that?'"  she
recalled telling Mr. Pritzker in a meeting. "He said, 'Don't worry, we'll
have the money. Thank God I was wrong. He was right.'"

Mr. Pritzker, leading a pre-opening tour, said, "The lesson were trying to
teach is that in small ways in everyday life we can rise and be
up-standers. This is the universal message that the museum is all about."

Among the people who will be telling their stories at the museum is Aaron
Elster, who moved to Skokie in 1955 by way of New York City. This is where
his nightmares of hiding in a Polish family's attic for two years during
the Holocaust began to subside.

"Like many people, I didn't want to speak about my background," said Mr.
Elster, 76, a retired insurance executive. "I didn't want to be known as a
victim. But while we can, I feel that its incumbent on every survivor to
speak up."

So many are already gone.

"I personally believe that their souls are here," Mr. Elster said. "And it
becomes a holy place for people like myself."

(source:  New York Times)



POLAND:

Young Jews march in memory of Holocaust victims


Thousands of young Jews and elderly Holocaust survivors marched Tuesday
at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz to honor those who perished in
the Holocaust, while an Israeli official condemned the Iranian
president's recent anti-Israel comments.

A shofar, or ram's horn, sounded the march's start. Around 7,000 people
from more than 40 countries, many carrying the blue-and-white flag of
Israel, then streamed through the infamous wrought-iron gate  crowned with
the words "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Sets You Free"  at the former
Auschwitz camp.

Under a clear blue sky, the participants trekked 2 miles (3 kilometers) to
the sprawling Nazi sister camp of Birkenau, home to wooden barracks and
the gas chambers.

The annual March of the Living, which honors the memory of some six
million Jews who died in the Holocaust, appeared this year as a
counterpoint to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech Monday at a
U.N. racism conference in Geneva.

Ahmadinejad, who has denied that the Holocaust happened and has called for
Israel's destruction, accused the Jewish state in his speech of being a
"most cruel and repressive racist regime." His official text had referred
to the Holocaust as "ambiguous and dubious" but Ahmadinejad dropped that
reference from his speech.

Speaking before Tuesday's march, Israel's deputy prime minister Silvan
Shalom dismissed the Iranian leader's address as "a speech of hatred."

"What Iran is doing today is not too far off from what Hitler did to the
Jewish people 65 years ago," Shalom said. "He (Ahmadinejad) would like of
course to develop these beliefs that Israel has no right to exist."

But Shalom called Tuesday's march the world's answer to the Iranian
president's remarks.

"We are saying very clearly to the Iranian president and to the entire
world that Israel will continue to exist, that the Jewish people will
continue to exist, and that the world is much more united than he believes
to stop such kind of phenomena, such kind of prejudice and hatred," Shalom
said.

At least 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles,
Gypsies and others, died in Auschwitz-Birkenau's gas chambers or from
starvation, disease and forced labor before Soviet troops liberated the
Nazi-run camp on Jan. 27, 1945.

After arriving at Birkenau, some marchers placed small wooden slabs with
messages of mourning on them between the train tracks that brought Jews to
their death. One read "I love and miss you Papa Adam," while another read
"In loving memories of families Gromb and Markovity, who were brutally
killed by the Nazis."

For camp survivors, the march presented an opportunity to remember those
who perished and to pass on their knowledge to a younger generation.

"I'm back because for me this is a pilgrimage. I come back to pay tribute,
first to the ones I did know, and then to the hundreds of thousands who
died here and were murdered here," said Noah Klieger, an 83-year-old
journalist from Tel Aviv who survived the camp along with his mother and
father.

"I feel it's my duty to come because I was saved and many others were
not," he said.

The march ended in a ceremony with the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer for the
dead, at the monument to the camp's victims between the red-brick ruins of
Birkenau's crematoria.

Younger marchers said it was important to understand the horror the
survivors went through.

"I'm here right now in memory of the people who perished, in honor of the
people (survivors) who are coming back," said Nathan Koreie, 18, who came
from Los Angeles. "They had not only the strength to endure what they went
through at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but that they've come back now and they are
coming to teach us is a testament to their strength and will to survive."

(source:  Associated Press)





UKRAINE:

New Looks at the Fields of Death for Jews

In the Ukrainian town of Berdichev, Jewish women were forced to
swim across a wide river until they drowned. In Telsiai, Lithuania,
children were thrown alive into pits filled with their murdered parents.
In Liozno, Belarus, Jews were herded into a locked barn where many froze
to death.

Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi
slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot
dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known about
the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of smaller killing fields across the
former Soviet Union where some 1.5 million Jews met their deaths.

That is now changing. Over the past few years, the Yad Vashem Holocaust
museum and research center in Israel has been investigating those sites,
comparing Soviet, German, local and Jewish accounts, crosschecking numbers
and methods. The work, gathered under the title The Untold Stories, is far
from over. But to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day, which starts Monday
evening, the research is being made public on the institutions Web site.

"These are places that have been mostly neglected because they involved
smaller towns and villages," said David Bankier, head of the International
Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. "In many cases, locals
played a key role in the murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to
every one German. We are trying to understand the man who played soccer
with his Jewish neighbor one day and turned to kill him the next. This
provides material for research on genocide elsewhere, like in Africa."

"For the purposes of this project, a killing field entails at least 50
people," said the project director, Lea Prais. The killing began in June
1941 with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. From the Baltic
republics in the north to the Caucasus in the south, Nazi death squads
combed the areas.

The first evidence for what took place was gathered right after the war by
Soviet investigating committees largely focused on finding anti-Soviet
collaborators.

The new research checks that evidence against German records, diaries and
letters of soldiers, as well as accounts by witnesses and the few
surviving Jews, some of whom climbed out of pits of corpses. Sometimes,
the researchers said, the Soviets seemed to have exaggerated, and that is
noted on the Web site. One goal of the project is to learn more exactly
the numbers killed.

One little-known case comes from a German sailor who filmed killings in
Liepaja, Latvia. The film has been on view for some years at the Yad
Vashem museum. But the new Web site has a forgotten video of a 1981
interview with the sailor, Reinhard Wiener, who said he had been a
bystander with a movie camera.

According to part of his account, "After the civilian guards with the
yellow armbands shouted once again, 'I was able to identify them as
Latvian home guardsmen. The Jews, whom I was able to recognize by now,
were forced to jump over the sides of the truck onto the ground. Among
them were crippled and weak people, who were caught by the others.'"

"At first, they had to line up in a row, before they were chased toward
the trench. This was done by SS and Latvian home guardsmen. Then the Jews
were forced to jump into the trench and to run along inside it until the
end. They had to stand with their back to the firing squad. At that time,
the moment they saw the trench, they probably knew what would happen to
them. They must have felt it, because underneath there was already a
layer of corpses, over which was spread a thin layer of sand."

Ms. Prais said one of the discoveries that had most surprised her was the
way in which Soviet Jews who survived the war made an effort to
commemorate those who had perished. In distant fields and village squares
they often placed a Star of David or some other memorial, despite fears of
overt Jewish expression in the Soviet era.

"The silent Jews of the Soviet Union were not so silent," she said.

The slaughter that some of them had escaped defies the imagination. One
case Ms. Prais and her colleagues have cross-referenced involves what
happened in the town of Krupki, Belarus, where the entire Jewish community
of at least 1,000 was eliminated on Sept. 18, 1941.

A German soldier who took part in the mass killing kept a diary that was
found on his body by the Allies, she said. In it, he wrote of having
volunteered as one of 15 men with strong nerves asked to eliminate the
Jews of Krupki. "All these had to be shot today," he wrote. "The weather
was gray and rainy," he observed.

The Jews had been told they were to be deported to work in Germany, but as
they were forced into a ditch, the reality of their fate became evident.
Panic ensued. The soldier wrote that the guards had a hard time
controlling the crowd.

"Ten shots rang out, 10 Jews popped off," he wrote. "This continued until
all were dispatched. Only a few of them kept their countenances. The
children clung to their mothers, wives to their husbands. I won't forget
this spectacle in a hurry...."

(source:  New York Times)






ENGLAND:

Hitler's art attracts big sale prices


A painting by Adolf Hitler sold for almost $15,000 Thursday -- more than
six times as much as expected.

The watercolor was one of 15 items of Hitler art being sold at auction.
Together, the artworks by the Nazi leader fetched almost $120,000.

They had expected to raise just under $50,000, auction house Mullock's of
Shropshire estimated.

Many of the pictures were on the market because one of the sellers wanted
money to install a new central heating system in his house, a spokesman
for the auction house said.

"The watercolors came from a collector who is a regular vendor of ours,"
said Richard Westwood-Brookes, a historical documents expert at Mullock's.
"He'd forgotten about them for years. He found them in his garage."

He refused to disclose the identity of the seller, as a matter of policy.

Thirteen watercolors were expected to fetch $580 to $2,200 apiece, while
the lone small oil painting was estimated at up to $30,000, the auctioneer
estimates.

All of the watercolors shattered expectations -- 12 of them selling for
between $4,400 and $9,000.

The remaining watercolor -- a 1910 painting showing a figure sitting on a
stone bridge -- fetched almost $15,000. There has been speculation that
the figure was a depiction of Hitler himself.

The oil painting sold at only almost $20,000. A pencil sketch signed "A
Hitler 1914" went for almost $4,700, beating the auctioneer's estimate of
up to $3,700.

An easel thought to have belonged to Hitler sold for nearly $15,000,
having been expected to bring $2,900 to $5,800. An anonymous bidder
purchased it by phone.

Hitler dreamed of being an artist as a young man, and although he failed
to get into the Vienna Academy of Arts, he supported himself by painting
watercolors for several years before World War I, according the Holocaust
Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The auction also includes dozens of items related to Hitler's time as
leader of Nazi Germany -- including documents from concentration camps
where those deemed "undesirable" by the Nazis were imprisoned, sterilized
and murdered. Approximately 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi death
camps, alongside millions of political prisoners, homosexuals, Gypsies and
others.

"Who would want to have in their house a painting by the most horrible
murderer in the history of mankind?" asked Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center which aims to fight anti-Semitism. "Any individual
that would buy it to hang in their homes should be ashamed of themselves."

Hier said he did not object to Holocaust-related documents being auctioned
"if their purpose is to wind up in research institutions," noting his own
organization had obtained "important documents" that way.

Westwood-Brookes defended the sale of Nazi memorabilia.

"It's just as much as part of the Second World War as photographs of
(Winston) Churchill," the British prime minister during the war. "It's
something that happened and you can't ignore it."

He said he hoped buyers would preserve items such as a teenage girl's
registration document for the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp,
where approximately 1 million people were murdered.

"The intention is that people will acquire this material and make sure it
is preserved for future generations to study," Westwood-Brookes said.

The buyers could be "anybody and everybody," he said.

"There are many, many collectors of Second World War memorabilia all
around the world," he added.

"Some people wouldn't want it," he admitted, but some would, "mainly
because they want something to do with a famous person in history. In this
case it happens to be Hitler, but in another sale it might be Churchill or
Gandhi."

"I don't take any moral position" on the sale of Hitler-related artifacts,
he said. "You can't say this guy was a bad guy, so I won't sell his
memorabilia, this guy was a good guy so I will sell his. If you do that,
where do you stop?"

The Hitler paintings came from three sources, Westwood-Brookes said,
describing them as "people who had collected them over the years."

"The rest of the stuff has come in from all sorts of sources -- dealers
who acquire stuff and sell stuff from other auction houses or private
sources, members of the public who find something in the attic, and
collectors, who are constantly changing their collections and selling off
that bit that they don't want in order to buy stuff that they do."

(source:  CNN)

April 17



USA:

Nazi war crimes suspect granted emergency stay

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He called the evidence against Demjanjuk "overwhelming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(source:  CNN)





GERMANY:

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(source:  Spiegel Online)

April 12





FRANCE:

Holocaust memorial in France defaced with swastikas--Hunt for vandals who
scrawled Nazi graffiti at Drancy, wartime camp from where 63,000 Jews went
to their deaths


The government of France vowed yesterday to hunt down the vandals who
scrawled anti-semitic graffiti on the country's chief Holocaust monument.
Large, black swastikas were painted on to the memorial at Drancy, the site
of the second world war deportation camp from where tens of thousands of
Jews were sent to their deaths.

Local authorities said one of the people behind the defacement was
captured on surveillance cameras and was believed to be a man in his 20s
"of European origin".

The train carriage that was once used by the Nazis for deportations, and a
stone pillar, were daubed with swastikas. Shopfronts in the towns of
Drancy and Bobigny were also attacked, according to the police.

In a statement, the interior minister, Michelle Alliot-Marie, said:
"Everything is being done to identify those responsible for these
unspeakable acts and to bring them to justice."

The vandalism, in the middle of the Passover celebrations, sparked anger
and unease among France's Jewish population, the largest in western
Europe.

The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions said such acts were
indicative of a prejudice "deeply engrained" in French society. In a
statement, the umbrella group condemned the graffiti at Drancy, denouncing
it as an "insult to the whole of France".

The statement said: "Those responsible wanted to spit on the Jews deported
from Drancy to death camps  insult the Jews who are celebrating Passover,
the Jewish Easter  and dirty the town of Drancy."

Raphael Chemouni, responsible for the upkeep of the memorial, said it was
the first time since the inauguration in 1976 that it had been daubed with
swastikas. "Until now there has been a very great respect for this
monument," he said.

Situated on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris, the internment camp was
the site to which French Jews were taken on route to concentration camps
in eastern Europe. By the time the camp was liberated in 1944, 65,000
people had been deported on board its trains, 63,000 of whom died.
Although under overall control of the occupying Nazis, the day-to-day
running of the camp was the responsibility of the Paris police force.

Lucien Tismander, from the Auschwitz Memorial Association, said this
weekend's vandalism was particularly hurtful because of Drancy's symbolic
importance in the history of France. "This monument is in a sense the tomb
of the 76,000 French deportees and it has been sullied," he said.

(source:  The Guardian)


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

New book lays bare French collaboration with the NazisMatthew Campbell,
Paris
AN unusual history of the Nazis in France has trampled on one of the
countrys most painful taboos by focusing on women who slept with the enemy
during the occupation.

Flouting a long-running convention of silence on what he calls horizontal
collaboration, Patrick Buisson, the author, describes the Nazi occupation
as the golden age of the French brothel, chronicling a dramatic growth in
prostitution to satisfy German demand.

The book, 1940-1945, Erotic Years, is the second hefty volume in a
wide-ranging sexual history of the occupation that one critic last week
described as a magisterial provocation because of its assault on the myth
that life under the Nazi boot was all resistance, hardship and suffering.

Brothels that had been on the verge of closure before the war, as the
abolitionist league gained force, enjoyed a dramatic revival as German
soldiers poured into France.

Some of the so-called maisons closes were reserved exclusively for
officers, whose good looks and gallantry  they would bring chocolates and
flowers  won them admirers in a country whose natives were rather less
charming with prostitutes.

Im almost ashamed to say it, Fabienne Jamet, a madame at one of the top
addresses, is quoted as saying, referring to debauched, champagne-drenched
soires, but Ive never had so much fun in my life. Those nights of the
occupation were fantastic.

Seldom has a book delved as deeply into what is regarded by many as a
source of national shame: far from being forced into bed with the invaders
through economic hardship (as the official history would have people
believe), thousands of French women fell in love with German soldiers and
it is estimated that 200,000 children were born to Franco-German couples
during the war.

That the departure of the Germans caused thousands of women deep
affliction . . . is one of those facts that political necessity commands
us to ignore, writes Buisson, director of Frances History Channel and a
presidential adviser.

Members of the artistic and literary elite were particularly sensitive to
the seductiveness of the enemy, the author says. He describes a string of
romances between German officers and such iconic figures as Coco Chanel,
the fashion designer, Mistinguett, the singer, Colette, the writer, and
Arletty, the pseudonym under which Lonie Bathiat, the actress and star of
Les Enfants du Paradis, was known.

Arletty later justified her affair with a dashing young Luftwaffe captain
by saying: My heart is French but my body is international.

The aristocracy also showed a fondness for les boches and many of the most
famous Parisian hostesses, including Countess Marie-Laure de Noailles,
allowed themselves to be occupied by the invaders.

Their [the elites] behaviour helped to take away the sense of culpability
of women of more humble station who felt the same fascination or
attraction [for the enemy], the author writes.

Many, inevitably, sought favours from the Germans and there were an
estimated 100,000 occasional prostitutes working in Paris  five to six
times more than before the war. Women began dyeing their hair black in the
belief that it would make them seem exotic because the wives of their
Teutonic clients were more likely to be fair-haired.

In less than an hour, writes Buisson, a girl who sells her charms to the
occupier can earn up to three times the daily allowance that was given to
the wives of French prisoners of war in 1941.

Brothels, many of which were requisitioned for the exclusive use of the
Germans, became a booming industry, upon which the collaborationist Vichy
government imposed taxes. The business was tightly monitored by the
occupiers, who imposed three stringent weekly medical examinations on
women to prevent disease in the ranks.

The 15 doctors in charge of these inspections were obliged to sign a form
in which they acknowledged that any negligence on their part would be
considered by the Wehrmacht to be an act of sabotage.

Never have the brothels of France been better maintained than in their
presence, said Jamet, who ran a club called One Two Two. The working girls
were just as grateful. Everything indicates that the new clients of the
summer of 1940 were given a favourable form of treatment that the
seductive power of the [deutsch-mark] alone could not entirely account
for, writes the author.

Officers seemed often to regard the brothel as a home from home: They were
a substitute for the warmth of a distant hearth, convivial places where
you would go for a drink, to listen to music, to dance with the women
without necessarily going upstairs with one at the end of the evening.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 was a distressing
event for Parisian brothel owners, Buisson relates, because so many of
their youngest and most vigorous clients were redeployed to the eastern
front.

Women ended up paying for their betrayal: thousands had their heads shaved
to shame them after the liberation  the revenge of the French male,
Buisson says.

(source:  The Sunday Times)





USA:

Stolen Nazi art: Boynton Beach man, family getting paintings back----
Boynton man satisfied valued paintings are coming back to family


At 73, Peter Bloch's memories of his grandparents are faint. The Boynton
Beach retiree last saw them in Germany in 1940, when he was 5 and they
were about to be interned in a Nazi concentration camp.

But Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer will be indelible in Bloch's mind today
during ceremonies in Sacramento, Calif., when Italian Renaissance
paintings that the Nazis looted from the couple prior to World War II are
returned to his family. For decades the three works have hung on the walls
of the state-run Hearst Castle in San Simeon.

The art is valuable, if not priceless. But, said Bloch, "I think the other
aspects are more important to us than monetary value. There is great
satisfaction to be able after so many years to recover a work of art taken
during a terrible period of history."

In granting ownership to Bloch and eight other Oppenheimer heirs,
California officials acknowledge the artworks' past. The wealthy Jewish
art dealers were forced by the Nazis to liquidate their Galerie van Diemen
in Berlin in 1935.

Denounced as "Jewish capitalists" by the Nazis, Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer
fled to France in 1933. He died in Nice, France, in June 1941. His wife
was arrested in France by the Germans and sent to the Auschwitz
concentration camp, where she perished in November 1943. Proceeds from the
many valuable paintings in their gallery went to pay "flight taxes" and
other fees levied on Jews who left Germany, according to historians.

Bloch and his parents fled Germany in 1940. He retired in 2002 as food
service director at John Knox Village, a Pompano Beach retirement
community.

Efforts to recover Oppenheimer treasures began about 20 years ago, Bloch
said.

The family's Paris-based attorney, Eva Sterzing, struck a deal with the
state of California several months ago, after San Simeon curators agreed
the paintings were Oppenheimer holdings sold at a Judenauktion, a coerced
auction of Jewish possessions.

The three works were acquired by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst
for his 165-room, hilltop castle in 1935. "He was unaware of their
history," said museum director Hoyt Fields.

In recent years museums have shown a renewed interested in returning
looted art to the rightful owners, according to Erik Ledbetter, the head
of international programs and ethics for the American Association of
Museums

Twenty-five U.S. museums have negotiated settlements over Nazi-looted art
in the last 10 years.

"Our museums want no looted artwork hanging on our walls," Ledbetter said.

In a statement, Ruth Coleman, director of California State Parks, which
runs San Simeon, said, "It isn't often that we get the chance to right
such terrible wrongs. But today, we willingly and humbly do so with the
greatest amount of respect and reverence for the pain and hardships
endured by this family."

Under the family's agreement with the state, one of the pieces Venus and
Cupid, by a student of Venetian painter Paris Bordone  will remain at the
castle so it can be used to educate visitors about the Holocaust.

Bloch said Sotheby's will auction off the other two works, one a portrait
by a student of Jacopo Tintoretto, the other by a Venetian artist thought
to be Giovanni Cariani.

Fields declined to speculate on what the works might sell for. He said
when Hearst acquired the paintings in 1935, they were accompanied by
certificates of authenticity attributing them to Tintoretto, Cariani and
Bordone. But those certificates have disappeared, he said.

Sale proceeds will be divided among the heirs, including Bloch's two
sisters, in New Jersey and Atlanta, and cousins in Argentina.

"My thoughts [today] will go to the horror of what happened and to those
who perished, including my grandparents and a couple of uncles," Bloch
said Thursday as he prepared to board a flight to California. "My parents
would have been delighted to have known that some of these artworks are
returned.

"I am sorry they are not alive to witness that."

(source:  South Florida Sun-Sentinel)


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


Nazi suspect's deportation appeal rejected


A federal immigration board rejected an emergency appeal Friday for a
stay of deportation filed by the lawyer for Nazi war crimes suspect
John Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk is sought by Germany for alleged killings at a Nazi camp.

The decision by the Department of Justice's Board of Immigration Appeals
in Falls Church, Virginia, clears the way for Demjanjuk's deportation to
Germany, where he is being sought for his alleged involvement during World
War II in killings at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in Poland.

The deportation of Demjanjuk would close a chapter in one of the
longest-running pursuits of an alleged Holocaust perpetrator in history,
while also paving the way for an extraordinary German war crimes trial.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement are now free to pick up
Demjanjuk at any point and take him into custody for transport to
Germany, a board official said.

The appeals board rejected Demjanjuk's emergency stay request because it
concluded "there is little likelihood of success that his pending motion
to re-open the case will be granted," according to board officials.

The pending motion argues that a deportation of Demjanjuk, 89, to Germany
would constitute torture.

"In the four years since his deportation was [initially] ordered, his
health has seriously deteriorated," Demjanjuk's attorney, John Broadley,
told CNN in a recent telephone interview.

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

The board, however, has already signaled that argument will be rejected.

Demjanjuk may make an additional expedited appeal for an emergency stay to
the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, though his chances of getting the
board's ruling overturned are believed to be slim, according to Justice
Department officials.

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

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

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

Hier said that 250,000 Jews were killed at the camp, and that none of the
guards who worked there was blameless. "You were there for one job: kill
the Jews," he said. "And that's what they did full-time."

He called the evidence against Demjanjuk "overwhelming."

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

They studied an identification card provided by the U.S. Office of Special
Investigations, and concluded it was genuine, before issuing the warrant.

Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker living in Cleveland, Ohio, has been
fighting charges of Nazi war crimes for more than two decades. He was
previously extradited from the United States to Israel, where he was
convicted in 1986 of being "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the notorious
Treblinka extermination camp. The conviction was overturned by Israeli
courts on appeal, and he returned to the United States.

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

Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian, says he fought in the Soviet army and later was a
prisoner of war held by the Germans.

(source:  CNN)



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

Holocaust auction offers glimpse of Swedes heroic bid



One of the few precious freedom passes given to Jews fleeing the Holocaust
by Swedish World War II hero Raoul Wallenberg is up for auction in New
Hampshire this week, a reminder of the bravery so many showed battling
Nazi evil.

Word of the sale - by RR Auction in Amherst, N.H. - was intriguing news to
Robert Baron, 65, of East Dennis. His late father, Alexander, received a
similar pass from Wallenberg in 1944, helping him to escape the death
camps and raise a family in America.

"My father had no way to keep many of his documents during the times he
was trying to simply survive," said Baron, whose father authored Rainbows
Among the Ruins, a wartime memoir, in part to honor Wallenberg's heroics.

"You use documents while they help you and discard them when they may
endanger you," he said.

The document up for bid, a "schutzpass," or protective passport, was
signed by Wallenberg and issued to Mrs. Julius Heller on Aug. 23, 1944.
It bears her picture.

She is thought to be the sister of one of the many Jews Wallenberg
employed to make thousands of the passes. Bobby Livingston, sales manager
for the auction house, declined to comment on the Israeli man who
consigned the item for sale, citing confidentiality.

Livingston brought the pass to Barons Cape Cod house on Friday, granting
the appreciative son a chance to marvel at the folio of flimsy paperwork
that meant life to Hungarian Jews like his dad.

His father had already suffered Nazi depravities, but when he "ended up
getting a piece of paper with Raoul Wallenberg's signature on it, it meant
that he was protected by the Swedish government, and the Nazis couldnt
take him."

The pass is a rare item and is expected to fetch some $10,000, Livingston
said. He said the online auction, which ends Wednesday, is most likely to
attract collectors.

Diane Blake, director of research for the U.S. Raoul Wallenberg Committee
in New York, said, As the population that held onto the passes all these
years ages, I think we are going to start seeing even more of them.

"People can't hold onto them forever," she said. "We would love to have
one in our collection. I wish we could afford to bid on this one."

Wallenberg's bravery still stirs hearts. In mid-1944, the 23-year-old
businessman, born to privilege in Sweden, dared to confront the Nazi death
machine by creating a diplomatic haven for Jews.

"He must have had such an aura about him," Baron said. "My father was
very, very fortunate. Wallenberg actually saved him at least twice that
he talked about with those passes. He would just shove past all of the
Nazi captains."

Wallenberg was last seen alive in Hungary in 1945. He is believed to have
been imprsioned by the invading Soviet army.

"Wallenberg volunteered to walk into that hell," said Blake said. "He was
Swedish. His country was neutral in the war. He had no reason to be there
or care. But he went. No one really knows what motivated him to do it,
except that's just the kind of man he was."

(source:  Boston Globe)



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


Holocaust Memorial Story Comes To Temple Beth David



The New Haven Holocaust Memorial was the first such monument to be placed
on public soil  a lasting tribute to the six million Jewish victims who
were killed during World War II by the Nazi regime.

Dedicated in 1977, its simple design is meant to evoke a quick and
immediate response from all those who look upon it, even if they happen to
be passing by in their car.

For 30 years, the memorial has been a place where individuals could go for
solemn reflection and to honor the dead, and that memorials roots stem all
the way back to Cheshire, where two local businessmen designed the
monument that stands there today. And now, more than 30 years later, an
exhibit honoring their work, and the work of hundreds who have looked to
maintain that site and restore it to its original vigor, has come to
Temple Beth David.

"We are the first synagogue in the entire state to have the exhibit
brought here," said Maddy Tannenbaum, a trustee for Temple Beth David, who
chaired the committee charged with bringing the exhibit to Cheshire. "We
are celebrating our 40th anniversary this year. We are not a young
synagogue anymore. We are middle aged and we thought it was about time to
bring in an exhibit like this."

The exhibit is relatively simple in design. A set of cubicle-like walls
are arranged in a circular pattern, with each wall displaying a different
aspect of the history of the memorial, from its initial conception all the
way through the restoration process that has taken place over the last few
years. Intertwined are the stories of the people who made the memorial
possible, with memorable quotes from a variety of individuals displayed.
Outlining the entire display are pieces of what look to be barbed wire,
which criss-cross each other at each corner of the walls, representing the
real barbed wire that was used at concentration camps.

In conjunction with the exhibit, Temple Beth David will also highlight
their Adopt a Survivor youth program, which has asked students in the
synagogues religious school to each interview a Holocaust survivor and do
a project based on their life.

The survivors are all dying off, said Tannenbaum. We told the students
that they have an awesome responsibility to never forget and to say never
again.

Surrounding the exhibit are numerous poster boards, each one with a
picture of a Holocaust survivor interviewed by a student and a synopsis,
including pictures and drawings of that persons experiences.

"We wanted to make this a family-centered activity because that is when it
becomes real," said Jane Kessler, the principal at the religious school.
Kessler stated that the exhibit was a perfect addition to the project for
her students; most of whom came on the first day it was open at the
temple.

"They were awed," said Kessler. "You can get a sense with kids as to when
they are really paying attention to something and this, they were paying
attention to."

One of the reasons why the story of the exhibit appeals to both young and
old residents alike, Tannenbaum pointed out, is that the entire project
has its foundation in Cheshire.

In the 1970s, local businessmen Marvin Cohen and Gus Franzoni spearheaded
the design and construction of the memorial. Cohen, at the time, owned the
Cheshire Nursery Garden Center and Franzoni, an architect working out of
New York, had an office in town.

In 1977, Cohen was approached by the New Haven Jewish Federation about
coming up with a landscape design for the memorial. Initially, the design
was going to be a grove of trees, but after Cohen brought his friend,
Franzoni, in on the design of the project, it was decided that more was
needed.

From that initial idea sprung the memorial that today stands in Edgewood
Park on Whalley Avenue.

"It was something that was very important to me and is still very
important to me," said Cohen, now in his late 70s. "I think we are all
proud of what we did and proud to have been a part of the entire thing."

Franzoni called the memorial one of the best things I have ever done, and
stated that it was a project in which he took great pride.

"It's a place where people can go  an important place  and having been a
part of that means a lot," said Franzoni. "It means a lot that people are
learning about what it took to get it going. What they are doing now (with
the exhibit) really means a lot."

The exhibit will be open to the public from now through the end of April.
Viewing times are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and
Tuesday and Thursday, 5 to 8 p.m. There will be a closing reception for
the exhibit on April 26 at 6:30 p.m. The reception is free, but Temple
members ask that those interested in attending respond beforehand. For
more information, call (203) 272-0037.

(source:  Cheshire Herald)




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

Opera banned by Nazis revived in L.A.

(Review: L.A. Opera's "Recovered Voices" restores "The Birds."----By
TIMOTHY MANGAN)

The history of music  of all the arts, really  belongs to the innovators,
the rebels and the revolutionaries. Those that follow in their path, no
matter how skilled or gifted, are for the most part forgotten. Which is to
say that conservative artists, those that look back instead of forward,
rarely get a fair shake.

The German composer Walter Braunfels (1882-1954) didn't get a fair shake.
Los Angeles Opera tried to do something about that Saturday night when it
revived his rarely heard opera from 1920, "The Birds," as part of the
company's "Recovered Voices" project. Spearheaded by music director James
Conlon, the project unearths music banned by the Nazis, including that
written by victims of the Holocaust. Now in its third season (and long may
it continue), "Recovered Voices" has already hit gold with performances of
operas by Viktor Ullmann and Alexander Zemlinsky.

Braunfels is a special case. Half Jewish, but converted to Catholicism, he
seems to have run afoul of the Nazis not for racial reasons, but for his
criticism of them in the 1920s and for his refusal to write the group an
anthem. When, in the 1930s, the Nazis banned performances of his music and
designated it "degenerate," Braunfels' career was essentially over, though
he survived the war and continued to write music. By the time his music
was again performed after 1945, it was considered old-fashioned. Music
history had moved on.

But "The Birds" was already old-fashioned in 1920. The premiere in Munich
proved hugely successful and the opera was eventually performed throughout
Europe. A tried and true conservative as a composer, Braunfels drew on the
great German tradition of Mozart, Wagner and Richard Strauss for his
musical idiom. "The Birds" is supremely crafted music, even inspired at
times. But hearing it for the first time Saturday night, one had the
inescapable feeling of having heard it before. It's hard to imagine the
work surviving even without the Nazi ban. Little or nothing else written
in so conservative a style during this radical period in music history
has.

Braunfels himself wrote the libretto, basing it on the Aristophanes play
(c. 406 B.C.) of the same name. Two city dwellers named Good Hope and
Loyal Friend escape to the kingdom of the birds in search of a better
life. Loyal Friend convinces the birds to build a citadel in the sky and
in doing so they run afoul of the gods. Good Hope falls in love with the
Nightingale. Zeus blasts away the bird kingdom with a storm, the birds are
repentant, and Good Hope and Loyal Friend return to city life, each
learning their own lessons from the experience.

The opera opens with the Nightingale singing, in a recollection of
Beethoven's "Pastoral" Symphony. The Straussian touch is especially
evident throughout ("Der Rosenkavalier," "Till Eulenspiegel," "An Alpine
Symphony"), as well as Wagner (King Marke's declamation from "Tristan")
and Mozart (the regal choruses from "The Magic Flute"). Make no mistake,
it's all very well pulled off, beautifully orchestrated and eminently
lyrical and charming, but we've been here before. An impressive stretch of
inspiration beginning with the entrance of Prometheus in Act Two and
stretching through the storm to near the end shows Braunfels at his best.

The performance was good, not great. The unit set places the action in the
clouds and treetops. The birds are dressed in shimmering (ancient) Greek
robes, with wings, and director Darko Tresnjak and choreographer Peggy
Hickey have them prancing and fluttering about as if in a high school
play. Conlon led the orchestra in a competent run-through, but there were
few sharp corners or contrasts  the music hadn't settled in yet.

Italian soprano Dsire Rancatore provided the chirping Nightingale, pearly
and at ease in the coloratura acrobatics, drab and narrow-voiced
elsewhere. Tenor Brandon Jovanovich introduced a stentorian Good Hope who
seemed to sing everything fortissimo. Martin Gantner gave a pleasing,
veteran turn as Hoopoe; James Johnson managed a burnished Loyal Friend,
but failed to project the buffoon in the character.

Arriving as Prometheus partway through the second act, Brian Mulligan
nearly stole the show with his deep, dark and urgent warning. He seemed to
dig, where the others had merely sketched. Even the old-fashioned must be
made anew.

(source:  Orange County Register)






SCOTLAND:

Revealed: the Scots pensioner and the Nazi war crimes investigation


FOR more than 60 years Steven Brandon has lived peacefully in rural
Berwickshire, an ordinary existence in stark contrast to his life as
Istvan Bujdosoin in war-torn Hungary during the Second World War.

At his modest prefab bungalow in the small village of Earlston, the
elderly Hungarian spoke about his police service in his homeland and
recalled the most tumultuous period of his life to refute what he views as
a grossly unfair and baseless accusaADVERTISEMENTtion.

A small, thin man with sharp features and large round glasses, Brandon is
remarkably sprightly and sharp-minded for his age and remains proud of his
wartime role as a police sergeant in the Hungarian gendarmerie.

"I was a driver in the army, then joined the gendarmerie, where I was also
a driver. I have never committed any crime, and for Dr (Efraim] Zuroff to
suggest otherwise is offensive. There were thousands of police officers in
Hungary. Are we all war criminals?" he said.

The 88-year-old is a well-known and respected figure in the locality who
came to the Borders in 1948. There he married a Selkirk girl, raised a
family and worked as a mill mechanic. He is popular with the Hungarian
community in Scotland and for some years now has organised events to
celebrate Hungary's national day. A Hungarian patriot, he has erected
plaques at hotels in Selkirk and Galashiels to commemorate the visit of
the famous Hungarian leader, Lajos Kossuth, who visited the area in 1856.

"He (Kossuth] was a great man and is a hero in Hungary who fought for
freedom and democracy," Brandon said, while showing a photocopy of an old
article from the Kelso Chronicle detailing Kossuth's visit.

Inside his home, he has one room where he keeps memorabilia, including a
large Hungarian flag which he unfurled and posed beside. One wall in the
room is covered in photos and letters, and it was here that an
investigator came across a grainy sepia photograph in 2005 that resulted
in Nazi hunters tracing a man ranked as one of the world's most wanted
Second World War criminals.

That man is Dr Sandor Kepiro, 94, a former Hungarian police captain
currently living in Budapest. He is fourth on Nazi hunter Dr Efraim
Zuroff's wanted list, after concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim, whose
personal papers were recently found in Egypt, SS camp guard John
Demjanjuk, known as Ivan the Terrible and living in the US, and Alois
Brunner.

Brandon served under Kepiro and they remain close friends. It is this
relationship that prompted Zuroff to call for an investigation into the
former's role during the spring of 1944.

An investigator visited Brandon, spotted the photograph of Kepiro and from
there Zuroff and his team traced Kepiro to Budapest, where he lives across
the street from a synagogue.

Kepiro was one of several gendarmerie officers prosecuted in Hungary for
their role in the mass murder in 1942 of 1,200 men, women and children in
Novi Sad, Serbia. The victims were mostly Jews, but included Serbs and
Gypsies.

Kepiro was sentenced to 10 years' imprisonment for his role in the
murders, but the Nazis, who occupied Hungary shortly thereafter, annulled
his conviction in 1944 and returned him to service. Zuroff said that after
the war in 1946, Kepiro was again prosecuted for war crimes and convicted
in absentia, but by this time had disappeared to South America. Serbia is
currently trying to extradite Kepiro  who denies committing war crimes  to
stand trial for his role at Nova Sad.

But Brandon robustly defended both himself and Kepiro and said that
neither of them had committed any offences during their service in the
gendarmerie.

"Kepiro was my captain. I joined the police in 1943 and was posted to
Miskolc in November 1943," Brandon said. "I was there until December 1944.
I was Sandor's driver and we became good friends. We were there for
traffic control and to keep order among the population. We became known as
the 'peace guards'. We were not involved in the transportation of Jews and
I never saw anyone mistreat Jews in Miskolc. Hungarian soldiers and German
soldiers rounded up the Jews, not the police. I thought that what happened
to the Jews was terrible, really terrible. We actually believed at that
time the Nazis were taking them to Palestine. What you have to bear in
mind is that the situation back then was very difficult for many people.
The Nazis forced people to do things, as it was in Holland and Belgium.
People sometimes had no choice."

As the Allies approached Hungary towards the end of 1944, Brandon said the
Nazis forced him and Kepiro to flee to Austria so he left Miskolc with
Kepiro and drove him in an Opel Kadett car to the city of Linz in Austria,
where they stayed until 1947.

"I worked on a farm and Sandor worked on a railway. It was on the farm
that I first learned about the concentration camps. It was an SS officer
who told me. I could not believe what they had done," Brandon said.

In 1947, Kepiro left Austria for South America while Brandon came to
settle in Britain and build a new life. He moved to Hampshire before
relocating to Scotland, where he has lived happily ever since. In 1957, he
changed his name from Istvan Bujdoso to Steven Brandon. He explained that
he did so over fears that his young children would be bullied at school.

Brandon remains friends with Kepiro and insists that his associate played
no part in the killings at Nova Sad and that the truth has been distorted.

"He (Kepiro] was there but did not kill anyone and was appalled at what
happened. He reported his fellow officers for breaching an order not to
shoot and was charged with disloyalty. That was the crime he was convicted
of and that conviction was later revoked."

Nothing and no one can shake Brandon's belief in himself or the nation of
his birth. Even above his front door a small flag has been painted in the
colours red, white and green.

Hungary's chilling role in mass murder

HUNGARY'S role in the darkest events of the 20th century is not widely
known, and it is a chilling story.

During the 1930s the central European country became more dependent on
trade with Germany to help alleviate the effects of the Great Depression.
Hungarian politics drifted strongly to the right and the nation adopted
foreign policies which were supportive of Nazi Germany under Hitler and
Mussolini's Fascist Italy.

Following pressure from Germany, Hungary officially joined the Axis powers
in 1940 and the following year its forces joined the Wehrmacht in its
invasion of the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa.

In July 1941, the Hungarian government transferred responsibility for
18,000 Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenian Hungary to the German armed forces.
These Jews without Hungarian citizenship were sent to a location near
Kamenets-Podolski, where, in one of the first acts of mass killing during
the Second World War, all but 2,000 were shot.

Hungary then passed the 'Third Jewish Law' in August 1941, prohibiting
marriage and sex with Jews.

Six months after the mass murder at Kamenets-Podolski, Hungarian troops
killed 3,000 Serbian and Jewish hostages near Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, in
reprisal for resistance activities.

In March 1944 Nazi troops occupied Hungary and deportations of Jews to
death camps in Germany and Poland began. The infamous SS colonel Adolf
Eichmann went to Hungary to oversee deportations. Between May 15 and July
9, Hungary deported 437,402 Jews; all but 15,000 went to
Auschwitz-Birkenau. One in three Jews killed there was a Hungarian
citizen.

Of the 800,000 Jews residing within Hungary's expanded borders of 1941,
only 200,000  around 25%  survived the Holocaust.

In December 1944 the Red Army encircled Budapest and the Nazis were
expelled. A few pro-Nazi Hungarian units left with the Germans and fought
until the end of the war. In Landsberg in Bavaria, where Hitler had
written Mein Kampf, it was a Hungarian garrison which stood in parade
formation to surrender as US forces.


Most wanted: the Gecas case

THE most wanted Nazi war criminal to have lived on Scottish soil was Anton
Gecas.

The innocuous looking pensioner ran an Edinburgh guest house for many
years. But his sedate existence in the capital masked a horrific past.

Gecas was wanted by Nazi hunters for his part in the execution of 34,000
Jews, Soviet citizens and prisoners of war while with the 12th Lithuanian
Police Battalion. Although the then Justice Minister, Jim Wallace,
authorised extradition proceedings, Gecas was deemed too ill to face trial
and died in Edinburgh in 2001, aged 85. Lithuanian prosecutors had asked
the Scottish authorities to help them in their bid to bring the butcher to
justice.

Sixteen witnesses identified Gecas as playing a crucial role in 11
massacres in Lithuania and Belarus during the Second World War. Far from
just obeying orders, the evidence shows Gecas volunteered to lead shooting
parties and on at least five occasions was seen shooting Jews himself.

The number of suspected war criminals in Scotland is unknown. In 2006
there were reports that two men, believed to live in the Central Belt,
were the subject of a probe by the Crimes Against Humanity Unit, the
department of the Metropolitan Police that took over the case load.

The 1991 War Crimes Act allows British courts to try anyone living here
for crimes abroad in the Second World War.

(source:  Scotland on Sunday)

April 9



POLAND:

Poland Searches Its Own Soul


In "Defiance," a clunky but well-meaning action film set during
World War II and starring Daniel Craig, the Bielski brothers save hundreds
of fellow Polish Jews by battling Nazis in the Belarussian forest.
Directed by Edward Zwick and based on a true story, the movie, released
around New Year's, tried among other things to counter Hollywoods usual
tales of Jewish helplessness during the Shoah.

Whether it did, or instead implied that Jews who didnt fight bore a
measure of responsibility for their own fate, became a matter of some
passing debate in America.

But the film provoked a different sort of fuss shortly before it arrived
here some weeks later. Movie critics in Poland wondered whether Hollywood
would ever get around to showing Polish partisans as heroes, as opposed to
anti-Semites. A book rushed out by a couple of journalists for Gazeta
Wyborcza, a liberal newspaper, raised doubts about the financial motives
of the roughneck real-life Bielski brothers and was pulled from bookstores
soon after publication because of accusations of inaccuracy and
plagiarism.

Then the movie opened, and the whole issue fizzled. The film quietly
disappeared from theaters. Poland, it turned out, had already moved on.

As Europe diversifies, nearly every nation and culture on the continent
seems to battle for victimhood status. Poles have especially good reason
to see themselves as long oppressed, having been fought over and occupied
for much of the last century by vicious regimes. Shifting political power
struggles during and after the war, among other complications of Polish
Jewish history, led some Polish Jews at certain points to side with
Soviets against Nazis and Polish partisans. The whole moral morass,
essential to Polish identity, tends to be lost on outsiders, many of whom
unthinkingly regard the country, throughout most of the last century at
least, as just a Jewish killing field.

Jerzy Halbersztadt is director of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews
in Warsaw, which will soon begin construction of a new $60 million home
next to the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, paid for by the nation and the city.

Polish anti-Semitism persists, Mr. Halbersztadt said. "But Poles are more
strongly pro-American, and a side effect is that Poland also has the
strongest pro-Israel policy, to which there is no opposition anywhere on
the local political spectrum," he added. "Anti-Semitism is no longer an
issue particular to us in daily life."

Michal Bilewicz, a young Jewish psychologist who specializes in
Polish-Jewish relations, echoed that thought. He sat one recent morning in
his office at the University of Warsaw, in a building that used to be
Gestapo headquarters, beside the former ghetto.

Not that there isn't anti-Semitism in Poland, "but there is no place for
it in public today," Mr. Bilewicz said. "The last time a national survey
was done here, in 2002, although the number of anti-Semites rose slightly
- and these were almost all older people - more important the number of
anti-anti-Semites went way up."

He pointed to books like "Fear" and "Neighbors" by the historian Jan T.
Gross, documenting pogroms at Jedwabne and other atrocities by Poles
against Jews during and after the war, which provoked much public
soul-searching and made denial of Polish complicity no longer possible.

Culture, despite the virtual absence of Jews here, has meanwhile helped
shift attitudes in this country, not entirely but significantly. Walk into
a Polish bookstore these days, and youll find shelves heaving with volumes
about Jewish history and culture. There is a Jewish book fair here in
Warsaw, a Jewish cultural festival in Krakow, not to mention Mr.
Halbersztadts museum, planned to open in 2012.

Films like Roman Polanski's "Pianist," released in 2002, about a Jewish
survivor, allowed that a modicum of Polish decency outlasted the war. And
in 2007, "Katyn," directed by Andrzej Wajda, dramatized the murder of some
15,000 Polish officers by the Soviet forces, a massacre Poles were
forbidden to discuss under the Soviets. It also was part of the cultural
process of publicly untangling the complexity of modern Polish history.
Mr. Wajda has said he made the film now to reach a generation of Polish
"moviegoers for whom it matters that we are a society," as he put it, "and
not just an accidental crowd." That is to say, to reach a generation
anxious to unpack the past.

Outsiders' views of Poland may also be changing, slowly. The other day
busloads of Israeli high school students arrived, as they regularly do, at
the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, draped themselves in Israeli flags and sang
patriotic songs. Israeli security guards kept a lookout, but with no one
else around on a gray, chilly morning, the voices of the teenagers echoed
in the silent square against the surrounding Soviet-era apartment blocks.

