German neo-Nazi gang 'developed Monopoly-style game with death camps'

A neo-Nazi gang suspected of murdering 10 people developed their own version of the board game Monopoly featuring death camps and gas works.

Called "Pogromly" and intended for other far-right extremists the game has the names of four Nazi concentration camps instead of the railway stations found on the traditional Monopoly board. Players have the chance to buy Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck, with each camp costing 4,000 reichsmarks, the currency used in Hitler's Germany.

A number of sets of the game were discovered in a garage used by the gang the self-styled National Socialist Underground amongst bomb-making equipment and unused nail bombs last month.

Players start on a square emblazoned with a swastika and also have the chance of landing on a numbers of squares marked with the SS emblem. The board also comes with pictures of Hitler and sinister looking Jews. It is thought the game is based loosely on events surrounding Kristallnacht. On the night of November 8, 1938, the Nazi's unleashed a violent pogrom against German Jews, destroying hundreds of synagogues and Jewish-owned business, and arresting 30,000 people, many of whom were sent to concentration camps.

The gang, apparently, produced dozens of Pogromly sets, which retailed on the underground far-right scene for about £42, as a way of supplementing their finances from 2000 to 2011. The games were sold by an associate of the gang Andre K., who has since been arrested, although, apparently, they suspected he was pocketing too much of the proceeds.

A report by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine said that gang members called other extremists to complain about the lack of money they were receiving from their colleague.

Pogromly comes as the latest lurid twist in the scandal surrounding the operations of the National Socialist Underground. Despite murdering nine men of immigrant background and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007, and conducting 14 bank robberies, police remained oblivious to the gang's existence.

It was not exposed until a botched bank raid last month led to two members committing suicide and the survivor handing herself into the police.

Daily Telegraph

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

Holocaust museum security guard shot and killed in Washington

A suspected white supremacist opened fire inside the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington today, killing a security guard who stopped him in the entrance before being wounded by return gunfire.

The museum that commemorates the victims of genocide in the second world war became the scene of bloodshed and panic today, when an elderly man suspected of writing racist anti-Semitic internet tracts entered the building brandishing a rifle and opened fire on two guards who confronted him.

The killing of security guard Stephen Johns, whose quick action officials credited with saving perhaps dozens of lives, came just five days after Barack Obama visited the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany and implored the world never to forget those who perished in the Holocaust.

"I am shocked and saddened by today's shooting at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum," Obama said in a statement. "This outrageous act reminds us that we must remain vigilant against anti-Semitism and prejudice in all its forms. No American institution is more important to this effort than the Holocaust museum, and no act of violence will diminish our determination to honour those who were lost by building a more peaceful and tolerant world."

"The security guards performed exceptionally well and exactly as they were supposed to," Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty told reporters. "In these days and times you never know when someone is going to grab a gun and use it in an inappropriate way."

Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier said the gunman appeared to have acted alone, though the FBI was investigating the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.

Police officials suspected James Von Brunn in the shooting and found his car blocks from the museum. Von Brunn, 89, was in critical condition at a Washington hospital tonight. On a racist, anti-Semitic website purportedly written by Von Brunn, he says he was a lieutenant in the US navy during the second world war and lived in Maryland, about two hours away from Washington, and worked as an artist.

In 1983 Von Brunn was convicted of attempting to kidnap members of the US federal reserve board. At the time, police said Von Brunn wanted to take the members hostage because of high interest rates and the nation's economic difficulties. On the website, Von Brunn blames his six-year imprisonment on "a Jew judge" and "Negro jury".

After the shooting, about 2,000 stunned visitors fled onto the pavement outside and police established a wide perimeter around the museum, snarling traffic across downtown Washington. The museum, a US government body, lies within blocks of the White House, the US capitol building and several major monuments, along a heavily policed corridor of government office buildings.

Eyewitnesses standing outside the police cordon reported hearing about four to six gunshots just inside the entryway to the museum, near the x-ray machine and magnetometer visitors must walk through to enter.

David Unruh, 66, from Wichita, Kansas, said he was in the lobby when he heard shots and somebody yell "hit the floor". He was roughly 30 feet from where the shots were fired. He, his wife and two grandsons dropped to the floor and a man shielded them. "We were scared to death," he said. He said the evacuation was orderly but people were visibly upset.

"You feel pretty secure," he said. "You've gone through security. You don't expect that to happen at a place like this. It's a place of dignity and respect."

The shooting was the third in the US in recent weeks that appear to have been motivated by political hatred. Last week a man opened fire outside an Army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas, killing one soldier and wounding another. Late last month, an anti-abortion extremist killed Kansas physician George Tiller at his church.

Guardian

Hunt for most-wanted Nazi war criminal ends in Egypt

Son says 'Doctor Death' died in 1992 after search tracks down SS fugitive to Cairo hotel

The hunt for the world's most-wanted Nazi war criminal, Aribert Heim, appeared to have come to an end today with reports suggesting that he died in Cairo almost 17 years ago, after converting to Islam. According to new evidence published today, Heim, known as "Doctor Death" for the atrocities he committed against Jews as a physician at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps, spent the last decade of his life living in Egypt after reinventing himself as an apparently kindly old man called Uncle Tarek, who played ping-pong with local children.

While serving with the SS, he was accused of injecting petrol into his victims' hearts, removing organs from healthy patients and decorating his desk with the skulls of prisoners he killed.

Heim was the prime target of Operation: Last Chance, the campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to track down the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust. After 240 leads, which mainly focused on south America, Heim appears to have been tracked down to a hotel in Cairo. His son, Ruediger Heim, has admitted for the first time that his father died of cancer on 10 August 1992, after watching the Barcelona Olympics on TV. He said he was with his father when he died.

An investigation by the New York Times and the German broadcaster ZDF discovered a briefcase belonging to Heim which included his passport, bank details, and newspaper clippings of reports of efforts to track him down and his trial in absentia. It also included letters protesting his innocence and accusing Simon Wiesenthal of inventing Heim's atrocities.

ZDF reported that Heim was buried in a cemetery for the poor in Cairo, where graves are reused after several years "so that the chance of finding remains is unlikely".

According to friends in Egypt, the doctor who had applied himself so vigorously to butchering and torturing his victims in the name of medicine had asked for his own body to be donated to medical research at his death. According to ZDF, his wish was not granted for religious reasons.

Today, the Wiesenthal Centre said that while there was "no doubt" that Heim had lived in Egypt, it had not been established that he had died there.

"What is not clear, what is missing from the presentation by ZDF and the New York Times, is the conclusive proof he indeed died in Egypt in 1992," Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the centre, told Reuters. "There's no grave, there's no body. We can't do any DNA testing."

Zuroff also pointed out that Ruediger Heim had previously said that the only contact he had had since his father went into hiding in 1962 were two notes, and that he had no idea if he was alive or dead.

"Ruediger has been lying," Zuroff told the Associated Press. "Either he is lying now or he was lying before, and he has a vested interest in this so anything he says has to be taken with a certain amount of scepticism and suspicion and the most important thing is missing: the body."

If it turns out to be true, however, Zuroff said that "the German police have a very important investigation on their hands in terms of prosecuting people who helped Heim escape justice". Ruediger Heim refused to comment when contacted at his home by the Associated Press.

Born on 28 June 1914, in Radkersburg, Austria, Heim joined the local Nazi party in 1935, three years before Austria was annexed by Germany. He later joined the Waffen SS and was assigned to Mauthausen, a concentration camp near Linz, Austria, as a camp doctor in October and November 1941. He was held by the Americans after the war but released before the true extent of his crimes had become clear. He kept a low profile for the next two decades, even avoiding being photographed in the team picture of the ice hockey club he played for.

In 1961, German authorities were alerted that Heim was living in Baden-Baden and began an investigation, but when they finally went to arrest him in September 1962, they just missed him, apparently after he had been tipped off. Heim fled through France and Spain before crossing into Morocco, and eventually settling in Egypt, ZDF and the New York Times reported, citing Ruediger Heim.

He lived in Cairo, under the name Tarek Hussein Farid, at the Kasr el Madina hotel for the 10 years leading up to his death, the report said. Mahmoud Doma, whose father owned the hotel, said Heim was known as Uncle Tarek, and that he played table tennis with him on the roof of the hotel. He said he bought sweets for children in the neighbourhood. Heim converted to Islam and worshipped at Cairo's famous al-Azhar mosque, the New York Times said.

Ruediger Heim told ZDF that he first visited his father in 1976, organising the trip through his aunt and arranging to meet with him in a hotel.

"He recognised me right away," Heim recalled. "It was a meeting of worlds. I was there for 14 days."

But, he said, he did not talk with his father about the allegations against him, largely because he said he was not fully aware of them himself.

"I didn't ask him: 'How many people did you kill?' because I didn't know. I didn't know any concrete details," he told ZDF. "Later, on other visits, I got to know his life better."

Guardian

And the sun kept shining over Auschwitz

Keynote speech by Ronald Eissens during the INACH/ADL Global Summit on Internet Hate, 17 & 18 November 2008, Washington D.C.

Let me start by thanking the ADL and Chris Wolf for making this into a great conference. I’m pleased to be here in the United States, in fact I’m always happy to come here but this time is doubly joyful since America has voted massively for hope. Hope for America and hope for the world. Now, step into my time machine, we’re going back 2000 years.

The first dissemination of antisemitism comes to us from the Alexandrian Apion, a Greek-Egyptian philosopher and writer. When the great library of Alexandria burned down, Apion’s Egyptian History burned with it. We only know partly what was written in those books because the Roman historian Tacitus quotes some of the content. Another source for Apion’s antisemitism is to be found in the work of the historian Titus Flavius Josephus, the former Jewish military leader Joseph ben Matthias. Josephus wrote a treatise called ‘against Apion’ in which he attacks and refutes Apions’ ideas, which probably makes him the first advocate against antisemitism.

Apion described Jews as sinister and revolting, barbaric because of the practice of circumcision. Apion was not unique, many popular believes about Jews during those days –we’re talking about the year 30- were extremely negative. Because of the Shabbat, Jews were thought to be lazy. Jews were thought to sacrifice humans during strange rites – the blood libel throwing its shadow backward - Jews were considered anti-social and worshipped only one god, which in those polytheistic times was considered to be foolish and alien, although some of the Greek intellectuals thought the idea as such was very stylish. Apion’s antisemitism was quite popular with the Greek elite of Alexandria and his writings fuelled the flames of the first pogrom in history, in the year 38. That pogrom broke out when the Jews of Alexandria protested a decree by Roman Emperor Caligula in which they were ordered to pray to his statue. Apions’ rabble-rousing resulted in the murder of thousands of Alexandrian Jews.

