Far-Right Humor? Neo-Nazi Village Features 'Happy Holocaust' BBQ

"A place for people to gather," is how far-right NPD
politician Stefan Köster describes the garden behind his office.

Jamel, a tiny German village, is well-known for its connections to right-wing radicals. On the eve of elections in the state where the community is located, a journalist ran across a BBQ brandishing the phrase "Happy Holocaust." Was it a tasteless joke or a further symbol of a town that has lost its way?

Much has been written about the village of Jamel near Wismar in the far northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Hitler salutes in the streets, firing practice in local forests and outsiders chased away. The small run-down settlement has become a dark symbol of the growing reach of neo-Nazi ideology.

In the run-up to Sunday's local ballot in the state, a journalist from the website VBS TV arrived in Jamel. Although she was familiar with the village's larger-than-life reputation, she was shocked to see a large rusty barbeque inscribed with the phrase "happy holocaust."

The grill was in the barbed-wire encircled garden of the office of the far-right extremist National Democratic Party (NPD). The backyard was overlooked by a watchtower and a red, black and white old German Reich flag of the type used by the far-right scene.

'Stupid or Provocative?'

"I was shocked and I just couldn't believe what I saw. It felt really surreal," VBS TV journalist Barbara Dabrowska told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It was like in a bad American movie that tries to come up with the most ridiculous idea for how to make Nazis look really terrible. ... They probably meant it as a joke, but I was annoyed by their either stupid or incredibly provocative approach."

In her news report, Dabrowska interviewed Stefan Köster a politician for the NPD, a party dubbed "racist, anti-Semitic, revisionist" by Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Köster stressed his party's social outreach, explaining how his party distributes CDs in school yards and promotes German folk dancing. Asked about the happy holocaust barbeque in the garden behind his office, he said he hadn't noticed it before.

"Maybe someone is making fun of the political class because of how they repress open discussion," he said. "After all, if someone has an opinion about the holocaust, they should be able to express it," he stated, adding that he didn't find it to be funny.

"It must belong to someone in the building, but to me that matter is unimportant," he said.

The NPD party won seats in the state parliament for the second time in Sunday's state election.

Spiegel Online

RAF's rare anti-Nazi leaflet that told truth to wartime Germany

Heroes: Sophie and Hans Scholl were two
members of the group executed by the Nazis in 1943

A rare anti-Nazi leaflet dropped over Germany by the RAF during the Second World War will be presented to the UK Holocaust Centre this week.

The document is one of the few surviving White Rose leaflets produced by brave students at Munich University.

The White Rose resistance movement was behind thousands of copies of the leaflets, which gave details of the Holocaust and supported the ideals of democracy, freedom and religious tolerance. The six core members of the group, including Sophie and Hans Scholl, were executed in 1943. They are now regarded as heroes for their courageous opposition to the Third Reich.

The text of their sixth leaflet was smuggled out of Germany to Britain. In July 1943, copies were dropped over Germany by Allied aircraft.

Collector William Kaczynski is now donating one of the leaflets to the Holocaust Centre, a memorial and education museum in Newark, Nottinghamshire. It can be seen by the public at the first annual White Rose Ball, at the Kia Oval in South London on September 25 in support of the Holocaust Centre.

* To find out about the White Rose Ball go to www.whiteroseball.org.

Mail on Sunday

Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp to get UK funding

The Auschwirz-Birkenau concentration camp is an enduring symbol of the Holocaust

The government is set to contribute £2.1m towards the preservation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland, it has been announced.

The joint contribution will mainly be provided by the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Foreign Office. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation will be funded over the next three years.

More than a million people were murdered by the Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The concentration camp was the largest site for the mass murder of Jews. In recent years a number of countries have contributed to the fund to maintain the main concentration camp, Auschwitz, and its nearby satellite camp of Birkenau.

Auschwitz and Birkenau were operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II, and opened as a museum in 1947.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles said the camp, which stands as an enduring symbol of the Holocaust, was an importance place of remembrance which served to educate people about the horrors of the Holocaust. Speaking at the Jewish Museum in London, he said: "It is our collective responsibility to ensure that Auschwitz-Birkenau stands as a perpetual reminder of the pain and destructive force of hate. We must ensure that the lessons from the Holocaust are taught today and to future generations."

And Foreign Secretary William Hague said Auschwitz-Birkenau underlined "the horrific consequences of intolerance".

Mr Hague said he was "proud that the UK is able to play a part in commemorating the millions of victims who died there" and was helping to ensure the camp's preservation to educate future generations on "the evils of that period in history".

And Lord Greville Janner of Braunstone, who chairs the Holocaust Educational Trust, said the financial support sends a clear message that the camp should be maintained for future generations. He said: "Through our Lessons from Auschwitz Project, the Holocaust Educational Trust gives over 3,000 British students each year the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. This announcement will ensure that when young people visit Auschwitz, they will see for themselves what can happen when racism and prejudice is allowed to go unchecked."

BBC

Earliest eyewitness account of the Holocaust finally to be published in UK

Nazi troops arresting Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, 1943.
Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Story of Catholic who infiltrated Nazi death camp and brought report to Allies could become new film

The extraordinary memoir of a Polish resistance fighter who gave the first eyewitness report on the Holocaust to the Allies is to be published for the first time in Britain, and is to be made into a film by the producer of The King's Speech.

The Story of a Secret State, by Jan Karski, was published in 1944 in America. Karski, a devout Catholic, risked his life with the Polish underground and was involved in high-level secret missions to the Polish government-in-exile in London. A prisoner of the Russians and Nazis, and brutally tortured by the SS, he escaped from Poland and in 1943 was sent to London with a hidden microfilm revealing conditions under the Nazis and in particular the relentless persecution of Europe's Jews by the Third Reich.

As a member of the resistance and to learn the fate of Polish Jews, Karski was smuggled by Jewish underground leaders into the Warsaw ghetto and infiltrated the Belzec death camp dressed as an Estonian guard. He travelled across occupied Europe to England, and eventually to America. Karski personally reported to the Polish prime minister in London, General Sikorski, Britain's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, the US president, Franklin Roosevelt, and many other prominent figures. His description of the systematic annihilation of Jews was met with incredulity.

The drama of Karski's story has inspired the producer of The King's Speech, Iain Canning, to immortalise his role in another historic epic. Canning is believed to have just acquired the rights to the memoir from Penguin, who will publish the book next month. Film insiders said that Ralph Fiennes, who was Oscar-nominated for Schindler's List, was a likely contender for Karski.

The Story of a Secret State sold 400,000 copies in three months in the United States while the war still raged. In the postwar period, having been traumatised by memories he described as "my permanent possessions", Karski preferred silence, rather than to relive the horrors. But he revised his book before his death in 2000, expanding it with material he could not reveal during the war.

Given its historical importance, it is astonishing that the harrowing record of brutality and courage was not published in the UK. In the Warsaw ghetto, Karski said he saw "a cemetery" with living bodies. "Everywhere there was hunger, misery, the atrocious stench of decomposing bodies, the pitiful moans of dying children." He witnessed two "rosy-cheeked" Nazi youths laughing before taking pot-shots at inmates: "The shot rang out… Then the terrible cry of a man in agony. The boy who had fired… shouted with joy." Karski, a man used to Nazi brutality against Poles, remained frozen in shock.

In Belzec, a camp east of Warsaw, he found "squalor" and a "mass of sheer death". Horror-struck, he watched a train being loaded "hermetically", filled with naked bodies "to bursting" — a "quivering cargo of flesh". The floor was covered with quicklime to burn the bodies, "the flesh eaten from their bones," death coming slowly, but taking up to four days.

Before his mission to Britain, Karski agonised over what action the Allies could and would take to stop the murders in the ghetto and camps – if they believed him. "I know that many people will not believe me, will not be able to believe me, will think I exaggerate or invent. But I saw it," he said at the time.