It was the usual tour of Jewish memorial sites in Poland, a group leader
said. Such trips have for years reinforced an impression among Israelis,
as the Polish former Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz once said,
that Poland is "just one big cemetery" for Jews.

But it turns out that a few of the students on this trip were scheduled to
meet with Polish students. For the last couple of years the Museum of the
History of Polish Jews and an organization called the Forum for Dialogue
Among Nations have arranged these meetings.

"Of course there are historical reasons why the perception of Poland is
the way it is," said Andrzej Folwarczny, the forum's president. "On the
other hand, Communism taught Poles that Jewish suffering was only one
part of the general suffering of the Polish people, and that the first
150,000 or so victims at Auschwitz were Polish political prisoners. So
after Communism, when more and more Jews came here and said, 'Auschwitz is
our place of suffering,' suddenly these two sides, ignorant of each others
narrative, clashed over victimhood.

"But gradually more Poles have come to realize that their history is not
black and white, that we should be proud of Poles who saved Jews but also
be clear that other Poles killed Jews, and that something is missing from
our culture" -  he was now referring to the Jewish population of three
million before the war, today barely a few thousand - "for which we have
responsibility."

Mr. Bilewicz, the psychologist, agreed. He described two interesting
studies he conducted not long ago. In one, he said, different groups of
Israeli and Polish teenagers, brought together, were told either to chat
only about their lives today or to discuss only the war and Shoah. The
first group forged easy bonds. The second talked at cross purposes. "Both
sides need to learn to empathize more," Mr. Bilewicz concluded.

The other study surveyed residents of what used to be the Warsaw Ghetto,
where virtually no remnants of the Jewish past remain, aside from street
names and the memorial. To the surprise even of the researchers, many
residents said the Jewish history of their district was crucial to their
own sense of pride and home. The study found that the monuments, museums
and other cultural reminders of the past were essential to sustaining the
neighborhoods collective memory.

"History is being rewritten here every day," as Mr. Bilewicz put it. "How
come you in America believe that you can change, but Poles always remain
the same?"

(source:  New York Times)







GERMANY:

A QUESTION OF MORALITY----An End to Restitution of Nazi Looted Art?


For years, it has been widely accepted that artworks looted by the Nazis
should be returned to their rightful owners. But now a prominent British
expert has called for a stop to restitution -- and triggered protests in
the art world.

The art connoisseur Sir Norman Rosenthal may be a British institution, but
the equanimity often attributed to his compatriots is not one of his
distinguishing features.

Rosenthal, 64, was the leading curator at London's Royal Academy for more
than 30 years. Considered the public face of the institution, he was
knighted for his achievements. His vibrant passion for art is legendary.
He helped make British artist Damien Hirst and his peers famous when he
staged the exhibition "Sensation" at the Royal Academy. Last year, he left
the museum where he had caused many a stir -- and shocked the British and
others yet again.

Rosenthal, the son of Jewish refugees from Germany and Slovakia, called
for an end to the restitution of so-called Nazi looted art in an article
in the journal The Art Newspaper.

The fact that someone who lost members of his own family in the Holocaust
is now opposing restitution and is calling for an end to the practice has
injected a provocatively dissonant note into an already angry debate --
and has triggered fierce protest. At issue is nothing less than the
permanent whereabouts of some of the icons of art history.

Restitution is a term that has been constantly bandied about in the art
world for at least the last 10 years. It's a question of morality and the
righting of indisputable wrongs. But it has also become -- at least in
Rosenthal's opinion -- a question of big business.

It is clear that new restitutions will introduce even more turmoil into
the museum world and shrink the inventories of notable collections. The
controversy involves important artists such as Rembrandt, the German
Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, the Austrian Expressionist Egon
Schiele and even Pablo Picasso. Two of the Spanish painter's works with
somewhat murky histories are in New York, one at the Guggenheim Museum and
the other at the Museum of Modern Art. The heirs of the banker Paul von
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy recently reached an out-of-court settlement with the
two museums.

The E.G. Bhrle Collection in Zurich still owns "La Sultane," a painting by
Edouard Manet that is controversial because of its history as looted art.
Max Silberberg, an industrialist from Breslau (now the Polish city of
Wroclaw), was forced to sell the painting in 1937. Silberberg and his wife
were deported to Auschwitz five years later.

The principle of restitution seemed undisputed until recently. Who would
challenge the legitimacy of the claims of the heirs of Nazi victims to
their family property? In those cases in which museums have balked at
returning looted art, they have argued that they acquired the works in
question legally and in good faith. But does this argument truly release
them from the obligation to give back the art?

Each case underscores the unscrupulousness of the Nazis, whose special
teams systematically stole works of art from their Jewish owners from
Paris to Prague. And each case is linked to the tragedy of persecution,
and almost always to murder.

After the war, the Western Allies initially tried to shed light on the
biggest art heist in history. But a process of repressing the history
behind the stolen art soon began, clearing the way for art dealers to sell
many works to private collectors and museums around the world. Few
questions were asked when it came to determining who had owned the works
before 1945. Claims were ignored and inquiries were hampered.

It was not until a 1998 conference in Washington that 44 countries
committed themselves to finding "fair solutions." Under the Washington
agreement, statutes of limitations were lifted, at least for art in public
hands. But the treaty was not legally binding.

Austria, at any rate, enacted its own law and, after 1998, returned about
13,000 works to their rightful owners. But since 2006, when Jewish art
collector Ronald Lauder paid $135 million (102 million) for Gustav Klimt's
famous portrait "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," which had already been returned to
its owners by a museum in Vienna, the public's fascination with such
record sums and the glitz of large amounts of money have overshadowed any
gestures of fairness.

It was also Lauder who, in late 2006, bought Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's
"Berlin Street Scene" at auction for $38 million (29 million). Before
that, Berlin's Brcke Museum had restituted the Expressionist masterpiece
to the granddaughter of collector Alfred Hess, in a move that was
everything but voluntary.

Anita Halpin, the Hess heir, is still stubbornly fighting for other
paintings. A few months ago, she was awarded a painting by Franz Marc
titled "Cat Behind a Tree." Owned by a bank, the work was on loan to the
Sprengel Museum in the northern German city of Hannover.

Art historian Uwe Hartmann estimates that there are more than 10,000 works
that require investigation in German museums alone. Hartmann heads a new
office to investigate the provenance of works of art, which the government
established to assist museums. Commenting on the halting history of
restitution, he says: "After the 1998 Washington declaration, they said:
Now we're going to get started. Ten years later, they were still saying:
Now we're really going to get started."

Is there more activity today? In the Netherlands, 400 museums were
recently ordered to examine their collections. In Great Britain, an
amendment to a law is being considered that would make restitution easier.
These efforts represent an overdue moral victory.

But there are also counter-examples, especially in Germany. Museums from
Duisburg to Munich insist on their supposed right to keep their Emil
Noldes and Paul Klees, despite convincing evidence that the works were
looted. The mayor of a southern German town refuses to hand over a
painting by the 19th-century German painter Franz von Lenbach, arguing
that there is no law forcing him to relinquish the work. According to
Monika Tatzkow, an expert on looted art, the mayor says that the former
owner, Walter Westfeld, just happened to "go missing in a concentration
camp."

A district court in Berlin recently issued a momentous ruling, in which it
ordered the German Historic Museum to restitute a collection of posters
once owned by the Jewish dentist Hans Sachs, which was seized by the
Gestapo in 1938, to his son Peter. Peter Sachs chose to take the unusual
route through the civil courts, which could prove to be the more promising
approach in the future.

Ironically, the German government filed an appeal against the Berlin
court's decision. The Limbach Commission, founded a few years ago and
named after Jutta Limbach, the former president of the German
Constitutional Court, had previously ruled against Peter Sachs. It is
conspicuous that this commission has rarely been involved in disputes over
looted art in the past. Both parties to a dispute must appeal, and the
museums usually refuse.

In which direction is the mood turning, forward or backward? The latter
would be detrimental to the victims' heirs.

The best-known opponent of restitution in Germany is Bernd Schultz, 67,
the director of the Berlin auction house Villa Grisebach. In a speech at
the Chancellery two years ago, Schultz accused the heirs of having a
purely financial interest in looted art: "They say Holocaust, but they
mean money." He has never retracted the statement.

Rosenthal is also defiant, and he too wants to put an end to restitutions,
but his reasoning comes from a different direction. His motives include
the desire for reconciliation, rather than a wish to downplay the issue.

After ending his stellar career at the Royal Academy, Rosenthal is now
active in the art world from Abu Dhabi to Philadelphia. He does not
believe that restitution is an effective way to overcome the past. After
his article appeared in The Art Newspaper, which earned him the hostility
of leading members of the art world, including Nicholas Serota, the
director of the Tate Museums, he stopped commenting on the issue -- until
a new interview with SPIEGEL, in which he says: "We can no longer wipe
history clean."

Rosenthal and his Spanish wife, who works at the Prado in Madrid, have two
daughters. Every generation, says Rosenthal, must reinvent itself. The
claim to Nazi-looted art, he says, should expire with the death of the
last surviving owners.

(source:  Spiegel)



USA:

Hearst Castle to return artworks seized by Nazis----State parks officials
agree to turn over two paintings to heirs of Jewish art dealers. The
family allows a third to be kept at San Simeon to help tell the story of
the Holocaust.


For decades, three Italian Renaissance paintings have hung on the walls of
Hearst Castle without betraying their grim history.

But on Friday, state parks officials will formally acknowledge the
artworks' past, turning them over to the heirs of a Jewish couple who were
forced by the Nazis to liquidate their Berlin art gallery in 1935.

At a brief ceremony in Sacramento, the paintings will be repatriated
to descendants of Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer, who were among Germany's
premier art dealers before World War II. The transfer will be witnessed by
family members from as far as Argentina, and their Paris-based attorney,
who for two decades has been pressing claims on their behalf at museums in
Europe and the United States.

After researching the Hearst paintings since 2007, the state agreed with
attorney Eva Sterzing that they were sold at a Nazi judenauktionen -- a
coerced sale aimed at stripping Jews of their assets.

"This is an opportunity to right a wrong," state parks Director Ruth
Coleman said. "It also gives us a chance to tell the story over and over,
so we don't forget our history. Every time someone tours the castle,
they'll be learning about this."

Under the family's agreement with the state, one of the pieces -- "Venus
and Cupid," done by a student of Venetian painter Paris Bordone -- will
remain at the castle, the opulent 165-room home built by newspaper tycoon
William Randolph Hearst. Guides will be schooled in its history and make a
point of explaining it during their tours.

"I think it's marvelous that the state will continue educating people as
to what occurred," said Peter Bloch, an Oppenheimer grandson who lives in
Pompano Beach, Fla. "The family very willingly agreed to that."

The other two paintings -- a portrait by a student of Jacopo Tintoretto
and one by a Venetian artist thought to be Giovanni Cariani -- will
probably be sold by the family.

"There are nine heirs involved on three continents and trying to keep the
paintings would be difficult," said Bloch, a retired food services
manager. He would not discuss the works' monetary value.

No other pieces at Hearst Castle are thought to have tainted origins,
museum Director Hoyt Fields said. In 2003, staff members started the
laborious process of vetting the entire collection as required by the
American Assn. of Museums. However, they had not yet examined the
paintings when the Oppenheimer heirs made their claim.

Denounced as "Jewish capitalists" by the Nazis, Jakob and Rosa Oppenheimer
fled to France in 1933. He died in 1941 in France. She died at Auschwitz
two years later. Proceeds from the many valuable paintings in their
gallery went to pay "flight taxes" and other fees levied on Jews who left
Germany.

Repatriating art confiscated or looted by the Nazis has become a subject
of intense interest in the museum world only in the last decade, according
to Erik Ledbetter, the head of international programs and ethics for the
American Assn. of Museums. When the Berlin Wall fell, previously
inaccessible archives opened up. By then, descendants of Holocaust victims
were a generation or two removed from the horror, and more interested than
many of their parents in seeking reparations.

Twenty-five U.S. museums have negotiated settlements over Nazi-looted art
in the last 10 years.

"There's not a great deal of law on the subject, but the dominant view
right now is that, for sales ordered by the Nazi government, the
transaction is the equivalent of theft," said Thomas R. Kline, a
Washington, D.C., attorney who has done extensive work in the field.

Although documents tracing the ownership of disputed works are scattered,
a surprising number still exist because of the Nazis' penchant for
record-keeping.

"The consensus seems to be that they were fascinated by creating a legal
framework for their art looting," Kline said. "If a Jew fled the country
or was even taken to a camp, his property was considered abandoned and
could be seized."

Attorneys for the California State Parks Department approached the
family's claim with predictable skepticism. But they verified it after
examining numerous documents, including 50-year-old West German court
records in a successful claim filed by the family. They also conferred
with the San Diego Museum of Art, which had settled with family members in
2004 over their claim for Peter Paul Rubens' "Allegory of Eternity."

"The debate soon became: Was there a solution greater for both parties
than just returning the paintings?" said Bradly Torgan, a Los Angeles
attorney who was general counsel for the state parks at the time.

The transfer will not leave the Hearst Castle art-poor. A legendary,
voracious collector, Hearst had buyers scouting galleries all over Europe.
His home at San Simeon, which was opened to the public by the state in
1959, still holds about 25,000 pieces -- a small portion of all he
collected.

As for the Oppenheimers' paintings, "we have no evidence to indicate he
was anything other than an innocent purchaser," Torgan said. "Our best
guess is that the gallery that acquired them at auction called Hearst's
agent and said, 'We've got some pieces Mr. Hearst might be interested in.'
"
(source:  Los Angeles Times)


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

Demjanjuk: Deportation would be like 'torture'-----Appeal made to
immigration board, citing fears of physical and mental pain


The deportation of alleged Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk should be
blocked because forcing the frail 89-year-old to go to Germany would
amount to torture, his attorney said in a court filing Tuesday.

John Broadley, the attorney for the retired Cleveland area auto worker,
asked the Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Va., to block his
client's deportation and reopen a U.S. case that has ordered Demjanjuk
deported.

Germany had wanted Demjanjuk in the country Monday. But a U.S. immigration
judge Friday agreed to temporarily halt his removal from the United
States, then revoked that decision Monday. The stay expires Wednesday.

Demjanjuk is accused in a German arrest warrant of 29,000 counts of acting
as an accessory to murder at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied
Poland in 1943. He has denied involvement in any deaths.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk came to the United States after World War II
as a refugee.

In Germany, Demjanjuk would have a chance to respond to the allegations
before a judge in Munich. German prosecutors are making their case based
largely on evidence used in the U.S. to strip Demjanjuk of his citizenship
in 2002.

'Severe physical and mental pain'
In a three-page signed statement last week, Demjanjuk asked for asylum in
the U.S. and said deporting him "will expose me to severe physical and
mental pain that clearly amount to torture under any reasonable definition
of the term."

He said he suffers severe spinal, hip and leg pain and has a bone marrow
disorder, kidney disease, anemia, kidney stones, arthritis, gout and
spinal deterioration.

Broadley said a government physician examined Demjanjuk on Thursday to
determine his ability to travel and there was "dramatic evidence" of his
back pain. Broadley submitted a portion of the exam videotape to the
government on Friday as part of his argument against deportation.

The Justice Department responded by saying Demjanjuk's medical capacity to
stand trial abroad "is, of course, irrelevant in a removal proceeding."

Demjanjuk first gained U.S. citizenship in 1958. But his citizenship was
revoked in 1981 when the Justice Department alleged he had served the
Nazis as the notorious Nazi guard "Ivan the Terrible" in Poland at the
Treblinka death camp.

He was extradited to Israel in 1986, and two years later he was found
guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He appealed, and
Israel's Supreme Court in 1993 ruled that Demjanjuk was not Ivan the
Terrible and allowed him to return to the United States.

His U.S. citizenship was restored in 1998. The Justice Department went
after his citizenship again, making a case that he had served at Sobibor
and other death or forced labor camps.

(source:  MSNBC News)



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


Rare Holocaust artifact stolen from Elmore store

A rare Holocaust artifact found at Auschwitz concentration
camp in Poland during World War II has been stolen from an Elmore antique
shop, the store owner said.

Ernie Scarano, owner of Mantiques on Rice Street, said he noticed the
artifact, a Star of David that was part of a piece of art for sale in his
shop, was missing this afternoon and reported the theft to Elmore police.

Scarano believes someone snatched the star, made of woven felt and sewn on
heavy canvas, while the store was open during the past week or two. He
said the star was with the artwork, an abstract sculpture that represents
good and evil, about 10 days ago.

Somebody just lifted it while they were back there browsing around in the
art section, he said.

Anyone with information regarding the theft is asked to call the Elmore
Police Department at 419-862-3100.

(source:  Port Clinton News Herald--Ohio)


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


Holocaust Commission wins Senate approval

A Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission would be created under a bill
passed unanimously by the Senate on Tuesday. The 18-member commission
would meet four times a year to provide educational materials to schools
and colleges, help implement course studies and awareness programs. It
also could coordinate work among organizations, agencies, museums, as well
as survivors.

The bill was co-sponsored by Sens. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and Florence
Shapiro, R-Plano, whose parents were Holocaust survivors.

"This is a very personal bill for me. I get pretty emotional when I talk
about issues like this," Shapiro said.

Citing that 15 million people were killed in the 20th Century through
persecution, Ellis and Shapiro said the bill is designed to provide the
learning tools so that the atrocities from Auschwitz to Darfur might not
be repeated.

"You don't need death camps or gas chambers," Shapiro said. "Mass killings
with the idea of wiping out a people can be carried out with machetes."

(source:  Dallas Morning News)

April 6




AUSTRALIA:

Schindler's List found in Sydney


A list compiled by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler has been
discovered by a researcher at a library in Australia.

Schindler's list helped hundreds of Jewish workers escape death in the
Holocaust during World War II.

It was found in research notes which belonged to the Australian author of
Schindler's Ark - the basis for the Oscar-winning film, Schindler's List.

The document was found at the New South Wales Library in Sydney.

There are 13 pages of fragile, yellowing paper, upon which are typed the
names and nationalities of 801 Jewish people.

They are being described as some of the most powerful documents of the
20th Century.

Gas chambers

The list was hurriedly typed on 18 April 1945, in the closing days of
World War II, and compiled by Oskar Schindler, a card-carrying Nazi.

Schindler ran a factory in Krakow, Poland, during the war, where he used
Jewish labour.

Appalled by the conduct of the Nazis, he sought to persuade officials that
his workers were vital to the war effort and should be spared from the
death camps.

"It saved 801 men from the gas chambers... It's an incredibly moving piece
of history," library co-curator Olwen Pryke said.

This Schindler's list was found sandwiched between research notes and
German newspaper clippings gathered by Australian author Thomas Keneally.

Ms Pryke said neither the library nor the book dealer, from whom it bought
the six boxes of material in 1996, realised the list was hidden among the
documents.

Mr Keneally was handed the list almost 30 years ago in a shop in Los
Angeles, by one of the people whom Schindler helped - Leopold Pfefferberg,
Jewish worker 173 on the list.

Mr Pfefferberg wanted the novelist to write Schindler's story.

April 4



AUSTRIA:

Vienna gives up art expropriated in Nazi Germany


The city of Vienna has set a precedent for the restitution of artworks
expropriated under the Nazi regime by this week giving up a piece that a
German Jewish banker was forced to auction in 1934.

The city council chose to return the artwork to the heirs of Herbert
Gutmann even though the Austrian law for art restitution only covers the
period between 1938, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and 1945,
when the Third Reich was defeated.

"It was about ... overruling the timeframe of the current restitution law
in view of a moral obligation," said Andreas Mailath-Pokorny, Vienna city
councilor for culture.

Herbert Gutmann was a wealthy Jewish banker, the son of a co-founder of
Dresdner Bank, Eugen Gutmann.

Forced out of the banking world after the Nazis came to power in Germany
in 1933, he sold his art collection and other possessions and fled to
Britain in 1936.

The Museum of Vienna acquired the painting "Pappenheim's Death," by Hans
Makart, from a Danish art dealer in 1968, but this week handed it back to
Gutmann's grandchildren.

"We hope the other pieces once belonging to our grandfather and which we
are currently pursuing will be restored to the family soon," Gutmann's
heirs said in a statement.

The case sets a precedent in Austria, which said last year it wanted to
tighten restitution rules and seek the return of works taken between 1933,
when Hitler first came to power in Germany, and 1945.

The government's move was prompted by criticism from the Austrian Jewish
community that it was not doing enough to guarantee art restitution, and
the law is likely to be amended this year.

"This is a milestone in the history of the restitution process," said
historian Michael Wladika and restitution specialist at the Museum of
Vienna.

"Vienna took special measures given that this was clearly a case of
expropriation."

Property belonging to Jews was confiscated as a matter of course during
Nazi rule in Germany and neighboring countries.

Thousands of art works have been returned to their original owners or
their heirs under Austria's present art restitution law, include five
paintings by art Nouveau master Gustav Klimt.

One of the 5 returned to the Bloch-Bauer family who originally owned
them was sold for $135 million in a private sale, believed to be the
highest price ever paid for a painting.

The remaining four fetched a combined $192.7 million at an auction at
Christie's in November, 2006.

(source:  Reuters)





GERMANY:

'Nazi guard' deportation blocked


A US judge has blocked an order to deport an alleged Nazi concentration
camp guard, two days before he was due to be extradited to Germany.

John Demjanjuk, 89, is accused of involvement in the deaths of 29,000 Jews
at a camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

He denies any involvement and has asked for asylum in the US, arguing that
deportation would constitute torture.

An immigration judge said the block would stay until a decision had been
reached on whether to re-open his case.

Lawyers for Mr Demjanjuk say his health is far too poor for him to make
the journey.

In March, Germany issued an arrest warrant for the Ukraine national over
the deaths of thousands of Jews at the Sobibor camp during World War II.

But Mr Demjanjuk, who migrated to the US in 1952, says he was a prisoner
of war of the Nazis rather than a prison guard.

In 1986, he was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death for war
crimes, after being identified by witnesses as "Ivan the Terrible" - a
notorious prison guard at the Treblinka camp.

But the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction, when new evidence
emerged suggesting he was not the same guard.

He returned to the US but was accused of lying on his immigration
application about working for the Nazis.

In 2002, a US immigration judge ruled that there was enough evidence to
prove Mr Demjanjuk had been a guard at several Nazi death camps and
stripped him of his citizenship.

German authorities now say they have new evidence linking him to the
crimes of which he has been accused.

(source:  BBC News)






USA//OKLAHOMA:

Holocaust Exhibition At Museum


"Deadly Medicine"----Here Through July 5


"Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," a Holocaust exhibition, will
be on display at Science Museum Oklahoma (Kirkpatrick Museum, 2100 NE
52nd St.) through July 5.

The exhibit examines how the Nazi leadership, in collaboration with
individuals in professions traditionally charged with healing and the
public good, used science and medicine to help legitimize persecution,
murder and, ultimately, genocide.

