Long Knives

[The New York Times] Hitler Exhibition Explores a Wider Circle of Guilt

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:04:30 -0400

[The New York Times] Hitler Exhibition Explores a Wider Circle of Guilt:

COPYRIGHT THE NEW YORK TIMES

BERLIN — As artifacts go, they are mere trinkets — an old purse, playing cards, a lantern. Even the display that caused the crowds to stop and stare is a simple embroidered tapestry, stitched by village women.

But the exhibits that opened Friday at the German Historical Museum are intentionally prosaic: they emphasize the everyday way that ordinary Germans once accepted, and often celebrated, Hitler.

The household items had Nazi logos and colors. The tapestry, a tribute to the union of church, state and party, was woven by a church congregation at the behest of their priest.

“This is what we call self-mobilization of society,” said Hans-Ulrich Thamer, one of three curators to assemble the exhibit at the German Historical Museum. “As a person, Hitler was a very ordinary man. He was nothing without the people.”

This show, “Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime,” opened Friday. It was billed as the first in Germany since the end of World War II to focus exclusively on Adolf Hitler. Germany outlaws public displays of some Nazi symbols, and the curators took care to avoid showing items that appeared to glorify Hitler. His uniforms, for example, remained in storage.

Instead, the show focuses on the society that nurtured and empowered him. It is not the first time historians have argued that Hitler did not corral the Germans as much as the Germans elevated Hitler. But one curator said the message was arguably more vital for Germany now than at any time in the past six decades, as rising nationalism, more open hostility to immigrants and a generational disconnect from the events of the Nazi era have older Germans concerned about repeating the past.

“The only hope for stopping extremists is to isolate them from society so that they are separated, so they do not have a relationship with the bourgeoisie and the other classes,” Mr. Thamer said. “The Nazis were members of high society. This was the dangerous moment.

“This we have to avoid from happening.”

Increasingly, Germans have put the guilt of the past behind them, reasserting their pride in national identity in many positive ways. But there also have been troubling signs seeping from the margins into the mainstream.

A best-selling book by a former banker promoted genetic theories of intelligence and said that Muslims were “dumbing down” society. A leading politician condemned “alien cultures.” A new right-wing party recently attracted hundreds to a speech by the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

Even government officials say that immigrant children are picking on native Germans. The media is filled daily with reports of conflict between immigrants, especially Muslims, and Germans.

The planners began discussing this kind of show 10 years ago, Mr. Thamer said. An expert committee viewed it as part of a continuum of penance and awareness that historians say began with the Auschwitz trials.

The process did not always go smoothly. A 1995 exhibition in Hamburg was widely condemned for showing that the Wehrmacht, or regular army, committed atrocities on the eastern front, just like the SS, the Nazi special police. The public was not ready to widen the sense of responsibility for Nazi-era wrongs.

But for this show, museum officials thought the time would be right. And in the end, they said, the timing added special value.

“It would be presumptuous to say that an exhibition could counter the radiance of populism,” said Rudolf Trabold, spokesman for the museum. “We try to achieve what we can afford, and to achieve our mission. But if that outshines the populist power of a Geert Wilders, I myself would not presume to say.”

As he walked through the exhibit on Friday, Eric Pignolet, a Belgian who has lived in Berlin for 22 years, said he was pleased that Germans were no longer saying, “I didn’t know.” But he said he was troubled by parallels between then and now.

“I think if you had someone like him today, it could be very dangerous,” he said halfway through his walk through the displays about Hitler. “There are a lot of people out there who want jobs, who are not happy with the political leadership, who would vote for someone like him if he came along.”

The line had already formed when the museum doors opened at 10 a.m. An estimated 3,000 visitors paid the $8.40 admission fee to see the nearly 1,000 items, including photographs, videos, uniforms and a narrative that explained the early appeal of a man and a party that offered jobs, pride and a sense of purpose, while employing wholesale violence and brutality to those who did not go along.

“This exhibition is about Hitler and the Germans — meaning the social and political and individual processes by which much of the German people became enablers, colluders, co-criminals in the Holocaust,” said Constanze Stelzenmüller, a senior trans-Atlantic fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Berlin. “That this was so is now a mainstream view, rejected only by a small minority of very elderly and deluded people, or the German extreme right-wing fringe. But it took us a while to get there.”

The museum placed the display downstairs, below street level, so it was dark and silent. Three images of Hitler projected on a mesh screen opened the show; behind them were pictures of cheering crowds, marching soldiers and other demonstrations of popular support. Around the corner were details of how Hitler was embraced early on, by the elite in Munich. “The wives of entrepreneurs, such as Elsa Bruckhmann, vied to be the first to drag Hitler” to a social event, one display said.

“Our teachers in the past were integrated in that system, and I can remember they wanted to tell us that the German people became the first victim of Hitler, that they were practically mugged,” said Klaus Peter Triebel from Seefeld, near Munich.

The exhibit explains the early appeal of the Nazis, who demonstrated a keen appreciation for the politics of populism’s creating a sense of unity and purpose: “Attending popular sports events, film premiers, they dedicated autobahns and new industrial builds,” read a display.

There were also the familiar striped uniforms forced on prisoners in the concentration camps, and the cold calculation in maps that showed the division of Poland between Germany and Russia.

But over and over, the point was spelled out clearly in the exhibit’s plaques like one, near letters written by children who were sent off to concentration camps, that said: “Hitler was able to implement his military and extermination objectives because the military and economic elites were willing to carry out his war.”

The exhibit, with all its photographs of young and old adoring Hitler, also sought to dispel the notion that the Nazi spirit was simply impossible to resist. It held up Johann Georg Elser as proof that “it was possible for an individual to develop into a resistance fighter.”

Mr. Elser was a carpenter who tried to kill Hitler at the outset of the war and was hanged for his actions.

His story, however, left some viewers to wonder why their parents and grandparents had not rejected Hitler. Why everyone went mad.

“My father was a Hitler Youth,” said Gutfreund Keller, as she walked through the exhibit with her husband and two daughters. “It’s hard to understand.”

Stefan Pauly contributed reporting.

[LA Times] Rob Reiner likens 'tea party' movement to Hitler

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:02:00 -0400

[LA Times] Rob Reiner likens 'tea party' movement to Hitler:

COPYRIGHT LOS ANGELES TIMES
October 25, 2010 | 10:38 am

The actor formerly known as Meathead blasted the “tea party” movement Friday night on HBO, comparing its followers to the Nazis.

“My fear is that the tea party gets a charismatic leader,” actor/director Rob Reiner said to applause in front of a live audience on Bill Maher’s “Real Time.” “Because all they’re selling is fear and anger. And that’s all Hitler sold. ‘I’m angry and I’m frightened and you should hate that guy over there.’ And that’s what they’re doing.”

Ranting between the senior advisor for the 2008 McCain/Palin campaign, Nicolle Wallace, and ABC’s Jake Tapper, Reiner began his assault on the tea party by talking about the likes of Christine O’Donnell, the GOP nominee for U.S. senator in Delaware. “They’re selling stupidity,” the director of “Spinal Tap” said. “They’re selling stupidity and ignorance and I’ve never seen a group of people, I’ve never seen an election cycle, with more ignorance than this one.”

And then Reiner began his comparison of the splinter group and the Nazi party’s Adolf Hitler. “He wasn’t a majority guy, but he was charismatic and they were having bad economic times –- just like we are now –- people were out of work, they needed jobs and a guy came along and rallied the troops,” Reiner said with an energy that America lapped up when he was a tie-dye-sporting hippie lashing out at his television father-in-law, Archie Bunker, in the hugely successful “All in the Family.”

Rob Reiner has been an outspoken political activist over the last few decades, tackling issues such as the environment, alternative energy and preschool education. One of his biggest political victories was 1998’s Proposition 10, for which he was the campaign chairman. Proposition 10 added a 50-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes to fund First 5 early childhood development and smoking-prevention programs. About $480 million in funds benefits California families each year.

That victory didn’t go without the notice of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who lampooned the overweight director for his seemingly contradictory crusade for health. The pair parodied Reiner in the 2003 South Park episode “Butt Out,” in which a cartoon version of Reiner goes to the Colorado town on an anti-cigarette campaign. The pair explained that Reiner was an easy target to make fun of.

“Obviously, South Park has a lot of politics in it, but ultimately we want to make a funny show and a good show. We try not to be, ‘All right, here’s the point we want to make,’” Stone told Reason Magazine in 2006. “But things like California’s smoking ban and Rob Reiner animate both of us. When we did that Rob Reiner episode, to us it was just common sense. Rob Reiner was just a great target.”

[Correction: An earlier version of this post misspelled Hilter’s first name Adolph. That has been corrected.]

— Tony Pierce

[Bloomberg] Wilders's Remarks About Islam Were Criticism, Not Defamation, Lawyer Says

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:00:33 -0400

[Bloomberg] Wilders's Remarks About Islam Were Criticism, Not Defamation, Lawyer Says:

COPYRIGHT BLOOMBERG

By Jurjen van de Pol - Oct 21, 2010 7:48 AM ET

Freedom Party Leader Geert Wilders, seen here, is on trial for calling the Koran “fascist” and comparing it to Adolf Hitler ’s book Mein Kampf in a 2007 Dutch newspaper editorial. Photographer: Peter Dejong, POOL/AP Images

Freedom Party Leader Geert Wilders criticism of Islam in newspapers and a film weren’t intended to defame Muslims, his lawyer told a Dutch court and asked for his client’s acquittal on incitement of hatred charges.

“Criticism on religion should be possible,” Wilders’ lawyer Bram Moszkowicz told the Amsterdam District Court today. “When Wilders says something about Muhammad, that doesn’t incite discrimination against Muslims.”

Wilders, 47, is on trial for calling the Koran “fascist” and comparing it to Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf in a 2007 Dutch newspaper editorial. A year later, he released his movie “Fitna,” in which he calls on Muslims to rip out “hate- preaching” verses from the book.

“Wilders finds it terrible he needs to answer to a criminal court for his comments” as a politician and has chosen to remain silent, Moszkowicz told Presiding Judge Jan Moors. “This trial puts a heavy burden on his political existence.”

The new minority government of the Liberal Party and Christian Democratic Alliance relies on Wilder’s Freedom Party to pass legislation. It plans to cut immigration and ban full- face Islamic veils, key issues for Wilders’ party, which more than doubled its representation in parliament in June elections.

Prosecutors last week said Wilders should be cleared of all charges, including defaming Muslims, because he “aims his criticism at Islam and not at Muslims.” The court can still convict Wilders in its ruling scheduled for Nov. 5.

Wilders, who is under police protection, faces as long as a year in prison or a fine of as much as 7,600 euros ($10,650).

To contact the reporter on this story: Jurjen van de Pol in Amsterdam at jvandepol@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Fraher at jfraher@bloomberg.net.

[Toronto Star] McCallion foe under fire for Hitler reference

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:58:40 -0400

[Toronto Star] McCallion foe under fire for Hitler reference:

COPYRIGHT THE TORONTO STAR

Published On Fri Oct 15 2010

Mississauga Councillor Sue McFadden shocked a group of Catholic high school students by mentioning Mayor Hazel McCallion in the same sentence as Adolf Hitler.

McFadden and several other wards 9 and 10 candidates attended a discussion with politics and civics students at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Secondary School Friday afternoon. Grade 12 student Kevin Gouda said he asked McFadden about a Star article published that day in which she had referred to McCallion as a dictator.

“I wanted to know why she called her a dictator,” said Gouda, 17. “She started saying how the mayor likes to do things by herself and she doesn’t like other people’s ideas and then (McFadden) led up to saying ‘she is starting to become a dictator, much like Hitler.’ ”

Gouda said the room of about 50 grades 10 and 12 students fell into a stunned silence.

“Everybody heard her say that. Everyone was in shock after she said that,” he said.

Student Olivia Da Costa, 17, said it was difficult to remember McFadden’s exact wording, but that it was clear she was comparing McCallion to Hitler.

“She just kind of talked about how the mayor was doing her own thing and basically was becoming much like a Hitler,” explained Da Costa. “Everyone was just shocked because she was referring to Hazel as Hitler and everyone loves Hazel.”

Patrick Mendes, who is challenging McFadden for her Ward 10 seat, said he asked her to take back the remark.

“I was appalled,” he said. “(She said) ‘in Mississauga we currently have a dictator and Hazel is a dictator.’ And she gave Hitler as an example.”

McFadden said Mendes “planted” Gouda’s question. She said she made the Hitler reference to explain to the students what a dictatorship is.

“I said, ‘I’ll put it into a metaphor for you.’ Because they’re students, right?” McFadden said.

She said she asked the students to imagine being in a family or classroom where they were unable to express their opinions for fear of repercussions. She then said that was what life was like under Hitler’s regime.

“So I did mention the name Hitler,” McFadden said. “But I didn’t say, ‘oh the mayor is Hitler.’ ”

Bill McBain, who is also running for the Ward 10 seat and participated in the discussion at Mount Carmel, said he was satisfied with McFadden’s explanation that she had only mentioned the Nazi dictator as an example, and not to draw a comparison.

“She unfortunately mentioned the word Hitler … but she did not refer to the mayor as Hitler,” he said. “She was providing historical context for a group of students.”

Either way, mentioning the name Hitler in that type of situation trivializes the Holocaust, said the Canadian Jewish Congress.

“Anytime you invoke the name Hitler you’re invoking a comparison. It’s an obscene comparison to compare Hazel McCallion to Adolf Hitler,” said CEO Bernie Farber.

He said McFadden should have tried to explain the word “dictator” in another way.

“If she wants to have a teachable moment, then pull out a dictionary and give the students a dictionary definition of what a dictator is. By using Adolf Hitler she begs the comparison and students especially will get it wrong,” Farber said.

A school board representative said the teacher who was in the room at the time did not think McFadden had made a direct comparison, but that it was a poor choice of words all the same.

“That’s an unfortunate analogy,” said Bruce Campbell of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.

[AP via Google News] Israeli orchestra to play Wagner in Germany

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:56:37 -0400

[AP via Google News] Israeli orchestra to play Wagner in Germany:

By IAN DEITCH (AP) – Oct 12, 2010

JERUSALEM — An Israeli orchestra will perform works by Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, Richard Wagner, in a taboo-breaking concert in Germany next year, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.

The Israel Chamber Orchestra will play works by Wagner at the Bayreuth festival in Germany in July, spokeswoman Meirav Magen Lelie said. It will be the first time an Israeli orchestra has played Wagner in Germany.

Since its founding in 1948, Israel has observed an informal ban on Wagner’s music because of its use in Nazi propaganda before and during World War II.

Some 6 million Jews were systematically murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators in Europe during the war.

Many Israelis still refuse to buy German-made products, and performances of the 19th-century composer are kept off stages and airwaves out of respect to the country’s 220,000 Holocaust survivors.

Sensitivities are so high that the orchestra won’t even rehearse in Israel and will only practice in Germany a few days before the festival, Magen Lelie said, adding that the move was an effort to alter the perception of the music.

“We would love to change the way his music is conceived,” Magen Lelie said, explaining that she understood the sensitivities of Holocaust survivors and others but said the music should be appreciated for what it is.

Music by composers banned by the Third Reich, including Gustav Mahler and Felix Mendelssohn, will be played there as well, she said.

Moshe Sanbar, a prominent member of Israel’s main Holocaust survivor umbrella group, said it is too early for Israelis to play Wagner.

“I think it’s better they don’t do this because Wagner was Hitler’s music,” Sanbar said. “They should play it in a few years when all of us death camp and Holocaust survivors are dead. It is really bad for our health, Wagner is too much for us, the memories are still very painful.”

The orchestra will be led by Roberto Paternostro, whose mother survived the Nazi genocide, and who is friends with Katharina Wagner, a great-granddaughter of Wagner and co-director of the Bayreuth festival.

Wagner said in a statement that the visit was an “outstanding contribution in the context of a growing rapprochement between our two countries.”

Israel and Germany established diplomatic ties in 1965, two decades after the end of World War II. Since then, Germany has become Israel’s second-largest trading partner and has paid some $40 billion in reparations to Holocaust survivors in Israel. Ties have become even closer since Angela Merkel became chancellor in 2005.

In a symbolic gesture to Israel, Germany’s military chief, Volker Wieker, visited Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, on Tuesday.