Now, Apion was a charismatic individual, who did not have the use of Internet but rather his writings, copied by scribes and disseminated by –and through his friends and admirers and he used public speeches to spread his hatred. Instead of Internet the Alexandrians of that age knew the bathhouse.net and the marketplace.net, where information, gossip, writings and speeches went from person to person.

Jumping forward in time, we have to note that for every succeeding pogrom there was either a verbal or written slander campaign to incite the masses to attack Jews. Sometimes it was writings by religious leaders; sometimes it was word-of-mouth, often instigated by kings, emperors, religious or other leaders, creating myths like the blood libel, the poisoning of wells by Jews, the Christ-killers accusations, and many variations on those and other themes, culminating in what Lucy Davidowitz very aptly calls ‘the war against the Jews’, the Shoah.

After the Shoah followed a period in which antisemitism in the western world was mainly spread underground, on paper – books and pamphlets. The protocols, Mein Kampf and other leftovers of Nazi ideology were disseminated both in Europe, the U.S. and the Middle East, where European-style antisemitism found an already fertile breeding ground. But, both in volume and in reach it was nothing compared to what we see these days on the Internet.

From 1992 on, Neo-Nazis started to use the Internet to spread their rhetoric. Already in the in the pre-world wide web age German Neo-Nazis saw the potential of Information Technology, using Bulletin Board Systems and moving onto the web when it came available.

In as sense, those German Neo-Nazi’s did not have to go far from home. As the journalist and writer Edwin Black proved, the information age was not born in Silicon Valley but in 1933 in Berlin. IBM facilitated the administration of the Holocaust with census cards and punch card technology, even after 1941, through full IBM subsidiaries managed from Switzerland. The Nazi’s had a problem and IBM had a solution for their final solution. It teaches us to be wary of those who say that they are only selling technology and don’t care what it is used for. Or those who say that others should do no evil while they themselves engage in the large–scale technological facilitation of oppression.

The Internet gave Antisemitism a new common carrier, to use a technical term. Thanks to the Internet, there is more antisemitism and Holocaust denial available in the world than ever. Thanks to the Internet, there is more information on the Holocaust and antisemitism available than ever. But these positions hardly cancel-out each other, even if you believe that bad speech can be countered by good speech. No longer is it the grubby bookstores, which sold stenciled copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion under the counter. No longer is it the house-to-house delivered stenciled antisemitic pamphlets, a hundred here, a thousand there. Now it's tens of thousands of websites and hundreds of thousands of expressions of antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Now it's millions of hits here and hundred thousands of page views there.

In 1995 who had heard of Stormfront? Yet there they were, in the forefront of the Internet age. As no other, Neo-nazi’s, white supremacists and other extremists understood the potential of the Internet for the unbridled dissemination of their ideas. Antisemitism. Holocaust Denial. National Socialism. Racism.

By now, the bulk of all antisemitism and Holocaust denial has firmly moved onto the Internet. Old media have become obsolete. You will still be able to find Mein Kampf or the Protocols or Hardwoods ‘did six million really die’ in the proverbial grubby bookstore – or get it by post order through the Internet. But ask yourself, who under 30 years old still reads books? Very few. In the 15 years since the Internet took off, antisemitism and holocaust denial have penetrated every nook and cranny. You can find it on web logs, web forums, Youtube, in online games, in chat boxes, on facebook, myspace, et cetera, and it is the largest category of online hate.

The number of websites offering antisemitism or Holocaust denial runs in the tens of thousands. We’re not only talking about ‘dedicated’ Neo-Nazi or other extremist sites here. A “normal” popular web forum has 1000-plus postings per day, of which on average 50 are of a racist or antisemitic nature. There are thousands of web forums like that. If you add the thousands of extremist web forums that generate hundreds of hateful expressions per day, the total volume of hate on the net is mind-boggling. I understand that the latest CD Digital Terrorism and Hate 2007, published by our colleagues at Simon Wiesenthal Center identifies some 5000 “problematic” websites. I think that is quite an underestimation. We’re not even taking into account all the web logs, and the still existing Usenet newsgroups, historically known for a large hate content. It is impossible to really give exact figures on online hate. We only know that the volume is enormous, but registering and monitoring is a bit like trying to count fruit flies. There are lots of them, they die soon but since they breed fast new ones appear all the time.

The current interactive web, web 2.0 as it’s is called, with its blogs, forums, photo –and video repositories like Youtube turns everybody into an instant publicist. Internet is the biggest soapbox in the world, and people who would not dare air their views offline find their outlet in posting them on the Internet, thinking they are totally anonymous. Internet is also the big recycler. Once something is online, it is quite hard to get rid of it for good. The boost the Internet gave to The Protocols is enormous. Twenty years ago, it had almost sunken into oblivion. The immensely popular Youtube is used on a large scale to share short video-clips with the world. Neo-Nazis use Youtube as another great tool, but you can also watch Holocaust deniers like David Irving walking in Birkenau, explaining why Jews were never gassed there. You can see Leuchter fans doing a so-called scientific experiment ‘testing’ Zyklon-B on each other, showing that ‘the concentrations of Zyklon-B that were allegedly used to kill Jews are in fact harmless’. Do a search on the Youtube site for ‘gas chambers’ and the second video that will be presented to you is footage of Fred Leuchter talking about his report which claims that the gas chambers at the death camps were never used to gas people.