"Deadly Medicine" is a traveling exhibition of the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum.

Oklahoma City has been chosen as one of three international sites for the
2009 tour.

The exhibit has been brought to the state by the Jewish Federation of
Greater Oklahoma City.

"The exhibition reminds us that only 64 years ago, 11 million people were
killed and debased in one of history's most horrific acts of hatred," said
Edie Roodman, executive director of the federation.

"That's approximately the entire population of Oklahoma, Kansas and
Colorado combined," she continued. "This gripping exhibition underscores
the warning signs of he abuse of scientific knowledge and the dangers of
remaining silent in the face of evil."

Nazi Germany's genocide against the Jews, Miss Roodman said, and the
murder and persecution of millions of others was founded upon the
conviction that "inferior" races and individuals must be eliminated from
German society.

"This was believed necessary so that the 'fittest Aryans' could thrive,"
she
explained.

"The Nazi state fully committed itself to implementing a uniquely racist
and anti-Semitic variation of genetic cleansing thought to
'scientifically' build what it considered to be a superior race," the
federation executive director remarked.

Germany adopted "racial hygiene" practices, she said, providing tax
credits to large "valuable" families and sterilization of genetic
"inferiors" to eradicate people of certain races, religious beliefs, the
blind, deaf, children with birth defects and those suffering from mental
illness.

(source:  The Black Chronicle)




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


USA//PENNSYLVANIA:

U.S. seeks to deport former Nazi guard now in Mercer County


Deportation proceedings have started against a Mercer County man who
served as an SS guard at two Nazi concentration camps during World War II,
the Department of Justice announced Friday.

Anton Geiser, 84, of Sharon had his citizenship revoked in 2006 through a
civil process started by the government. He has not been convicted of any
crime.

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Geiser's appeal. On
Wednesday, the government filed deportation papers with an immigration
court in Philadelphia.

Neither Geiser nor his lawyer could be reached for comment.

Deportation could be complicated because of Geiser's age, poor health and
the fact that his native country, Yugoslavia, no longer exists. His former
hometown now is in Croatia.

Geiser was drafted into the German army in September 1942 and trained in
the Waffen SS to be a prison guard. He was stationed at Sachsenhausen and
Arolsen, a sub-camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The Nazis killed an estimated 6 million Jews during World War II, with
most dying in concentration camps. Geiser said in court records that he
never killed or harmed anyone.

Geiser came to the United States from Austria in 1956 and became a citizen
in 1962. He worked for 31 years at Sharon Steel.

Since 1979, the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations has
had 107 people de-naturalized or removed from the country for being former
Nazis.

(source:  Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)




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


USA//CALIFORNIA:


Stamps, Coins and Artifacts: Haunting items from the Nazi era grow in
price - even camp uniforms


"If you forget the past, you're doomed to repeat it," or some variation
thereof, is a quote that's been recited ad infinitum for any number of
reasons. I thought about that when I visited France and Germany a few
years ago.

In both countries, I attended various coin and collectible shows. At each
one, dealers offered a variety of historic relics from the 1940s  clearly
a significant era for that part of the world. What were most curious were
the coins, currency and relics from the Nazis. On most every one a small
colored paper dot covered some portion of the item. When I inquired, the
dealers revealed that the dot covered any swastikas imprinted on the
objects.

Because both France and Germany were so decimated by the Nazi regime and
campaign, neither wishes to relive the era and has banned the swastika
from being displayed in any form. That includes historic items or
artifacts.

Those restrictions are a far cry from those we have here in the United
States. In the 1960s, the trade in Nazi memorabilia was prolific. Actual
daggers, medals, helmets, etc., changed hands for very little money.
American soldiers had brought many of those items back. Salvers shipped
others to the states from Germany hoping to make a few bucks.

Today, German World War II artifacts are substantially more valuable.
David Kols is certainly aware of that. He is president of Regency Superior
Auctions. Though specializing for years in rare stamps, Kols has expanded
his offerings to include space and aeronautic collectibles, sports
memorabilia and "militaria," focusing primarily on genuine items from the
Nazi era.

In an auction being held April 16-17 in Beverly Hills, many such items
will cross the block. Included in the catalog are pages of items from a
variety of branches of the German armed forces. From the Luftwaffe to the
SS and even Hitler Youth, the offerings include medals, badges, books,
armbands and propaganda posters.

Some of the most telling reflect the horror of the concentration camps.
Several postcards are being sold that were sent into and out of Camp Dora
replete with the censor markings. Naturally, the Germans were careful to
prohibit any information concerning the conditions the prisoners were
forced to endure. A chilling reminder of that is in another lot in the
sale. The item is a prisoner's metal tag from the infamous Dachau camp.
The imprint suggests it was for prisoner No. 785, housed in Block 5.

Along with the tag is an artifact from one of the perpetrators. It is an
SS collar patch once belonging to Obersturmbanfurer Altena  recognized as
"one of the worst war criminals in the SS." Kols is one of the leading
sellers of this type of military memorabilia and the largest auction house
offering the most haunting types of artifacts  those of actual Holocaust
victims and survivors. A Jew himself, Kols has a special interest in
making these items available. In part it may be because he's committed to
people never forgetting.

In previous auctions, he has sold items with "Jude" imprinted on them that
Jews were forced to display and Star of David insignias from prison camps.

Some of the rarest and most valuable items are the actual uniforms worn by
prisoners. Their substantial value is because so few who survived wanted
to keep what they were forced to wear. The vast majority of those uniforms
were burned or buried just after the war.

The few surviving and authenticated uniforms can sell for over $10,000
apiece. Clearly, there are more such pieces still stored away, especially
in Europe.

"The primary buyers of that type of item are Holocaust museums," said
Kols. "It's important that they be able to exhibit actual items and
artifacts to make sure the story is told."

(source:  Peter Rexford, Sacramento Bee)








FRANCE:

Chanel and the Nazis: what Coco Avant Chanel and other films don't tell
you

Why is Coco Chanel getting a free pass on her collaboration with the
Nazis? Her past was deeply compromised


K
As we gear up for cultural Chanel-mania this summer with two hagiographic
films about the designer, a new biography and the sound of slavering from
glossy magazines, it is worth pausing to investigate Coco Chanel's
wholesale - and retail - involvement with the Nazis.

The world's greatest fashionista may have rescued women from the corset,
but she did not have a good war. When shoppers swoon over the iconic
quilted handbag with the CC logo, most are unaware that Chanel once went
to Berlin to plot with Walter Schellenberg, who wore his Waffen SS logo as
Hitler's chief of foreign intelligence.

Perhaps Chanel-lovers also have no idea that she tried to wrest control of
her perfume manufacturing from a Jewish family, taking advantage of
pro-Aryan laws. Or that she was arrested for war crimes - and then
mysteriously released.

Previously, I'd seen it mentioned that Chanel had survived the war rather
comfortably at the Paris Ritz in the arms of a Nazi officer, Hans Gunther
von Dincklage, and then gone into exile in Switzerland with him, but a few
hours spent in the library revealed that she was far more deeply involved
with the Germans than that. There was even a (somewhat ridiculous) Nazi
plot, using Chanel as bait, called Operation Modelhut.

None of this will be discussed, of course, in two upcoming biographical
films: Coco Avant Chanel, starring Audrey Tautou, and Coco Chanel and Igor
Stravinsky, with Anna Mouglalis, about Chanel's relationship with the
Russian composer. Nor was it detailed in a Chanel television mini-series
with Shirley MacLaine last year, or in the 1981 film Chanel Solitaire.
With commercial good sense, all films avoid the German invasion of Paris
and Chanel's collaboration. It's a case of Don't Mention The War!

Time heals, but sometimes it's worth opening the wound again when a
reputation suddenly appears to be sanitised. While Chanel's biographer,
Edmonde Charles-Roux, says her style genius consisted in being
incorruptibly sober and pure, her life was less clean-cut. Paris during
the occupation was a compromising and uncomfortable place for other
artists and writers, who tended to keep their heads down: Oh, I am not
looking for risks to take, said Picasso, her friend, but in a sort of
passive way I do not care to yield to either force or terror.

Edith Piaf sang in nightclubs for the Nazis. Jean-Paul Sartre said:
Everything we did was equivocal. We never quite knew whether we were doing
right or wrong. A subtle poison corrupted even our best actions.

But Chanel was unequivocal. She decided to place herself snugly in the
enemy's bosom, conveniently near to her shop. After the Paris invasion she
fled to the country, but returned a year later to demand back her room at
the Ritz, which had been commandeered by the Germans. There, aged 56, she
shacked up with von Dincklage, a German playboy officer 13 years her
junior, who may have been a spy and was known frivolously as Spatz or
sparrow.

Whatever his role, von Dincklage's coterie brought Chanel into high Nazi
circles, yet she remains inexplicably untarnished, unlike Unity Mitford
and Diana Mosley. It's hard to tell what the intentions of Operation
Modelhut were, but they included the peculiar idea that one of Chanel's
friends, who knew Churchill well, would pass a letter from her suggesting
that there should be secret negotiations to end the war. Chanel - who had
met Churchill once or twice at social events - obviously saw herself as a
heroic figure in this.

Schellenberg was interrogated by the British after the war concerning the
visit in 1943 from Frau Chanel, a French subject and proprietress of the
noted perfume factory. According to the transcript: This woman was
referred to as a person Churchill knew sufficiently to undertake political
negations with him, as an enemy of Russia and as desirous of helping
France and Germany whose destinies she believed to be closely linked
together. Operation Modelhut fell apart, and the mutual friend of
Churchill and Chanel denounced her as a German agent.

It seems to me that Chanel bent to the times, always intent on survival.
The French call this Systme D, or systme dbrouillard, which means getting
round the rules somehow. As Charles-Roux notes, playing refugee was not
her style, hence Chanel's move to the Nazi-infested Ritz. Who else could
afford to buy her perfume? Later, when the law banned Jews from owning
companies, she tried to depose the Wertheimer family who manufactured her
scents. And towards the end of the war, as the Germans looked less than
victorious, Chanel revived her largely imaginary friendship with
Churchill.

After the war, thousands of the collaboratrices horizontales - sexual
collaborators - had their hair shorn in public humiliations, yet Chanel
was arrested and soon released, though no one knows exactly who among the
Allies protected her. Was it her connection with the Duke of Westminster?
There's no proof, except that Chanel and her perfume royalties went into
exile in Switzerland for a decade, because she was most definitely not
wanted at home.

Chanel made a comeback in 1956. The French papers panned her collection as
old hat: she was not forgiven. But across the Atlantic, the Americans just
loved those bags and little black dresses. Sales grew, Chanel was
rehabilitated, and history faded away. Now she is merely a brand in Karl
Lagerfeld's hands.

In his fascinating book, The Shameful Peace, Frederic Spotts notes that
"the occupation was merciless in exposing character." Keep that in mind -
or, if you do go to the Chanel films this summer, turn off your mobile
phones, forget Chanel's compromised past and enjoy the show.

(source:  The (London) Times)

April 2



GERMANY:

Former Nazi camp guard to be extradited to Germany


Former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk will be extradited from the
United States to Germany Sunday, a spokesman for the Germany Justice
Ministry told CNN Thursday.

Demjanjuk has been fighting charges of Nazi war crimes for well over two
decades. He was extradited from the United States to Israel, where he was
convicted in 1986 of being Ivan the Terrible, a guard at the notorious
Treblinka extermination camp. The conviction was overturned on appeal and
he returned to the United States.

The United States filed new charges against him in 1998, again alleging
that he had been a concentration camp guard. He was stripped of U.S.
citizenship and has been awaiting deportation since 2004, despite fighting
his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

(source:  CNN)

March 29


ENGLAND:

Britain eyes return of art stolen by Nazis


Holocaust survivors and their families should be given back works of art
stolen by the Nazis during World War II, a British lawmaker proposes.

Andrew Dismore, a member of the British Parliament, has proposed the
Holocaust Restitution Bill that would allow paintings and other artistic
works stolen by the German Nazis to be returned to their rightful owners,
The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday.

The proposed bill would focus on those works of art in national
collections in Britain.

"I hope it will close another chapter from the Holocaust," Dismore said.
"It means recognizing a right that has been denied for decades.

"I suspect many people would be prepared to allow their artwork to stay in
public collections but it's their right to decide what happens to it."

The Telegraph said among the items that could possibly be affected under
the proposal is the 1525 painting "Cupid Complaining to Venus." The work
by Lucas Cranach was once owned by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, but recently
has called the National Gallery its home.

(source:  United Press International)






USA:

US group performs Nazi death camp orchestra music


A group of musicians is performing the music of a special orchestra from
the Holocaust: death camp prisoners - all women - who survived by playing
for the Nazis.

They were led by Gustav Mahler's niece, Alma Rose.

Now, the Ars Choralis orchestra and chorus is telling their story at
concerts entitled "Music in Desperate Times: Remembering The Women's
Orchestra of Birkenau."

It was part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland.

On Saturday, Ars Choralis will play at Manhattan's Cathedral Church of St.
John the Divine. Its Episcopal bishop spoke against the persecution of
Jews in Europe already in 1933.

The group will perform in April in Berlin and at the site of a nearby
camp.

____

On the Net: http://www.arschoralis.org

(source:  Associated Press)




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


Holocaust survivors meet soldiers who saved them


During the Holocaust thousands of Jewish people on a train in Germany
were rescued from the Nazis. Now some of the survivors are meeting face
to face with the American soldiers who saved them.

Two thousand five hundred Jewish people were on a train to be exterminated
in a German concentration camp. But before it happened the German army
abandoned them.

"We intercepted this train and I played a very small part in it to gather
these people together, getting them onto vehicles," World War II veteran
Frank Towers said.

American soldiers brought the Jews to safety, and then continued fighting
in the war, while the American Government set the prisoners free. Now
those soldiers from the 30th Infantry Division are meeting face to face
with the Jews they saved.

"They're very grateful naturally, and they see April 18, 1945 the date of
the liberation as the date they were reborn," Matthew Rozell said.

Matthew Rozell is a high school teacher from New York and says these
liberators and former prisoners found each other through a holocaust
project by his students.

"Some of the survivors here today actually found themselves in those
photographs taken 64 years ago and they never knew they existed until my
students and I put them on our high school website," Rozell said.

Towers remembers the day he and fellow troops saw the prisoners. He says
they were nearly starving, infested with lice, and covered in feces from
being trapped on the train for five days.

"It was hard to believe that they were in the condition that they were,
that any human race could do this to any human race it was almost
unbelievable," Towers said.

Many of the Jewish refugees on the train had no homes to return to, and
they immigrated to countries including the US, Canada. and England.

(source:  WCSC)




GREECE:

Greek neo-Nazi acquitted of Holocaust denial


An Athens appeals court acquitted a well-known Greek neo-Nazi of
Holocaust denial.

The five-member court on Friday found Kostas Plevris not guilty of
"incitement to racial hatred and violence against the Jews" over his
1,400-page book "Jews -- The Whole Truth," which denies the Holocaust and
is blatantly anti-Semitic.

Plevris had been convicted in December 2007 and sentenced to 14 months in
prison, as well as three years probation.

The Greek Jewish umbrella organization, the Central Board of Jewish
Communities in Greece, in a news release said the court's decision
"saddens, perplexes and causes concern among citizens of a modern
democratic society as a self-confessed promoter of Nazism and racism
remains unpunished though he not only distorts proven historical evidence,
but even worse, uses his pen to incite hatred and provoke discrimination
and violence against citizens of Greece and Europe."

In the book, Plevris calls Jews "sub-human" and writes, "I constantly
blame the German Nazis for not ridding our Europe of Jewish Zionism when
it was in their power to do so." He also urges his readers to "Free
yourselves from Jewish propaganda that deceives you with falsehoods about
concentration camps, gas chambers, 'ovens' and other fairy tales about the
pseudo-holocaust."

(source:  JTA)






BRAZIL:

Brazilian bishop twists the Shoah


A Catholic archbishop in Brazil minimized the Holocaust and declared that
Jews dominate the world media.

Dadeus Grings, the archbishop of Porto Alegre, declared that "more
Catholics than Jews have died in the Holocaust, but this is not usually
told because Jews own the world's propaganda."

In a six-page interview that appeared Friday in the Brazilian trade
magazine Press & Advertising, Grings went on to say, "How many millions of
Catholics were victims of the Holocaust? Twenty-two million? The Jews say
they were the major victims but the major victims were the Gypsies, who
were exterminated. And they don't mention this."

Porto Alegre is home to Brazil's third largest Jewish community, with some
12,000 Jews.

"It's not the first time Mr. Grings refers to the Holocaust in a twisted
way," said Henry Chmelnitsky, president of the Rio Grande do Sul Jewish
Federation. "Fewer Jews died in World War II because there were and there
still are fewer Jews in the world. Proportionally, the extermination
minimized by the archbishop meant the slaughter of most of a people that
was already small. By reproducing stereotypes created by the Nazis, Grings
positions himself on the wrong side of history."

Grings is the second Catholic bishop in recent months to publicly minimize
the Holocaust.

Richard Williams, who headed a seminary in Argentina, caused a furor over
his public denial that gas chambers were used to murder Jews during World
War II and over claims that no more than 300,000 Jews were killed by the
Nazis. His rehabilitation by Pope Benedict XVI in January after decades of
exclusion over his membership in an ultra-right traditionalist sect
sparked a rift in Catholic-Jewish ties.

(source:  JTA)






FRANCE:

Jean-Marie Le Pen repeats Holocaust comments in European Parliament

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French far-Right leader, faced calls for his
prosecution after he repeated a claim that Nazi death camps were a "detail
of Second World War history".


MEPs have moved to prevent the 80-year-old French National Front leader
from presiding over the opening of the first session of the new European
Parliament on July 14 as the doyen of the house.

Officials have also indicated that he could face disciplinary action for
"bringing the parliament into disrepute" by using his immunity as an MEP
to avoid criminal prosecution for Holocaust denial.

Mr Le Pen on Wednesday caused a storm in the parliament by defiantly
hitting back at "inflammatory accusations" that he was a convicted
Holocaust denier who should be denied his right next year to become
"father" of the Parliament as the oldest sitting MEP. Mr Le Pen will
celebrate his 81st birthday following European elections in June, making
him the parliament's oldest member.

"I just said that the gas chambers were a detail of Second World War
history, which is clear," he told a sitting of the EU assembly.

Martin Schulz, a German Social Democrat and leader of the parliament's
Socialists, led the calls for Le Pen to be stripped of the privilege.

"As a German, I feel obliged to fight against all those who consider Nazi
crimes to be a 'detail of history'," he said.

But despite fines and convictions for making identical remarks twice in
the past, the French politician cannot be prosecuted for his comments on
Wednesday because he is protected by parliamentary immunity.

"He is exploiting immunity for his own squalid and evil ends. Disciplinary
action and the rule change preventing him from becoming father of the
house are certain now," said an official.

Mr Le Pen was convicted by a Munich court in 1999 for "minimising the
Holocaust" after telling a German far-right meeting that Nazi
concentration camps and the gas chambers are "what one calls a detail".

On that occasion, the EU assembly lifted his immunity because the comments
had been outside the parliament chamber.

Mr Le Pen also received a large fine of 1.2 million francs in France for
making identical claims in 1987.

He has had a string of other convictions for racism or inciting racial
hatred and was banned from being an MEP in 2003 following a physical
attack on a French Socialist MEP.

(source:  The Telegraph)

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


New Web site aims to work against Holocaust denial


In Paris, a new Web site aimed at curbing Holocaust denial will include a
history of Muslim-Jewish relations in English, French, Arabic and Farsi,
the project's organizers said before the project's launch on Friday by
prominent figures from Europe and the Muslim world.

The initiative, called Project Aladdin, hinges on the Internet site, which
is also to carry a history of the Holocaust and offer online Arabic and
Farsi translations of books including "Anne Frank's Diary," the organizers
said.

Among those unveiling the project include Senegalese President Abdoulaye
Wade, former French President Jacques Chirac and Abdurrahman Wahid, former
president of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation.

Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil, one of France's most influential woman
politicians, will also speak at the event.

Concerns about Holocaust denial captured headlines earlier this year when
the Vatican lifted the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop.
Holocaust-denying comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have
also sparked worldwide outrage in recent years.

Former US President Bill Clinton hailed Project Aladdin, which he said in
a letter "has the potential to play a vital role in countering denial with
facts and putting a human face on something that otherwise might seem too
terrible to believe."

The initiative, which was to be launched at UNESCO's Paris headquarters,
is partially sponsored by France's Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah.

Organizers said that more than 200 people, many prominent public figures
from across the Muslim world, have joined the project's so-called
"conscience committee." Jordan's Prince El Hassan Ben Talal and former
German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are among the project's sponsors,
organizers said in a statement ahead of the launch.

(source:  GMA News)







March 24



GERMANY:

HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS----Germany Agrees to Raise Compensation for Nazi
Victims


Long negotiations with the US-based Claims Conference have led to 60
million more in compensation payments to Holocaust survivors -- mainly
aimed at poor and elderly victims from Eastern Europe.

Eastern European victims of the Holocaust will receive more money from the
German government according to a deal reached on Thursday with the New
York-based Claims Conference. Some survivors will see their monthly
stipends rise, while others who have failed to win compensation from the
so-called Hardship Fund will be allowed to apply again.

More help is on the way for some Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe.
The re-application agreement will bring about 33 million ($42 million) in
additional money over the next decade to the Hardship Fund, intended for
Eastern Bloc victims of Nazism. It could affect as many as 13,000
survivors of German concentration camps now living in 36 nations,
including Israel, the US, Germany, Australia and Canada. They can apply
for one-time payments of about 2,500 each.

Until now, victims who had already applied for restitution from the
Hardship Fund, but whose applications were rejected, could not file a
second time. That rule has now been reversed.

The German government also agreed to pay more in benefits to elderly Jews
in Eastern Europe. As of January 2010 the monthly stipend for elderly
survivors will go up to 240. For victims in poor eastern countries like
Ukraine, this represents a rise of some 35 percent, from 178. For
survivors in wealthier EU member states, like Poland, it's a more modest
increase -- they now receive around 216 per month.

Stuart Eizenstat, a Claims Conference negotiator who served as US Deputy
Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, said the latest agreement
shows "there's no Holocaust fatigue among the German leadership. Even 60
years later, with a different generation of Germans, there's still a
sensitivity to their responsibility for the Holocaust and their
responsibility to try to compensate people, imperfectly to be sure, during
their declining years," he said, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post.

(source:  Spiegel Online)






SWITZERLAND:

Swiss watchdog warns of rising anti-German hatred



The Swiss government's racism watchdog issued an unusual warning Friday
about rising animosity toward German immigrants being stereotyped as
boorish, domineering or even Nazis.

Swiss racism laws forbid spreading hateful ideologies or discrimination
against groups because of their race, ethnicity or religion. The rules
cover denying the Holocaust or the World War I-era genocide of Armenians
in Turkey. But they have never been invoked  or needed  to protect
Germans.

Anti-German sentiment has risen, however, as Switzerland has opened its
borders and labor market to its European neighbors. Germans have taken the
greatest advantage, with over 220,000 now living permanently in the
neighboring country.