The Jews he spoke to – most of whom knew their fate was probably sealed – begged him to convey the desire for vengeance and "merciless" bombing and executions of Germans.

Having hoped to meet Winston Churchill, Karski had to make do with Eden, who presented a report to the war cabinet, but no direct action was taken as a result of Karski's testimony.

Commenting on whether the Allies could have done more once they knew about the death camps, the historian Andrew Roberts said that the issue was "a huge bone of contention… among historians". There were "major problems" with bombing – the risk to inmates "wouldn't look good for Allied propaganda". He also pointed out the huge distances that aircraft had to fly and their inability to pinpoint targets.

He added that Karski reported on killings, but did not know about the gas chambers.

Karski described Gestapo brutality and the "sheer pain of the first rubber truncheon" in terms we can all understand: "Something like… a dentist's drill [when it] strikes a nerve, but infinitely… spread over the entire nervous system."

Roberts added: "Karski, for all his amazing bravery shown in this wonderful book, was not able to provide… details of the gas chambers... It's heart-rending to think so little was done, but then Eden and others argued at the time that they were in fact helping the Jews by trying to defeat the Germans."

Observer

Holocaust Memorial Day – January 27th

Each year on 27 January the world marks Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). HMD has been held in the UK since 2001 and the United Nations declared this an International event in November 2005. 27 January was chosen as the date for HMD because it was on this date in 1945 that the largest Nazi killing camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated.

HMD is about remembering the victims and those whose lives have been changed beyond recognition of the Holocaust, Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and the ongoing atrocities today in Darfur. HMD provides us with an opportunity to honour the survivors but it’s also a chance to look to our own lives and communities today. Genocide doesn’t happen overnight, it’s a gradual process which begins when the differences between us are not celebrated but used as a reason to exclude or marginalise. By learning from the lessons of the past, we can create a safer, better future.

Each year, we announce a theme for HMD which provides a focal point and a shared message for the hundreds of events which take place around the UK. The theme for HMD 2011 is Untold Stories.

Anyone can organise a HMD activity and we provide free resources to enable you to do so. Order our free Campaign Pack to find out how you can become involved. There’s no such thing as a right or wrong HMD event – whether events are for invited guests in a council chamber, open to the general public in a large public space or a closed event within a school or college – each event marks HMD as a key date in the equalities and human rights calendar.

HMD is a day for everyone. It’s an opportunity for all the diverse strands of our communities to come together. It’s also an opportunity for groups or organisations to remember the past and commit to creating a better future. HMD can be commemorated individually or collectively.

HMD has taken place in the UK since 2001. It was established at a meeting on 27 January 2000, when representatives from forty-four governments around the world met in Stockholm to discuss Holocaust education, remembrance and research. At the conclusion of the forum, the delegates unanimously signed a declaration. This forms the HMD Statement of Commitment which is used a basis for HMD events internationally.

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust

Former neo-Nazi jailed for Auschwitz sign theft

Two-year sentence for Swede who masterminded the crime

A former Swedish neo-Nazi was yesterday jailed for more than two years for masterminding the theft of the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign from the entrance of memorial museum on the site of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. The 16ft wide sign, a lasting symbol of the Holocaust which states "Work Sets You Free", was removed from the gate of the former Auschwitz camp more than a year ago and found in woods in northern Poland three days later.

A gang of five Poles with a so-called "Swedish connection" was held responsible for the theft. They had planned to ship the sign to Sweden where it was to be sold. The theft provoked international outrage and protests from Israel and Jewish groups worldwide.

An estimated 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were systematically murdered at Auschwitz. The camp site is now a museum and serves as one of the world's most chillingly powerful Holocaust memorials. It is partially funded by the German government and it attracts thousands of visitors annually.

Yesterday, a court in the southern Polish city of Krakow, sentenced Anders Hogstrom, 34 – a former Swedish neo-Nazi who is said to have turned his back on the far right a decade ago – to two years and eight months imprisonment for his role in the theft. Hogstrom, who helped set up a far right, anti-immigrant group called the National Socialist Front in Sweden in the 1990s, told the court calmly after he was sentenced: "Yes I accept the verdict."

A Polish court spokesman said Hogstrom had reached a deal with prosecutors which would allow him to be sent to Sweden to serve his sentence. The court also sentenced two Polish men identified as Marcin Auguscinski and Andrzej Strychalski to jails terms of 30 months and 28 months respectively for stealing the sign and cutting it into three pieces to get it into their getaway vehicle. Auguscinski apparently met Hogstrom more than two years ago while doing odd jobs on his family estate in southern Sweden.

Despite his sentencing, Hogstrom's exact role in the theft remained unclear. The former neo-Nazi, who lives in the southern Swedish city of Karlskrona, is said to have renounced the far right more than a decade ago. He now claims to be a member of a group which helps ex-Nazis to return to normal life. Poland convicted him of masterminding the theft after prosecutors failed to turn up any evidence which supported Hogstrom's claims that he was acting as a middle man in a plot to steal the sign for financial and possibly political gain.

Swedish police arrested him early in 2010. Hogstrom also claimed that rather than being arrested, he had turned himself into the Swedish authorities after he realised that proceeds from the sign's sale was meant for a political campaign to disrupt Swedish general election in September which saw huge gains by the right-wing Sweden Democrat party. No evidence has emerged to support his claim that there was a political element to the theft

Polish prosecutors said Hogstrom had admitted his guilt at the last minute. The most likely cause for Hogstrom's change of heart appears to have been the settlement reached with prosecutors which allows him to return to Sweden to serve his sentence.

But whether the motives behind the sign's theft were political or linked in any way to the election gains by Sweden's anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats, remains a mystery. Robert Parys, the Polish prosecutor who headed the investigation, said he was convinced the main motive was financial. What is clear is that the gang, whose members were aged between 25 and 39, had clearly not bargained for the international outcry and nationwide manhunt the theft provoked.

Avner Shalev, chairman of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial was one of the many Jewish leaders who felt outraged. He said the incident had given "pain to Holocaust survivors and people of conscience everywhere."

Despite the rediscovery of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign soon after its theft, its place remained occupied yesterday by a copy. The original – under lock and key at the Auschwitz memorial museum – is being repaired and will eventually take its place.

Independent

Neo-Nazi Anders Hoegstroem jailed for Auschwitz theft

A Swedish neo-Nazi leader accused of ordering the theft of the Auschwitz death camp entrance sign will serve 32 months behind bars.

Anders Hoegstroem, who had risked up to 10 years' jail if convicted in Poland, admitted his role before the case reached court, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Krakow said yesterday.

Hoegstroem was arrested in Sweden on a Polish warrant in February on suspicion of ordering the theft of the infamous Arbeit macht frei - Work will set you free - sign from the site of the World War II Nazi camp in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim.

Polish police recovered the 5m metal sign two days after it went missing late last year. It had been chopped into three pieces. Of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, a million were murdered at Auschwitz.

The Australian

American huge compensation lawsuits after racist crimes

This article was submitted by one of our readers, Roddy Newman. We welcome any contributions from our supporters (as long as those contributions conform to the law and are in reasonably good taste). Please send your articles to us via email.

Some mainstream European politicians have been agonising recently about the growth of racist far right parties, which have recently entered parliament for the first time in Europe's least racist country, Sweden, which are currently propping up, or part of centre-right coalitions in Europe's most liberal countries, Holland and Denmark, and which have recently been part of right wing coalitions in more conservative countries like Italy and Austria.

However, there is a simple solution to the problem of racist far right organisations which could consign the heavily in debt BNP, and also the NF, EDL, SDL, WDL, EFP, BPP, etc. to the history books: The huge compensation award lawsuits after racist crimes which the USA's Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama civil rights law firm, have been using for decades to bankrupt numerous American racist organisations and activists.