Then there’s the online games and games sold over the Internet, like Ethnic Cleansing and ZOG’s nightmare, which add another level of nausea and last but not least there’s the virtual ‘Furry Nazi groups’ in Second Life, who amused themselves by building gas chambers and ‘playing’ camp, trying to capture Jewish Second Life users in order to ‘test their facilities’. Good news is that just two weeks ago, after pressure brought by Jewish groups in Second Life, owner Linden Labs removed the Nazi’s and their virtual ‘Third Reich’. A small victory.

The Netcraft October 2008 web server survey tells us there are now almost 200 million websites online. A sea of data, which would be impossible to navigate without search engines. But here’s the rub. Your average non-Jewish student who becomes curious about his Jewish classmate goes to Google and types in the word ‘Jew’. The third search result is the infamous hate site ‘Jew Watch’, which will teach the student that Jews control the world and every evil deed ever done in history was done by Jews. Oh yes, since recently you will see as a first search result a notice by Google saying that they do not endorse some of the disturbing search results and that it is better to search on Judaism then on Jews, in order to get informative and relevant results instead of ‘unexpected ones’. How easy it would be for the privately owned company Google to just omit sites like Jew Watch from their database. But I guess that would be ‘doing evil’.

Sadly, it doesn’t end with ‘classic’ antisemitism. Where before you could only find a limited amount of left-wing antisemitism, after the disastrous 2001 World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, which turned into an antisemitic hate-fest, the masks came off. Blatant antisemitism on left-wing sites is now quite acceptable, of course prudently called “anti-Zionism”. Some left-wing sites even link to antisemitic content on neo-Nazi sites and since the rise of Islamism and Jihadism there is an increasing overlap between Islamist and neo-Nazi rethoric, uniting seemingly natural enemies in their joint struggle against the “Zionist world conspiracy”. The common ground for online hate-mongers is called Jews.

The Internet not only dramatically changed the scope of antisemitism, it also facilitates its mutation. The antisemitism-virus always seems to seek a new myth to piggyback on and if there’s one thing the Internet is good in, it is the fast dissemination of urban legends and myths. The Jews are behind 9/11. The Jews working at the World Trade center stayed home on 9/11. The Jews are behind the financial crisis.

Then there is the online trivialization of the Holocaust – which is maybe the biggest danger. The Holocaust depicted as a dance party in the infamous video ‘Housewitz’. A Belgian far-right politician singing a song about ‘the little Jewess that is going to Dachau to be gassed’. Or comparing the Holocaust to anything, from bad treatment of animals and abortion clinics to discrimination of smokers.

Lastly, there is the encrypted antisemitism, a language of code words for Jews -like Zionists, or cabal, or the media elite, or those that control the banks. This language creates an environment that eases the path for openly antisemitic rhetoric.

The results: Holocaust Denial is becoming fashionable, antisemitism quite normal, Zionism is deliberately depicted as racism and antisemitic violence is on the rise.

Those who say ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’ need to do a reality check. Apion’s words fuelled the flames of the first pogrom. Hitler’s and Goebbels’ and Streichers’ words caused the Holocaust. Every genocide, pogrom, or act of antisemitic violence in history was built on words.
There’s a well-known quote from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” He wrote this in 1914 in his publication Other People's Money—and How Bankers Use It, referring to the benefits of openness and transparency in financial issues. Many an advocate of freedom of speech takes this quote to mean that hate speech, once it is exposed and out in the open, will shrivel away and die. First of all, I think it is doubtful that Brandeis meant this. Justice Brandeis died in 1941 but had he lived to see the Holocaust, I don’t think he would have agreed with the new meaning his quote was given. Secondly, in recent history, let’s says since 1900, we’ve had very little success countering genocides or atrocities only by publicity and sunlight. The sad thing is that the amount of people outside of Germany who were aware of the holocaust already in 1941 is quite large. But nothing happened while the sun kept on shining over Auschwitz.

The Shoah itself illustrates the danger of the repetition of hate speech best. Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels loved to advise everybody to “make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually people will believe it.” Mass-murderer Rudolf Höss, commander of Auschwitz, illustrated this further during his interrogation shortly after his capture in 1945 when he said: “I was absolutely convinced that the Jews were at the opposite pole from the German People, and sooner or later there would have to be a clash between National-Socialism and World Jewry…but everybody was convinced of this; that was all you could hear or read.”

The role of antisemitic propaganda and language was significant in creating a mindset in Germany in the 1930s that predisposed acceptance of racial policy even in its most radical form. The constant repetition of antisemitic sentiment, whether fanatical Party propaganda or the casual racial aside, lodged in the collective psyche in ways that reduced the ability and willingness of a great many Germans to question race policy and encouraged them to endorse it.[1]

So why should everybody work on countering antisemitism and Holocaust Denial? Many think that National Socialism and the Holocaust are things of the past, and antisemitism is not seen as a real problem.