German citizens have come to dominate Swiss universities, hospitals and
highly trained professional work in recent years. The president of the
Federal Commission against Racism, Georg Kreis, said the economic crisis
and rising unemployment was making people increasingly see Germans as
unwanted competitors. He also referred to recent tension between the Swiss
and German governments over tax evasion and banking secrecy.

The racism commission criticized newspapers headlines such as "The Germans
are coming" and "How many Germans can Switzerland stomach?"

It also cited open letters and Internet platforms for spreading
caricatures of the "ugly German," evoking the negative stereotype of an
arrogant, loud and culture-less cousin that offends the sensitivities of
the discreet Swiss.

Kreis noted that the German-Swiss banking dispute has caused an
"escalation" in hateful language from some politicians and media in
Switzerland.

Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz said last week it was in his country's
interest to refrain from unhelpful insults, urging calm on the 7.7 million
Swiss, who sometimes see their neighbor to the north, with 82 million
people, as domineering.

But other politicians have been less restrained, such as center-right
legislator Thomas Mueller, who recently said German Finance Minister Peer
Steinbrueck reminded him of "that generation of Germans who 60 years ago
marched through the streets wearing leather coats, boots and armbands."

"Nazi!" read the front page of mass circulation daily Blick with a picture
of Steinbrueck to lead into its story on the Mueller speech.

"Germans of today's generation have the right not to be associated with
Naziism," said Kreis.

Such a caricature can carry over into everyday life, affecting relations
between Swiss and Germans at the workplace, home and class or in trams,
buses and restaurants, the commission warned.

"Collective exclusion hurts the people who live here and disturbs the
peace of the community," Kreis said.

(source:  Associated Press)

March 19



USA:

US deports former Nazi camp guard


A FORMER Nazi concentration camp guard who served at death camps in
Poland, France and Germany, has been deported from the United States to
Austria.

The US Justice Department said it deported Josias Kumpf, 83, who worked as
an armed SS guard at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Germany and
at the Trawniki Labour Camp in Poland.

Kumpf, who was born in Serbia, emigrated from Austria to America in 1956,
acquired US citizenship in 1964, and settled in Racine, Wisconsin.

US officials said he took part in heinous acts during the Second World War
that contributed to the death of thousands of civilians.

Prisoners under his watch at slave labour sites in Nazi-occupied France
were forced to build launching platforms for German missile attacks on
Britain.

While a guard at Trawniki, he participated in a November 3, 1943, mass
shooting in which Jewish 8000 men, women and children were murdered in a
single day.

Kumpf helped guard the prisoners - including approximately 400 children -
who were shot and killed in pits at Trawniki. According to Kumpf, his
assignment had been to shoot to kill any survivors.

"Josias Kumpf, by his own admission, stood guard with orders to shoot any
surviving prisoners who attempted to escape an SS massacre that left
thousands of Jews dead," Acting Assistant Attorney General Rita Glavin
said.

"His court-ordered removal from the United States to Austria is another
milestone in the government's long-running effort to ensure that
individuals who participated in crimes against humanity do not find
sanctuary in this country," she said.

The Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations - the US office
tasked with locating and prosecuting or repatriating Nazi war criminals
hiding out in the United States - has won cases against 107 individuals
since it began operations in 1979, the office said.

(source:  Agence France-Presse)









GERMANY:

Alleged Nazi camp guard charged 29,000 times

Retired Ohio auto worker John Demjanjuk was charged Wednesday with 29,000
counts of acting as an accessory to murder while working as a guard at a
Nazi death camp in occupied Poland. The arrest warrant could move the
30-year global legal battle over his fate closer to conclusion.

The warrant by a Munich court seeks the deportation or extradition of
Demjanjuk, who lives in a Cleveland suburb and denies involvement in the
deaths at Sobibor. His family says he is too sick to travel.

The U.S. Justice Department says Demjanjuk, 88, was a Nazi guard and can
be deported for falsifying information on his entry and citizenship
applications in the 1950s.

The U.S. Supreme Court chose last year not to consider Demjanjuk's appeal
against deportation, clearing the way for his removal. But it had been
unclear until Wednesday which country would take him  his native Ukraine,
Poland or Germany.

German Justice Ministry spokeswoman Eva Schmierer said it was not clear if
the U.S. would automatically deport Demjanjuk, or whether Germany would
have to formally seek his extradition.

The case that led to Wednesday's arrest warrant is based partly on
recently obtained transport lists of Jewish prisoners who arrived by train
at Sobibor during Demjanjuk's tenure at the camp from March to September
1943.

"In this capacity, he participated in the accessory to murder of at least
29,000 people of the Jewish faith," said the Munich prosecutor's office,
which is handling the case because Demjanjuk spent time at a refugee camp
in the area after the war.

His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said in an e-mail to The Associated Press
that his father is innocent, and is suffering from a blood disorder and
acute kidney failure that makes him unfit for international travel.

"Whatever the Germans decide to do, we will continue to fight for justice
in this sad case as there has never been any credible evidence of his
personal involvement in even one murder, let alone thousands," Demjanjuk
Jr. said. "He has never hurt anyone  before, during or after the war. He
is a good person as his family, grandchildren, friends and neighbors have
always maintained."

Demjanjuk has said he served in the Soviet army and became a prisoner of
war when he was captured by Germany in 1942.

He emigrated to the U.S. in 1952 and gained citizenship in 1958 but was
extradited to Israel in 1986 after the U.S. Justice Department said it
believed he was a sadistic Nazi guard at the Treblinka death camp known as
Ivan the Terrible.

Demjanjuk spent seven years in custody before the Israeli high court
received evidence that the Nazi guard was in fact another Ukrainian, and
freed him.

Demjanjuk's U.S. citizenship was restored in 1998, but the U.S. Justice
Department renewed its case, saying he had indeed been a Nazi guard and
could be deported for falsifying information on his U.S. immigration
paperwork.

A U.S. court ruled in December 2005 that he could be deported to Ukraine
or to Germany or Poland. Demjanjuk spent several years challenging that
ruling, until the Supreme Court decision last year.

"We hope that the process can be expedited to ensure that this Holocaust
perpetrator will finally be appropriately punished," Efraim Zuroff, the
top Nazi hunter at Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Center Zuroff told the AP by
phone from Jerusalem. "We're on our way to a victory for justice today."

Munich prosecutors said Demjanjuk will be formally charged in front of a
judge once he is extradited to Germany.

(source:  Associated Press)






VATICAN CITY:

Pope Acknowledges Problems in Holocaust Denial Controversy



Pope Benedict XVI has made a rare admission of a "mishap" in the Vatican's
handling of Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson. A cardinal partly
to blame for the debacle has been stripped of his power, and the pope says
the Vatican ought to make better use of the Internet -- to inform itself
about crises more quickly.

An unswerving principle of infallibility has traditionally applied at the
Vatican, in particular when it comes to questions of doctrine: Popes don't
make mistakes. Benedict XVI has shattered this principle with a letter
dated March 10, addressed to his "dear brethren in the Episcopal
ministry." He mentions a "mishap which I sincerely regret." And he
mentions the consequences -- a reorganization of decision-making bodies
that will end the career of a powerful cardinal.

What does he mean by mishap?

The Ecclesia Dei Pontifical Commission, which was responsible for the
Richard Williamson case, is being dissolved and will be merged with the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a control authority headed for
years by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- before he became Pope Benedict XVI.
Now the pope believes it should take on more authority.

As a result, Cardinal Daro Castrilln Hoyos, who triggered the Williamson
debacle in mid-January, has been deprived of his power and, at almost 80,
will slip into a well-earned retirement. "Now that was quite a crash," a
prelate who witnessed the events said on Wednesday afternoon.

So much self-criticism is rare from a pope. A convoluted sentence in his
letter even suggests a sensation for the Catholic Church, though it's
easily to overlook at first glance. The Vatican, with its petrified
hierarchy, could be shaken by this obscure remark: "The collegial organs
through which the Congregation works on the questions arising (especially
the regular assembly of the Cardinals on Wednesday and the General
Assembly every one or two years) guarantee the involvement of the prefects
of various Roman congregations and of the worldwide episcopate in the
decisions to be made."


What does it mean? Benedict is referring to a meeting of decision-makers
in the Vatican that is not part of any established council. With "the
regular assembly of cardinals on Wednesday," he apparently wants to
install a kind of political cabinet of cardinals -- which has never
existed in this form and which was proposed weeks ago by Father Eberhard
von Gemmingen, the editor-in-chief of Radio Vatican's German department.


Defending the Society of Saint Pius X

The controversy over Williamson, a known Holocaust denier who belonged to
a group of four bishops excommunicated in the 1980s for defying the
Vatican, belonged to a larger effort by Benedict to bring the fractious
and ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) back into the fold.
In his letter, the pope uses plain figures to explain why he wants to heal
the rift with the SSPX. "Can a community leave us totally indifferent in
which there are 491 priests, 215 seminarians, 6 seminaries, 88 schools, 2
university institutes, 117 brothers, 164 sisters?" he writes. "Should we
really calmly leave them to drift away from the Church? I am thinking, for
example, of the 491 priests. The plaited fabric of their motivations we
cannot know

"Should we simply exclude them," the pope goes on, "as representatives of
a radical marginal group, from the search for reconciliation and unity?"

He also takes his critics to task. "It has saddened me that even Catholics
who could have known better have thought it necessary to strike at me with
such ready hostility," writes the Holy Father. Even within the church, the
dispute over the SSPX was waged with "a vehemence we have not experienced
for a long time."

The 82-year-old Benedict's letter contains another message that is
unusual for a pope. In the future, he writes, the Vatican should follow
more than just news in the printed media. The controversy over Williamson
was fired by an interview he conducted with a Swedish television, widely
available on YouTube, as well as swift commentary on the Web. "I
understand that following the news available on the Internet would have
made it possible to obtain knowledge of the problem in time," writes the
pope. "I learn from this that we at the Holy See have to pay more careful
attention to this news source in the future." In plain language, the pope
is telling his clergy: Do more research online!

Will the letter put an end to miscommunications at the Vatican? At the
very least, it heralds a new orientation in Rome, combined with a
self-critical pope. These two changes could lead to a new climate both
within the Vatican and in its relationship with bishops around the world.

Whether the pope's letter will lead the church to a new beginning or back
to its old ways, however, only time will tell.

(source:  Spiegel Online)

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

Pope to skip Holocaust museum on trip to Israel, envoy says

In Jerusalem, he'll visit Yad Vashem's memorial section, will skip museum

Pope Pius XII criticized for WW II actions; Vatican says he acted behind
the scenes


Pope Benedict XVI will not visit Israel's Holocaust museum when he makes
his first trip to the region as pope in May, though he will visit a
memorial that is part of the site, his ambassador to Israel said Tuesday.

Pope Benedict XVI, shown at the Vatican during a prayer Sunday, has spoken
out forcefully against the Holocaust.

  He will also become the first pontiff to visit the Dome of the Rock, one
of the holiest sites in Islam, said the envoy, papal nuncio Antonio
Franco.

Foreign heads of state normally visit the Holocaust museum, which is part
of the Yad Vashem complex in Jerusalem. But it includes controversial
wording describing the role of Pope Pius XII during World War II, which is
why Pope Benedict balked, an Israeli official said.

Critics have accused Pope Pius of doing too little to prevent the mass
murder of European Jews by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. A caption in the
museum says he maintained a neutral position during the years of mass
extermination of Europe's Jews.

The Vatican defends him and is gradually opening its archives in an effort
to show that he acted behind the scenes.

Franco gave the news of Pope Benedict's visit to Yad Vashem at a news
conference in Jerusalem.

Pope John Paul II also did not visit the museum section on his historic
pilgrimage to Israel in 2000, Father Federico Lombardi, a papal spokesman,
said as he confirmed that Pope Benedict will not do so.

An official with Israel's Foreign Ministry said the decision was made
jointly because of the sensitivity of the matter. Yigal Palmor conceded
that there is an argument over the wartime pope's actions during the
Holocaust and noted that the museum has a sign stating that the facts are
in dispute.

He said that Pope Benedict may visit other parts of the Yad Vashem
complex, which is divided into several compounds, and that the pontiff
will lay a wreath at the site's Hall of Remembrance, which is part of the
protocol for visiting heads of state.

The announcement that Pope Benedict will visit only part of Yad Vashem
also follows international outrage over his rehabilitation of a rebel
bishop who denied the Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews in the
Holocaust.

The Vatican ordered the bishop, Richard Williamson, to recant, and said
the pope was not aware of Williamson's views on the Holocaust when he
lifted the excommunication of the bishop.

Pope Benedict, who was born in Germany and forced to join the Hitler Youth
as a teenager, has spoken out forcefully against the Holocaust on a number
of occasions, including on a visit to the site of the Auschwitz
concentration camp.

Pope Benedict will make his pilgrimage to the Holy Land May 8-15 with
stops in Amman, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, according to the
itinerary released by the Vatican.

He will be celebrating Mass in Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, the city
where Christians believe Jesus preached and lived. Some 50,000 pilgrims
are expected to attend that event, the bishop of Nazareth said.

In Jerusalem, a city holy to all three of the major monotheistic faiths,
Pope Benedict will visit the Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site,
and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which Catholics believe is the site
of the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The pope will also meet Israel's chief rabbis and enter the Dome of the
Rock with the chief Muslim cleric in the Holy Land, the grand mufti of
Jerusalem.

He will also meet Jordan's King Abdullah and Israeli President Shimon
Peres, as well as Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian
Authority, Franco said.

(source:  CNN)



ISRAEL:

YAD VASHEM TO STUDY PIUS XII----To Join With Salesians for 2-Day Work
Session

The International Institute for Holocaust Research of the Yad Vashem and
a Salesian study institute will join to evaluate the investigation on
Pope Pius XII and the Shoah.

The Studium Theologicum Salesianum will join with the research group from
Jerusalem's Holocaust memorial for two days of research this Sunday and
Monday.

Salesian Father Francesco De Ruvo told ZENIT that "historians will come
together who will share the results of their investigations to respond to
a series of questions that affect the current controversy."

Yad Vashem has a caption regarding Pius XII that attributes to the Pope
"silence and the absence of guidelines" during the Holocaust, something
which many historians, including Jewish ones, say is blatantly false.
The study session will occur as Benedict XVI prepares his May visit to the
Holy Land and a stop at Yad Vashem.

"In recent years, many books and new articles have been published, and as
a result, new material has been presented that permits bringing to light
new aspects, which should be looked at and synthesized to see if there are
novelties and if something should be revised," Father De Ruvo explained.
Among the themes to be considered are the period before Pius XII's papacy,
relations with the German bishops, Pius XII and the Holocaust, the
situation of Italy during the Holocaust, and the period following the
Holocaust.

Those who will participate include Sergio Minerbi, Paul O'Shea, Michael
Phayer, Susan Zuccotti, Thomas Brechenmacher, Jean-Dominique Durand,
Grazia Loparco, Matteo Luigi Napolitano and Andrea Tornielli.

"For some," Father De Ruvo noted, "[Pius XII] has been an indifferent
spectator of the Holocaust who, with his silence, became an accomplice of
the tremendous tragedy that was occurring. Other investigators and
historians, on the other hand, have affirmed for some time now a totally
different thesis, which offers a positive evaluation of the work of Pius
XII: He worked to limit with every possible means the effects of the
Holocaust, sometimes achieving efficacious results."

This latter position, the Salesian continued, "is based on archived
historical documents and spoken and written testimonies of the
protagonists. The historians who exalt the action of Pius XII in the
saving of the Jews propose their conclusions regardless of their ethical
or religious belonging. Among them there are many Jewish scholars."

Father De Ruvo said that "a climate of cordial and respectful listening
has been maintained till now among the institutions involved in this
initiative which, as everyone hopes, will lead to an understanding of the
current text that can be seen in the Yad Vashem."

(source:  Zenit News)

Mar. 6



GERMANY/USA:

THE CASE OF JOHN DEMJANJUK----Nazi Guard, Sick Old Man or Both?


German prosecutors believe that John Demjanjuk was a sadistic guard at the
notorious death camp Sobibor. They would like to put him on trial in
Munich, but his family says the 88 year old is too old and frail to be
extradited -- and that he is innocent anyway.

The wife of the alleged concentration camp guard is petite and rather
friendly. She's wearing a blue-green checkered blouse, and her long hair
is pulled back in a bun. Standing there at the door of her yellow
farmhouse in Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, she seems a bit
lost.

Vera Demjanjuk speaks a mishmash of German and English. She looks
exhausted as she explains that everything is starting over again and that,
once again, she will have to fear for the fate of her 88-year-old husband,
John. Her family, she says, has neither the energy nor the means for a new
court case, especially not in far-off Germany. "We are poor and have no
money," she says.

It was 1977 when American Nazi hunters first set their sights on her
husband. At that time, the retired Ford auto worker was stripped of his US
citizenship and extradited to Israel. The Israelis wanted to hang him.
They accused him of being "Ivan the Terrible," the barbarous operator of
the gas chambers at the Treblinka concentration camp.

'A Sick Old Man'

In 1993, though, the Israelis released him after it became clear that
"Ivan the Terrible" was likely someone else. Demjanjuk was allowed to
return to the US. Since then, though, more and more clues have surfaced
indicating that Demjanjuk may actually have been a guard at the Sobibor
death camp in present-day Poland. Prosecutors in Munich want him to stand
trial in Germany. They allege that he took part in the murder of 29,000
people.

Demjanjuk is stateless. Last May, the US Supreme Court refused to hear his
final appeal. Nothing now stands in the way of Demjanjuk's being
extradited to Germany at any time to face the new charges.

Experts from Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation have just
recently verified the validity of Demjanjuk's ID, which puts him in
Sobibor during the period when the crimes took place. Their finding marks
an important step in the effort to try him in Germany.

But there is a potential hitch: Is the 88-year-old physically capable of
standing trial? Demjanjuk's son, John Demjanjuk Jr., has said that his
father is "very frail." His father reportedly suffers from a "blood and
bone marrow disease," which forces him to go to the hospital several times
a month for regular blood transfusions. During the last year, his son
adds, Demjanjuk's condition has worsened so much that he fears his father
couldn't make it through a trial.

John Jr. says that, were his father extradited to Germany, he would need
"round-the-clock medical attention." Even Demjanjuk's lawyer, John
Broadley, says that his client is "a sick old man." The family, though,
has been saying the same thing for decades. He has even appeared in court
in a wheelchair.

'As Strong As an Ox'

Nine years ago, Jonathan Drimmer was part of the US Department of
Justice's Office of Special Investigations when he helped lead the
government's successful efforts to strip Demjanjuk of his citizenship. "At
that time, he was still a huge man," Drimmer says, adding that he was
tall, broad-shouldered and had huge hands. At the time, Demjanjuk was able
to testify for an entire day. "At the end of it, I was exhausted, but he
was still going strong. In 2000 he was as strong as an ox," Drimmer
recounts.

Nowadays, Demjanjuk looks like the 88-year-old he is, says his neighbor
Erik Keller, a young graphic designer, who chats with Demjanjuk often.
According to Keller, Demjanjuk's bad knees won't allow him to stand or
walk for long periods. Keller adds, though, that after a recent snowstorm
Demjanjuk shovelled his driveway. Keller says he helped Demjanjuk clear
his walkway -- and says he has never seen him in a wheelchair.

Keller goes on to say how Demjanjuk spends his summers in jeans and a
sweatshirt tending to his large vegetable garden. And sometimes his wife
Vera even stops by to give him some tomatoes. "They're very neighborly,"
Keller says, adding that Demjanjuk was proud of his garden and speaks
often about his days working at Ford.

But, says Keller, Demjanjuk never talks about anything that happened
before that. And Keller has never asked. As Keller sees it, Demjanjuk
enjoys a little neighborly chit-chat, but "he doesn't talk with a lot of
people."

Dreams and Nightmares

While most of the neighbor's mailboxes have big numbers on them, those on
the Demjanjuks' are small. In front of the house, there is a big sign that
says: "No Trespassing." The single-family residence has an attached
garage, a greenhouse and a big outdoor garden. It's in better condition
than most of the other houses on the street -- despite the fact that
losing his citizenship also meant losing his state retirement benefits,
which forces Demjanjuk to live off support from his children.

Seven Hills is a suburb of Cleveland, formerly a booming industrial city
but now one of the poorest large cities in America. Not long after World
War II, this neighborhood -- with its low-slung houses made of brick and
wood -- was part of the American dream.

But, today, it is also part of a nightmare. Garage doors are locked shut,
shades are pulled and the mailboxes are covered in rust. The streets are
empty of people, and a good 20 minutes can go by before a car drives down
the street. Seven Hills is as good as dead. Only the sound of highway
traffic can be heard in the distance.

'My Father Has Never Killed Anyone '

John Demjanjuk Jr. says that his father doesn't seem concerned about the
discussion in Germany. "He is trying to take care of his health so that he
can survive for a few more years," John Jr. says. As he sees it, there is
absolutely no evidence "that could be used to convict his father in a
criminal proceeding."

The son has made protecting his father his life's labor. "My father has
never killed anyone," John Jr. says. "There's no proof that he had
anything to do with it." John Jr. continues: "He isn't a murderer. He is a
very gentle and friendly person. I know from the bottom of my heart that
he never killed anybody. He was a soldier in the Red Army who became
caught up in the events of World War II."

John Jr. says that he believes his father is innocent and that this
knowledge has given him the strength to fight for his father through the
years. He calls the crimes of the Holocaust "horrendous" -- but says that
"that's not the point."

Contesting the Evidence

But, in the minds of American and German prosecutors, that is the point.
Seven water-tight pieces of evidence substantiate that Demjanjuk served in
the Sobibor concentration camp, says Drimmer, the former prosecutor. Seven
different documents from different archives and agencies. As Drimmer sees
it, this makes it very unlikely that there has been a mistake and very
unlikely that someone could be trying to frame Demjanjuk. Still, 63 years
after the end of the war, it doesn't mean that Demjanjuk will be put on
trial.

John Jr. doesn't have a plausible explanation for how these bits of
evidence incriminating his allegedly innocent father could have found
their way into court papers. But he says that the burden of proof in a
German criminal case is much higher than in the American case which
focused on stripping him of his citizenship. He also says that Germany
doesn't have a single living eyewitness. And, of course, he points out
that his father is too ill to stand trial anyway.

But if you ask him what might really have happened in his father's past,
he doesn't have an answer.

(source: Spiegel Online)

Mar. 3


GERMANY:

German car firm 'used hair from Auschwitz'

Rolls of textiles made by Schaeffler 'contain hair from 40,000 death camp
inmates'


One of the pillars of German industry, the giant but debt-crippled
Schaeffler car parts supplier, was accused yesterday of using hair shorn
from at least 40,000 Auschwitz death camp prisoners to make textiles at
its factories in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War.

The highly disturbing allegations were contained in new evidence unearthed
by Polish historians at the Auschwitz museum, who said they had found
rolls of fabric made from camp inmates' hair at a former Schaeffler
factory in Poland's southern region of Silesia.