For example, after White Aryan Resistance skinheads beat an Ethiopian man, Mulugeta Seraw, to death with a baseball bat, SPLC successfully sued WAR, and its leader, Tom Metzger, for $12.5 million compensation. As a result, Metzger was forced to sell his home, and was bankrupted. WAR continued, but like Metzger, it still has to make regular payments to Seraw's family, in Metzger's case out of his welfare cheques.

In another case, SPLC successfully sued the Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, its state leader, and 4 other individual members for $37.8 million compensation (later reduced to $21.5 million on appeal) after they burned down an African American church. As a result of the compensation award, the Christian Knights immediately went from being one of the most active KKK groups in the US, to effectively ceasing to exist.

You can read about these, and other hate and extremism lawsuits on the SPLC website. All of them have been funded by donations from SPLC supporters, as the SPLC do not take any money from the people who they sue on behalf of.

If the BNP, NF, EDL, SDL, WDL, EFP, BPP, etc., and their leaders all faced huge compensation award lawsuits after every racist or religious crime which they or their members engaged in, for engaging in, or inciting racist or religious criminality, or for using malicious and deliberate lies to incite racist or religious criminality, they could all obviously be bankrupted very quickly.

Nick Griffin was of course successfully prosecuted for inciting racial hatred after he denied the Holocaust in an article, but unfortunately, he was not sued for a huge compensation award, which could have been paid to Holocaust survivors.

The USA has no racial or religious hatred incitement laws, which is why so much Holocaust denial literature is printed in the US, and why SPLC lawsuits cannot sue on those grounds, but British laws, and European laws in general, are much stricter, as they should be.

Hitler and the Nazis would have been bankrupted long before they got into power if Weimar Republic Germany had had such laws, and if an SPLC type law firm had used them rigourously.

For example, the Russian Tsarist secret police (Okhrana) forgery, "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion", which the Okhrana created to turn the hatred which much of the Russian public felt for the Tsar into hatred of Russia's Jews, incited people to vote for the Nazis, who popularised the document, and who were later incited by "The Protocols" to organise the Holocaust.

You can buy Norman Cohn's book about "The Protocols" inciting people to vote for the Nazis, and inciting the Holocaust here.

Today, racist organisations are in some cases far more extreme than the Nazis, as I explained in an earlier article which discussed the current or past BNP and EFP leaders who admire, or admired a now dead American fascist party leader who was far more extreme than the Nazis, as he openly advocated killing all of the world's billions of non-white people and Jews, so it is very important that huge compensation award lawsuits are used to destroy racist organisations which have used "Protocols" type malicious and deliberate lies in their propaganda to win votes, and whip up racial hatred, and thus racist criminality.

Anti-racist lawyers could thus contact the SPLC for advice, and could then begin bankrupting all British far right organisations and leaders, by suing them because of racial or religious hatred inciting malicious and deliberate lies in past leaflets, articles, and other propaganda which would have led to past racist or religious crimes by them, or their members.

Anti-racist lawyers could also contact any lawyer friends they have in other European countries, to suggest the same tactic to them.

"Searchlight" magazine, and other anti-fascist organisations, have long been documenting the remarkably large numbers of criminal convictions for terrorism, hard drug dealing, paedophilia, gang rape, inciting racial hatred, racist violence, football hooliganism, etc. which racist activists have, so the law, and a deluge of huge compensation demand lawsuits, are the correct way to deal with the criminals who are responsible for organised racist activism once and for all.

Neo-Nazis No Longer? Marine Le Pen Tones Down France's Far Right

The father of the French far-right National Front Party, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a famously Holocaust-minimizing (he called the Nazi occupation of France "not particularly inhumane"), anti-immigrant and anti-European Union leader, is teetering toward retirement. But not before the National Front has yet another phoenix-like return from sworn obsolescence.

Political commentators throughout the middle of the last decade promised that the tough immigration policies of President Nicholas Sarkozy (at times so aggressive they seem pulled directly from the playbook of the extreme right) would siphon off voters from the right-wing margins and bring them under the umbrella of the center-right mainstream. Indeed, Sarkozy's controversial anti-burqa law (and fines that have already gone into affect) is believed to be meant to appease the rabid right wing. But while many far-right voters supported Sarkozy in the last elections, in the regional elections last month, the National Front surged ahead in the French rural areas, dampening any talk of their imminent demise.

Part of that success may be because the National Front has spent the last few years regrouping, reconsidering its position, and gently maneuvering a newer, younger, and, frankly, more beautiful face into the limelight. That new face belongs to Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean-Marie, and an elected member of the European Union Parliament for the last six years. "[S]he is widely expected to succeed Jean-Marie Le Pen as leader of the National Front, the persistent far-right party preaching French purity and exceptionalism, opposing immigration and the European Union, and which she wants to bring into the media age. More and more, she is the face of the party in television debates and national campaigning," The New York Times wrote last week. "She sees herself as having a destiny now, if not one so lofty as that of the party's emblem, Joan of Arc, chosen by Mr. Le Pen as a symbol of French sanctity and resistance to invaders."

In fact, Marine Le Pen, 41, has been jockeying for position behind her father for some years now, softening the image of the National Front with support for gay rights, women's rights, and, perhaps more surprisingly, given the history of the National Front, an outstretched hand to the Jewish community. (Whether they shake back is another story.)

As Anton Pelinka, professor of political science and nationalism studies at the Central European University in Budapest, and director of the Institute of Conflict Research in Vienna, told me a few years ago, "Europe has to be much more careful [than the United States] with respect to right-wing extremism, and for that reason, right-wing extremists claim to be something else - they claim to be much more moderate than they are in reality."

About five years ago, Marine began outspokenly condemning attacks on Jews by North African youth. "The French Jewish community, who are increasingly victims of attacks by Islamic radicals, should be able to turn to us for support," she told the Jerusalem Report in January 2005. It was a way of distancing herself from the other potential heir apparent to the head of the National Front, Bruno Gollnisch, a man who openly questioned the numbers of dead in the Holocaust - a means of minimizing the tragedy.

Marine also petitioned to march with the Jewish community of France after Ilan Halimi, a young Sephardi mobile phone salesman, was tortured and murdered by a rogue band of Muslim immigrants in January 2006. At first she was turned down, but some months later she marched alongside mainstream politicians in protest of the murder.

Le Pen's pushing back against the image of anti-Semitism - the British press has reported that Marine was furious with her father for his continued anti-Semitic outbursts - has been a smart move politically. Marine Le Pen knows well that the taint of anti-Semitism can roll back progress for a far-right party. "To be openly anti-Semitic," Anton Pelinka, the Austrian political scientist said, "even in Austria, could be the end of a political career" because of Europe's brutal 20th century history of the Holocaust. It has certainly marginalized her father – and by extension herself. She calls herself a victim of "collateral damage," from fallout around her father and her party's anti-Semitic statements.

Le Pen fille, has also spoken openly against both the hijab, or veil, and the burqa; she often makes what might be called a feminist argument for extreme right-wing politics - even though the far right has roots in conservative gender roles and Marine Le Pen herself - twice divorced and a working woman - is not particularly traditional. Of Muslim immigrants, "They have to adapt to our values," Marine Le Pen told me when I met her in the spring of 2006. We were at the headquarters of the National Front, in a suburb of Paris. "But our Republic must not adapt itself to Islam. Because some values do exist which are, effectively, contrary or opposite to ours. Equality between men and women is non-negotiable." She continued, "There are dozens of countries in the world that apply Sharia. But us, we will not change. You like it, or you don't like it. But you cannot [for example] attack a gay man because he is gay. Those, those are the values of France."