The Nizkor Project– whose director, Ken McVay, to my great pleasure, is present here today, gives us the answer. In 1996, a small Neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist White Peoples Party, wrote in their electronic magazine "The real purpose of Holocaust revisionism is to make National Socialism an acceptable political alternative again." Nizkor published this profound quote on its main page – and it is still there today.

This is why we need to counter antisemitism and Holocaust denial. We want to do it because we need to remember those who were murdered, lest they be forgotten, but we need to do it to make sure National Socialism never again becomes an acceptable political option. Now to make the world understand that. A tough challenge.

Of course we need good speech. Of course we need truth. So are we doing that? In the physical world I think we can’t complain. Lots of great work is done by scholars, Non-Governmental Organizations, Jewish Communities and Community organizations. Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial are illegal in a number of European countries. Thanks to the effort of a number of Jewish NGOs and individuals, some present here, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency now has a Working Definition of Antisemitism. We have Holocaust museums. We have a wealth of online information on the Holocaust, available through the Nizkor Project, the Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, Yad Vashem and many others. We commemorate. We warn. We give testimony. We educate. We take young people to see the camps. We try to prevent.

On and through the Internet, NGOs like mine, the INACH Network, the ADL, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre and others work on countering hate. Since 2002, the INACH network has gotten thousands of instances of antisemitism and Holocaust Denial removed. That sounds like a lot, but looking at the vast hate-scape that has unfolded on the Internet, it seems almost futile. I fear we are not able to stem the tide in this way.

The memory of the holocaust is fading, the first and second generation of Holocaust survivors are passing away, and antisemitism is moving into the electronic mainstream.

What we should do is put all our efforts in education, not only anti-hate education and education about the Holocaust but also Media literacy; how to assess information on the Internet, how to check for credibility, how to check sources and how to think critical. But we should also advocate for anti-discrimination lessons and for Holocaust education and prejudice reduction modules to be included in all school curricula. That is in my view the only way to –in time- effectively counter hate.

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of Alexandria, opened 5 years ago and is built next to the location of the antique library. It contains millions of books. It aims to be ‘a center of excellence in the production and dissemination of knowledge and a place of dialogue, learning and understanding between cultures and peoples’.

It has Tacitus’ Histories, quoting Apion’s antisemitism. It has The Protocols of the elders of Zion in many translations. The online catalog proudly describes ‘The protocols’ as a ‘Complete plan for world destruction’. This august new institution for knowledge in the Middle East, partly financed by UNESCO, also has the Leuchter report in Arabic, Mein Kampf, and other antisemitic material. Of course it has a complete copy of the Internet Archive containing most hate sites on the Internet. From Alexandria in the year 30 to Alexandria in 2008 - it seems that Apion has come full circle and not only that – antisemitism is now part of the largest library in the world – unquestioned, uncommented antisemitism.

During the 2007 annual INACH conference in Berlin a resolution was adopted which calls upon countries and international bodies like the OSCE and the EU to coordinate measures against cyber hate and to start working on media education. That’s excellent, but we need to do more. When I did one of my usual gloomy speeches last February during the Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism in Jerusalem, people asked me ‘but what can we do?’ Well, we need to engage our schools and our politicians, to make it clear to them that we have to take action now.

After Lunch, some of you will be visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Right after the main entrance, on your left, you will see the flags of the U.S. Army units that liberated the concentration camps. One of those is the flag of the 4th armored division of General Patton’s 3rd army. I have an interest in that since the 4th armored was the division that liberated my father-in-law from Buchenwald.

The motto of the 4th armored was “They shall be known by their deeds alone” and I think that is a fitting message to all of us. Let’s stop talking, and be known by our deeds.

Keynote speech by Ronald Eissens during the INACH/ADL Global Summit on Internet Hate, 17 & 18 November 2008, Washington D.C.

[1] Richard Overy, Interrogations – the Nazi elite in allied hands, 1945. P.196, The Penguin Press, 2001

Leon Greenman OBE, Auschwitz survivor 98288 (1910 – 2008)

The very sad news has reached us of the death of Leon Greenman at the great age of 97. I won't say anything about Mr Greenman's personal story which is pretty well covered in the Guardian piece from 2005 (below), but I will say that I had the very great pleasure of meeting and talking to him when he came to Lancaster a few years ago to speak at a meeting of the then Anti-Nazi League. Despite even then being over eighty, one was immediately struck by his boundless energy where it concerned travelling anywhere to spread the word about the Nazis and the Holocaust, what it had meant to him personally and what it means now to fight and keep on fighting to keep the menace of the far-right at bay.

Lancaster Town Hall saw its biggest ever public meeting on the night he came to talk to us and there wasn't a single person in the audience who wasn't deeply affected by what he had to say. Nor was there anyone who wasn't impressed by his complete devotion to his task and the constant work he put into it. If we had a hundred Leon Greenman's, the fight against the far-right would be over in no time. Read the quote from him at the end of this article and remember it whenever you find your energy flagging. It should inspire all of us.

Leon Greenman

On January 27 1945, Soviet soldiers advancing through Poland discovered the largest and most lethal of Hitler's death camps: Auschwitz. Sixty years on, a survivor of the camp tells Stephen Moss his story

The first thing you notice about Leon Greenman's large but shabby terraced house in Ilford is that it has mesh shutters. He had them put up 10 years ago, soon after the National Front threw bricks through the windows. Two years ago, he received a Christmas card from the local fascists telling him he would make a lovely lampshade. Don't tell Greenman that nazism is a dry-as-dust historical phenomenon.