The discovery was the latest in a series of damaging blows for the ailing
Schaeffler concern, which employs 200,000 people worldwide. The company is
currently saddled with debts totalling 14bn (12.6bn) and faces the
prospect of bankruptcy.

Last month, Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler, the concern's flamboyant and
usually fur-coated millionaire owner, appeared at a trade union rally and
wept openly as she appealed to the government of the German Chancellor,
Angela Merkel, for a state-funded bailout. In an attempt to clear up
rumours about the company's wartime role, Mrs Schaeffler recently admitted
to using slave labourers at its factories during the Second World War.
However, the company's officially published history still only begins in
1946.

The company's own historian dismissed the allegations yesterday and said
there was no evidence to support the theory that Schaeffler processed
death camp inmates' hair industrially during the Second World War.

But Dr Jacek Lachendro, a historian at the Auschwitz museum, told
Germany's Der Spiegel television channel that 1.95 tonnes of cloth made
from inmates' hair had been discovered at a former Schaeffler textile and
army tank parts factory in the town of Kiertz (formerly Katscher) after
the Germans withdrew at the end of the war.

The amount of cloth, which was pictured on Spiegel television as rolls of
closely-woven brownish fabric, was said to have derived from the hair
shorn from some 40,000 Auschwitz prisoners. Dr Lachendro said that
subsequent analysis of the hair showed that some of it contained traces of
the Zyklon B gas used by the Nazis to murder millions in the death camps.

Former workers at the factory in Kiertz who were interviewed on the
programme said that they remembered two wagon-loads of human hair being
delivered to the company in 1943. Kiertz is three hours' drive away from
the Auschwitz camp.

Hair was routinely shorn from prisoners, usually on arrival, at the death
camps. The Nazi war machine used it to make army blankets and socks for
U-boat crews. The Auschwitz museum on the site of the former death camp
displays a store filled to the roof with inmates' hair originally intended
for so-called "human recycling".

The Kiertz textile factory where the hair is alleged to have been
processed formerly belonged to the Jewish-owned Davistan AG concern on
which the Schaeffler empire was founded after it was taken over by the
brothers Wilhelm and Georg Schaeffler. Their company made armaments for
the Nazi war machine, but after the Second World War it re-emerged as one
of Germany's main suppliers of parts to the car industry, specialising in
needle roller bearings.

However, the devastating impact of the credit crunch coupled with
Schaeffler's misjudged hostile takeover of the tyre giant Continental have
since plunged the concern into its worst crisis since the war.

Maria-Elisabeth Schaeffler, an Austrian born former medical student,
married into the concern and became its sole owner in 1996 after her
husband, Georg, died. Last month she took the unprecedented step of
joining a demonstration staged by 800 of her company's employees to appeal
for government help. Previously, the company's management style had been
called "feudal".

Mrs Merkel's government, which is currently being asked to provide state
aid for Germany's ailing Opel car company, has still to decide whether it
will help Schaeffler with a bailout.

(source:  Reuters)

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

Study: Some German schools kept Nazi names
Published: Feb. 5, 2009 at 2:05 PMOrder reprints  |  Feedback
CHEMNITZ, Germany, Feb. 5 (UPI) -- Several schools in Germany are still
named after supporters of the Nazi Party despite the party's history of
genocide and hatred, a study has found.

Historian Geralf Gemser found that several schools in the German state of
Saxony remain adorned with the names of individuals who were either
high-ranking Nazi members or who supported the party's infamous German
regime, Der Spiegel said Thursday.

Eight of the estimated 2,000 schools in Saxony are named after Nazi party
members, Gemser said. An additional three Saxony schools were named after
members of the Nazi party's Sturmabteilung paramilitary group, while one
features the name of a Schutzstaffel, or SS, member.

Gemser said while schools traditionally aren't named after actual war
crime suspects, such educational sites should take action to prevent being
linked to the notorious Nazi empire, Der Spiegel reported.

"With their names, schools occupy a place in a historical tradition and
Nazi supporters and functionaries should be excluded from that," the
historian said.

(source:  United Press International)




USA--CALIFORNIA:

Holocaust-denying Bishop banned


Holocaust-denying British Bishop Richard Williamson will not be allowed to
enter any Roman Catholic church, school or other facility in the
Archdiocese of Los Angeles, it has been decided.

Cardinal Roger Mahony published the ban in a joint statement with two
members of the American Jewish Committee.

Mr Williamson is one of four members of an ultra-traditionalist group who
were excommunicated. He denied the Holocaust in a previously taped
interview broadcast in January on the same day the Pope lifted his
excommunication.

Mr Mahony's statement makes no mention of any plans by Mr Williamson to
visit Los Angeles, but it notes that the situation has given many
religious and civic leaders an opportunity to acknowledge the Holocaust.

(source:  Press Association)

Mar. 1



SWEDEN:

The Wallenberg Curse ---- The Search for the Missing Holocaust Hero Began
in 1945. The Unending Quest Tore His Family ApartArticle


In neat script, blue ink on white letterhead, Fredrik von Dardel began
writing to the stepson he had long been told to leave for dead: "Dear
beloved Raoul."

It was March 24, 1956. He always wrote at his living-room table, his wife,
Maria, looking on from a corner of the couch by the phone. On a chest, a
spray of flowers she kept fresh stood beside a picture of her son, Raoul
Wallenberg.

Mr. Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who safeguarded 20,000 Jews in
Budapest in the waning months of World War II, vanished into the Soviet
penal system in 1945. But the couple, then 71 and 65 years old, believed
their son was alive and readied a letter for Sweden's prime minister to
take to Moscow.

"We have been sustained by the hope of one day seeing you among us and
again being able to kiss you and hold your hands and hear your beloved
voice," his stepfather wrote in an old and elevated Swedish. "There's a
room here waiting for you."

Mr. Wallenberg did not come home then, or ever. His end remains unclear.
The world now knows the missing Swede as a symbol of humanitarianism -- an
honorary citizen in four countries, commemorated with stamps in eight and
monuments in 12, the subject of scores of films and books.

Unknown, however, is the price his family paid as it tried in vain to
bring him home. For six decades, his parents and siblings battled Moscow
and their native Stockholm, mounting a search for answers that cost them
their savings, careers, relationships, health and, concealed until now,
two of their lives.

Also unknown, even to the Swedish foreign ministry -- whose file on Mr.
Wallenberg dwarfs its record of any king, colony or war -- is that the
family documented its struggle. Mr. Wallenberg's late mother and
stepfather, who died two days apart in 1979, kept a diary. His
half-brother, Guy von Dardel, now 89, compiled a 50,000-page archive.

Together with hundreds of interviews, the family's thousands of journal
entries, letters and documents -- most read for the first time by The Wall
Street Journal -- lay bare the toll of an unending quest.

"It's a bestial thing," says Nina Lagergren, who at 87 still spreads her
half-brother's name. "If you don't know if somebody is dead or if they are
alive, you have to go on to look for the truth."

Raoul Gustav Wallenberg was born on Aug. 4, 1912, in Liding, Sweden. His
father, a member of a family with wide-ranging influence in banking and
business, had died of stomach cancer three months before. Twenty-one years
old, the widowed Maj Wallenberg wished to die, too. "But then I felt that
I wanted to live, for my little poor fatherless child," she wrote weeks
later.

In 1918, she married Fredrik von Dardel, a healthcare official who would
later head the Karolinska Institute, Sweden's top medical university.
Raoul's half-siblings, Guy and Nina, were born over the next three years.

Raoul's paternal grandfather, Gustav, groomed the multilingual Wallenberg
scion for a banking career and dispatched him to business posts in South
Africa, then Palestine.

There, in a kosher boarding house in Haifa in 1936, the Swedish Lutheran
met a German Jew whose brother had been murdered by a Nazi. He soon read
Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf twice, his half-sister recalls.

On Jan. 22, 1944, the United States established the War Refugee Board, an
agency intended to protect the endangered populations of Europe. The board
asked the Swedish foreign ministry, which staffed a mission in Budapest,
to suggest a candidate to run an office there. Word reached Mr.
Wallenberg.

Hired by the U.S. and granted diplomatic status by Sweden, Mr. Wallenberg,
31, arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944. The Nazis had already deported
more than half of Hungary's 750,000 Jews, nearly all to Auschwitz in
Poland, where most were killed. Slight, balding and colorblind, Mr.
Wallenberg used safehouses, counterfeit passports and bravado to safeguard
thousands who remained.

On Dec. 12, he wrote his mother that the Soviets were so close he could
hear their gunfire. He expected to be home by Easter. "Dearest Mother," he
concluded. "I will say goodbye for today."

On Jan. 17, Soviet officers in Budapest arrested him on orders from
Moscow.

Sweden's foreign ministry asked the Soviets about the wellbeing of its
mission in Budapest. The Soviets wrote them Mr. Wallenberg was in their
custody. According to Soviet and Swedish records, Stockholm didn't
respond.

In mid-February, Mr. Wallenberg's mother arrived unannounced at the Soviet
embassy in Stockholm to appeal for her son. Ambassador Alexandra Kollontay
told her "that Raoul was in the Soviet Union and that he was treated
well," Ms. von Dardel recounted to a reporter in 1971.

Appeals for Aid

Courtesy Guy von DardelA letter to Stalin from Raoul Wallenberg's mother,
July 21, 1947:

"I am desperately appealing to the powerful ruler of the Soviet Union for
help regaining my beloved son." See the full letter. (Courtesy
Riksarkivet)

* * *
In 1947, Guy von Dardel, enlisted fellow physicist Albert Einstein to
appeal to Stalin on behalf of Mr. Wallenberg, his missing half-brother :

"As an old Jew, I appeal to you to do everything possible" See the full
letter. (Courtesy Guy von Dardel)

* * *
From 1952 to 1978, Mr. Wallenberg's stepfather, Fredrik von Dardel, kept a
diary. This is an excerpt from the second entry, Nov. 12, 1952:

"This was irksome, particularly as this paper is a life-organ of our
social circle. After I and several others shook up the editorial offices,
they inserted in their national edition, and in the subsequent Stockholm
edition, a corrected announcement in a prominent place." Read the full
diary entry. (Courtesy Riksarkivet)

* * *
A letter to Mr. Wallenberg from his stepfather and mother, March 24, 1956:

"The 11 years that have passed since your disappearance have been filled
with despair night and day, but we have been sustained by the hope of one
day seeing you among us and again being able to kiss you and hold your
hands and hear your beloved voice." Read the full letter. (Courtesy Guy
von Dardel)
On March 8, the Soviets stated on Hungarian radio that the Gestapo had
murdered Mr. Wallenberg in Budapest.

But assured by the ambassador, Ms. von Dardel was hopeful when, on April
18, she stood on a Stockholm quay awaiting the ship Arcturus. Some of its
passengers had worked alongside her son in Budapest. She scanned the
disembarking Swedes. Raoul wasn't there.

Sweden didn't ask for Mr. Wallenberg's return, even though the Soviet
Union had seized the diplomat in violation of international law. Current
and former Swedish foreign ministry officials say that amid worsening
East-West relations, neutral Sweden feared petitioning the emerging
superpower on behalf of a diplomat financed by the U.S.

Swedish leaders also worried about offending Scandinavian principles of
egalitarianism. "How could the socialist government be seen to intercede
on behalf of a Wallenberg?" says Jan Lundvik, a retired Swedish ambassador
who handled the Wallenberg case in recent decades.

On April 25, more than three months after Moscow had told Stockholm that
Mr. Wallenberg was in its custody, Sweden responded. "It is possible that
[Mr. Wallenberg] has been in some kind of accident," Swedish ambassador
Staffan Sderblom told the Soviet deputy foreign minister, according to a
memo in the Russian foreign ministry archives. The ambassador gave him a
more brazen message in December: "It would be splendid if the mission were
to be given a reply...that Wallenberg is dead."

On June 15, 1946, the ambassador reiterated this message to Joseph Stalin.
The case, Stalin promised, "will be examined and solved."


Sipa Press
Solitary Search: Guy von Dardel in 1989 outside Lubyanka prison in Moscow,
one of the places where his half-brother Raoul Wallenberg was held.
The Swedish foreign ministry told Mr. Wallenberg's family that it knew
nothing of his fate.

The family marked Raoul's 33rd birthday with a dinner in August. It paid
his annual taxes in October, a City Hall official classifying him as
bortavarande, missing. And it began to seek help through meetings, phone
calls and letters addressed to everyone from the World Jewish Congress to
United Nations chief Dag Hammarskjld to actress Ingrid Bergman.

In the coming months, rumors placed Mr. Wallenberg in an Estonian prison,
a Slovakian castle and an airplane arriving at the Stockholm airport,
where his brother raced in vain in October.

In fact, her son was alive and in Moscow's Lefortovo prison, according to
Russian foreign ministry documents. There, in cell 203, a fellow inmate
later recalled to Swedish officials, Mr. Wallenberg tapped coded messages
on walls and pipes. Returning in March 1947 from his fifth interrogation,
he relayed his interrogator's withering words: "Nobody cares about you."

On Aug. 18, 1947, Andrei Vyshinsky, the Soviet deputy foreign minister,
sent a letter to the Swedish ambassador in Moscow. It read: "Wallenberg is
not in the Soviet Union and he is not known to us."

Others, too, washed their hands of Mr. Wallenberg. Leaders of Sweden's
Jewish community endorsed the country's foreign ministry. U.S. officials
did not pursue their former representative in Hungary after Sweden's
ambassador in Moscow snubbed their offer to help.

A List of Leads
Between 1952 and 1978, Mr. Wallenberg's stepfather, Fredrik von Dardel,
kept a diary. In 1976, with his wife Maj, he typed its handwritten pages
and indexed the 587 people and institutions mentioned in them. Click the
image below to read a portion of the S's.


  The von Dardels readied for a long fight. They helped found Wallenberg
Action, a committee to fund and publicize the search. The mother
instructed her younger children to presume Mr. Wallenberg alive until the
year 2000.

'A Dark Cloud'
On Oct. 24, 1952, his 34th wedding anniversary, Mr. von Dardel started a
diary. After two paragraphs devoted to his wife, he turned to the stepson
who had come to call him Papa: "Raoul Wallenberg's fate has lain like a
dark cloud over our existence."

The next year, after Mr. von Dardel retired, the couple moved to a
ground-floor apartment. There they would press their son's case for the
rest of their lives, he at his table and she on the couch some 10 feet
away.

Mr. von Dardel railed in letters and his diary against Swedish officials.
He wrote of his wife's heated words for the foreign minister. "In
Germany," she had told Mr. Undn, "there were a few who worked and
succeeded in getting home the many. Here in Sweden, it seems many are now
working but are not succeeding in getting home one."

Ms. von Dardel spent hours on the phone, most often on "negative, chilling
calls from the foreign office, when they seemed to be quite without
heart," recalls her daughter, Ms. Lagergren. Ms. Lagergren's daughter,
Nane Annan -- the wife of diplomat Kofi Annan -- recalls her grandmother's
knuckles whitening as she clutched her phone.

The von Dardels had their distractions. He played solitaire and painted
watercolors. She sewed dresses and repaired the home. But they had all but
stopped socializing: Sweden's neutrality during World War II remained a
discomfort to Swedes, and the loss of Raoul served as a constant reminder
of it. "People have a difficulty meeting somebody who lost someone," Ms.
Lagergren says. "They cross the street."

On March 24, 1956, days before he was set to travel to Moscow, Swedish
prime minister Tage Erlander visited the von Dardels. He told them he
shared their wish that he return with their son. Mr. von Dardel sat down
to write his stepson of the family's previous 11 years and their yearning
for his return.

Mr. Erlander took their letter. He returned empty-handed. The family
Easter, Mr. von Dardel wrote in his diary, was ruined.

On Feb. 6, 1957, the Swedish ambassador in Moscow received a memo from
Soviet deputy foreign minister Andrei Gromyko. It stated that Soviet
officials had recently found, in the archive of Moscow's Lubyanka prison,
a letter dated July 17, 1947, that prison health director Alexander
Smoltsov had written to Soviet security minister Viktor Abakumov.

It began: "I report that the prisoner, Walenberg [sic], who is well known
to you, died suddenly in his cell this night, probably as the result of a
heart attack." A notation added that the body had been cremated without
autopsy.

The Swedish foreign ministry alerted the von Dardels to the memo the
afternoon it arrived. "First they say that they have taken him under their
protection," says Ms. Lagergren. "Then they say that he was
murdered...then that he didn't exist in Russia. They kept with this until
they said that he died in 1947, that he died of a heart attack. So
naturally, we didn't take it seriously."


Courtesy Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren
Fredrik and Maj von Dardel at home in 1975 with an article about their
son.
The von Dardels had hoped that Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg, the powerful
brothers at the helm of their family bank, would press the Kremlin to send
home the cousin they had called "little Rulle." But the family
acknowledges the brothers wrote just two letters on Raoul's behalf -- one
to former ambassador Kollontay in 1947, another in 1954 to a Czech
business contact with Soviet ties. They also repeatedly declined to meet
with the von Dardels' group, Wallenberg Action, according to a letter the
group sent them in 1954.

"Mommy has been suffering for a long time," Ms. Lagergren wrote her
brother Guy in March 1959, "not having any contact or support from Raoul's
family."

Peter Wallenberg, 82, says his father, Marcus, who co-headed the family
bank, had told him that Raoul's mother had asked the Wallenbergs not to
interfere. "You didn't do things without total government consent," he
added. "And there was not total government consent in regards to Raoul."

'Slippery as an Eel'
Mr. von Dardel increasingly scorned that government. He wrote that
ambassador Rolf Sohlman was an "ineffective bastard," prime minister
Erlander "slippery as an eel," foreign minister Undn "horrible."

As Mr. von Dardel recorded the drip of witness accounts in his diary over
the years, his stepson was aging. But looking out from a picture frame on
the green-marble chest top in his parents' Stockholm apartment, he
remained 24.

In 1970, Mr. von Dardel wrote "Raoul Wallenberg: Facts Around a Fate," a
sober recounting of the family's 25-year search. The book didn't sell.
Says Ms. Lagergren: "People got tired."

And increasingly uncomfortable. "People look at me as if I was mentally
ill," Ms. von Dardel told a reporter in 1970.

Having endured so many reports of her son's death, she periodically wished
for her own. "She said over and over again, 'I no longer want to live,' "
recalls her daughter-in-law, Matti von Dardel.

Maj von Dardel had broken her leg years before and walked with forearm
crutches, a bag about her neck to carry things. Her husband, blind for
decades in one eye, was losing sight in the other. But both wished to see
their diary published. In 1976, they typed its handwritten entries and
created an index of the 587 names that populated its pages. No publisher
was interested.

On Feb. 6, 1978, Mr. Lundvik visited the von Dardel home. "A very painful
meeting with these two old people," the ambassador wrote in his diary.
"That he is alive is taken for granted."

The next month, Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal -- who had earlier reported
that Mr. Wallenberg was in an Irkutsk psychiatric hospital -- told the von
Dardels he'd been mistaken.


From Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren
Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren in 1989 with their brother's passport.
On April 28, 1978, Mr. von Dardel concluded the diary begun nearly 10,000
days before. On its final page, he wrote two English words: "stone wall."

On July 10, Mr. von Dardel wrote to Swedish doctor David Hummel. According
to a book written by a colleague, Dr. Hummel was helping people to die
with insulin and Diminal Duplex, a sleeping pill. "I would like to give
you my wife's and my thanks," Mr. von Dardel wrote, his script large and
slack, "for your regards and for your prescription."

Soon after, Mr. von Dardel lay in his bed and raised a spoonful of
sleeping pills to his lips. "But," says his daughter-in-law, "he dropped
it and couldn't find his pills."

In 1979, Swedish papers reported that a former Soviet prisoner testified
to the Swedish foreign ministry that Mr. Wallenberg had been in a prison
in the city of Vladimir until at least the summer of 1975. But holes now
emerged in this testimony, too.

Mr. von Dardel, aged 93, decided again to end his life. On Feb. 12, he
died in his bed.

Raoul Wallenberg's mother, again widowed, lay on her sofa two days later
and swallowed an overdose of barbiturates.

Nina Lagergren arrived shortly after. Her mother, still alive, asked Nina
to promise that she and Guy would keep fighting for their older brother --
and presume him living, as she had long instructed, until 2000.

Nina gave her word.

Mourners laid a blanket of yellow, white and pink flowers over a pair of
closed coffins. In their parents' death notice, the siblings listed three
surviving relatives: Nina Lagergren, Guy von Dardel and Raoul Wallenberg.

Siblings' Secret
Together, Nina and Guy would carry until now the secret of their parents'
suicides. But they would fulfill their mother's deathbed request in ways
that increasingly pulled them apart.

After their half-brother's disappearance, Guy von Dardel often turned from
his wife, two daughters and career as a particle physicist in Geneva to
help his parents pursue Mr. Wallenberg. He chipped at diplomatic
stonewalls and mined contacts -- persuading fellow physicist Albert
Einstein, for example, to argue Mr. Wallenberg's case in a letter to
Stalin.

Nina Lagergren, a housewife and mother of four in Stockholm, tried to
provide her parents daily respite from their singleminded search. "I
thought the best I could do for Raoul was to give them a real life," she
says.

In the days after their parents' deaths, Mr. von Dardel, 59, asked his
sister, 57, to help him form an advocacy group for Mr. Wallenberg. Ms.
Lagergren wondered to a friend, Nobel Foundation president Stig Ramel,
whether she should take up the mantle without traumatizing her family. She
later recalled that he responded: "Can you do anything else?"

Ms. Lagergren soon asked her missing brother's cousin for help. Marcus
Wallenberg offered funding and an office. Within months, the Raoul
Wallenberg Association had a board and members.

Throughout the spring and summer, Mr. von Dardel and Ms. Lagergren sowed
word of their sibling, meeting with dignitaries from Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin to U.S. Senator Joseph Biden. By fall, Raoul
Wallenberg committees were flowering in Jerusalem, London, New York and
Stockholm.

Ms. Lagergren began to dress in red and blue, she says, "for courage." She
found strength meeting Jews shielded by Mr. Wallenberg, including U.S.
politician Tom Lantos and his family. "I felt a very strong emotional
sensation looking at these lovely people, all so deeply committed in
wanting to pay their debt to their saviour," she wrote in July 1979.

In December, Mr. von Dardel took the siblings' search to Moscow. He tried
to drum up support for a Soviet-Swedish commission to research his brother
and persuaded fellow physicist Andrei Sakharov to travel to sites where
former prisonmates of Mr. Wallenberg were rumored to be.

In January 1980, Sweden's foreign ministry declassified some 2,000
documents -- about one-ninth of its holdings at the time. Ms. Lagergren
told reporters: "We must look forward and act with certainty that Raoul is
alive."

Mr. von Dardel wrote his sister: "You are doing a fantastic job."

In February, the first anniversary of their parents' suicides, Ms.
Lagergren placed flowers on their adjoining graves. "I think that mom and
dad in heaven probably are quite pleased with developments," she wrote to
her brother. "We haven't been able to free Raoul, but his name is known as
never before."