It is the traditional expression of National Front xenophobia on the one hand, and totally mainstream, on the other. Who on the left would argue against the point about gay men? Or equality between the sexes? That said, the context, purposefully, makes many uneasy. But that is the savvy oratory of the younger Le Pen.

"In France," Le Pen said, speaking in rapid French made husky by years of smoking, "our republic, our schools are facing pressure from radical and Islamist organizations. Teachers find it more and more difficult in some places to talk about the Holocaust. They can no longer evoke Darwin. Seriously! We cannot learn English. Because English is the language of imperialism. It is against this that we are fighting and that we accuse the French political class of having left this...to develop. To have done nothing to preserve our Republic and to firmly reaffirm the principles of the French Republic."

Knowing how the far right is perceived in French politics - in other words, badly, at best - Marine has continued to work to better her image. It particularly galled Le Pen the younger, a lawyer by training, as she watched the encroachment of then-interior minister and now-President Nicholas Sarkozy onto the traditional territory of the National Front. "We were the first to raise the alarm on globalization and its consequences," Le Pen told me. "We were the only ones to put in the center of the debate the problem of immigration by saying that the big influx of migrants was going to be the problem of the 21st century," she complained. "Some in the political class are looking to take over the branches of this debate for electoral reasons...I think they are saying the same thing we are saying to prevent us from saying it."

In 2006, Marine Le Pen launched a remake of her identity: by presenting, French style, a book, "A Contre Flots" - Against the Tide - and revealing, Oprah style, a weight loss and a new, more glamorous appearance. She is slim and nearly 6 feet tall. When we met she wore jeans and a filmy silk shirt. It is very unusual for a French politician to be so casually dressed when she meets with a journalist. Politicians are a class of people who favor well-tailored suits.

Marine Le Pen is seen as a softer alternative to the old guard of the far right. But there are those who question her Islamophobia, masked as feminism, and her attempts to modernize what has always been a bogeyman at the margins of French society. As Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the far right in France and a researcher at the Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégique, told me a few weeks after I met Madame Le Pen: "People on the far right say Europe is no longer Europe, it is becoming something new, colonized by Islam and the values of Islam. This is a massive fear, not only on the extreme right, but among average people. This gives fuel to the extreme right." Marine Le Pen draws on that fear, normalizes it, and channels it as she jockeys for position at the helm of the National Front.

Sarah Wildman at Politics Daily

The British National Party and the Holocaust

The far-right party admits that it is a tricky subject for candidates

The British National Party, whose leader, Nick Griffin, is standing for parliament in Barking, has made great efforts to present itself as a legitimate political organisation. But what other party would give media training to its election candidates on how to avoid questions about the Holocaust?

Alby Walker, a former BNP councillor in Stoke-on-Trent who is now sitting as an independent, has told the New Statesman that he received the training before last year's elections for the European Parliament. "We were given advice on answers and the kind of questions you'd be asked. BNP candidates had previously been tripped up by questions about the Holocaust."

The training consisted of practice interviews with a panel of three party officials, Walker said. "For example, they would tell us to say there wasn't just one Holocaust but that there were left-wing ones, too. Or [to say]: 'Yes, it was a terrible thing that happened, but it's not relevant to the modern day.' "

When asked by the New Statesman about Walker's claims, the BNP leader Nick Griffin initially dismissed them as "lies" and said: "We have media training on a whole range of subjects." But, asked if that training specifically covered the Holocaust, he admitted: "That subject does come up, yes."

Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said: "The Holocaust is a historical fact, and if it has any relevance to the current election, it is as a stark reminder of where bigotry and intolerance can lead. Perhaps that explains the discomfort some politicians feel in talking about it."

New Statesman

No time limit for Nazi convictions

Heinrich Boere at court in Germany last week

It is part of society's obligation to the victims to make a serious effort to hold Nazi criminals such as Heinrich Boere to account

There no doubt are many people who wonder whether the conviction this past week in Germany of 88-year-old Heinrich Boere for Nazi crimes committed during the second world war serves any useful purpose. They can point to the fact that more than 60 years have passed since he committed his crimes and that he was not a mass murderer, the likes of those who helped run the death camps or served in the infamous Einsatzgruppen mobile killing units. But a closer look at his case will show why his prosecution and conviction in Aachen were, indeed, justified and the life sentence he received so important.

A resident of Maastricht, Netherlands, Boere, the son of a Dutch father and a German mother, volunteered to serve in the Waffen-SS shortly after the Nazis occupied Holland. After service on the eastern front he returned home, where he voluntarily joined Sonderkommando Feldmeijer, a unit whose primary function was the murder of members of the Dutch resistance and those opposed to the Nazis. In the course of Operation Silbertanne (silver fir tree), at least 54 individuals were killed, three of whom Boere admitted shooting to death – Fritz Bicknese, Teun de Groot and FW Kusters.

After the war, Boere escaped to Germany for fear of prosecution – and, in fact, was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court in 1949 for the three murders. Holland asked for his extradition from Germany, but he was the beneficiary of the Fuhrererlass, a law promulgated by Hitler granting German citizenship to foreign Nazi collaborators. Since Germany refused in principle to extradite its citizens to stand trial in other countries, Boere had no reason to fear the Dutch court. He could, in theory, have been prosecuted in Germany, but for more than five decades that was not the case. In this respect, he was spared by the unofficial local prosecution policy on Nazi war criminals, which usually refrained from prosecuting individuals who were not officers, even if they had personally committed murder.

About two years ago, however, the state attorneys in Dortmund, headed by Ulrich Maas, announced that they would seek to prosecute Boere and they successfully contested a decision that he was not fit for trial. And thus, in November 2009, the Dutch executioner found himself in a German court facing the charges which he had escaped for more than 60 years.

Boere's conviction and life sentence are therefore more than justified, but they are also highly significant for several additional reasons. The first is that the Boere case is a precedent for Germany, where there are other instances of foreign Nazi collaborators who escaped from their countries of origin for fear of prosecution and who have hereto never faced legal action in Germany. The most famous of these cases are those of a Dutchman, Klaas Carl Faber, and a Dane, Søren Kam. The former, like Boere, served in Sonderkommando Feldmeijer and was sentenced to death in Holland in 1947 for the murder of at least 11 individuals. In 1952, he escaped from a Dutch prison to Germany, which has refused all requests for his extradition and has so far failed to bring him to justice. The latter, who is accused of murdering Carl Clemmensen, a Danish anti-Nazi newspaper editor, also escaped to Germany and was treated in the same manner. Thus Boere's conviction will hopefully serve as a precedent which will be applied in additional cases.

Several more personal factors specific to the Boere case add to its significance. The first is that he never expressed true regret for his crimes. On the contrary, at his trial, he said openly that he was very proud to have been accepted as a volunteer for the Waffen-SS and that during the war, at no time did he ever feel he had committed any crimes. His defence of coercion based on "superior orders" was totally rejected by the court. In that respect, it was the son of his victim Teun de Groot (the oldest of 12 children who has the same name as his father), who astutely remarked to reporters that if Boere had truly been sorry for the murders he committed, he should have returned to Holland to face justice and serve his punishment.

The presence in the courtroom in Aachen of children of Boere's victims was also an opportunity to learn first hand of the devastating impact of his crimes on the families of those murdered. And their insistence that he be tried despite his age reinforces the significance of justice, even when long delayed, as part of the obligations of society to the Nazis' victims to make a serious effort to hold Holocaust perpetrators accountable. This elementary truth and the successful result of the proceeding send a powerful message that the efforts to bring Nazi war criminals to justice are still very worthwhile and just as necessary today as they have been in previous generations.

Efraim Zuroff - Comment is free

Three jailed for Auschwitz theft

Three men were jailed today for stealing the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) sign from the Auschwitz memorial site last year. Their sentences ranged from six months to two-and-a-half years.

The court in Krakow said the men confessed to the theft, which meant the case did not have to go to trial. The theft happened overnight between December 17 and December 18, a brazen act that shocked Holocaust survivors and many others committed to preserving the Auschwitz-Birkenau site.

The former death camp gets more than a million visitors a year and is one of Europe's most important sites honouring the memory of the Nazis' victims and of warning the world about the dangers of hatred and totalitarianism.

The thieves left traces in the snow and then cut the sign into three pieces to make it easier to transport. They also left behind the last letter "i" in the snow. Authorities later said that the Polish men who carried out the theft were petty thieves working on commission for someone else.

A Swedish man with a neo-Nazi background, Anders Hogstrom, is also a suspect. He is under arrest in Sweden and due to be extradited to Poland. Two other Polish suspects remain imprisoned and under investigation. Poland has said little about the case against Hogstrom and other aspects. They have not specified what role they believe Hogstrom played, nor said if he was the ultimate buyer.

Some reports have suggested that a British collector of Nazi memorabilia commissioned the theft, but police have not confirmed that. Officials with the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial museum have their doubts about the collector hypothesis given that the theft was so badly botched.

Police tracked down the cut up sign in a snow-covered forest on the other side of Poland less than three days after it was stolen.

The cynical slogan on the Auschwitz sign has come to be a potent symbol of Nazi Germany's atrocities during the Second World War and the Holocaust. Between 1940 and 45 more than a million people, mostly Jews, were killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau or died of starvation or disease while forced to perform hard physical labour at the camp.

Independent

Rantings of a Nazi monster

Dr. Josef Mengele (second from left, with SS officials at
Auschwitz in '44) wrote his diary while hiding in Argentina

He stared at the deliberate German script in the tattered notebook -- the ravings of one of the most evil minds in history, and the killer of 100 of his family members.

"I don't want to touch it," he said.

The Orthodox Jewish New Yorker first laid eyes on the diary of Dr. Josef Mengele on Thursday at a Connecticut auction house. He bought the 86-page journal last week from the auctioneer after the document failed to attract a bidder at the $60,000 reserve price. The buyer has requested anonymity but agreed to speak to The Post about his reasons for acquiring the Nazi madman's innermost musings.

The buyer's grandmother, who survived Auschwitz, witnessed the "Angel of Death" choose prisoners to go to the gas chambers.

"People were terrified to even look at him," she told her grandson. "The SS soldiers were even scared to look at him."

Mengele, an SS officer and physician at the death camp in Poland, conducted nightmarish human experiments, including amputations, sterilization and surgeries without anesthetics. He was obsessed with twins and oversaw gruesome tests on 3,000 sets.

Mengele started the diary -- handwritten in blue ink in a school notebook bearing the image of children with a horse on the cover -- in 1960 while hiding out in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It does not mention Nazis, Hitler or the death camps. But it is filled with subjects near and dear to the mad doctor's cold heart -- eugenics, the superiority of the German race, the inferiority of women.

Mengele meanders from a discussion of aesthetics in "Dr. Zhivago" to a rant on how the mentally challenged should be sterilized so their "inferior genes" would not be passed on. His primary point is: "the simple and fundamental truth that human beings are not equal."

"Everything will end in a catastrophe if natural selection is altered to the point that the gifted people are overwhelmed by billions of morons (this might happen faster than you think)," he writes. He believes that "women's work has to depend on fulfilling a biological quota."

The contents turned the buyer's stomach.

"He shows no regret. No emotion," he said. "If people are looking for closure, they won't find it in this diary."

Mengele eluded punishment, dying in 1979 after a stroke while swimming at the age of 67. His body was exhumed in 1985 in Brazil and his identity confirmed through DNA tests seven years later.

"It's very emotional," said the buyer, who purchased the diary with his parents after reading about it in an Israeli newspaper. "It should have been written in red ink because it was written by a man with blood on his hands."

He said they felt the diary "must be preserved" and kept so "it doesn't fall in the wrong hands or get destroyed." They plan on donating it to a Holocaust museum. Some Holocaust survivor groups question the authenticity of the document and the morality of selling Mengele's handiwork for profit.

The auction house, Alexander Autographs, said it bought the diary from an American collector who observers believe acquired it from Mengele's son, Rolf, 65. Bill Panagopulos, president of the Stamford-based auction house, claimed he verified the diary, matching it with several authenticated war-dated letters and pinpointing the age of the paper, ink and notebook.

Rabbi Marvin Heir, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center -- whose namesake unsuccessfully hunted Mengele -- has been in close contact with the New York family that bought the document.

"I think this family did a very courageous thing," Heir said. "What would happen if Jews didn't secure documents? They would end up underground in the hands of an anti-Semite or destroyed. The choice is: Lose it, or retain it for history."

Mind of a madman

Entries from the 1960 diary of Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, written while he was in hiding in Argentina:

'As citizens of the Western World, we should abhor the idea of recruiting gifted people from other countries. I also doubt that there’s any need to try because all significant steps of human history happened in Europe, and only Europeans or their descendants achieved them. ’

'Birth control can be done by sterilizing those with deficient genes. Those with good genes will be sterilized when the number of 5 children has been reached.'

New York Post

Holocaust survivors' stories

Polish Jews being moved out of the Warsaw ghetto by SS troops in April 1943

As the number of survivors in the UK dwindles to 5,000, Stuart Jeffries commemorates Holocaust Memorial Day by hearing the stories six of them have to tell

Sixty-five years ago tomorrow, the largest Nazi killing camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by the Soviet army. The Holocaust Day Memorial Trust will celebrate the anniversary of that event. So what, you might be thinking. Another anniversary, another wall of newsprint. What, really, is the point of continuing to commemoratesomething that happened a lifetime ago? There are three good reasons. One is, as all the survivors of the Holocaust I interviewed told me, that the slogan "Never again" has become a sick joke, degraded by the genocides in Cambodia (1975-79), Bosnia (1992), Rwanda (1994) and Darfur (2003- today). We have learned too little and let people die en masse not for what they did but for who they were – just as happened in the Nazi death camps.

Second reason: this is one of the last years we are going to have many Holocaust survivors in Britain to share with us what they went through. The Holocaust Day Memorial Trust estimates there are 5,000 survivors left in the UK. It's urgent that we hear their – often incredible – stories before they die. When the war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, there were 200,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors, according to one source (Zoe Waxman's 2006 book Writing the Holocaust, Oxford University Press).

But Jews weren't the only victims, nor the Holocaust's only survivors: the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, for instance, defines Holocaust survivors as "any persons, Jewish or non-Jewish, who were displaced, persecuted or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who were refugees or were in hiding." The museum has a registry that includes more than 196,000 records related to survivors and their families. Any estimate of the number of Holocaust survivors immediately after the war, though, is likely to be wrong, not least because no one then had as their first priority counting up the number of people who survived the death camps.

Third reason: many of the survivors I spoke to, while hopeful for Britain's future, drew parallels between the Nazi Holocaust and the way ethnic minorities are treated in the UK today. As Carly Whyborn, chief executive officer of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, says: "Britain is not Nazi Germany in the 1930s. It is not Pol Pot's Cambodia. But on Holocaust Memorial Day we can pause to look at how we treat those around us. We can all make the choice to challenge exclusion when we see it happening – we can choose to stop using language that dehumanises others and we can stop our friends and family from dehumanising and excluding ­others." Otherwise, it might be added, we haven't really learned the lessons of the Holocaust or later genocides.

Memories of the Holocaust: Zigi Shipper
Memories of the Holocaust: Harry Spiro
Memories of the Holocaust: Sabina Miller
Memories of the Holocaust: Ben Helfgott
Memories of the Holocaust: Martin Stern
Memories of the Holocaust: Kitty Hart-Moxon

Guardian

HMD Trust
Holocaust Memorial Day events in your area

We are still in the shadow of the Holocaust

Anti-Semitism is on the rise, which makes memorial day all the more vital, says Michael Gove

This Wednesday we remember the greatest crime ever inflicted by man against his fellow man. Holocaust Memorial Day allows us to reflect on the bleakest chapter in the history of the 20th century. And there is a special urgency in the call to remember this year, of all years - because the shadow of the Holocaust continues to fall over the world today.

Mass murder is still deployed as a political tool by tyrants, from Burma to Zimbabwe. Racism is returning to the streets of Europe, from St Petersburg to Antwerp. And, hard though it is to credit after the horrors of the last century, anti-Semitism is creeping back into the corridors of power.

We know that Nazi ideology still has the power to motivate evil men. From the Swedish fascist who tried to acquire the "Arbeit macht frei" sign which hung over the gates of Auschwitz, to the British fascists of the BNP, there is an ominous resurgence of extremist activity visible across our Continent. It is because we face a new fascist threat, and because the extremism of the BNP is mirrored in the equally toxic ideology of anti-Semitic groups such as Islam4Uk and Hizb-ut Tahrir, that we need, all of us, to make an additional effort to remember how the Holocaust started. And where it ended.

The history of the Holocaust is the history of a society which blamed the Jews for its miseries, sought to push them to the margins and then sought, literally, to make them vanish from sight. In our time we can see the same trends returning. The calls for boycotts of Jewish thinkers at Israeli universities, the rise in anti-Semitic incidents on our streets, the inflamed rhetoric of vilification which culminates in the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call to wipe Israel off the map, are all connected.

As the chief rabbi, Lord Sacks, has so presciently pointed out, anti-Semitism is a virus which mutates. Originally it was the Jewish people's religious identity which came under attack, and the Church led a programme of forced conversion. Then, as society replaced religion with science as a source of authority, anti-Semitism mutated so that the Jewish people came under attack on racial grounds. Now it is Jewish identity expressed through the right of Israel to self-determination which is the focus of anti-Semitism. Israel, like any state, makes mistakes. Sometimes grievous ones. But many of Israel's enemies now risk repeating one of the greatest errors of history by infusing anti-Semitism with a new and toxic vibrancy. We see it in some of those who have attached themselves to recent anti-war campaigns, with Britons marching through the streets of London declaring "We are all Hezbollah now" even though Hezbollah is a fascist organisation whose leader is a Holocaust-denier who believes the Jews are "grandsons of apes and pigs". And we also see the apparent mainstreaming of anti-Semitism in comments such as those of a former ambassador who recently objected to the composition of the Iraq inquiry team because two of its members were Jewish.

When prejudice is unleashed in this way we are all affected. As the chief rabbi has pointed out, what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. The Nazis targeted gay men and women, Roma, the disabled and Christians of conscience. The BNP are, similarly, as homophobic, Islamophobic and plain, downright racist as they are anti-Semitic.

History teaches us many lessons, if we are willing to pay attention. And one of the most profound is that the best guide to the health of a society has always been how secure its Jewish community feels. Throughout history the freest societies, from 17th-century Holland to 20th-century England, have been those in which Jewish people have felt safest. And over the ages the surest sign that a country is moving away from liberalism has been a growing prejudice towards the Jewish community, whether Vienna a hundred years ago, Germany in the thirties or Russia in the last decade.

It is because that lesson of history is so important that Holocaust Memorial Day is so crucial. And it is because we must ensure the next generation learns those lessons that the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust is so vital. The Trust provides the tools for schools to communicate the lessons of the Holocaust – so that young people can understand the consequences of allowing prejudice to grow. The Trust provides schools with books, maps, images and artefacts from the past as well as a Bafta award-winning production containing the testimonies of survivors. And two students from every school in the country are given the chance to visit Auschwitz and see the site of mankind's most terrible atrocity with their own eyes.

As the survivors of the Holocaust grow older and we face losing their vivid living testimonies, so the risk of forgetting grows stronger, and with it the risk of repeating history's mistakes. That is why the Holocaust Educational Trust's work has never been more necessary, the lessons of history never more relevant and the act of commemoration never more important. Whatever else may divide politicians, the lesson of the last century is that the resurgence of anti-Semitism requires us all to unite against this most poisonous of prejudices.

Telegraph

BNP 'facists' target town

The Scottish leader of the country's most notorious political party will target Barrhead voters in this year's General Election in a bid to claim a top political scalp.

The British National Party's (BNP), Gary Raikes [left], will wage a campaign on the town's streets in an attempt to woo Barrhead voters and oust MP Jim Murphy from his seat in Westminster.

The party, led by outspoken MEP Nick Griffin has been slammed for its 'fascist' views, and says that although it does not expect to win the seat, the BNP is determined to stop Murphy from being re-elected and hopes to take around 1,000 votes from the Barrhead politician. This, the party says, would split the vote and allow the Tory candidate to take the seat.

Mr Raikes, who has led the BNP in Scotland since 2007, is keen to kick-off the publicity campaign, which he says will help his party take root in Barrhead. And he is optimistic about his party's chances in the upcoming election.

He said: "I have decided to stand in East Renfrewshire seat as this is held by Jim Murphy MP - the self appointed anti-BNP spokesman in Scotland. It is time voters got to see the true face of the BNP instead of the stereotype nonsense peddled by Murphy. I am pleased to be standing against the Labour Scottish secretary. I very much look forward to sharing a platform with Mr Murphy during the campaign and enlightening him to the truth about today's BNP."

Responding to Mr Raikes announcement, Mr Murphy said: "Its a shame that the leader of the BNP in Scotland is coming here to peddle his poison and in his own words try to help the Tories win this seat. The people of Barrhead won't be fooled by the BNP. The BNP is a fascist party. Their hatred is the kinds that lead to six million being killed in the holocaust. It is trying to look moderate by swapping skinheads for sharp suits, but they are still the same trade union hating and foreigner hating extremists."

The Conservative candidate for East Renfrewshire, Richard Cook, is determined to keep the fight about politics - and not about the publicity surrounding the BNP's decision to field an election candidate. He said: "The BNP is not welcome in East Renfrewshire, [this] is the great place it is because of its diversity. We proudly boast the largest Jewish population in Scotland and one of the fastest growing Muslim populations too. It is not by accident that we live together in peace and harmony - it is because we are a tolerant area with mutual respect for one another and a loathing for the type of politics pedalled by the BNP.

"As the only East Renfrewshire candidate standing at the British General Election to have been at the forefront of the Scotland United Against Racism and Fascism march last November that ran the Scottish and English Defence League's out of Glasgow, I intend to run a campaign that does the same to the BNP in East Renfrewshire."

Barrhead News

Brown, Murphy and Darling all targeted by BNP in Scotland

The leader of the BNP in Scotland will contest Jim Murphy’s Westminster seat at the next general election as part of a publicity-grabbing campaign which the fascist party believes will help them win a Holyrood seat in the 2011 election

BNP representatives will also stand in Gordon Brown, Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling’s seats.

Although the party expects to lose against the Scottish Secretary in the General Election, BNP chiefs hope to gain enough attention during the race to win a regional list seat when the Holyrood elections come round in 2011. Mr Murphy will be fighting for his political life at the general election as the Tories see his East Renfrewshire seat as one of their key targets, and will be counting on every vote.

Campaigners have attacked the BNP’s Scottish leader Gary Raikes and claimed his decision to stand in multicultural East Renfrewshire, which contains almost half of Scotland’s Jewish population and large Islamic communities, could inflame community tensions. In response to the BNP move, Mr Murphy is now vowing to recruit Christian, Muslim and Jewish groups to fight what he described as the “abhorrent” far-right party.