The Bayreuth festival is Germany’s most important festival for classical music. Merkel and many other prominent personalities regularly visit the annual event, which was founded by Wagner himself in 1872.

The Wagner family had close connections to the Nazis and their ideology, and Hitler headed the Bayreuth festival in the 1930s.

Bayreuth Mayor Michael Hohl said the Israeli orchestra’s appearance would be “a really special event, because it is groundbreaking.”

“The special role that Bayreuth and Wagner played in the ideology of the Nazi dictatorship is still unforgotten and cannot go unmentioned in view of such a cultural event,” he added, noting that Bayreuth was happy to welcome “the people in power at that time and their inner circle as regular festival guests.”

Hohl said the orchestra’s visit to play Wagner was “like a late, symbolic victory of tolerance, art and culture over the barbarism of dictatorship.”

The concert will not be the first Wagner performance by an Israeli orchestra. In 2001, world-renowned conductor Daniel Barenboim angered many Israelis when he played some of Wagner’s music in Israel.

Associated Press writer Kirsten Grieshaber contributed to this report from Berlin.

[NPR] National Archives Puts Nazi Papers On Public View

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:55:12 -0400

[NPR] National Archives Puts Nazi Papers On Public View:

COPYRIGHT THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON October 6, 2010, 05:19 pm ET

The laws signed by Adolf Hitler taking away the citizenship of German Jews before the Holocaust were placed on rare public display Wednesday at the National Archives.

The Nuremberg Laws were turned over to the archives in August by The Huntington, a museum complex near Los Angeles where they were quietly deposited by Gen. George Patton at the end of World War II. The papers will be on display in a separate gallery from the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence through Oct. 18.

Tony Platt, a historian who has studied the laws and is currently researching in Berlin, said the laws offer lessons from what happened in Germany and from how the documents were hidden away in the United States for decades.

“They’re symbolically important because this was done in a public way and because Hitler actually signed these documents,” he said Wednesday.

Still, Nazi actions against the Jews began before the laws were signed in 1935 with earlier policies barring Jews from certain jobs and occupations.

Previously, the Nuremberg Laws had only been displayed in Los Angeles while on loan from The Huntington to the Skirball Cultural Center, which includes a Jewish history museum.

The handling of the original Nuremberg Laws has frustrated some scholars and the family of one of the soldiers who uncovered them in Germany. U.S. soldiers first found them in a German bank vault and gave them to Patton. At the end of World War II, Patton disobeyed orders by taking the papers out of Germany.

Patton, a known war souvenir collector, quietly left them at The Huntington without clear instructions, and died shortly afterwards after he was in a car crash. Patton had been friends with the family of Henry Huntington, the California railroad baron behind the museum complex on his estate.

The documents should have served as evidence in the Nazi war crimes trials, scholars have said.

“In many times during the trial, they would confront the defendants with original documents they had signed, and it was very dramatic,” said Greg Bradsher, a senior archivist who specializes in World War II history at the National Archives.

Without the original Nuremberg Laws, prosecutors used a copy published the day after the laws were passed. All the trial evidence eventually was sent to the archives in Washington.

“So in many respects, this is coming to us 63 years late,” Bradsher said.

The unveiling of the documents pleased the family of a Jewish soldier who was part of the group that originally found the papers in Germany. The soldier, Martin Dannenberg, told his family for years that he knew Nazi documents they had recovered were lost, according to his son, Richard Dannenberg of Owings Mills, Md.

“My father turned these documents over three days later to Patton’s office, as he was supposed to, and then apparently Patton just whisked them out of the country,” Richard Dannenberg said. He said his father “felt they should be in a national place where everyone can see them and understand what these led to, the horrors that occurred.”

Martin Dannenberg died in August, before the papers went on view in Washington.

[Winchester Star] Holocaust survivor’s message: never forget

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:53:46 -0400

[Winchester Star] Holocaust survivor’s message: never forget:

COPYRIGHT Winchester Star

Posted Oct 28, 2010 @ 04:15 PM

Winchester, MA —

One of the worst moments of Eliezer Ayalon’s life came when the German guard, with one swift swoop, smacked away his one worldly possession — a small, porcelain cup.

It happened at his first of five concentration camps, Blyzin, in the spring of 1943.

“The first thing that happens when you come to a new camp: there’s a roll call,” Ayalon, now in his eighties, told a capacity crowd at Tufts University’s Cabot Hall. “We were all to put our belongings on the ground to be taken away.”

Ayalon’s cup was a cherished possession: the last thing his mother had given to him before they parted forever at the ghetto gates in his hometown of Radom, Poland.

“I was trying to hide this cup,” Ayalon remembered, the pain and emotion of the moment still evident in his strong but measured voice. “I curled my finger around it. And then a guard with a stick in hand approached me, and before I was able to explain to him that this is an empty cup, he smacked my hand and it fell to the ground and broke into pieces.

“The blow from the stick stung, but my eyes watered for that cup. This was the only thing that I had from my mother and my home, and I was so sad it was no longer with me,” he continued.

The next day, Ayalon came back to the site of the roll call, hoping desperately to find even a tiny broken piece of his mother’s final gift. There was nothing there. There was nothing anywhere, except hunger, sadness and death — the three consistent forces that followed him relentlessly on a three-year journey to hell and back.

Sixty-five years later, Ayalon tells his story whenever he has the chance, to as many people as he can. He tells it with honesty, emotion and gusto — not because it’s easy to relieve the nightmares, but because he is the only person in his family who lived to tell it, and one of a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors who take it upon themselves to keep on speaking until there are no voices left.

Ayalon, who now works as a tour guide at the Holocaust Museum in Israel, was brought to Tufts last Tuesday to tell his story last Tuesday by Winchester resident Bill Cummings, who recently announced he will be donating $1 million from his Beacon Grille Restaurant in Woburn to establishing a Holocaust education program at the university.

Invasion

The youngest of four children, Ayalon said he had a “joyful life” before Nazis invaded Radom on Friday, Sept. 8, 1939.

The Germans wasted little time in forcing every Jew over age 10 to wear the star of David, and began to separate them from non-Jewish Poles by prohibiting them from going to the movies, theaters or places of worship.

Ayalon never thought that, in the months and years ahead, he would look back at this time or discrimination fondly.

“To share our happiness and suffering together was not bad,” he said. “This little apartment, our home, bound us. It was safe and warm.”

Life changed forever seven months later, when Ayalon and his family were packed into a ghetto with 22,000 other Jews in a neighborhood where just 7,000 Poles had lived before.

Surrounded by barbed wire, guarded by sentries with machine guns, the ghetto was a miserable slum, Ayalon said, where he and other Jews “alternated between the desperate struggle of survival and death from starvation.”

Opportunity to earn money knocked when the Germans “interviewed” 2,000 young men ages 15 and older for 100 jobs outside the ghetto in a German war factory.

Though Ayalon was just 13, he did something that would save his life over and over in the coming years: came to attention when spoken to and shouted a crisp, robust reply.

“I shouted, ‘I’m 15’ so convincingly that he had no doubt,” Ayalon remembered, a defiant smile crossing his face.

Ayalon’s job was his salvation. It kept him out of the camp six days per week, and when he returned from making the uniforms, boots and helmets for the German soldiers, it was at least with money and bread in his pockets.

In August 1942, however, things changed again when it was rumored the entire population — except those with work permits, like Ayalon — would be sent east for a “resettlement.”

“I said, ‘I am staying here. Whatever happens to you will happen to me.

“My mother insisted I had to go back. She approached me every few minutes and put her hands on my shoulders and said, ‘You have to go back.’”

Ayalon lost the argument, and on the last afternoon they would share on this earth, mother and son walked slowly to the ghetto gates.

“As we stepped outside, I noticed that my mother was trying to hide something under the scarf she was wearing,” he remembered. “All I wanted was — if I could only stop the clock. I wanted time to slow so I could stay with my mother a little longer,” he said, his heavy words tinged with longing.

“I knew that once I got outside the ghetto, I would never see my mother again.”

Though he pleaded with his mother during the short walk to the gate, she never wavered.

“She pleaded with me to go, and admitted for the first time that we might be separated.”

Then came the words that stick to him to this day.

“As we approached the exit gate, she turned to me and said … ‘If there’s anyone in this family with a chance to survive, it will be you. You will survive.’