Mr. von Dardel let his sister know, however, that he saw little point in
publicizing Raoul's exploits. "Next Sunday," he wrote to his sister on
June 22, 1980, from Palo Alto, Calif., where he was on a teaching
sabbatical at Stanford, "Mrs. Fleishacker, who is it seems one of the ten
upper class people in San Francisco, opens her house in honour of Raoul. I
do not normally find that Raoul is much helped by social events."

But such events drew Diaspora dollars and press. Mr. Wallenberg's story
joined the writings of Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank and William Styron in the
Holocaust education of a postwar generation.

On Oct. 5, 1981, Ronald Reagan declared Mr. Wallenberg an honorary U.S.
citizen -- its second, after Winston Churchill. "What he accomplished was
of biblical proportions," the president said in the White House's Rose
Garden, the two siblings standing alongside.

Sweden, however, had no Raoul Wallenberg street, stamp or statue. And when
a Soviet submarine ran aground on its coast in late October, Stockholm
ignored a call from Mr. Lantos -- now a U.S. representative -- to trade
its crew for answers about Mr. Wallenberg. It towed the sub into
international waters

"The place where we are met with the most indifference," Mr. von Dardel
wrote in a letter two months later, "is still our and Raoul's native
country."

In 1984, Mr. von Dardel stepped up his assault, suing Moscow in a federal
district court in Washington, D.C. "Von Dardel v. Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics" alleged that the arrest of a Swedish diplomat was
illegal and demanded the return of Mr. Wallenberg or his remains. The
court ruled in Mr. von Dardel's favor. But the Soviet Union didn't respond
and the case was eventually dismissed. He retired to search full-time for
his brother.

A Sister's Campaign
Nina Lagergren tirelessly spread the name of Mr. Wallenberg, her
half-brother. Among the thousands of honors bestowed him are these eight
stamps issued between 1983 and 2001.

Ms. Lagergren, meanwhile, assembled a book of letters her mother wrote
about Raoul when he was young. She headlined the New York premiere of a
Raoul Wallenberg movie in the fall of 1984. The next spring, at a
black-tie dinner in her missing half-brother's honor, she dined on gravlax
and reindeer alongside Henry Kissinger and Max von Sydow and lamented that
her mother hadn't received such support.

Mr. von Dardel didn't attend either event.

Swedish reticence and Soviet intransigence began to give way. In 1987,
Sweden issued a Raoul Wallenberg stamp and dedicated a Stockholm square to
him. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev introduced an era of openness.

Mr. von Dardel traveled to Moscow in 1987 and 1988 to meet again with Mr.
Sakharov, relaying locations near Tbilisi and Leningrad where his
half-brother was rumored to be. Mr. Sakharov and his wife, Elena Bonner,
set off. "I was in a state of urgency," Ms. Bonner recalls.

The next year, the Soviet ambassador in Sweden summoned the siblings to
his embassy and said they were invited to Moscow. "Their faces were
glowing," he later recalled to a Swedish newspaper.

On Oct. 16, 1989, a Soviet official set a wooden box before Ms. Lagergren
and Mr. von Dardel. The siblings, 68 and 70, beheld what had been seized
from their half-brother 45 years before: an address book, calendar, car
registration, cigarette case, diplomatic passport and stacks of old money
-- Bulgarian leva, Hungarian pengos, Swedish krona, Swiss francs and U.S.
dollars. The Soviets reiterated that Mr. Wallenberg had died in 1947 and
nearly all his case files had been destroyed.

Mr. Sakharov, too, told the siblings that he believed their brother was
dead.

Memories of Brother

The two returned home from Moscow, their paths now increasingly determined
by their pasts.

Ms. Lagergren recalled her missing brother vividly. He had loved to dance
and mimic, imitating German officers and French diplomats at a 1943
Christmas party. He remained everpresent in her home -- a bust of Raoul in
her entryway, his architectural sketchings in her study, the wooden box
from Moscow now tucked in her basement.

She spoke about him weekly at her Stockholm association but not to her
aristocratic circle of friends. Ms. Lagergren began to take
anti-depressants and sought refuge in her yard, tufts of corydalis ringing
the trunks of her apple and pear trees. "I must have this dual life to be
able to exist," she says.

Mr. von Dardel had not been as close to his brother and kept few of his
possessions. He struggled to recall him, says his wife, Matti. A doctor
suspected Parkinson's disease. Mr. von Dardel's face became increasingly
still. Soon after, he wept without expression when he listened to Raoul's
college classmates recount how the missing man had hitchhiked, shopped at
Montgomery Ward and liked Laurel and Hardy.

The former physicist turned to research. He created the
Soviet-International Commission on the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul
Wallenberg, which gave way to a Swedish-Russian governmental group. Its
members hoped the Soviet Union's collapse would loosen archives and
officials.

Mr. von Dardel distanced himself from the Raoul Wallenberg Association he
had founded with his sister. The dues of its 1,000 members funded an
annual concert and helped spread his name. There was now a Raoul
Wallenberg daffodil, a Raoul Wallenberg wax statue in a Swedish museum, a
Raoul Wallenberg entry in the Guinness Book of World Records ("Greatest
Number of People Saved from Extinction"). In 1991, Mr. von Dardel did not
attend the association's board meeting and in later years did not return.

"I have found these activities relatively uninteresting, if not to say
tasteless, as long as Raoul's destiny is unsolved," he wrote in June 1994
to Peter Wallenberg, who had supported the association since assuming his
family's helm in 1982. Mr. von Dardel asked the banker for $50,000 to fund
his search.

Peter Wallenberg declined the request. (He says he was instructed to do so
by Ms. Lagergren; she says this is false.) Soon, the Wallenberg bank also
refused Mr. von Dardel access to its archive, the family lawyer stating on
Swedish television that it was open only to "serious research."

Mr. von Dardel commissioned an FBI sketch of what his brother would look
like at age 80. He wrote his sister to ask for Raoul's dental records. He
traveled to Russia 15 times in 1994 alone -- the 75-year-old man enduring
scabies, hypothermia and, when he approached a man Soviet files say
interrogated his brother a half-century before, a cane swung at his head.
He began to question the motives of those he'd hired to help him, letters
show, and wondered if his phone was tapped.

Mr. von Dardel had used his savings, a few hundred thousand dollars, to
fund his research, his wife says. He'd spent another $100,000 from his
youngest daughter. By 1995, 50 years after he began looking for his
brother, he'd all but stopped speaking to his sister.

Using his wife as an intermediary, she says, he told Ms. Lagergren he
wanted to tap the account Mr. Wallenberg had left behind. Ms. Lagergren
acquiesced. Over the next five years, Mr. von Dardel withdrew $130,000,
Mr. Wallenberg funding his own search.

The siblings' Raoul Wallenberg Association closed its doors in 1999. Ms.
Lagergren opened the Raoul Wallenberg Committee. She was its sole member.

Apology From Sweden
The year was 2000. The siblings were to assume their brother dead. But Ms.
Lagergren couldn't bring herself to do so. The time, she says, "was not
ripe yet."

In January 2001, the Swedish-Russian group that included Mr. von Dardel
published its final report on Mr. Wallenberg. It was inconclusive.

Days later, Swedish Prime Minister Gran Persson phoned the siblings.
Recalls Mr. Persson: "It was an expression of apology from the kingdom of
Sweden."

The prime minister failed to comfort. "How can one call after so many
years?" asks Ms. Lagergren. "Just call?"

In short order, Mr. von Dardel broke his hip, got a pacemaker, caught
pneumonia and, says his family, spoke less and less. He stopped speaking
of his brother.

His doctors were unsure why. His family wasn't. "You understand now," says
his daughter, Louise, "that the illness is Raoul Wallenberg illness."

In 2003, a commission appointed by the Swedish prime minister published "A
Diplomatic Failure," an open critique of Sweden's policy toward its
missing diplomat. "Diplomatic opportunities that might have helped
Wallenberg were missed," says Sweden's current deputy foreign minister,
Frank Belfrage.

Mr. Lundvik, the ambassador who long handled the Wallenberg case, is more
blunt. "The Swedish government did not want him back," he says.

In 2005, Mr. von Dardel's younger daughter, Marie Dupuy, emptied the
contents of her father's living-room closet into her Peugeot and drove it
to her home in Versailles, France. She divided some 50,000 pages into 75
bins. One was devoted to her father's career in physics, 74 to his missing
half-brother.

Here were the 32 years before Mr. Wallenberg disappeared -- a tracing of
his newborn foot, an invitation to a 1944 cocktail party he hosted. But
mostly, here were the 61 years that came after -- pleas for information
from soldiers and girlfriends, lawsuits and librettos bearing his name.
Here was the account of the Pole who claimed to have given Mr. Wallenberg
extra soup rations. Here was the thank-you note, dated 1978, to the doctor
who would help Raoul's parents die.

In September 2007, Ms. Lagergren visited Geneva and stopped to see her
brother. He didn't speak. "The years when he was on the commission must
have been very trying for him," she says.

On Aug. 4, 2008, dressed in red and blue, Ms. Lagergren clipped three red
roses from her garden. She placed the flowers, as her mother had, next to
the portrait of Raoul that had stood in her parents' living room.
Ninety-six years after the day he was born, she still presumed him living.

Eight days later, Mr. von Dardel sat silently in Room 233 of a Geneva
hospital. Belted to a recliner chair, his hospital bracelet sliding over
his thin right forearm, he listened to this reporter recount his family's
search.

"I think it was very unfair," he said in a faint voice, of the brunt of
two suicides on his sister. "Nina was in the center position."

Talk turned to the search.

"One should go to the top," he said.

Vladimir Putin?

"Yes."

What would he like to tell the Russian leader?

Days before turning 89, Mr. von Dardel summoned his strength: "If we sit
down...try to find out...the real hope would be if new information..."

Did he still think about Raoul?

"Yes, I do," Mr. von Dardel answered in his strongest voice.

Later, he added: "I see him in Russia."

(source:  Wall Street Journal)




ENGLAND:

Holocaust-denier Williamson "will fight any German extradition"


British bishop Richard Williamson is to fight with all legal means any
extradition request from Germany over remarks he made in that country
denying the Holocaust, it was reported Sunday.

The Sunday Telegraph newspaper quoted his lawyer Kevin Lowry- Mullins as
saying this after German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries told
journalists last week that Berlin could demand Williamson's extradition to
face court proceedings for Holocaust denial.

The lawyer, who according to the Sunday Telegraph had already represented
another Holocaust denier, was quoted as saying Williamson would fight any
extradition request right to the final instance of appeal, Britain's House
of Lords.

Denial of the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, but not in Britain, to
where Williamson returned last week after being expelled from Argentina.

Zypries, in remarks to reports in Brussels, had said Friday that 'in
principle, the offence falls under the rules of the European Arrest
Warrant. That means that Germany could indeed issue such a warrant.'

This was because an interview in which Williamson questioned the scale of
the Holocaust, broadcast in Sweden, was recorded in Germany, giving the
German courts jurisdiction, she said. The bishop is already under
investigation in Germany for his comments.

Williamson, who has been residing at an undisclosed location in Britain
after his expulsion from Argentina on Wednesday, later published a
statement on the website of the British arm of the ultra- conservative
Society of Saint Pius X expressing 'regrets' about the 'harm and hurt'
which his Holocaust denial remarks had caused.

Williamson said Pope Benedict XVI had requested that he reconsider the
remarks made on Swedish television four months ago, 'because their
consequences have been so heavy.'

'Observing these consequences I can truthfully say that I regret having
made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and
hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to
survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I
would not have made them.'

In the Swedish television interview, Williamson, 68, had challenged the
figure of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and said he believed that
the figure was 'up to 300,000' Jews killed, and that 'I believe there were
no gas chambers during World War II.'

But as with the original remarks, his new statement published Friday only
served to raise further controversy.

In an initial reaction from Rome, the Vatican dismissed the new statement
as falling short of what the pope had demanded. Holy See chief spokesman
Father Federico Lombardi said that the apology 'does not seem to respect
the terms' set by the Vatican.

Lombardi described the statement as 'generic and equivocal,' contrasting
it to a request made by the Vatican to Williamson that he 'clearly and
publicly distance himself' from his remarks on the Holocaust.

(source:  Monster and Critics)





NORWAY:

Norway honors writer Hamsun with mixed feelings


Some 15 years ago, sculptor Skule Waksvik started work on a statue of
1920 Nobel Literature Prize winner Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian who was
adored by his countrymen for his writing but despised for supporting
the Nazis during World War II.

"No one wanted it," said Waksvik. "I threw it away."

Waksvik is trying again, this time with a firm order for a 7-foot bronze
statue for the National Library's Hamsun Year, which started Feb. 19 and
culminates with the 150th anniversary of the writer's birth on Aug. 4,
1859. He's prepared for angry reactions.

"I know it might get knocked over or vandalized," said Waksvik.

The idea of honoring Hamsun, reviled as a traitor after 1940-45 Nazi
occupation of Norway, stirs angry debate here, 57 years after his death on
Jan. 19, 1952. Hamsun supported Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling and his
collaborator government, gave his Nobel medal to Nazi propagandist Joseph
Goebbels in 1943 and wrote an obituary praising Adolf Hitler in 1945.

Yet this is the also the man whose writing inspired the likes of Ernest
Hemingway and who is called a definer of "modernist" novels. His most
famous works include "Hunger" and the Nobel-winning "Growth of the Soil."

"We have two writers in Norway of international format: (Henrik) Ibsen and
Hamsun," said Atle Kittang, a literature professor at the University of
Bergen. "Hamsun was celebrated and loved by Norwegian readers until the
war. It was as if they were wounded in love, and that hurt sits deep. In
Norway, that hurt can also be passed from generation to generation."

Quisling was executed after the war. Hamsun's wife, Marie, served three
years of hard labor for treason. But what of Hamsun? How could they punish
a famous, Nobel Prize-winning, 85-year-old writer?

"He was charged with treason, but an order came, from quite high up, for
him to have a mental examination," said Kittang. "He was declared to have
a lasting mental impairment (and declared unfit to stand trial) so the
charge was dropped."

The "mentally impaired" Hamsun completed his last book, the best-seller
"On Overgrown Paths" in 1949, partly while in custody. He was later fined
for having been a member of the Norwegian Nazi party, a claim he denied.

Lars Frode Larsen, one of Hamsun's biographers, said the Nazi issue always
distracts from Hamsun's brilliance as a writer.

For example, in the town of Grimstad, the city council voted 18-17 in
February to name a town square after Hamsun outside a new museum devoted
to his life.

The head of the theater for Nord-Trondelag county, Otto Homlung, declared
his stage a "Hamsun Free Zone" for 2009, asking in the Jan. 13 edition of
the Adressavisen newspaper: "Can we separate celebration of the wordsmith
Hamsun from a celebration of the Nazi Hamsun?"

The Aftenposten newspaper reported that the Hamsun Committee had trouble
finding sponsors because companies don't want to seem to support a Nazi.

Hamsun was born in central Norway as Knud Pedersen  a patronymic based on
his father's name Peder. The family moved when he was 3 to the Hamsund
farm in the far northern town of Hamaroey, about 100 miles north of the
Arctic Circle.

Like many of his characters, Hamsun was born into poverty, and had little
formal education. At age 9, he was sent to work for an ailing uncle under
a regime of strict discipline and hard work. Since he was not allowed to
play with other children, he read and learned to write on his own in what
he later called his "blighted" childhood.

Hamsun's first short story "Den Gaadefulde"  which means the enigmatic
was published in 1877 under the name Knud Pedersen when he was 18.

Eventually, he took the name of the Hamsund farm, a common practice at the
time, and in 1884  at least as Hamsun lore has it  the 'd' was
accidentally dropped from his name in the printing of an essay on Mark
Twain in 1884, and he liked it.

The young Hamsun also worked a variety of usually menial jobs in the
United States, including as a trolley car conductor in Chicago. He
described his difficult times in the U.S. in the sarcastic book "From the
Cultural Life of Modern America."

Hamsun's breakthrough came with the 1890 publication of "Hunger," a partly
autobiographical tale of a starving writer that is often described as one
of the first psychological novels. However, it was his Nobel-prize winning
"Growth of the Soil" from 1917 that won him world attention.

Kittang said Hamsun had reactionary views with a strong aversion to
classical civilization and modern society, and he idolized an
old-fashioned, rural life of working the soil.

He was also an ardent supporter of Germany, and Kittang said some aspects
of Nazism appealed to him, such as idealization of nature. However, he did
not appear to adopt the "ugly" aspects of Nazism or display any
anti-Semitism, the researcher said.

Hamsun was 80 when German troops marched into Norway in April 1940, and
Kittang said he may have become so ideologically inflexible in his old
age, just automatically preferring Germany to its enemies. However, Hamsun
had also openly supported Hitler since 1934, and wrote in support of the
occupation.

According to biographies, Hamsun had a disastrous meeting with Hitler in
June 1943, when he enraged the Nazi dictator complaining about the
mistreatment and executions of Norwegians by German occupation forces.

With uncannily poor timing, Hamsun wrote one more article that remains
etched in the national consciousness: an obituary praising Hitler as "a
warrior for mankind" that was published as Norway was being liberated in
May 1945.

"There were a lot of Norwegian Nazis, but they are forgotten now," said
Kittang. "Hamsun was too famous to be forgotten."

(source:  Associated Press)




POLAND:

Poland seeks foreign donations to preserve Auschwitz camp



Poland has appealed for international donations to preserve facilities
and exhibits at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz where more than
one million Jews perished during World War Two.

The Auschwitz site, near the city of Krakow in southern Poland, comprises
155 camp buildings, 300 ruined facilities and hundreds of thousands of
personal belongings and documents scattered over more than 200 hectares.

In a letter obtained by Reuters on Friday, Polish Prime Minister Donald
Tusk said those running the Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum would set up a
foundation to administer a special fund with a minimum capital of 120
million euros.

"Saving Auschwitz-Birkenau means saving the memory of millions who
suffered and were bestially murdered. It is the responsibility and duty of
entire Europe," Tusk said in a letter addressed to leaders of European and
some other countries, especially those with a large Jewish diaspora.

The museum itself lacks the resources to check the progressive decay and
deterioration of its facilities and objects, Tusk said in his letter,
dated February 10 but not previously made public.

Jews from all over Europe perished in the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-
Birkenau concentration camp set up by the Nazis after Germany's conquest
of Poland in 1939. Many others died of starvation, forced labor, disease
and in medical experiments.

Poland founded a museum on the site, known as Oswiecim in Polish, after
the war. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the museum every year,
passing through the iron gate bearing the motto "Arbeit macht frei" (work
makes free).

(source:  Reuters)







GERMANY:

Schaeffler Founder Had Nazi Ties, Cicero Reports

Wilhelm Schaeffler, one of the founders of Schaeffler Group, was a member
of the Nazi party and employed forced labor to produce weapons for the
German military during World War II, Cicero magazine reported.

Schaefflers company, called Davistan AG at the time, was purchased in 1940
from creditors after being abandoned by its Jewish owner in 1933,
according to Gregor Schoellgen, a historian commissioned by the Schaeffler
family to research their past, the magazine said in its March issue.
Wilhelm Schaeffler joined the Nazis in 1941 yet didnt play an active role
in the party, the report said.

Schaeffler, who died in 1981, was the brother-in-law of Maria-Elisabeth
Schaeffler, who now owns Schaeffler Group with her son Georg. The
manufacturer, strained by 11 billion euros ($14 billion) of debt from the
purchase of Continental AG, makes transmission parts and ball bearings for
cars, planes and fishing reels.

In 1942, Wilhelm Schaeffler converted some of the companys textile
production to the manufacture of bombs, armored vehicles and canons. He
acted as did most German industrialists of this time, Schoellgen, a
professor at the University of Erlangen, said in the report.

Those who wanted to keep their companies above water entered the defense
business and contributed to the German war and annihilation machine,
whether they wanted to or not, said Schoellgen.

Imprisoned Until 1951

Slave labor was used by the company from 1943 as military call-ups led to
labor shortages, the magazine reported. Wilhelm Schaeffler was arrested in
1946 and imprisoned until 1951 for misappropriating Polish property.

The report rejects claims that the company used human hair from the
Auschwitz concentration camp to produce textiles.

All evidence today contradicts these suspicions, said the report, adding:
None of the systematic searches of German archives in connection with
Schaeffler found even a hint of links to Auschwitz, let alone the delivery
of hair, said the report.

Detlef Sieverdingbeck, spokesman for Herzogenaurach, Germany-based
Schaeffler, said in an e-mail yesterday that Schoellgen was engaged
several years ago to investigate business activities prior to Schaeffler
Groups founding in 1946 on the familys own initiative.

Because of false reports and allegations that have surfaced recently on
the Internet, Professor Schoellgen published, for clarification, the most
essential results of his research in Cicero, he said.

(source:  Bloomberg News)




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


Feb. 24




USA:

Exhibition Review | 'State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda'
Nazis' 'Terrible Weapon,' Aimed at Minds and Hearts


The most haunting image in "State of Deception: The Power of Nazi
Propaganda," a major new exhibition at the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum here, may be the first one you see after the introductory
videos. At the end of a darkened corridor is a black-and-white photograph
on a black background. Underneath, with unornamented simplicity, is a
single word: Hitler.

It is a campaign poster from 1932, when the Nazi Party was already the
second largest in the German Parliament. The mass rallies, the storm
troopers, the frenzied rhetoric of this electrifying speaker: all are
condensed into this silent face, which is deliberately unsettling, starkly
divided into light and shade, mixing comfort with ferocity, transparency
with subterranean energies.

It is chilling because we know what that face unleashed, and as we make
our way through the exhibition, we feel almost physically assailed. A
muscular fist smashes into the face of a cringing, sweating Jew (1928). An
enormous Hitler is superimposed on a crowd of ecstatic Germans raising
hands in salute as red gothic letters shout, "Ja!" (1934).

These images verge on kitsch but have too much force to be easily
dismissed. Some are as graphically brilliant as the Nazi flag Hitler
designed, its blood red background surrounding a white circle stamped with
the swastika scar. That jagged black cross is almost never in repose; it
pivots on the point of an extended arm, its shape cutting through space,
as if caught in circular motion, a fearsome revolutionary weapon.

The exhibition mounts some of these posters as they might have been seen
at the time, plastered on walls. Beside them campaign images attacking the
Nazis in 1932 - democracy's last gasp - seem hopelessly understated, even
one from the Social Democratic Party that shows a skeleton with a Nazi
cap and bloody hands. "Nein!" the poster futilely shouts.

As the show, organized by Steven Luckert, winds its way from the
beginnings of Nazism in the aftershocks of the First World War to the
Allied attempt to eradicate Nazi propaganda after the Second, the effect
is overwhelming. Conceptually everything is familiar: the foundering
Weimar Republic, the celebrations of Aryan virility, the Jew as embodiment
of evil, the mass rallies, the death camps, the defeat. But the effect is
not in the facts but in the images and artifacts, many of which have been
lent by institutions in Europe for this show.

And if this is how powerfully these images affect an early-21st-century
viewer who would have been a prospective victim, imagine the power they
had on believers, flattering their highest vision of themselves while
reminding them that endangering this imminent utopia was the conniving
Jew, known from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In one 1943 poster a
giant hand points accusingly at a corpulent caricature wearing a yellow
star, "Jude": "He is to blame for the war!" This, of course, while Jews
were being carried off on trains heading east to feed the crematoriums.