Greenman is an amazing 94, living alone in one room of his cold house; a room piled with papers and portraits of the wife and child he lost in the Holocaust, and of mementoes of his postwar days as a singer of ballads. The other rooms in the house are, he says, full of the goods he used to sell on street stalls, once the Beatles had done for the world of dance bands. He retired from the markets more than 20 years ago, so maybe the ladies' handbags in the locked-up rooms are back in fashion now.

The most poignant portrait on his living-room wall is of his son, Barnett "Barney" Greenman, born on March 17 1940; gassed in Auschwitz two and a half years later. Child and victim of war. Long, curly hair and a gorgeous, girlish face, thrusting a hand to a future that was to be denied him. Even now, had he lived, Barney would be only 64. The Holocaust. Greenman, small, wiry, a boxer in his youth, fought on, has spent 60 years combating racism, was awarded the OBE for his struggle, but in truth never recovered from that blow.

He was born in London, one of six children, but his paternal grandparents were Dutch and his father took the family to live in Rotterdam when Leon was five. His mother had died three years earlier and his father, struggling with his large family, had married his housekeeper. She beat Leon; the schoolmasters beat Leon; he took up boxing, a pocket battleship, unsinkable. He worked in a barber's shop and later in his wife Else's father's book business, commuting between London and Rotterdam.

Greenman's failure to leave Rotterdam before the Nazi occupation of Holland in May 1940 was a catalogue of catastrophes. He intended to leave in 1938 but was reassured by the Munich agreement; the British consul told him that, as a British passport holder, he would be evacuated in the event of war, but when war came, the embassy staff fled; he gave his passport to a friend for safe keeping; the friend panicked and burned it. Greenman was paperless, stateless, friendless. In October 1942, he and his wife and son were taken to the nearby Westerbork concentration camp. Four months later, they were moved to Auschwitz. Greenman was one of 700 Dutch Jews in that consignment; he and one other man survived.

In his book, An Englishman in Auschwitz, Greenman describes his arrival in Birkenau. "The women were separated from the men: Else and Barney were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women ... I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me, too, for she threw me a kiss and held our child up for me to see. What was going through her mind, I will never know. Perhaps she was pleased that the journey had come to an end. We had been promised that we could meet at the weekends after our work was done. We will have a lot to talk about, I thought to myself."

"I thought they must be still alive," says Greenman now. "I didn't know they were gassed within hours. I didn't know about gassing. In my mind, there was nothing wrong with them. I told myself I would find them. They were somewhere in the camp. We'll wait and see. That went on day after day after day. The thought that I would see them again kept me going."

Greenman's hairdressing helped him survive: one of his jobs in the camp was to shave the inmates' beards. In September 1943, he was sent to the work camp at Monowitz, where he was employed as a builder, extending the camp. "You were there to work and to die," he says, "and the big fellers went quicker than the little ones." Greenman is a little over five feet tall and built for survival. He endured almost a year and a half in Monowitz, then a 60-mile death march to Gleiwitz, and a nightmarish five-day journey in open cattle trucks to Buchenwald, from which he was liberated by American forces on April 11 1945. A tiny man with the largest of hearts, in this tiny, paper-strewn room that contains the century.

Guardian

“Young and old alike must learn about the Holocaust as warning against the dangers of racism. There is no difference in colour or religion. If I had survived to betray the dead it would have been better not to survive. We must not forget. Please do not forget.”

Leon Greenman

The hunt for Doctor Death

As an SS medic, Aribert Heim carried out horrific experiments on concentration camp prisoners. He escaped and is thought to be hiding in Argentina - but the net may finally be closing. Rory Carroll and Uki Goñi on the search for the last of the Nazis

It was 1945 and Europe was a crime scene. The most destructive war in history had left a miasma of ruined cities, refugees and occupation armies, but there was worse than that. The Nazi extermination camps had been discovered and little-known placenames were becoming sickeningly famous. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Belzec, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sobibór, Treblinka. It was time for a reckoning.

The Nuremberg trials sent Hitler's senior henchmen to the gallows or long stretches in prison. But others escaped. Quietly, with barely a ripple, middle- and low-ranking war criminals slipped the Nuremberg net and subsequent efforts to catch them. They obtained false papers, packed their bags and vanished across the Atlantic to a safe haven: South America.

Legends followed them. There were stories of U-boats packed with Nazi gold docking on the coast of Patagonia. Novels and films imagined a shadowy Fourth Reich of mosquitoes, swastikas and eugenic laboratories in the Amazon jungle and Andean foothills. Some fantastical accounts had the Führer himself in a Panama hat somewhere clipping orchids.

The reality was more prosaic but still sinister. Hundreds, possibly thousands, had escaped through the "ratline" and found sanctuary. As the decades slid by, a handful were caught. Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust, was kidnapped by Israeli agents in Argentina in 1960. Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons", was extradited from Bolivia in 1983. Erich Priebke, a Waffen SS captain, was extradited from Argentina in 1995. The story petered out. The fugitives were no longer just pensioners but octogenarians, nonagenarians and, for the most part, dead. When the 20th century ended so, it seemed, did the hunt for Nazis.

Not quite. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre recently made a bombshell announcement. The hunt was back on. The Jewish human rights group revealed that it was launching one final drive to locate the remaining genocide collaborators hiding in South America: Operation Last Chance. "We don't know how many Nazi war criminals are in those countries but we think it's dozens, if not hundreds," said Efraim Zuroff, the centre's chief Nazi hunter. It was extremely late in the day, he acknowledged, but not too late.

After years of indifference or outright obstruction, the region's governments had decided to help the hunters. Private and public money had been raised to offer rewards for information. And there were leads. Police had names, bank accounts and tip-offs. Wire-taps were yielding tantalising clues. Media campaigns in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil were publicising telephone hotlines and the $10,000 (£5,000) reward for each tip leading to a conviction. Even after six decades the trail seemed warm.

"Given the large number of Nazi war criminals and collaborators who escaped to South America, this has the potential to yield important results," says Zuroff. He is uncompromising about his prey. "The natural tendency is to be sympathetic towards people after they reach a certain age, but these are the last people on earth who deserve sympathy. Their victims deserve that an honest effort be made to find them."

Zuroff does not fit Hollywood's image of a dashing investigator. In his three-piece suit, big spectacles and shiny black shoes, he looks every inch the 59-year-old academic that he is. A New York-born Israeli historian specialising in Holocaust studies, he is the successor to Simon Wiesenthal, a Viennese Jew who survived the camps, moved to the US and tracked Nazis until his death in 2005. Zuroff's tools are reports, databases, tip-offs and publicity. Hardly James Bond, but for a small organisation on a tight budget there are limited ways to scour haystacks for tell-tale glints.

South America is big, a continent almost twice the size of Europe stretching from the Caribbean through the Andes, the Amazon and the pampas and tailing at the icy tip of Tierra del Fuego. Thirteen countries, thousands of cities, 370 million people. If you were a Nazi, where would you lay your hat? Skim the Lonely Planet guidebook and one town leaps off the pages. It resembles a Tyrolean ski resort, the plaza has an "Alpine design", the restaurants serve fondue, venison and chocolate cake, and there is a cable car soaring up "Gothic spires of rock". Welcome to San Carlos de Bariloche.

It appears so perfect as to be a cliche, but this holiday capital in Argentine Patagonia is the suspected bolthole of the most wanted Nazi in South America. Investigators have a hunch that somewhere among the skiiers and student revellers who throng the picturesque streets is a 93-year-old Austrian by the name of Aribert Heim - otherwise known as Doctor Death, or, in Spanish, Doctor Muerte.

"This is the most important manhunt in over 20 years. If we only get Heim it will be a success," says Zuroff. The most sought after Nazi since Josef Mengele has a bounty of $448,000 (£227,000) on his head and the governments of Argentina, Chile and Germany on his tail. "When three countries are bent on finding somebody, he will be found. Where there's a will, there's a way," says Zuroff.

The reason Heim tops the most wanted list makes for grim reading. As an SS doctor at Mauthausen, a concentration camp near the Austrian city of Linz, he earned a reputation for exceptional cruelty. Camp survivors said he injected prisoners in the heart with petrol and poison and timed the deaths. He allegedly performed amputations without anaesthetic, removed the tattooed flesh of a prisoner to make seat coverings for the camp command-ant's flat and boiled the flesh off a head to use the skull as an exhibit.

After the war, the young physician was overlooked by Nuremberg investigators and moved to a spa town near Frankfurt where he found work as a gynaecologist, married and played in the ice hockey team. However, by 1962 Austrian investigators were closing in and Heim fled. Over the years there were alleged sightings in Egypt, Uruguay, Chile and Spain. But now all attention is on Bariloche. Heim has a 64-year-old daughter, Waltraud, who lives just across the border in the Chilean town of Puerto Montt. His one-time lover and Waltraud's mother, Gertrud Böser, visited Chile 18 times between 1979 and 1992. Gertrud is dead and Waltraud declines to discuss her father. Heim's other family, a wife and two sons in Baden-Baden, Germany, say he died of cancer in Argentina in 1993.

If so, that would repeat the anti-climax of the hunt for the other notorious doctor, Mengele. Investigators discovered his bones in a cemetery near São Paulo in 1985. Auschwitz's "Angel of Death", memorably played by Gregory Peck in the film The Boys from Brazil, apparently had a stroke while swimming six years earlier. Might the hunters also be too late for Heim?

A retired Israeli air force colonel, Danny Baz, has published a book claiming he was part of a squad that tracked down and killed him in California in 1982 and dumped the body in the Pacific. Zuroff dismisses that as fantasy and says the evidence strongly indicates that Heim was alive. In 2001, his lawyer sought a refund from German tax authorities on the grounds that his client was living abroad. Heim's wife and sons were secretive and uncommunicative and had not tried to claim a Berlin bank account in his name containing €1m (£750,000). Surveillance records showed that the mother phoned her sons on his birthday to remind them of the date.

"We are very serious about capturing Heim," says Hans-Jürgen Schrade, a captain from the State Office of Criminal Police in Stuttgart, which is handling the case. Schrade, who visited Chile and Argentina in April, is convinced that Heim is somewhere near Bariloche and close to his daughter's town: Puerto Montt is only two hours away from the Argentine border. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre had received "potentially very important information" along the same lines, says Zuroff, without elaborating.