“My mothers words were soothing,” said Ayalon. “She had this magical way to make the hurt and the pain fade away.”

As she spoke, she handed him what had been concealed under her scarf: a small white porcelain cup, covered with a length of cloth secured with a piece of string.

“She said to me, take this cup with you. You will have a sweet life, because it was meant to be.

“I took the cup, hugged my mother and left the ghetto.”

Hell

The night he left, those in the ghetto were sent to Treblinka, the largest death camp in Poland.

Two weeks later, Poles at his work told him they heard that Treblinka was a place where Jews were gassed to death.

“We discounted all this information because we didn’t want to believe that our families were dead,” Ayalon said. “They were dead.”

However, when Ayalon was allowed a few hours to collect some things one day at the ghetto, he raced home and found that his father and one brother were among about 1,000 Jews who had been left behind to clean the ghetto.

“My father believed that my mother and the rest of the family would come back soon,” Ayalon said.

In January 1943, his father and brother were sent to Treblinka. Ayalon never saw anyone from his family again, and soon he was sent himself to a concentration camp, called Blyzin.

He was told by inmates to tell the Germans he had some skill to avoid hard labor in stone quarries.

“I decided that I was going to be a shoemaker,” he said — something he willed himself to learn in three days.

Life began with a 5 a.m. wake-up whistle, at the sound of which he and the others with whom he shared a thin straw mattress and blanket rose with groans in their bellies to face breakfast of brown cold water.

After all the prisoners were counted in a process that took hours, Ayalon worked until noon, when a lunch of watery soup with the occasional potato skin was served.

Dinner was a loaf of bread split with five others.

“I couldn’t wait for the bread every day. I remember watching with hungry eyes and wondering, ‘What part of the bread will I get today? The middle part, or the edge?”

The worst moments were those in which inmates had to pass a “selection” process in which one man would decide the fate of another with the flick of his wrist.

“I had this tremendous willpower … to remain on the side of the living,” said Ayalon, spurred by the words of his mother. “I did everything possible to survive.”

During a selection, Ayalon would stand in a long line of prisoners, each of which would stand in front of a Nazi physician to learn if they were healthy enough to work or should be killed.

“He would notify you in a split second with a flick of his thumb. Left, right. Left, right. Without saying a single word.”

Ayalon whispered a prayer before every selection and acted the same way each time.

“I stood stiffly, removed my jacket and shouted, ‘Shoemaker” — ‘schuster’ in German — and within a split second his thumb would move to the direction of the living, and I darted there like a rabbit.”

This continued for four more camps. First there was Plaszow — made famous by the film “Schindler’s List” — where Ayalon witnessed notorious murderer Amon Goeth randomly and without warning trot around and shoot prisoners in the head from atop his large white horse.

In one particularly heinous act, he forced 18,000 people to witness the brutal execution of a 16-year-old Jew caught “stealing” two potatoes from a kitchen.

Though he tried to turn away, the guards struck Ayalon with a pole and forced him to watch as the boy was tied to a pole and attacked by two large dogs

“Within a few minutes, this boy was torn into pieces until he stopped crying,” he said. “Killing in this camp was sport.”

The same baseless cruelty continued in August 1944, when he was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria and given a new “identity.”

“This was my name,” he said, holding a piece of paper high for the audience to read, on which was written the number 84,991.“I was not a human being, but a number.”

Though it’s been 65 years, Ayalon didn’t need to look at the paper to remember the digits.

Every day, guards would get drunk, he said, and for their own amusement approach a prisoner, cover the number printed on their clothes and order them to recite their “name.”

If they failed, they were often beaten to death. “I had to repeat this number to myself every minute of the day.”

After a few more transfers — including a nearly three-day death march in which those who lagged behind were shot on site — he arrived at Ebensee, where 350 people were being killed per day in gas chambers as Allied forces crept closer.

“I could smell the stench at night. I could see the chimneys pouring out dark smoke,” said Ayalon, who at this point was so emaciated he would feel his ribs every day to see how much skin was left.

“I was a walking skeleton … [but] I would not give up.

“My mothers words were always here,” he said, pointing to his head with both hands. “She said I would survive and have a sweet life.”

Heaven

On May 6, 1945, three hours after the camp’s commanders and guards fled in cowardice, a beige American tank burst through the entrance gate to Ebensee.

“To me they were not American soldiers,” said Ayalon, who actually got a chance to meet one of his liberators last year in Detroit, Mich. “To me they were angels that came down from heaven to save our lives.

“I stood there and pinched my arms to make sure this was not a dream.”

Horrified at what they saw, the soldiers emptied their pockets of everything — cigarettes, gum, biscuits — and gave them to 13,000 “skeletons” that lay before them.

Although many died from overeating, Ayalon said food wasn’t his end goal. Instead, he wanted a shower, a toothbrush, underwear — something that would “make me feel human.”

He settled for the jacket of German cook. He ripped off the swastika, put it on and ate ravenously but in moderation — somehow — and was taken to Italy.

“I was 17 years old and 55 pounds. That was me.”

Ayalon went on to accomplish his dream — raising a family that now includes two married children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

His wish for the future is simple.

“My life is a continuing defeat to the Nazis, to Hitler,” he said, pointing at the college students who lined the sides of the hall as every seat was taken.

“For 37 years I kept everything inside,” before a friend convinced him to speak of the atrocities he witnessed. “I wish to make an appeal to you today: make sure that genocides never happen again,” he said forcefully. “Speak out against racism, against baseless hatred.

“We have seen how silence could kill millions of people,” he said. “I decided as long as I can stand on my feet I will continue to speak, to remind people that this can never happen again.”

After the event, he thanked Cummings for his $1 million pledge to the Holocaust Education program, which is expected to bring other noted speakers to the university as well as sponsor trips to countries affected by genocide.

Before he concluded, Ayalon took out a porcelain cup he bought 15 years ago in his hometown, and told the audience a little more about the cup his mother gave him six decades ago.

As he walked away from the his mother for the last time in 1942, Ayalon said he looked inside the cup she had given him when she told him he would have a “sweet life.”

“I was shocked. Of all things, the cup was full of honey. Honey,” he said. “I hadn’t seen honey for a long time.

“Where did my mother get the honey? I don’t know to this very day.”

Ayalon has since taken the honey as a metaphor for his life.

“I put this piece of cloth with the string exactly how my mother gave it to me,” he said, holding the small white cup from Radom in his hands gingerly. “To me this is the authentic cup. And it is not empty,” he said with emotion.

“There is still honey in it. And that honey is spreading out over and over to other people, and they will fill their cups with that honey from my mother.

“My life is the honey that is flowing over and over.”
Copyright 2010 The Winchester Star. Some rights reserved

[Reuters] Historic German Jewish children's book goes on sale

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:51:45 -0400

[Reuters] Historic German Jewish children's book goes on sale:

COPYRIGHT REUTERS

By Michelle Martin

BERLIN | Fri Oct 29, 2010 12:14pm EDT

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) - Six and a half decades after the Holocaust, the first Jewish publisher of children’s books in Germany will issue its inaugural title on Monday.

Filmmaker and author Myriam Halberstam, a German-American Jew, said she set up “Ariella Books” in May 2010 because there was a lack of children’s books on Judaism in Germany.

“A Horse for Hanukkah” — a humorous story about a horse who wreaks havoc on a family’s celebrations during Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights — is Halberstam’s first attempt to cater for Germany’s 200,000-strong Jewish community.

“At Christmas there are all these books you can buy for your children, but if you’re Jewish and you want to read them something about Jewish holidays, you can’t,” she told Reuters. “I needed to create something for my own daughters.”

Presenting the book in Berlin’s Jewish Museum on Friday, Halberstam said there was a need for the books in Germany because local communities had grown rapidly in recent years due to an influx of Jews from the former Soviet bloc after 1989.

Halberstam said she wanted to be able to pass on her Jewish identity to her two young daughters via the book, which is intended for children aged 4-8.

The 32-page book — which is being published in English and German — is not just aimed at Jews. Halberstam said she hoped Gentiles in Germany’s increasingly multicultural society would also read the book and become aware of Jewish traditions.

“It would be nice if Jews and Judaism would become a normal part of German society — but only if you know about Jews can they become normal,” she said.

Halberstam said the book, which features colorful illustrations by prize-winning U.S. illustrator Nancy Cote, was a “milestone” on Judaism’s path back to normality in Germany, whose Nazi leaders exterminated some 6 million European Jews.

“In Germany the Shoah is omnipresent, it’s still in the media and it determines the relationship between Jews and non-Jews,” she said. “I wanted to do something that looks to the future in a positive way without the burden of the past.”

Halberstam has pledged three euros from each 12.95 euro copy of “A Horse for Hanukkah” sold to the German-Israeli foundation for children with cancer, a charity which aims to fight the disease and foster closer ties between the two countries.

Most German literature on Judaism still focuses on the Holocaust so it was important to have a book in which “Jews are normal and nothing terrible happens to them,” she said.

“One has to remember the past but it’s very difficult,” she said. “When do you start burdening Jewish children with that, especially when you’re living in Germany?”

MFA is owner of contested painting

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:43:43 -0400

MFA is owner of contested painting:

COPYRIGHT THE BOSTON GLOBE

The federal Appeals Court in Boston has found that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston owns a valuable 1913 painting by expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, ruling that the statute of limitations had run out on an Austrian woman’s assertion that she was the rightful owner.

Claudia Seger-Thomschitz sought the return of “Two Nudes (Lovers),’’ arguing that Jewish art collector Oskar Reichel had sold it under duress after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. Seger-Thomschitz is Reichel’s sole surviving heir.

The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit said it had not made a judgment about the legality of the museum’s acquisition of the painting in 1973. It also pointed out that “statues of limitations do not vindicate the conduct of parties who successfully invoke them,’’ while urging museums to take a close look at the background of paintings from that period.

“For works of art with unmistakable roots in the Holocaust era,’’ the court said, “museums would now be well advised to follow the guidelines of the American Association of Museums: “Museums should take all reasonable steps to resolve the Nazi-era provenance status of objects before acquiring them for their collections, whether by purchase, gift, bequest, or exchange.’’

Reichel sold the painting after the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria in March 1938, to a dealer he knew who had moved to Paris. The painting passed through several other owners before it was bequeathed to the MFA, the decision said.

Reichel and his family were forced to close the business he had founded and give up the family home and another property. One son was deported to Poland and killed. Reichel’s wife survived a concentration camp, and he died of natural causes in 1943. Seger-Thomschitz is the heir of one of Reichel’s other sons, who died in 1997, the decision said.

In 2007, attorneys for Seger-Thomschitz contacted the museum to demand the painting’s return. After negotiations failed between Seger-Thomschitz and the museum, the MFA sued in 2008, seeking to confirm its ownership of the painting.

US District Judge Rya W. Zobel ruled in May in favor of the MFA, but Seger-Thomschitz appealed. The Appeals Court agreed with the lower court judge that Seger-Thomschitz could not sue because, under state law, people must file lawsuits within three years of learning they have been harmed.

By her own admission, the court said, Seger-Thomschitz learned in fall 2003 that she might have a claim to artworks previously owned by Reichel when the Museums of Vienna contacted her to return works by another artist that were once owned by Reichel.

Her attorneys did not contact the museum until March 12, 2007, more than three years later, the court said.

Seger-Thomschitz is a nurse with no training in Nazi-era art claims. But the court said it was her burden to seek professional help to find out whether she had a claim.

The MFA had researched the painting after learning of Seger-Thomschitz’s claim and concluded that the original sale of the painting was valid.

Katherine Getchell, deputy director of the museum, said in a statement yesterday that the judgment “shows our commitment to the research and doing the right thing.’’

Getchell also said the MFA’s research had found that the “family knew about this painting and did not assert a claim.’’

Attorney Thomas J. Hamilton of Washington, who represented Seger-Thomschitz, did not immediately return a call seeking comment last night.

The painting is a self-portrait of the artist with Alma Mahler, wife of the composer Gustav Mahler, with whom Kokoschka had an affair. In recent years, other Kokoschka works have sold at auction for as much as $1 million.

The 26-page ruling from a three-judge panel of the court was written by Justice Kermit Lipez.

Geoff Edgers of the Globe staff contributed to this report.

[The Washington Independent] Anti-Illegal Immigration Group Denies Ties to White Supremacists, Nazis

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:42:23 -0400

[The Washington Independent] Anti-Illegal Immigration Group Denies Ties to White Supremacists, Nazis:

COPYRIGHT WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT
By Elise Foley 10/19/10 3:36 PM

It may be a bad time to be endorsed by Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, or ALIPAC. The group is once again being accused of ties to white supremacist groups and Nazism, this time by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The DCCC released a statement Monday alleging that Jesse Kelly, a Republican candidate for Congress from Arizona, “has doggedly pursued the support of a group with known white supremacist, anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi ties.” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the committee noted, tied ALIPAC to white supremacists when the group endorsed his primary opponent in March, while the Anti-Defamation League has accused the group of unfairly demonizing illegal immigrants.

ALIPAC denies having any ties to white supremacists, Nazism or anti-Semitism. “This attack comes while there is zero evidence that ALIPAC or any officers of ALIPAC have ever sought or intentionally received any support from such groups!” the group wrote in an email to its supporters today.

Kelly’s campaign isn’t happy with the characterization either. “There is a special place in hell for those who would slander combat veterans who would have gladly been mutilated, subjected to chemical weapons and killed in defense of our freedom,” Kelly campaign manager Adam Kwasman told Politico.

As Republican candidates often sough to prove their conservative values during primaries, endorsements from ALIPAC were doled out only to candidates considered toughest on illegal immigration. But the group backs some Democrats as well, although all are incumbents and most are Blue Dogs: Reps. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.), John Barrow (D-Ga.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), Mike McIntyre (D-N.C.) and Pete DeFazio (D-Ore.).

[Telegraph UK] Councillor made Nazi salute in Adolf Hitler outfit

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:41:02 -0400

[Telegraph UK] Councillor made Nazi salute in Adolf Hitler outfit:

COPYRIGHT TELEGRAPH (UK)

Mike Gardner, a council leader from Harrogate, has been photographed at a party dressed up as Adolf Hitler and performing the Nazi salute.
Published: 9:39AM BST 22 Oct 2010
Harrogate councillor Mike Gardner who dressed as hitler at a fancy dress birthday party the conroversial picture was posted on facebook: Councillor made Nazi salute in Hitler outfit

Tory councillor Mr Gardner has now been deselected after pictures of him at the fancy dress birthday bash were leaked onto the Internet via the social networking site, Facebook.

His colleagues in the Conservative party said his behaviour was “unacceptable” while Cllr Gardner claims he was the victim of a smear campaign.

While the politician will not be able to stand as a conservative in the next election he remains leader of Harrogate Borough Council, North Yorkshire, and a ward member until the end of his office term.

Heather Adderley, chairman of the Harrogate and Knaresborough Conservative Association, said: “For Councillor Mike Gardner to dress up as he did is totally unacceptable and we condemn it.

“Councillor Gardner was deselected and as a result will not (be) standing as a Conservative candidate next year.

“A new candidate has already been selected and is busy working in the ward.”

Cllr Gardner defended himself, saying: “I don’t dress up as a Nazi normally. This was an exception. I am not a Nazi and I don’t behave like that.

“It was a private birthday party and the dress code was the war.

“Do I feel ashamed? No. It was fancy dress and a piece of fun.

“The invitation was to depict the year in which you were born, I was born in the war.”

He added that he checked with the organiser whether his outfit would be acceptable.

He said: “There were a lot of people at the party who are in the armed forces or the MOD, it was not offensive to them or to the family.

“I was brought up in the war, my mother and father were heavily engaged in fighting the Nazis. We grew up hating the Nazis.

My father was a pilot in the war, and my mother worked in the munitions industry.

The fight against Hitler and the Nazis dominated my life in childhood. In that context everyone was greatly amused.

“If I had done this as a councillor I would expect to be shot.

“I have done nothing wrong, I am sorry that offence has been taken but it does not impinge any standard in the council.”

He blamed political rivals for leaking the photo, adding that it had been done in a “nasty” and “dubious” way.

He insisted that he “can not remember” doing a Nazi salute or having his photo taken, but he has been forced to defend himself to his fellow councillors.

In a statement to them, he said: Now we dont hate the Germans but we do make fun about the Nazis - so to fit in with the evening I hired a German or Nazi uniform for that specific occasion.

There were many weird and wonderful outfits and it was a very successful piece of fun or pantomime as intended and I offended nobody by dressing as Hitler.

His partner later put the pictures on Facebook with restricted access but they were withdrawn soon afterwards.

A spokesman for Harrogate council said Cllr Gardner was still council leader and remained Tory member for the Pannal ward.

She added there was “no issue with the members’ code of conduct”.

The councillor was suspended form his local Conservative party in July, following the birthday bash in May.

[Belfast Telegraph] Book of the Week: Simon Wiesenthal - The Life and Legends, By Tom Segev

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:39:24 -0400

[Belfast Telegraph] Book of the Week: Simon Wiesenthal - The Life and Legends, By Tom Segev:

COPYRIGHT BELFAST TELEGRAPH

Trail of a mighty hunter

Reviewed by Carole Angier
Friday, 29 October 2010

Mapping the coordinates of atrocity: Simon Wiesenthal

As one of Israel’s “New Historians”, Tom Segev is used to disinformation and conflict. That is just as well, for a biographer of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, whose story is packed with both.

This is a historian’s biography, concentrating on the archives – many newly opened – and on sifting fact from fiction, both Wiesenthal’s and his enemies’. The previous Life, by Hella Pick, was more personal and empathetic. So, for instance, Segev lists the depressions of Wiesenthal’s wife, Cyla, and their roots in his Holocaust obsession – even at one stage accusing him of cruelty. Pick explores more vividly, but also more delicately, how Cyla suffered, and how little of his life she shared. “I am not married to a man,” Pick quoted her. “I am married to thousands, maybe millions, of dead.” Segev quotes this too.

His book does not lack drama. Segev is a fact man, but in Wiesenthal’s case the facts are the drama. His war was extraordinary: escape from a forced-labour camp with the help of two “good Germans”; then three of the worst concentration camps – Plaszów (the camp in Schindler’s List), Gross Rosen and finally Mauthausen, where he was liberated by the Americans, weighing 97 pounds and barely alive.

But every survivor’s story is extraordinary. The unique drama came afterwards. Even stripped by Segev of Wiesenthal’s many careless or compulsive exaggerations, his life is a thriller of almost unbearable tension.

Wiesenthal was not involved in the final capture of his main prey, Adolf Eichmann. But it was he who proved that Eichmann had not died, and he who traced Eichmann to Argentina. He played an even bigger role in the hunt for other Nazi criminals: Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, and Karl Silberbauer, the policeman who arrested Anne Frank. Even his failures – and they were many – make nail-biting stories: such as Franz Murer, “the butcher of Vilna”, acquitted in Graz in 1961; Erich Rajakowitsch, one of Eichmann’s aides, who got off with a sentence of 30 months; or Josef Mengele and Martin Bormann, who both died before Wiesenthal could find them.

Segev’s facts are not always welcome. He shows that many of Wiesenthal’s most vicious battles were not with Nazis, but with fellow Jews – rival Nazi hunters, the Jewish communities of Linz and Vienna, the Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, the head of the American Holocaust centre set up in his name. This is distressing but true. The problem is that Segev devotes almost as much time to it as to the main business of Nazi-hunting (especially to the quarrel with Kreisky, who appears to have been almost insane). In-fighting took up much of Wiesenthal’s life; but it is anti-climactic and should have been given less room.

On the other hand, Segev draws a vivid portrait of Wiesenthal the man. He was a classic “organiser” – the name given in the camps to the wheelers and dealers who were most likely to survive. He went straight to the top, pretended to have a huge organisation behind him – which he never had – and was a consummate showman, who could turn his genuine anguish on and off like a tap.

He was obsessive from the start, presenting his first list of Nazi criminals to the Americans days after liberation. He was egocentric, ambitious and easily offended, with many admirers but few friends. Despite the thousands of victims with whom he lived every day – or because of them – he was a lonely man. He was not a great thinker or writer, as he would have liked to be. But he was something more important: a man of unshakeable moral instinct, who fought for the victims of Nazism alone for decades, until the rest of the world caught up with him.

This is where the historical focus of this biography comes into its own. Segev documents in detail how no one cared about Nazi criminals or their victims for 20 years after the war, and how it took another 20 for the Holocaust to become the (almost) universally known symbol of evil it is today. It was the Eichmann trial of 1961 that began the change, and we know Wiesenthal’s role in that.

The fact that it took Mossad seven years to follow his lead to Argentina – and even longer to find Stangl, living under his own name – demonstrates the tragic divide that runs through the Jewish world. Neither Israeli nor American Jews can accept defeat or humiliation; and neither did enough to help the victims of the Shoah at the time, or to bring their murderers to justice after.

America never punished Nazi criminals for killing Jews, but only for lying to US immigration. Germany and Austria never treated Nazi crimes as unique, but handled them as ordinary offences. The British did still less than the Americans – so little that Segev doesn’t discuss it. Even the Germans did too little too late: nine out of ten suspects were never brought to trial, and more than half acquitted for “lack of evidence”. Only 6,656 Germans were found guilty, and only 200 convicted of murder. Most received light sentences, while longer ones often ended in commutations and pardons. And let us not speak of the Austrians, who all suffered until recently from Waldheimer’s Disease – forgetting what you did in the war.

Jewish attitudes to the Shoah have changed like everyone else’s, and today it is at the heart of Jewish identity. Wiesenthal was the main agent of this change, and a conservative in both Austrian and Israeli politics. Nonetheless, in the post-Eichmann Jewish divide (because Jews, alas, always divide) he took the left-liberal side.

Like Primo Levi, he sought justice, not revenge – he even argued against the execution of Eichmann. Because of his own experience of good Germans, Segev suggests – and because of Cyla’s experience of good Poles, he might have added – Wiesenthal firmly rejected collective guilt, and insisted that every case must be decided on its own merits. So, on the evidence, he exonerated both Waldheim himself and John Demjanjuk, one of the last suspects to be tried.

Like Levi again – but against the Jewish establishment – he insisted that the Holocaust was not unique, and not only a Jewish tragedy. He spoke up for contemporary victims of genocide, including the Muslims of Bosnia; and no one did more than he, Segev says, for the remembrance of Hitler’s Roma victims. He even agreed with Hannah Arendt that the Jewish leadership, and all other Jewish collaborators, were criminally responsible, not (as Levi argued) victims as well; and he pursued them equally, or tried.

In his rejection of some of our most basic instincts, for revenge and tribal loyalty, this instinctive man showed the greatest courage of all. And in writing his biography, so has Segev. His other books have all been published in Israel, despite being critical of Israeli policy. But Simon Wiesenthal has been translated from “an unpublished Hebrew-language work”. After 40 years, Wiesenthal’s last enemies faced the truth, but after 65 he still hasn’t succeeded with his friends.

Carole Angier’s biography ‘The Double Bond: Primo Levi’ is published by Penguin

[The New York Times] Robert Katz, Who Wrote About Nazi Massacre in Italy, Dies at 77

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:35:11 -0400

[The New York Times] Robert Katz, Who Wrote About Nazi Massacre in Italy, Dies at 77:

By BRUCE WEBER
Published: October 22, 2010

The cause was complications following cancer surgery, said his wife, Beverly Gerstel Katz. Mr. Katz lived in Pieve a Presciano, Italy.

Mr. Katz, an American who lived in Italy for much of the last 50 years, wrote nonfiction books, novels and screenplays, many set against the backdrop of 20th-century Italian history. He was attracted to bloodshed and high drama.

One book, “Days of Wrath: The Ordeal of Aldo Moro” (1980), is a journalistic recreation of the kidnapping of Moro, an Italian statesman and former prime minister, from the center of Rome by left-wing militants known as the Red Brigade, and of his eventual murder. A 1990 book, “Naked by the Window,” is a thoroughgoing account of the 1985 death of the artist Ana Mendieta, who either committed suicide by leaping from her 34th-floor Greenwich Village apartment or was thrown from the window and killed by her husband, the sculptor Carl Andre. Mr. Andre was tried for and acquitted of the crime.

Mr. Katz’s 1977 novel, “Ziggurat,” concerned terrorist blackmailers threatening to detonate an atomic bomb at the North Pole, and his screenplay for the 1976 thriller “The Cassandra Crossing,” which starred Richard Harris, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster and O. J. Simpson, involved a plague-infected terrorist fleeing the authorities on a passenger train.