The impact of these images is prerational or antirational; they
short-circuit argument. To suggest that perhaps this caricatured figure
was not to blame for the war would be like insisting on an alternate
universe. The accusation could be rejected only if everything were
rejected. Exorcism and murder were not a policy; they were a
responsibility. They all flowed out of these posters and their associated
beliefs.

And once accepted they are tirelessly applied. A children's game here,
"Juden Raus!" ("Jews Out!"), has a playing board that is a perverted
version of Candyland. Its pictured resting places are retail stores
labeled Gorstein, Cohn or Stern. Succeed in chasing out six Jews, the
board affirms, and you win.

At the exhibition too are pages from the most fervent Nazi publication,
Der Strmer, helpfully translated. One advertisement shows a label that
must have been the Nazi equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal: "This
emblem on clothing protects you from unwittingly buying Jewish products!"

But however medieval the vision, the methods were contemporary. On display
is the Volksempfnger, the Peoples Receiver: an inexpensive radio powerful
enough to bring Hitler's voice to millions of Germans, yet weak enough so
few signals could be received from other countries.

The people's radio helped ensure a closed world in which the Nazi vision
could unfold without challenge. Propaganda, as Hitler noted in "Mein
Kampf", "is a truly terrible weapon in the hands of an expert."

The exhibition should have included more on how Nazi propaganda was used
on an international scale to lull the democratic West into acceding to
Hitler's expansionism, and how it portrayed Germany's triumphs and
defeats. But the shows major flaw is that it cant quite settle on what to
make of propaganda itself. Surely we don't need the Nazi example to teach
us that propaganda "omits information selectively," "simplifies complex
issues" and "plays on emotions." That is also true of advertising and much
political advocacy.

And while it is necessary to understand the historical context, as this
exhibition does, how far can such insight go? The narrative begins with
Allied propaganda during World War I, which caricatured the "Hun" as a
fearsome brute. Hitler wrote: "There was no end to what could be learned
from the enemy by a man who kept his eyes open." If the Allies could make
up stories about German war atrocities, why shouldn't the Nazis use that
strategy against the Jews?

But the situations are less comparable than they seem. German atrocities
during World War I were exaggerated, but historians do not regard them all
as delusions. Nazi propaganda was something different in kind, not just
degree. It created a world that had no foundation except in myth, even
attributing the Nazi desire for extermination of the Other to the Other.
Nazis accused the Jews of having a secret plan to exterminate the Germans
and, as evidence, cited a crank vanity publication by a New Jersey
salesman.

The show ends with an account of the Nuremberg trials in which Julius
Streicher, the founder and editor of Der Strmer, was convicted and
executed for being a propagandist, setting a precedent for prosecuting for
"incitement to genocide." The exhibition points out that in 2003 that
charge was used to convict the publisher of a tabloid and the owner of a
radio station in Rwanda. It also notes that some have suggested the
charge be brought against the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for
declaring that Israel "must be wiped off the map."

The museum is developing a curriculum based on the show that will probe
the notion of propaganda and examine contemporary implications. But here
the slope becomes slippery. How much does the Nazi manipulation of media
reveal about propagandas misuse in democratic societies? Does the extreme
example shed light on the commonplace, without the dangers of the extreme
being lessened, the dangers of the commonplace amplified?

Such analogies risk slighting what was so powerful about Nazi propaganda:
It didn't just distort reality to make an argument; it reshaped it. It
tapped into mythic beliefs about Jews being genocidal and inhuman, thus
spurring retaliation. Is anything rhetorically comparable today?

Perhaps. The exhibition points out that the Nazis financed anti-Semitic
broadcasts by Haj Amin al-Husseini, "an Arab nationalist and prominent
Muslim religious leader." Now no sponsorship seems needed. Major Middle
East media outlets have asserted that Jews use childrens blood to bake
matzos. In recent weeks we have heard that Jews are following the
nefarious plot outlined in the Protocols to exterminate all gentiles, this
from the poet and former member of the Lebanese Parliament Ghassan Matar.
An Egyptian cleric, Safwat Higazi, has described Jews being as "smooth as
a viper": "Dispatch those son of apes and pigs to the Hellfire."

And an Egyptian cleric with strong ties to the West, Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradhawi, has described Jews as "a profligate, cunning arrogant band
of people": "Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them, down to the
very last one."

The extent of these visions (chronicled by the Middle East Media Research
Institute), the historical distortions they codify and the readiness with
which they are taught to children and are secularized into political
action suggest that the strongest contemporary analogy to Nazi propaganda
may be one the exhibition leaves unmentioned.

"State of Deception" remains on view through December 2011, at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW,
Washington; (202) 488-0400.

(source:  New York Times)




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


Feb. 22



USA:

Elie Wiesel: Embracing memory and madness----The 81-year-old Holocaust
survivor's 49th book, 'A Mad Desire to Dance,' revisits themes common to
his writing through the years.


Reporting from New York -- "Purple in the grays. Vermillion in the orange
shadows, on a cold, fine day."

-- Pierre Bonnard, from his notebooks


Manhattan in a winter storm seems galaxies away from Bonnard's bright
interiors. I carry an exhibition catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of
Art to Elie Wiesel's office in Midtown.

As we talk, the bright yellow cover blinks up from the coffee table,
louder than the thousands of books in his office; louder than his voice,
which is soft with a strong French accent and something else.

Wiesel is 81. He is modestly dressed in a blue blazer, gray pants and
black shoes. His manner is a gentle combination of elegance and humility.
He is not frail, but I suspect I am not the first to feel the instinct to
protect him, to speak quietly, not to move suddenly, to live up to the
sophistication and humanity he deserves.

Wiesel's 49th book, "A Mad Desire to Dance" (Alfred A. Knopf: 274 pp.,
$24) is a novel that contains, like all his books, the voice of a madman.
"These were the first people to be taken away," he says, thinking back to
World War II. "Children, old people, madmen. I give them shelter in my
books; there is always a place for them. They haunt my universe and I say,
'Come in.' "

In the novel, Doriel, a middle-aged man whose parents lived through the
war, believes he may be haunted by a dybbuk -- in Jewish folklore, the
dislocated soul of a dead person. He seeks help from a young female
therapist. The chapters follow the progress of the therapy, alternating
between the therapist's and Doriel's points of view.

Wiesel began writing to bear witness to the Holocaust and to inspire
others to write their stories. For years, he has defended the importance
of memory against those who deny aspects of the Holocaust.

A loyal following

Even on the day we meet, the media carry the story of a Catholic bishop
who questions the existence of the gas chambers. But readers have never
abandoned him. Half a century after its publication, "Night," which
details his months in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a young teenager,
continues to appear on bestseller lists.

"Why did I write it?" Wiesel asks in the 2006 preface to a new
translation. "Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to
go mad in order to understand the nature of madness, the immense,
terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of
mankind?"

In February 2007, Wiesel was attacked by a different sort of madman,
pulled off an elevator in San Francisco by a 22-year-old Holocaust denier
named Eric Hunt who tried to drag him into a hotel room. Ever since,
Wiesel has had a bodyguard. He has just returned from the inauguration and
sees the election of Barack Obama as "history trying to redeem itself." He
remembers visiting the South in the early 1950s and feeling ashamed to be
white.

Most of Wiesel's books are written in French; the author settled in France
after the war, studying psychology and philosophy at the Sorbonne. His
wife, Marion, was his translator for many years, but recently she has been
called to full-time work at the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, which
the couple started after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, and which
suffered losses of around $15 million, substantially all of its assets, in
the Bernard Madoff scandal. "Night" was written in Yiddish, his childhood
language.

"A Mad Desire to Dance," the author explains, is a response to his 1964
novel, "The Town Beyond the Wall," in which Michael, a Holocaust survivor,
returns to the town in which he was born, is captured by communists, put
in prison and tortured. The novel ends with Michael locked in a cell with
a madman, a catatonic who is unable to break through his wall of silence.
"He knows," Wiesel explains of Michael, "that if he does nothing he will
go mad as well, so he tries to cure the madman."

In "A Mad Desire to Dance," Doriel is "cured" when his therapist leads him
to the realization that his mother, a prominent resistance leader, had an
affair during the war.

Did the new novel begin with a memory of dancing? "I've never danced in my
life," Wiesel says. "I don't know how to dance or swim." Rather, the book
"began with a melody. As for the structure, it offers itself from the
inside. If I were to begin a novel with a preconceived structure, it would
be false."

Certainly the structure of "A Mad Desire to Dance" comes from Doriel's
therapy: the realization of his mother's affair and his ability to forgive
her. "I believe in therapy," Wiesel says, "particularly between friends.
If a friend talks to another friend to relieve his suffering, that is
therapy. Human beings were not born to be alone. God alone is alone.
People are capable of falling in love. Illness is not being able to fall
in love."

Wiesel writes each book three times. He is long past denying the element
of autobiography in his work. He is, like many writers, exhausted after
writing. "One," he says, "has to condense so much."

Readers often come away from Wiesel's books questioning their faith, even
the existence of God. "I want them to feel that life is worth living," he
explains, "but I'm not a policeman. Who am I to be a guardian of faith? It
is humanity I believe in. Humanity is so frail."

When Wiesel speaks, he often comes across a memory. Speaking of human
frailty, he recalls how frightened he was as a young boy in the camps. "I
kept thinking, I haven't done anything to remain alive."

After his father died, on Jan. 28, 1944, in the bed next to him, Wiesel
says flatly, "I died. I asked myself what would I have done if I had been
chosen to be a kapo [a prisoner selected to help supervise other
prisoners]. I hope I can say with certainty that I would have said no, but
I honestly don't know. I haven't been tested. What can I tell the child in
me?"

This is the question Wiesel asks in all his books. "The child in me is my
judge."

'It was a nightmare'

Wiesel was born in Sighet, Romania, in 1928. When he returned 20 years
after the war, he did not recognize the town. "It looked the same," he
says, "but there were no Jews. Strangers lived there. It was a nightmare.
I felt threatened. But I found, in the synagogue, some of the books that
had once been mine and some of the commentaries I wrote as a child on the
Bible. I remembered what we had done the last night before we were taken
away."

On that long ago evening, Wiesel's father had dug a hole in the basement
to hide the families' valuables. Wiesel, meanwhile, had hidden a gold
watch his grandfather had given him in a tree. Two decades later, he snuck
out in the middle of the night "into someone else's garden to see if the
watch was still there. It was there. I put it back. I left it there."

Wiesel has taught philosophy for 40 years. (He is the Andrew W. Mellon
professor in the humanities at Boston University.) "I love my students,"
he says. "I spend time with them; I listen to their stories." He also
loves the thousands of stories he receives from fellow survivors; he reads
them all, writing letters and prefaces and sending encouraging words. Once
in a great while, he discovers that a writer is lying, and this shocks
him, but he does not judge. "It is difficult enough to tell the truth," he
says.

Indeed, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was difficult for the author to get his
books published. No one wanted to read about the Holocaust. "Now," he says
with pride, "there isn't a school that doesn't teach it."

In the end, Wiesel believes, "The beauty of a good book is the special
link between the reader and the writer -- sparks from the ashes, light and
shadow." But he worries about preserving that link amid the speed of
modern life.

"When I was a child," he recalls, "we would spend months preparing to
visit my grandfather. We had time to think about things -- to anticipate
-- before we did them. You'd think for a long time about taking a girl
out. Now you ask her out and get divorced on the same day.

"In America, everything is numbers. But I'm happy if I write one good
sentence."

(source:  Los Angeles Times)







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


Feb. 17




FRANCE:

France Responsible in WWII Deportations-----Ruling by Nation's Top
Tribunal Is Clearest Official Admission of Government's Role in
Expulsions



France's highest administrative tribunal ruled Monday that the French
government was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Jews to
Nazi death camps during World War II.

The ruling, by the Council of State, marked the clearest and most
authoritative official admission of responsibility for the still-
controversial role of the collaborationist Vichy government in the
treatment of Jews during four years of German occupation. It said French
authorities helped deport Jews even without being forced to by the
occupying German army, rejecting an interpretation still clung to by some
French people unwilling to confront the history of what happened.

The declaration's practical effect for French Jews seemed likely to be
limited, however, as the council also ruled that reparations paid to
deportees and their survivors by the French government since 1945 "have
repaired, as much as this is possible, all the wrongs suffered." The
reparations were decided in accordance with the norms of human rights, it
added, and were similar to reparations paid by other European governments.

The council was responding to a request for a ruling from a lower
administrative tribunal hearing a claim from the daughter of a Jew
deported from France who perished at the notorious Auschwitz camp. She
demanded about $250,000 in reparations for the death of her father and for
the hardships she herself suffered during and after the war.

The council's judgment, although significant for its sweeping admission of
responsibility, appeared to signal a dismissal of her claim in the lower
court and of a number of similar such claims before various French courts.
The council, a sort of supreme jurisdiction for France's administrative
tribunals, is widely respected as the last word in interpreting
administrative law.

"The various measures taken since the end of World War II, by way of
indemnities as well as symbolic, have repaired, as far as this is
possible, all the wrongs suffered," the ruling said.

There was no immediate response from the claimant or any of the several
organizations that represent France's half-million Jews.

The role of the French government under Nazi occupation has long been a
tender subject in France. Collaboration was widespread, including the
government based in Vichy that openly cooperated with Berlin.

Charles de Gaulle, taking power at the war's end, chose to emphasize those
who resisted German authorities as a way to enhance national unity as the
country sought to recover from its defeat. Since then, however, new
generations have arisen and the subject of France's conduct during the war
has been widely examined by French historians, writers and filmmakers.

Then-President Jacques Chirac in 1995 formally acknowledged the betrayal
of French Jews during the war, saying the country was guilty of a
"collective fault." Olivier de Berranger, bishop of Drancy, two years
later asked forgiveness for the silence of the Roman Catholic hierarchy as
thousands of Jews were deported to camps via a railway staging point at
Drancy, in the Paris suburbs.

In the same vein, the tribunal's ruling Monday said Marshal Philippe
Ptain's collaborationist government, using French police, carried out
"arrests, internments and transports whose destination was transit camps
that were, during World War II, the first station of the deportation of
these people toward the camps in which most of them were exterminated."

(source: Washington Post)

Feb. 19





ARGENTINA:

Argentina expels Holocaust- denying bishop


Argentina has given a Roman Catholic bishop 10 days to leave the country
or be expelled after he caused an international uproar by denying the
extent of the Holocaust, the government said on Thursday.

Bishop Richard Williamson, an ultra-traditionalist who headed a seminary
near Buenos Aires until earlier this month, has said he believes there
were no gas chambers and that no more than 300,000 Jews died in Germany's
Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million figure that is widely
accepted.

The Vatican ordered him to retract his comments and the British-born
Williamson responded that needed more time to review the evidence.

"The interior minister ... orders Richard Nelson Williamson to leave the
country within 10 days or be expelled," Argentina's government said in a
statement.

Williamson's views were anti-Semitic and "deeply offended Argentine
society," the government said. Argentina is home to one of the world's
largest Jewish communities outside of Israel.

At the seminary outside Buenos Aires, in the rural town of La Reja, two
clergymen told Reuters that Williamson had already left the sprawling,
tree-lined compound.

"It's very sad but there you have it," said a bespectacled, young
Frenchman who identified himself as Juan de Dios, or Juan of God.

Neither he nor priest Alvaro Calderon was willing to say if Williamson had
left for good.

Pope Benedict angered Jewish leaders and many Catholics last month when he
lifted excommunications on Williamson and three other traditionalists to
try to heal a 20-year-old schism within the Church that began in 1988 when
they were ordained without Vatican permission.

Williamson, who belongs to the ultra-traditional Society of Saint Pius X,
was removed earlier this month as head of the seminary in La Reja.

World Jewish organizations and German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticized
the pope for rehabilitating Williamson. The pope, who is German-born, has
tried to heal wounds by meeting Jewish leaders and ordering Williamson to
recant his views.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and state prosecutors in the
southern city of Regensburg are investigating Williamson for incitement.

German neo-Nazi websites and blogs have published pieces supporting
Williamson's stand.

Argentine Jewish groups applauded the government's decision. Aldo Donzis,
head of the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations, said denying
the Holocaust was "unacceptable."

Rabbi Daniel Goldman, a child of Holocaust survivors who sought government
action against Williamson, told the Jewish News Agency that "actions such
as these clearly show that our people and our leadership refuse to live
alongside a lie."

A leader of Germany's Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, said
on Sunday it was "almost ridiculous" that Williamson has said he needs
time to review evidence about whether the Holocaust took place.

(source: Reuters)





GERMANY:

Prosecutor slams delay in Demjanjuk Holocaust case


Germany's war crimes prosecutor issued an impassioned warning Thursday
against any further delay in bringing 88-year-old John Demjanjuk to trial
for allegedly helping kill 29,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp.

Kurt Schrimm, who heads Germany's national office on war crimes in
Ludwigsburg, said his staff have already set out a compelling case against
Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born man who now lives in the US state of Ohio.
Schrimm rejected claims by local German prosecutors that the case was
incomplete.

Demjanjuk was acquitted in 1993 by the Israeli Supreme Court of charges
that he was a guard at the Treblinka death camp.

The Germans say they have proof that he served the Nazis from April to
July 1943 at a different extermination camp, Sobibor, operating diesel
engines that were used to gas inmates to death.

'The evidence we have sent to Munich suffices,' Schrimm told Deutsche
Presse-Agentur dpa.

He said a failure to try Demjanjuk would prompt fresh criticism of the
German justice authorities.

Schrimm's unit does not have the powers to prosecute Demjanjuk itself.
Insted it sent the file to prosecutors in Munich last November. Munich is
the German city where Demjanjuk lived as a displaced person till he
emigrated to the United States in 1952.

The Schrimm team found a Sobibor witness and obtained expert evidence that
Demjanjuk's Nazi identity card was genuine and had not been tampered with
by Soviet authorities. Schrimm then hoped Munich would apply quickly for
Demjanjuk's extradition.

However Munich has initiated a new forensic study at the Bavarian police
laboratories into the SS identity card, which links Demjanjuk to the
so-called Trawniki group of Ukrainian and Baltic 'volunteers' who were
recruited to do some of the Nazis' dirty work.

'The card has been thoroughly checked by three US experts. It is genuine
without a shadow of a doubt,' said Schrimm, who also criticized Munich for
asking Ukraine, Poland, Israel and the United States for any extra
evidence they might have.

'We sent sent 17 binders of evidence to Munich,' he said. 'It was the
result of comprehensive research. Every known document connected to the
name Demjanjuk is already in there as an original or a copy.'

'There is an adequate case there to bring to trial.'

Schrimm said eastern European nations were generally slow to respond to
calls for assistance in inquiries.

'The world can't wait. Demjanjuk is old. Every day counts now,' he said.

Eli Rosenbaum, head of the US Office of Special Investigations (OSI), has
a vital interest in seeing Demjanjuk brought to justice.

The acquittal on the Treblinka charges was a serious setback to the OSI,
which helped compile the case that he was a Treblinka guard remembered by
the nickname 'Ivan the Terrible.' That claim will not be part of the
German case.

But the OSI did find enough evidence of SS membership to have Demjanjuk
formally stripped of his US citizenship in 2008.

In Munich Thursday, a prosecutions spokesman defended the re-examination
of the evidence. He said it was not in the interest of the Munich
prosecutions department to risk another acquittal.

'We are used to doing a proper job, and aim to avoid evidentiary problems
cropping up at trial that might have been avoided in advance,' he said. He
also defended the bid to find any further Sobibor survivors in Israel as
witnesses.

The identity card indicating Demjanjuk was in the SS paramilitary group
which worked in the death camps was a key to his conviction by an Israeli
court in 1988, which was overturned on appeal.

The certificate contains the Ukrainian's photograph, an SS service number
and notes about his service at two Nazi sites.

Claims that the abbreviation SS might have been added later or the
photograph might have been switched are ruled out by Schrimm's experts,
who say both those elements are demonstrably original.

(source:  Monsters & Critics)





FRANCE:

French Holocaust role recognised


Between 1942 and 1944, some 76,000 French Jews were deported France's
highest court has recognised the state's "responsibility" for the
deportation of Jews in World War II.

The Council of State said the state had permitted or facilitated
deportations that led to anti-Semitic persecution without being coerced by
the occupiers.

But the council also found reparations had since been made "as much as was
possible, for all the losses suffered".

Correspondents say the ruling is the clearest such recognition of the
French state's role in the Holocaust.

Between 1942 and 1944 some 76,000 Jews were deported from France by the
Vichy government in collaboration with the German occupying army.

In 1995, former French President Jacques Chirac officially recognised the
French state's responsibility in the deportation of French Jews, putting
an end to decades of ambiguity by successive governments.

"These dark hours forever sully our history and are an insult to our past
and our traditions," he said. "Yes, the criminal folly of the occupiers
was seconded by the French, by the French state."

Previous administrations had always blamed either Nazi Germany or the
Vichy government, absolving the French state of responsibility.

Compensation claim

The Council of State's pronouncement on Monday came after the Paris
administrative court sought its opinion on a case brought by the daughter
of a deportee killed at Auschwitz, who is seeking reparations from the
French state.

She is also asking for material and moral damages for her own personal
suffering during and after the German occupation.

   The reparations required called for individual compensation for victims,
as well as a solemn recognition of the state's responsibility and of the
loss and damages collectively suffered

French Council of State

In its judgement, the council said it believed the responsibility of the
state was evident because it had "permitted or facilitated the deportation
from France of persons who had been victims of anti-Semitic persecution".

The state's actions were not the result of "direct constraints put upon it
by the occupying force", it added.

The council cited "arrests, internments and displacement to transit camps"
carried out by the French authorities, which it said were "the first stage
of the deportation of these people to camps in which most of them were
exterminated".

However, the court also said that it did not believe the government should
be liable for any further compensation claims.

"The reparations required called for individual compensation for victims,
as well as a solemn recognition of the state's responsibility and of the
loss and damages collectively suffered," it explained.

"The various measures taken since the end of World War II, both in terms
of compensation as well as symbolic reparation, have repaired, as much as
was possible, all the losses suffered."

In 2007, a Bordeaux appeal court overturned a ruling ordering the state
railway operator, SNCF, to compensate the family of deportees.

(source:  BBC News)





USA----WISCONSIN:

Names of child victims sought for Holocaust event


Community members are requested to submit names of children - relatives or
friends of Milwaukeeans - who perished in the Holocaust. The child victims
will be remembered at the community-wide Yom HaShoah commemoration, held
on Sunday, April 19.

Requested information includes name and age and, if possible, the
birthplace, any known information, a photo and the location of death.

Anyone who has such information is asked to send it to Dorene Paley,
Director of Community Services at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish
Community Center, 6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Milwaukee, WI 53217.

The one-and-a-half million children who died in the Shoah will be
remembered this year and in future years at the community-wide
commemorative event. This year it is scheduled to be held at the JCC.

(source:  Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle)