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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also among the DPs were ex-Nazis.

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

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

Friedrich was rejected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Others describe their tormentors, hoping they will be prosecuted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International Herald Tribune

Fascism's post-modern ally

Fascism is not a popular ethical choice in modern society. Britain’s cultural mythology is inextricably linked to fighting it in its most ascendant form. All countries of Europe bear its scars. Yet there is little doubt that, at least in Europe, the far-right and fascism are making a comeback.

The accession of Bulgaria and Romania to the EU in January provided enough far right MEPs to form the first far right group within the EU parliament. Under the banner Identity, Tradition and Sovereignty they describe themselves as anti-immigration, anti-EU constitution (though there they are not alone) and anti-the incorporation of Turkey into the EU. