Philadelphia man ordered deported for serving as Nazi guard

The main entrance to Buchenwald

A U.S. immigration judge has ordered an 85-year-old retired steelworker deported to Austria, or any other country that will accept him, for serving as an armed Nazi death camp guard during World War II.

Anton Geiser and his attorney did not immediately return calls and an e-mail for comment on the decision announced Tuesday by the Justice Department. Judge Charles Honeyman issued the 14-page order out of Philadelphia on Monday. Geiser was born in what is now part of Croatia and came to the United States from Austria in 1956. He has lived in Sharon, about 60 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, since 1960. He became a citizen in 1962 and is married with three sons.

"As a Nazi concentration camp guard during World War II, Anton Geiser must be held to account for his role in the persecution of countless men, women and children," Assistant U.S. Attorney General Lanny Breuer said in a statement Tuesday. "The long passage of time will not diminish our resolve to deny refuge to such individuals."

A Department of Justice spokeswoman said Geiser was not in custody. He can appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals in Washington.

Geiser has acknowledged being an armed guard who watched over and escorted prisoners at three Nazi death camps. He has argued that his service was not voluntary and that he was therefore eligible to emigrate under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953. Federal prosecutors have instead cited the 1978 Holtzman Amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act to exclude citizenship and deport "aliens who persecuted any person on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion, under the direction of the Nazi government of Germany."

Geiser, an ethnic German, was drafted into the German army at 17 and served as an armed SS Death Head guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin for much of 1943. He later was transferred to an SS officer training camp at Arolsen, where he escorted prisoners to and from the Buchenwald camp, where tens of thousands of Jews and others were exterminated. He was at Arolsen until April 1945. Geiser has denied harming any prisoners, though he has acknowledged having orders to shoot prisoners who tried to escape.

A federal judge in Pittsburgh revoked his citizenship under the Holtzman amendment, and he lost a U.S. Third Circuit appeal in 2008. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case last year.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Nazi Archives Documented in Powerful Portfolio by Photographer Richard Ehrlich

Richard Ehrlich’s photographs of the Holocaust Archives

More than half a century has passed since the Holocaust — enough time to digest a plethora of scholarship, museum exhibitions, monuments, documentaries and artistic reckonings — but still not enough time to understand. Into this mix, we can now add Richard Ehrlich’s photographs. His portfolio of the Holocaust Archives at the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen illustrates the Nazi bureaucracy with images at once artistic and chilling.

Created in two visits in 2007, Ehrlich’s portfolio contains 52 color, digital images. The complete portfolio is already in a number of public collections, including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; Yad Vashem in Jerusalem; the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaisme in Paris; the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; and the Special Collections of the UCLA Young Research Library.

The work was first publicly exhibited at American Jewish Committee’s Annual Meeting in May 2008, where it was viewed by over 1,000 people, including members of Congress, foreign dignitaries and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. The portfolio will next be exhibited at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica, California from August 26–30, 2008, where it will be co-sponsored by AJC Los Angeles and the German Consulate and German Information Center. Says Seth Brysk, Executive Director, AJC Los Angeles, “I am pleased the relationship with Rick will continue in Los Angeles.” A free, public opening reception is set for Tuesday, August 26 from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., where Christian Stocks, Consul General of Germany, will speak.

The portfolio will also be included in the exhibition “Of Life and Loss,” opening October 26, 2008 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Jewish Federation of Santa Barbara. Additional exhibitions are planned at Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum; the University at Buffalo Art Gallery, State University of New York; and the Musée du Judaisme in Paris. Éditions de La Martinière will publish the portfolio in book form.

The Holocaust Archives at the International Tracing Service, Bad Arolsen

With archives of some 50 million documents, the International Tracing Service (ITS) has played an important role in historical research, family reunification, refugee services, and in tracing the fates of countless individuals. Although it has been active since 1943, the ITS has maintained a low profile, in consideration of the privacy of the more than 17.5 million people in its Central Name Index. Occupying six buildings — including a former SS barracks — in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the ITS archives contain more than 16 miles of records and artifacts that reveal, with excruciating exactitude, the Nazi campaign to murder millions and eradicate European Jewry and other minorities.

Having read a short article about the ITS in the International Herald Tribune, Richard Ehrlich, a surgeon with a growing reputation as a photographer, pulled out all stops to gain access to the Bad Arolsen collection. When his initial request was denied, he explains, “I called anyone who might have influence and finally found a sympathetic official in the State Department.” In two visits totaling seven days in June and September 2007, Ehrlich completed this compelling portfolio. In bringing these images to the public forum, Ehrlich recreates his own shocking and ultimately numbing encounter with the “banality of evil.”

Through Ehrlich’s lens, we see the obsessive mentality of the Nazi bureaucracy—countless aisles of catalog drawers, towering stacks of paperwork, row upon row of file folders. At a time of resurging Holocaust denial, these folders, storage boxes and ledgers — the normally mundane paraphernalia of record keeping — provide painful and irrefutable evidence of history’s most unimaginable crime.

The records in the ITS archives were collected from a number of sources, including the Gestapo, ghettos, prison camps and every agency of Nazi authority. Among the many individual documents depicted in the portfolio are the original Schindler’s list, a transport order to Bergen Belsen including Anne Frank’s name, and an invitation from Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich to a brunch meeting to discuss “a total solution to the Jewish question in Europe.” Through Ehrlich’s photographs, we can read entries in the Buchenwald prisoner logs and death book, study the Nazis’ elaborate system for coding prisoners in charts and maps, read of a precise, every-two-minute shooting Himmler ordered in honor of Hitler’s birthday, and view medical records that count the lice removed from prisoners.

Richard Ehrlich’s interest in photography began as a child growing up in the northern suburbs of New York City. He postponed photography for almost 40 years to build a surgical practice in Los Angeles, limiting his picture taking to a visual record of his work in the operating room. Seven years ago, he renewed his devotion to photography and soon received acclaim for his work. California painter Tony Berlant describes Ehrlich’s photography as “…technically precise, yet soaringly evocative in content.”

Working in series that focus primarily on natural landscapes, architecture and his world travels, Ehrlich has created a substantial body of work. Wherever he directs his lens, Ehrlich’s keen eye elicits a resonant sense of place, as may be seen in his portrayal of his local turf, Homage to Rothko: Malibu Skies. Ehrlich’s photographs have been acquired by many museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Denver Art Museum. He is represented by a number of prestigious galleries, including Bonni Benrubi, New York City; Fay Gold, Atlanta; Weston, Carmel, CA; and Craig Krull, Santa Monica. Richard Ehrlich’s photographs of I.M. Pei’s Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center were published in 2007, and Nazraeli Press has published a volume of his images, Namibia: The Forbidden Zone (2007). Nazraeli will publish Ehrlich’s The Body as Art: The Art of the Body in 2009.

artdaily

Personal items of Nazi victims returned to relatives sixty years on

Relatives of loved ones put to death by the Nazis over sixty years ago have received their last possessions this week. Watches, photos, parcels, wallets and jewellery belonging to the resisters were discovered in a Red Cross archive in Germany.

"It is as if the ghosts of the past have walked into my life," said Gerrit Jan Evers, who learned only a few weeks ago that the effects had been found. "So many died. And now, 63 years later, I'm here holding my father's identity card in my hand," he added with tears in his eyes.

His father was rounded up in a wave of Gestapo arrests in 1944 after an attack on a German troop column that left four Nazis dead. Six hundred Dutch men and women were rounded up and sent to concentration camps where the majority of them died through maltreatment or were executed. Other items belonging to his father include an old pocket watch with cracked, yellow glass and its case, a scratched-up lock and key and a photograph with writing on the back. The Nazis had kept all the items packed in boxes, which were then confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war.

The artefacts were found by accident. The Red Cross Tracing Centre at Bad Arolsen, Germany, is the largest repository in the world of Nazi files and they have sorting through them since 1945.

Evert de Graaf, a Dutch historian working with Red Cross officials to identify the relatives of the dead, said: "We found files on 80 of them, and an envelope containing personal effects was attached to eight of them. There could be more artefacts in other files that we have to cross-reference."

This week several families went on a chartered bus from Holland to Bad Arolsen to collect the remnants of lives cut short by tyranny. "When the trip began, everyone was cheerful," De Graaf said. "But the closer we got to Bad Arolsen, the quieter everyone became."

Evers's hands shook as he opened a package to find the brittle, yellowing ID card marked "Personsbewijs" - ID card - in Dutch inside to glimpse the photograph of a gaunt, serious-looking man.

"That's my father," he says softly.

Evers is named after his father but has no recollection of him other than his mother's anecdotes. Gerrit Evers Senior died in December 1944 at Neuengamme concentration camp, near Hamburg. Three weeks later, his son was born in the Netherlands. Evers' stepson, Gerjo Mulder, said: "It's beyond belief for him that people could be so cruel to one another here, in the middle of Europe. I can't grasp it myself. I'm trying to put myself in his shoes. But I'm just 35."

Viewing his dead brother's concentration-camp registration card, Willem Dorgelo, said, "I keep trying to tell myself that it wasn't 'the Germans,' it was Adolf Hitler. Well, I try anyway. They worked him to death, starved him, for painting slogans on walls, gave him no winter clothes. He didn't survive," he said, turning over a wallet in his hand that used to belong to a man who has been dead for 63 years.

Standing next to him, Johan Dorgelo, Willem's son, said: "I hardly have anything to remember my father by. I was a baby when he was rounded up and taken away."

Daily Mail

A closely guarded Holocaust archive opens its doors

Like other Holocaust victims, Noemi Ban has gone back numerous times to survey the ghostly field of chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where she and her family arrived in July 1944, and she alone survived.

But last May, Ban got an even more jolting glimpse into her past, when she visited the Holocaust archive in this tranquil town in central Germany. There, filed in the labyrinthine shelves of records, was a faded scrap of paper that she remembers signing on the day she arrived at the camp from Hungary.

"I was shocked to see my handwriting," Ban, 84, said by telephone from her home in Bellingham, Washington State. "When I signed it, I had no idea why. Why they needed such precise data in that horrible place is amazing."

The Nazis kept meticulous records of their mass extermination during World War II, and much of it ended up here, in a closely guarded archive maintained by the International Tracing Service, which is administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Now, after more than six decades, the tracing service is opening its vast repository of information - not just to survivors like Ban, who have long had the right to see material here, but to scholars who are eager to plumb its depths for fresh insights into an unfathomable horror.

On Aug. 20, the archive plans to transfer digital copies of the first major trove of documents to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

The files cover 51 concentration camps and prisons, and include transportation lists, medical reports, entry documents - like the one signed by Ban - and Gestapo prison records. About 10 million documents in all, they will represent a third of the entire collection at Bad Arolsen.

Prying open the doors of Bad Arolsen has been a lengthy, politically fraught process, and it is not completely finished. Three of the 11 countries that oversee the institution have not yet ratified an amended treaty that would give historians unfettered access to the archive.

In May, though, the 11 countries, among them Germany and the United States, agreed to begin the electronic transfer even before the last three countries - Italy, France, and Greece - ratify the treaty.

"We have interpreted the decision in a way that there is no turning back," Reto Meister, the director of the tracing service, said. "It became very evident that the ITS had to change because the victims wanted it to change."

A tall, rangy Swiss national who has spent his career in places like Iraq and Lebanon for the Red Cross, Meister has made it his mission to dispel Bad Arolsen's reputation as a secret Nazi archive - a characterization he contends was always a bit exaggerated.

Outside experts on the Holocaust, who have long pushed for more access, said he had been remarkably successful.

"I have a good deal of admiration for how far he's moved the place," said Paul Shapiro, the director of advanced Holocaust studies at the museum in Washington. "He's dealing with a staff that, for a very long time, operated in a closed and secretive manner. He also has to balance multiple forces."

Among those is the German government, which pays nearly $20 million a year for the upkeep of the tracing service and its 320 employees. Until last year, Germany opposed granting wider access to the archive, contending that it would violate privacy standards.

The documents include confidential personal information, like reports of medical experiments carried out on prisoners, and accusations of murder and homosexuality made by the Nazis to discredit people.

Much of the material was discovered by Allied forces when they liberated the camps at the end of World War II. They dumped the files in a complex of vacated SS barracks in Bad Arolsen, which was conveniently located near the border dividing the U.S. and British occupation zones.

Few historians doubt there is a wealth of dramatic, wrenching personal stories in the archives. Shapiro said he expected enormous interest from researchers, who previously had to rely on documents in government archives in Washington, London and Moscow, which focused less on individual victims than on the Nazi system.

Among the files on displaced persons here is a sheaf of drawings and illustrations by a Latvian refugee who was conscripted into the German Army in 1944 and ordered to dig trenches in Germany.

Among those watching Bad Arolsen most closely are lawyers for Holocaust victims and their relatives. They cited the archive this year in opposing a settlement with an Italian insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, over unpaid claims on life insurance policies.

As part of the settlement in February, Generali agreed to give heirs of Holocaust victims until next August to uncover evidence of unpaid claims at Bad Arolsen. Officials there said no one had made inquiries.

The complexity of the archive, combined with the flood of inquiries, resulted in a huge backlog of requests - 450,000 at its peak earlier in the decade, causing a wait of several years for a response. The backlog is now down to 75,000, but officials say new requests are answered within eight weeks.

As records are transmitted to Washington and Jerusalem, part of this research burden will shift to the Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem. Shapiro said he expected a wave of inquiries. Some survivors have already complained that the museum is playing a gatekeeper role.

While it would have been nice to wait for new technology to organize the archive, Shapiro said, the advancing age of Holocaust survivors - many are over 80 - makes it vital to answer requests as soon as possible. "That's a big job, but it's one we're committed to doing," he said.

International Herald Tribune

From a vast Nazi archive, a panorama of misery in newly liberated Europe

Looking back at the first weeks after World War II, a French lieutenant named Henri Francois-Poncet despaired at ever fulfilling his mission to establish the fate of French inmates of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

For the living skeletons who survived the Nazi terror, the Displaced Persons camp set up two miles (three kilometers) away offered little relief from misery.

People still died at the rate of 1,000 to 1,500 a day. Corpses were stacked in front of barracks, to be carted away by captured SS guards. "Bodies frequently remained for several days in the huts, the other inmates being too weak to carry them out," Francois-Poncet wrote in a report for the Allied Military Government.

"As most of the survivors could not even give their own names, it was useless trying to obtain information as to the identity of the dead," he wrote. He reported a meager 25 percent success rate.

When the Third Reich surrendered in May 1945, 8 million people were left uprooted around Europe. Millions drifted through the 2,500 hastily arranged DP camps before they were repatriated.

A bleak picture springs with stark immediacy from typewritten reports by the Allied officers, found in the massive archive of the International Tracing Service in the central German town of Bad Arolsen. The Associated Press has been given extensive access to the archive on condition that identities of victims and refugees are protected.

Far from scenes of joyful liberation that should have greeted the end of Nazi oppression, the files reveal desperation, loss and confusion, and overwhelmed and often insensitive military authorities.

Many had nowhere to go, their families among the 6 million Jews consumed in the Holocaust, their homes destroyed or handed out to new occupants. Those who wanted to get to Palestine were shut out by a British ban on Jewish immigration to the Israeli state-in-waiting.

"Owing to ill treatment by the Germans, most DPs have a distrust and fear of the Allied authorities," said a September 1945 report signed by British Lt. Col. C.C. Allan. "Many DPs have sunk into complete apathy regarding their future."

Liberated concentration camps were transformed into DP camps. Food was still scarce — often just coffee and wet black bread — and medical care was insufficient, said a report written for President Harry Truman.

Inmates were kept under armed guard to maintain order. They still wore their old striped, pajama-like concentration-camp-issue uniforms and slept in the same drafty barracks through a bitter winter.

Compounding their misery, they could watch through barbed wire fences and see German villagers living normal lives. In some places, those villagers were forced to tour the camps and help with the burials or at least face up to what their Fuehrer had wrought. But it was scant comfort to the victims.

"As things stand now, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them," wrote presidential envoy Earl G. Harrison in his famously quoted report to Truman after visiting that summer.

Known for its unparalleled collection of original concentration camp papers, the ITS, a branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, also safeguards the world's largest documentation on postwar DP camps. It has nearly 3.4 million names on its card index of those who sought designation as refugees eligible for aid.

Until now, the documents have been used only to trace missing people and verify restitution claims. But now the full breadth of the archive, filling 16 miles (25 kilometers) of shelf space, is to be opened to historians for the first time. At a meeting last week in Amsterdam, Netherlands, the archive's 11-nation supervisory commission agreed to begin transferring electronic copies this autumn to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Within weeks after the war, U.N. agencies and volunteer charities took over the DP camps, processing applications for relief and emigration. By 1947, a quarter million Jews — a piteous remnant of European Jewry — shared space with displaced Eastern Europeans fearful of return to what was now the Soviet bloc.

Also among the DPs were ex-Nazis.

Adam Friedrich's 1949 application to the International Refugee Organization to join relatives in St. Louis, acknowledges that for three years he belonged to the Waffen SS, the combat arm of Hitler's dreaded paramilitary organization. He also noted he had been imprisoned for 20 months after the war.

An IRO official scribbled on his form, "The applicant was forced to report to the SS in Jan. '42. Served in the infantry and took part in fighting."

Friedrich was rejected.

But U.S. authorities did not have that information four years later when he applied again through the U.S. Refugee Relief Act. Then, Friedrich reported he had been in the German army but said nothing about his SS service.

Decades after he obtained citizenship, the U.S. Justice Department uncovered Friedrich's past. He was stripped of his citizenship in 2004, lost a Supreme Court appeal, and was due to be deported when he died last July.

At Bad Arolsen, questionnaires and affidavits are stuffed into 400,000 envelopes which, including families, refer to 850,000 displaced people, and fill binders spreading over several rooms of floor-to-ceiling shelves.

The last DP camps were closed in 1953, so "When you feel the paper tug as you try to pull it out, that means no one has opened it for 40 or 50 years," said Rudolf Michalke, head of the archive's postwar section.

Some files contain detailed histories of survivors and the tortures they endured. Refugees relate their futile struggle to resettle after the war, and their hopes of rebuilding their lives far from Europe.

An Austrian pastry chef recounts the hostility he found when he returned to Vienna. "Given the large and increasingly negative climate against Jews, I have not been able to get a job and am forced to emigrate," he testified, seeking passage to Australia.

Others describe their tormentors, hoping they will be prosecuted.

A Polish Jew writes about "Workmaster Batenszlajer," one of about a dozen guards he named as particularly cruel.

"He made selections. Those who lost their strength because they were exhausted and looked bad were picked out and shot down," he wrote. Batenszlajer would pick four girls at a time and hold them for several days. "He raped them and afterward he took them into a wood and shot them down."

In a world where racism was rampant, finding a new home was not easy, as one Yugoslav-born man with Asian features learned. "Being a Kalmyk of Mongolian race, (he) is ineligible for most Anglo-Saxon countries," authorities scrawled on his form.

"The doors are closed to unmarried mothers," said a note from strongly Catholic Ireland.

Lining up employment in a new country was critical for obtaining a visa. Yugoslav-born Nikolai Davidovic, a mathematics professor who spoke seven languages and authored two textbooks, left for America in 1950 with his wife Larissa — but only after she had been promised a job as a maid.

Friedrich was not the only war criminal to slip through the screening process. Dieter Pohl, of the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, estimates that up to 250,000 Germans and Austrians had participated in the Holocaust, but only 5 to 10 percent were ever punished — most of them in the Soviet zone. Altogether, an estimated 500,000 to 1 million people committed crimes against humanity, he said.

But no one knew who the perpetrators were. "More than 90 percent of files on Nazi war crimes were destroyed," Pohl said in a telephone interview.

The U.S. zeal in pursuing former Nazis came late. In the war's aftermath, the Americans were more concerned about the looming threat from Stalin's Soviet Union.

In 1979, the Justice Department created the Office of Special Investigations to pursue ex-Nazis who committed visa fraud by lying about their past. Since then, it has won 104 prosecutions and denied entry at the U.S. border to 175 people from its watch list of 70,000 suspected persecutors.

"We are still very busy with World War II cases," said OSI director Eli Rosenbaum. "We have always routinely checked Arolsen's DP holdings when we've been investigating someone," he told the AP.

But the ITS files are far from complete, and unlike Friedrich, most former SS members concealed their crimes with lies or half-truths.

John Demjanjuk, a Ukranian-born camp guard who became an auto worker in Cleveland, reported in his refugee papers, seen in Bad Arolsen, that he had been a "worker" in Sobibor. Although Sobibor later became infamous as a death camp in occupied Poland, few people had heard of it after the war because it had been dismantled in 1943. Demjanjuk was awarded DP status.

In 1977, the U.S. government moved to revoke his citizenship, misidentifying him as "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious guard at Treblinka extermination camp. He was extradited to Israel, tried and sentenced to death in 1988. The sentence was overturned on appeal and Demjanjuk returned to the U.S., where his citizenship was restored — only to be taken from him again for concealing his work for the Nazis. He is now fighting deportation.

The file on Valerian Trifa, who became the U.S. archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox church and who once gave the opening prayer for the U.S. Senate, sheds light on the deceptions he deployed to win a ticket to the U.S.

Trifa, a leader of Romania's fascist Iron Guard, told refugee officials he had been interned in Dachau and Buchenwald, but he said nothing about the privileges or protection he received from the Germans, according to Paul Shapiro, who investigated the Trifa case in the late 1970s for the Justice Department. Shapiro is now director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Shapiro saw Trifa's file at ITS for the first time when he visited Bad Arolsen last year with an AP reporter. "I knew the facts that are in here, except for the manner in which he was treated in terms of his Displaced Persons status," he said, flipping through aging pages in the manila folder. "It's quite shocking when you actually see it."

Trifa relinquished his citizenship in 1980 after it was discovered he gave a speech in 1941 in Bucharest that unleashed a pogrom in which more than 150 Romanian Jews were killed. He left the United States in 1984 for Portugal, where he died three years later.

"To see someone receiving citizenship based on lies is not a great thing," Shapiro said. "If this stuff had been available then (in the 1970s), his case would have been resolved earlier. He would have lived fewer years in the United States."

International Herald Tribune