Raikes said: “Jim Murphy is a very important target for us. We’d like to see all Labour politicians lose their seats.”

The BNP’s Scottish leader added: “This is just a step to 2011 when we will be in with a chance of winning a regional list seat. The sheep will still vote Labour in this seat, however I do think the Tories are in with a real chance of winning the seat. If we can take a thousand or so votes off Murphy and help him lose his seat we will be happy.”

The BNP also plans to stand against Gordon Brown in Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Alistair Darling in Edinburgh West and in Alex Salmond’s Banff and Buchan seat, although Salmond will not be contesting it. Candidates will also stand in Aberdeen North and Aberdeen South, which is Anne Begg’s seat.

The next tactic will be to field candidates for all eight regional list seats in 2011, in the hope of winning a place in Holyrood. The BNP claimed it has a “good chance” of getting enough of the vote in the Central and Glasgow regions to win a seat. The BNP hopes to capitalise on recent public resentment over the expenses scandal. Mr Murphy warned that anger with politicians was “being exploited by people with evil intentions.”

The Scottish Secretary now faces the prospect of sharing a platform with the BNP. “I didn’t ever think I would have to debate a fascist party,” Mr Murphy said. “I thought that type of politics was a thing of the past but that poison is back in the form of the BNP.

“They are now planning to stand against me and its time for them to give some answers about their denial of the Holocaust and their hatred of immigrants. Their politics are alien to our British way of life – where we try to see people for who they are rather than their skin colour, nationality or religion. The BNP’s Nazi salutes and Holocaust denials turn my stomach.”

Mr Murphy has a history of battling the BNP and has previously said that its members are a problem facing Scotland, not just England, and that their support has grown tenfold in the past decade to 29,000 across Scotland.

Mr Murphy now plans to muster support from all religious groups in his constituency to mount a fightback.

He added: “We need to rise to this challenge sooner rather than later and we must succeed not for the sake of politicians but for the sake of our country. I will consult with churches, Jewish and Muslim groups about the best way to engage with, and defeat, the abhorrent views of the BNP.”

Scotland has faced a number of “fascist” threats recently, claimed Aamer Anwar, human rights lawyer and organiser of Scotland United, a coalition that stood against the far-right Scottish Defence League when it tried to march in Glasgow.

He said: “This should be of concern because the BNP has repeatedly been exposed as a fascist organisation. They have so far failed to get a toehold anywhere in Scotland ... but what is of concern is the publicity they will try to gain in these high profile seats.”

Sunday Herald

Sobibor survivor: 'I polished SS boots as dying people screamed'

Thomas Blatt (above) will give evidence at the trial of John Demjanjuk this week

Thomas Blatt testifies this week at the trial of John Demjanjuk. Here, he tells Tony Paterson of his life in the camp and an extraordinary escape

He is a small, energetic looking man with thick spectacles and white hair. He speaks English with a thick, slightly American accent. As he stands in the queue outside Munich's criminal court in his beige zip-up jacket, he looks like any ordinary pensioner with time on his hands. He might have come to watch justice being done merely as an impartial observer.

Yet Thomas "Toivi" Blatt is no ordinary senior citizen. Aged 82, he is one of the last people alive to have survived the hell of the Nazi extermination camps in which millions were systematically slaughtered by brutal German and Ukrainian SS henchmen during the Second World War.

Only 82 people survived the death factory camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland. Thomas Blatt is one of them. He still has a bullet lodged in his jaw to show for it. He got it when he was shot in the face and had to "play dead" after a miraculous escape from Sobibor in October 1943.

This Tuesday, having travelled from his home in California, he will enter the witness box in the clinical surroundings of Munich's modern neon-lit criminal court and recall the horror he endured as a 15-year-old Jewish prisoner in Sobibor, where 250,00 people including his parents and his 10-year-old brother were murdered.

Mr Blatt's testimony is expected to be crucial in deciding the outcome of what has been called the world's last Holocaust trial. The alleged former Nazi SS guard John Demjanjuk, a former Ukrainian citizen, who was extradited to Germany from Cleveland, Ohio last year, is accused of complicity in the murder of 27,900 mainly Dutch Jews who were gassed or beaten to death at Sobibor in the spring and summer of 1943.

Demjanjuk, who is 89 and suffering from numerous ailments, is refusing to speak at his trial, and follows the proceedings in court lying on a hospital stretcher with a baseball cap pulled over his eyes. He has denied complicity in mass murder.

Mr Blatt has not been able to identify Demjanjuk as having been one of the 100 Ukrainian guards at the camp, although he believes he was certainly there at the time he was a Sobibor prisoner. His testimony will nevertheless make it chillingly clear that anyone employed as a Sobibor guard was a vital cog in the machinery of genocide. "We were terrified of the Ukrainian guards at Sobibor. They were worse than the Germans – and I was there at the same time as Demjanjuk," he said.

Mr Blatt was born in Izbica, only 43 miles from the Sobibor death camp. A Nazi SS squad picked him up with his father, mother and young brother during a routine "Jew round-up" in April 1943. They were bundled into a truck. "The camp gate opened to reveal what looked like a beautiful village," he said. "We had heard what went on in there, but we refused to believe it. But I knew better, I was 15 and I realised that I was going to die," he added.

He remembers a man standing next to him peering through a hole in the truck's side at a group of Ukrainian guards equipped with bull whips. The man said, in Yiddish, how the place was "black" with them in reference to their black SS uniforms. Within a matter of seconds the Jewish prisoners were herded out of the truck and set upon by the screaming, whip-wielding guards who drove them up a path known as the "Himmelfahrtstrasse" or "road to heaven" towards the gas chambers.

"They mistreated us, they shot the old and the sick new arrivals who couldn't walk anymore. And they were the ones who drove the naked people into the gas chambers with their bayonets. They would come back with splashes of blood on their boots," Mr Blatt told The Independent on Sunday. "I often had to work a few feet away. If they refused to go on, they hit them and fired shots. I can still remember their shout of 'Idi siuda', which means 'come here'," he added.

Young Thomas saw his father being beaten with a club."Then I lost sight of him. I said to my mother, 'And yesterday I wasn't allowed to drink the rest of the milk, because you absolutely wanted to save some for today'. That strange remark of mine still haunts me today – it was the last thing I said to her. My brother stayed at my mother's side. They were all murdered in the gas chambers within the hour." A few weeks later, Thomas Blatt was forced to watch his best friend, Leon, being slowly beaten to death.

Middle-class Dutch Jews started being sent to Sobibor shortly after his arrival and the SS changed their tactics to trick them. "When a Dutch transport arrived, usually an SS man would hold a speech. He would apologise for the arduous journey, and said that for hygienic reasons, everyone needed to shower first. Then later they would be given jobs. Some of the new arrivals applauded. They had no idea what was in store," he recalled.

He survived only because the SS had executed a number of so-called "work Jews" at Sobibor the day before he arrived. The camp commandant was looking for replacements and 15-year-old Thomas pushed himself forward, pleading "Take me, take me!".

His jobs included polishing SS men's boots, sorting the clothes and shaving the hair off naked women prisoners before they were driven into gas chambers pumped full of exhaust fumes. It took up to 40 minutes for those inside to die. "We heard the whine of the generator that started the submarine engine which made the gas that killed them. I remember standing and listening to the muffled screams and knowing that men, women and children were dying in agony as I sorted their clothes. This is what I live with," he said.

He survived by supplying his Ukrainian tormentors with the gold coins he found in the victims' clothing after they were gassed. The guards used the money to pay for prostitutes. He tried to look healthy, strong and useful to avoid being murdered in the routine executions of the "work Jews". "I knew the Germans like it when you were clean and healthy looking," he said. "I watched out that my pants didn't get wrinkled and that they kept their creases and I always went around looking for possibilities to escape," he added. The chance came in October 1943 soon after a group of Jewish Red Army soldiers arrived at the camp. Within two weeks they had planned an uprising, which later became the subject of a book by Blatt The Forgotten Revolt, and an award-winning television film Escape from Sobibor. Thomas Blatt helped to kill 12 SS officers by tricking each one separately into believing that a fine leather coat had been saved for them from one of the Jewish transports. Prisoners armed with axes and knives killed the SS men as they arrived to collect their booty.

A breakout ensued. Jewish prisoners scaled the perimeter fence under a hail of gunfire from the camp watchtowers, which were still manned. The ones who got over the fence were blown up by mines that surrounded the camp. Mr Blatt escaped this fate because his jacket caught on the fence. He eventually got through the minefield by jumping through the pits in the ground caused by the explosions.

He and a friend bribed a Polish farmer to hide them under the floor of a barn in return for loot they took from the camp. But after stripping off some of their clothes and hiding them in a pit, the farmer decided it would be safer to kill them. The farmer shot at them and Thomas was hit in the face. He pretended to be dead and then managed to escape, spending the rest of the war hiding in woods or abandoned buildings and scavenging for food.

Mr Blatt says he is not seeking vengeance. "I don't care if he [Demjanjuk] goes to prison or not – the trial is what matters to me," he said.

"The world should find out how it was at Sobibor. As the camp's last living perpetrator, Demjanjuk should confess, he knows so much."

IoS

Auschwitz asks Britain for help to preserve decaying death camp

'There is only one thing worse than Auschwitz itself...and that is if the world forgets there was such a place.'

Henry Appel, Auschwitz survivor

The guard towers of Auschwitz are splintering, the barracks are waterlogged: the concentration camp where one million Jews were slaughtered is decaying so fast that conservationists have called on Britain to help to save it. The theft last month of its distinctive, sinister sign, Arbeit macht frei (work sets you free) has underlined the vulnerability of the Nazi death camp, stretching over 20 hectares (50 acres) of southern Poland.

“Nobody could have imagined such a horrific act of vandalism,” Jacek Kastelaniec, director-general of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, said. “Now try to imagine the public outcry if one of the barracks started to fall down, impossible to restore.”

Auschwitz was built on boggy ground between two rivers; as a result the high groundwater and bad drainage has rotted the foundations. Walls are blistering and starting to lean, roof frames are buckling, plasterwork and wall-paintings are flaking.

Mr Kastelaniec will go to the Cabinet Office tomorrow to press the Government on Gordon Brown’s promise to contribute to a €120million (£110million) endowment fund that will guarantee the preservation of one of the main sites of the Holocaust. Mr Brown visited the camp last April, and, plainly upset by what he had seen, declared: “We will join with other countries in supporting the maintenance and retention of the memorial at Auschwitz.” No figure has been suggested publicly for Britain’s possible contribution, but Polish sources say that the conservationists are hoping for about €10million.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, has said that her country would put up half of the costs, but the managers of the Auschwitz museum need other commitments. Mr Kastelaniec will also visit France, Belgium and the United States. The Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, has sent an appeal to 40 heads of government.

“The conservationists say we need to start work in the next two years if we are to avert irreparable decay,” Mr Kastelaniec told The Times, “and that will only be possible if the money is paid into the fund now.”

The decay of the camp is politically sensitive. The current trial in Munich of the alleged Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk is being seen by the public as the last for Nazi war crimes — the 89-year-old defendant is wheeled into court on a hospital bed. Holocaust survivors are dwindling. “In ten years there will be no witnesses,” Mr Kastelaniec said, “and it will be easier for the crazy people who say nothing happened in the camps.” Only the buildings will remain.

Auschwitz cannot simply have a makeover because that would undermine its claims to authenticity, and open the way for those on the far Right who try to deny or trivialise the Holocaust. The strategic point of the restoration is to use its almost over-powering sense of menace as a clinching counter-argument against anti-Semitism and racism.

The portfolio to be presented to the British Government underlines the vast scale of the camp. The priority is being set on 45 brick barracks. The managers estimate that it will cost up to €890,000 to restore a single barracks building. On top of that come 22 wooden barrack rooms — where inmates were crowded into bunks up to the ceiling. Each will cost €310,000.

Then there are the remains of 210 barrack buildings. Some sheds have collapsed, but there are concrete outlines where floors and chimneys stood. Without some strengthening, these foundation markings will disappear. Cost: €78,000 per barrack room. The 27 wooden guard towers need to be reinforced at an annual cost, for the next 14 years, of €62,000.

Work is under way on conserving the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoriums, but the managers want to extend this to include a provisional gas chamber-bunker, two other crematoriums and the unloading ramp.

Property taken from prisoners before they were gassed, now exhibited in small piles in the museum, is also showing signs of age: 460 artifical limbs, 40kg (90lb) of discarded spectacles, 260 prayer garments and 3,800 suitcases that belonged to people who ended their journey in Auschwitz.

The sluggish response worldwide to the restoration had been down, in part, to the feeling that the main burden should be on Germany. Mr Kastelaniec said: “The breakthrough came when we convinced not only Germany but also other contributors that this was not a project about guilt, but about the future.”

Times Online

Auschwitz

Donations to Auschwitz

Anne Frank diary guardian Miep Gies dies

Miep Gies (left) with Otto Frank (centre) in October 1945

Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped protect Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, has died in the Netherlands aged 100

She and other employees of Anne Frank's father Otto supplied food to the family as they hid in a secret annex above the business premises in Amsterdam. Anne's diary of their life in hiding, which ended in betrayal, is one of the most famous records of the Holocaust. It was rescued by Mrs Gies, who kept it safe until after the war.

Miep Gies died in a nursing home after suffering a fall just before Christmas.

Speaking last year as she celebrated her 100th birthday, Mrs Gies played down her role, saying others had done far more to protect Jews in the Netherlands. She and her fellow employees kept Anne and the seven others supplied for two years, from 1942 to 1944. When the family were found by the authorities, they were deported, and Anne died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

It was Mrs Gies who collected up Anne's papers and locked them away, hoping that one day she would be able to give them back to the girl. In the event, she returned them to Otto Frank, who survived the war, and helped him compile them into a diary that was published in 1947. It went on to sell tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages.

Mrs Gies became a kind of ambassador for the diary, travelling to talk about Anne Frank and her experiences, campaigning against Holocaust denial and refuting allegations that the diary was a forgery. For her efforts to protect the Franks and to preserve their memory, Mrs Gies won many accolades.

In an interview from 1998, published on the annefrank website, Miep Gies says she thought it "perfectly natural" to help Anne and the seven others despite the penalties she could have suffered under the Nazi occupation.

"They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn..." she says. "We did our duty as human beings: helping people in need."

Her role was, she recalls, to fetch vegetables and meat while others supplied bread or books. Her memory of Anne is of having the feeling she was "speaking to an adult".

"I'd say to myself, 'My goodness, child, so young and talking like that already'," she says in the interview. She believes that she once came across Anne writing the diary.

"It was a very uncomfortable situation," she says. "I tried to decide what to do. Should I walk away or go to her? At that moment she glanced at me, with a look that I'll never forget. This wasn't the Anne I knew, that friendly, charming child. She looked at me with anger, rage. Then Anne stood up, slammed her diary shut and glared at me with great condescension. 'Yes,' she said, 'I'm writing about you, too.' I didn't know what to say. The only thing I could manage was: 'That ought to be interesting.'"

Mrs Gies also remembers the day the Franks were taken away and how she went up into the empty annex to find the pages of the diary lying on the floor. Removing the pages, she did not read them immediately, telling herself at the time: "These may belong to a child, but even children have a right to privacy."

BBC

Miep Gies

Anne Frank Museum