If Doctor Death is captured in the resort town, it will suggest a certain Nazi herd mentality. It was here that Erich Priebke, an SS officer who participated in the massacre of 335 prisoners on the outskirts of Rome in 1944, was confronted by a US television network in 1994 and from here that he was subsequently extradited to Italy. Currently serving a life sentence under house arrest in Rome, the 94-year-old is a poster-boy for master-race longevity. He scoots to court on the back of his lawyer's Vespa, takes calls on his cell phone and flogs his autobiography on his own internet page.

There is believed to be a smattering of fugitives in Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay, but by far the most popular destination was Argentina. A government panel reported in 1999 that at least 180 Nazis facing criminal charges in Europe had moved to Argentina. That excluded rank-and-file Nazis not facing individual charges. There is no mystery about why so many ended up here: they were invited. The government of Juan Perón established "ratlines" to spirit war criminals and collaborators into Argentina. With the cold war breaking out, America, Britain and the Soviet Union poached Nazi scientists, so this is a subject without moral high ground, but Perón's welcome extended to men with few talents beyond mass murder.

There were several reasons. When posted as a military attaché to Italy in 1939-41, the ambitious Argentine developed a taste for Mussolini's firebrand fascism. He forged a relationship with SS agents who gave him intelligence on South American countries in return for Argentine cover. They cooked up an aborted plan to install a puppet regime in Bolivia. The professional soldier in Perón considered the Nuremberg trials an insult to military honour. As a nationalist president he wanted scientists, jet-plane designers and nuclear experts for his arms industry. On his immigration papers, Eichmann stated his profession as "technician". Mengele claimed to be a "mechanic".

Declassified documents in Argentina, America and Europe show how Buenos Aires teamed up with Vatican officials, notably the Argentine cardinal Antonio Caggiano and the French cardinal Eugène Tisserant, to rescue beleaguered Nazis and collaborators from post-war Europe. Imagining itself to be fighting communism, the network issued false documents to slip Hitler's helpers to Italy and on to passenger ships departing from Genoa.

One of the first to arrive in Buenos Aires was Pierre Daye, a Belgian collaborator who had been sentenced to death. Unusually, he flew, but the sentiments in his memoirs were doubtless shared by others: "It was with a sense of deliverance, of escape, a veritable joy in the heart, that I boarded the plane that would carry me to South America." As the four-engine Douglas neared sanctuary, he grew giddy. "They may be looking for me in that troubled Europe. But they cannot reach me. I fly far from a world gone mad, towards peace. It's all over. I have escaped. I fly through the blue."

At the same time that Evita was wowing crowds outside the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, her husband was importing Nazis in bulk. Perón authorised Daye to set up the Society in Argentina for the Reception of Europeans in a grand church-owned building. An Argentine-German SS captain, Carlos Fuldner, established a company called Capri that did contract work for Argentina's state water utility and offered a sinecure for the likes of Eichmann.

There may not have been submarines laden with gold nor jungle laboratories making blue-eyed Indians but there was indeed a shadowy network of genocidal murderers in Argentina. It is a stain on the revered founder of Perónism that has been belatedly and grudgingly recognised. In 2005 the government repealed "directive 11", a secret order that prohibited Jews fleeing the Holocaust from entering Argentina in the 1940s. Younger Argentines have been willing to explore this dark side of their history, but for many older Argentines it is too painful. Denial and obstruction endure. Though more helpful to Nazi hunters than before, the government is widely believed to be withholding immigration records that could expose details of the ratline.

That reluctance and the mindset it betrays appears to impel Zuroff's hunt more than the prospect of putting Nazis behind bars. Operation Last Chance was first launched in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in 2002. Five years later, the results seem paltry: three arrest warrants, two extradition requests and five cases that may or may not lead to trials. Now that it has moved to South America and been renamed Operación Ultima Oportunidad, what are its chances?

"The scheme [in the Baltics] has not been as successful as we hoped in the practical sense of achieving convictions," says Zuroff. But it was not just about justice; it was about "the struggle for historical truth". Six decades after a horrified world watched newsreels of walking skeletons and pits of emaciated flesh, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre was concerned that memory was fading and being distorted. The outright denial of Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an extreme case. In Europe it took the form of pinning blame for round-ups, massacres and camps solely on the Germans and denying the often enthusiastic local complicity. In much of the Baltics and eastern Europe that complicity remains taboo, says Zuroff. Hunting Nazis, in other words, is not just about bringing them to justice. It is about fashioning them into tools, educative instruments, to turn back the clock and remind a forgetful world about that sickening feeling in 1945.

That may seem an excessive load to pile on to Aribert Heim, a 93-year-old who has been running for most of his life and apparently wants to spend his twilight years near his daughter. In Mauthausen, he was a 27-year-old junior doctor surrounded by moral chaos. Now he could be a great-grandfather. The wanted poster showing him as he may appear today is hardly sympathetic, but it cannot mask the pathos of somebody so old being prey. If Heim is caught taking fondue at the Alpine plaza overlooking the lake, he will not finish his meal. He will be taken away in handcuffs and almost certainly die in an Argentine or German jail cell.

"The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators," says Zuroff. "Killers don't become righteous gentiles when they reach a certain age." For the hunter, those images from Mauthausen, the poison injections, the stopwatch to time the deaths, the tattoo seat covers, the skull - they tumble into the present. They are always present.

Guardian