But Mr. Katz’s most frequent subject was the Holocaust, especially as it pertained to Italy. In 2003, he published “The Battle for Rome: The Germans, the Allies, the Partisans and the Pope, September 1943-June 1944,” an account of the German occupation of Rome from the fall of Mussolini to the city’s liberation. In many ways it expanded on his first book, “Death in Rome,” the one that had brought him notoriety.

“Death in Rome” (1967) was a reconstruction of the infamous Ardeatine Caves massacre of 1944, when the Nazis, in reprisal for an attack by Italian resistance fighters on a German-speaking police battalion, herded 335 Italian men — prisoners and civilians — to a series of man-made caves on the outskirts of Rome and shot them. In his book, Mr. Katz, citing evidence he later called strong but circumstantial, said that Pope Pius XII had learned of the planned executions 19 hours before they occurred but chose to remain silent, an accusation that was immediately denied by the Vatican.

“This is not a book of history but a polemic in which the special interests of the author are dominant and in conflict with the interests of research and presentation of the facts,” a Vatican spokesman said at the time. (Among documents later released by the Vatican, one indicated that Pius had, in fact, been made aware of the Nazi reprisal, though only five hours before it took place.)

The book was made into a film, “Massacre in Rome,” in 1973. The next year, in a legal proceeding initiated by the niece of Pius XII, who had died in 1958, Mr. Katz along with the film’s director, George P. Cosmatos, and producer, Carlo Ponti, were charged with “defaming the memory” of Pius. They were found guilty and given suspended sentences. (Mr. Katz’s was 14 months.) After several appeals and counterappeals, the charges were set aside in 1980 by Italy’s highest court.

Mr. Katz was never one to shy away from assigning blame in historical events or from drawing other potent conclusions, and his work, though often admired for his research and writing style, also drew fervent objections. His 1969 book, “Black Sabbath,” about the rounding up of 1,000 Roman Jews in October 1943 for liquidation in Auschwitz, was praised as an “elaborately documented history” by Michael M. Bernet, writing in The New York Times Book Review. But Mr. Bernet also wrote that “Katz’s attitude to Judaism, Jewry, Zionism and Israel is hostile and uninformed, if not downright offensive.”

Robert Katz was born on June 27, 1933, in Brooklyn, where his parents ran a grocery. He attended Brooklyn College and worked as a writer on the staff of the American Cancer Society. He wrote “Death in Rome” in New York City after a first trip to Italy; he and his wife, whom he married in 1957, moved there permanently after it was published.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons Jonathan and Stephen, both of Rome; his brothers Alan, of Manhattan, and Howard, of Merrick, N.Y.; and two grandchildren.

[Colorado Independent] Personhood backers disavow Nazi website but agree with comparisons

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:29:00 -0400

[Colorado Independent] Personhood backers disavow Nazi website but agree with comparisons:

By Joseph Boven 10/27/10 8:59 AM

Personhood Colorado Director Gualberto Garcia Jones Tuesday told the Colorado Independent that his organization did not agree with a Facebook page portraying No on 62 campaign members as Nazis. However, he said the dehumanizing thought process that allowed the planned extermination of 5.9 million Jews during the Nazi regime bears similarities to what he sees as the misinformed perception that zygotes are not human.

On Monday, ColoradoPols noted the Facebook page entitled “’No on 62’ Nazis – End Infant Genocide – Vote ‘Yes on 62!’” The page, which punctuates its point by providing a Nazi banner over the top of a bloody fetus, lists Personhood USA, Personhood Colorado, and Amendment 62’s campaign website Mycampaigntracker.com in its info section.

Jones, who is also a co-founder of Personhood USA, said it was the first time he had seen the site. He said that despite the fact the info page provides links implicating his organizations, he does not know who created it. He said that it could possibly be a volunteer or other individual involved in the campaign.

At least two members integral to the personhood campaign appear to have been aware of the site’s existence. Jennifer Mason, communications director for Personhood USA, “liked” comments posted by the site’s administrators as early as Oct. 8, the first day the page began posting. While Leslie Hanks, vice-president of Colorado Right to Life and co-sponsor of the Personhood Amendment, similarly ‘liked’ a variety of comments on the site, he said he does not agree with the main theme of the site.

“I don’t agree that the people on the No on 62 campaign are like Nazis,” Jones told the Colorado Independent. He said they, like some members of his own family, are just misinformed.

Still, while not seeing pro-choice advocates as Nazis, Jones said the comparison between abortion and the Nazi plan to commit genocide was apt in one way. He said that, like the thought process used by those involved in the plan to exterminate the Jewish population, individuals who support abortion must dehumanize a human life to view the procedure as ethically permissible. “I would say the disregard for human life is necessary,” Jones concluded.

Cara DeGette, spokeswoman for the No on 62 campaign, said Jones’ comments were “preposterous.”

“[The Holocaust] is not what we are talking about here,” DeGette said. “It has no relevance.”

DeGette said that while the No on 62 campaign was shocked upon to see the Facebook page, the campaign was focused on educating and ensuring that voters make it to the polls to vote against Amendment 62 — the so-called “Personhood Amendment.”

On Oct.8, the “End infant genocide page” posted this opening note:

“WELCOME PERSONHOOD ADVOCATES – LET’S EXPOSE THE TRUTH BEHIND THE “NO on 62″ FEMI-NAZI’S AGENDA => DENYING THE PERSONHOOD OF THE UNBORN SO THEY CAN KEEP KILLING KIDS LEGALLY! PLEASE PASS IT ALONG & SUGGEST THIS PAGE TO ALL YOUR FB FRIENDS!”

“Were we shocked? Absolutely. Were we revolted? Absolutely,” DeGette said. “But in the end we just want to make sure people get out and vote against Amendment 62.”

If passed by voters, Amendment 62 will change the definition of person in the Colorado Constitution by providing the full range of constitutional rights to a zygote. Among other changes, the amendment would outlaw abortion, numerous forms of birth control and embryonic stem cell research in the state.

Jones said that if the argument was about name calling, “the other side routinely says we are like the Taliban.”

A Google search found that supporters of personhood across the country are often pejoratively referred to as “the Taliban” by some comment posters.

DeGette said her own organization has steered clear of name calling. She said such behavior has no place in the political debate.

“We have been as respectful as possible. There is no reason to get in the gutter and name call,” DeGette said. “We don’t engage in those types of name calling.”

[Deutsche Welle] Chilean president apologizes for Nazi-linked guest-book gaffe

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:27:00 -0400

[Deutsche Welle] Chilean president apologizes for Nazi-linked guest-book gaffe:

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera has apologized after writing a phrase associated with Nazism in the guest book of German President Christian Wulff. Pinera said he was unaware of the link to the Third Reich.

The president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, apologized on Monday for writing a message linked to Nazism in the guest book of German President Christian Wulff.

Pinera said he had been unaware of the significance that the phrase “Deutschland ueber alles” (“Germany over all”) now has within Germany.

“I was not at all aware that this phrase was associated with the dark past of the country, and therefore I am sorry,” Pinera said from Santiago after returning from a tour of Europe.

Pinera wrote the phrase in the presidential guest book on Saturday, while visiting Wulff’s office towards the end of his trip abroad.

The Chilean miner rescue effortBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The Chilean leader became better known during the country’s rescue of miners trapped undergroundThe words come from the “Deutschlandlied,” which has long been used as Germany’s national anthem. However, the lyrics from the first verse, in which “Deutschland ueber alles” is sung, became associated with the Nazi era and were removed after the Second World War.

Learned phrase as a boy

The Chilean leader said he learned the phrase as a boy at a German school, of which Chile has many, in the 1950s and 1960s. He said that he had thought it was associated with the unification of Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century.

Pinera said the note he wrote was intended as a message of thanks to Germany for help and support offered during the devastating Chilean earthquake in February as well during the rescue of 33 Chilean miners trapped underground earlier this month.

Author: Richard Connor (AFP, dpa, Reuters)
Editor: Nancy Isenson

[Brooklyn Paper] Is this graffiti anti-Semitic or anti-violence?

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:24:00 -0400

[Brooklyn Paper] Is this graffiti anti-Semitic or anti-violence?:

By Stephen Brown
The Brooklyn Paper

Some sicko wrote, “Geese first, Jews next,” on an emergency call box in Park Slope over the weekend — but it’s unclear whether the vandalism is an anti-Semitic call for violence or a sincere attempt to link this summer’s federal goose extermination to one of history’s greatest atrocities.

The vandalism, which appeared at Prospect Park West and Second Street, invokes the gassing of some 300 geese in Prospect Park, and also the Holocaust.

Andy Bachman, the rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim on Garfield Place, thought the scribbling was in bad taste no matter its meaning.

“It’s either a bad joke in poor taste that falls flat, or someone too easily making reference to the extermination of Jews,” he said.

Whoever the vandal was, he or she was likely familiar with the famous statement attributed to Martin Niemoller: “First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. … Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time, no one was left to speak up.”

Bachman said that vicious, anonymous attacks like the one that are regrettably quite common.

“Jews, blacks, gays and many others are often the target of nasty graffiti,” said Bachman, adding, “It’s unfortunate.”

[RT] Neo-Nazi gets life sentence for hate killings

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:22:00 -0400

[RT] Neo-Nazi gets life sentence for hate killings:

Published 28 October, 2010, 20:16
Edited 29 October, 2010, 09:33

The Moscow City Court has sentenced a 22-year-old neo-Nazi to life in prison for killing 15 people. Vasily Krivets, who was also handed a fine of 13.5 million rubles ($450,000), has not confessed to the crimes.

The court also sentenced Dmitry Ufimtsev, 23, who confessed to committing five murders, to 22 years in prison. After their meeting in 2007, Ufimtsev and Krivets collaborated in the murder of 15 people, most of whom were migrants from Central Asia and the Caucasus. The two have also been linked to the Nationalist Socialist Society (NSO), an ultra-nationalist gang that first began as a political movement.

Ufimtsev and Krivets said they identified their victims according to their physical appearance, specifically targeting “foreigners” and assaulting them with knives. One such victim, for example, was an elderly violinist who played for small change near a metro station in Moscow, the Gazeta daily reported. Krivets admitted to stabbing the man and leaving him to die for “being Jewish” – testimony he later denied.

This is only the third time that a man has received a life sentence for hate killings in Russia. Two previous life sentences were handed to Nikolay Korolev in 2008, for a bombing that killed 14 people, and Aleksandr Degtyarev in 2010 for murdering four people.

Ufimtsev and Krivets have refused requests to speak to the press. Their lawyers have ten days to appeal the verdict from the moment they receive a written copy of it.

Hate crimes have seen a recent rise in Russia. The Ministry of Interior has stated that 548 such crimes were committed in 2009, up by more than 50 per cent from 2007. Ultra-nationalist gangs have also mushroomed, with more than 150 of them currently operating throughout Russia.

[BBC News] US political ad mistakenly shows German troops

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:19:49 -0400

[BBC News] US political ad mistakenly shows German troops:

A North Carolina state legislator says he supports the military, but a flyer prepared by his campaign could lead some to question which country’s.

Democrat Tim Spear’s campaign has apologised after inadvertently sending voters a leaflet showing actors in World War II-era German uniforms.

The firm that produced the advert touting his support for the military has accepted blame, US media reported.

The state Republican Party obtained the flyer and distributed it to the media.

Mike Brown of Washington DC consulting firm MSHC Partners told the Associated Press that designers had not noticed the soldiers portrayed with their backs to the camera were in German uniform.

The flyer read: “In combat, you always want another soldier covering your back.”

[Bloomberg] Hitler Planned to Hold Out in Austrian Alps, Allied Intelligence Indicated

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 13:17:55 -0400

[Bloomberg] Hitler Planned to Hold Out in Austrian Alps, Allied Intelligence Indicated:

By Chris Spillane - Oct 28, 2010 7:01 PM ET

Adolf Hitler Planned to Hold Out in Alps

Allied military intelligence indicated Adolf Hitler had built an underground Alpine fortress to house “the elite of Nazi Germany” in a desperate, final stand in World War II, according to documents released today.

Intelligence reports from 1944 and 1945, the last two years of the war, suggested that leading Nazis would seek refuge from an allied invasion of Germany in a vast underground network of tunnels and caves in a “Nazi National Redoubt” hidden within the Austrian Alps, the secret files published by the U.K.’s National Archives in London showed.

The hideout was believed to have enough capacity, food and munitions to supply about 60,000 men for two years, according to the files. The reports described those who would take refuge there as “war criminals,” “Nazi fanatics” and “those with nothing to lose.”

History proved the intelligence wrong. As the war approached its climax and Russian troops bore down on Berlin, Hitler remained in the German capital, refusing to flee the city for the south. The Nazi leader committed suicide in his bunker on April 30, 1945, and Germany capitulated a week later.

From their hideout, the Nazis would coordinate resistance groups worldwide, using propaganda, sabotage and bribery, while the Nazis had established specialist training schools to prepare soldiers for mountain warfare, the intelligence indicated.

“The chief importance of the reduit will be as a center for directing the activities of the pro-Nazi and fascist elements in all European countries, and particularly Germany,” the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, said in the files.

“A small number of politically minded overoptimists” were relying on ideological and commercial differences between the Allies and their continuing war against Japan to cause the assault on Germany to falter, the document said. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, was a prime example of those who believed that the redoubt had a chance of success.

To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Spillane in London at cspillane@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Eddie Buckle at ebuckle@bloomberg.net.

[National Post] Avi Benlolo: Hitler and imagery, evil that still sells

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:40:00 -0400

[National Post] Avi Benlolo: Hitler and imagery, evil that still sells:

COPYRIGHT NATIONAL POST

I am standing in front of one of the newest exhibits at the German Historical Museum, trying to understand why I feel so deeply troubled. Titled “Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime,” it is the first official exhibition in Berlin to focus on Hitler’s fascist ideology and his effect on the German people.

The exhibit is an outstanding presentation of rarely seen imagery, propaganda and documents that catapulted Adolph Hitler to power. It is a sharp display of a horrific marketing machine that turned Hitler from an ordinary street thug into a folksy super leader. Posters of proper Aryan men, women and children stand in contrast to Hitler’s own appearance; for Germans of the time, his looks were irrelevant.

The exhibit shows how Hitler was portrayed as the ultimate statesman as he addressed thousands of well-dressed Germans at rallies; photographs reveal a leader loved, almost worshipped by the people he lead down a path of unimaginable evil. On display are Nazi uniforms, hats, knives, pins and flags – the kind of memorabilia easily purchased on eBay these days. Several versions of Mein Kampf were displayed – sealed in a glass case, of course, because the book is illegal to purchase in Germany. When probed, our guide informed us the book can be acquired by other means.

So I ask myself, why do I feel so uneasy? Perhaps because I’m concerned that many of the people visiting this temporary exhibit will not interpret it in the way it was intended. For me, the exhibit is a demonstration of a sick society that rose to power along with the criminal mind it venerated.

But what will it mean to thousands of others who may not be intimately familiar with the Holocaust? Will it be, to some, a glorification of Hitler? As our guide noted when talking about German pop culture, Hitler sells. Hitler still sells because people are fascinated by him and the iconic imagery of the Nazis. This is not a trivial concern: the idea of creating an exhibit similar to “Hitler and the Germans” was dismissed by Museum officials several years ago for exactly this reason.

My travelling companions advise giving people the benefit of the doubt, arguing that Hitler has come to embody the idea of evil and the point the Museum is making is a fairly obvious one. This is true – despite what I believe is insufficient evidence about the devastation and tragedy wrought by this common little man; the information is presented almost without context. In a world filled with increasing Holocaust denial, context seems so very significant.

Is it out of context in Berlin which has a prominent Holocaust monument, a Jewish Museum, an outdoor Holocaust Exhibit as well as the German Historical Museum (where this exhibit is being held) which deals with the Holocaust? I’m not sure, although I would hope anyone living in or visiting Berlin will have been exposed to Holocaust education at some point.

As for the exhibit itself, I am thankful the curators included the word “crime” in the title.

National Post

Avi Benlolo, President and CEO of Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, is currently leading a group of community leaders to visit the sites of the Holocaust in Germany and Poland. These are his thoughts upon visiting a new German exhibition dedicated to understanding how Hitler and the Nazis rose to power.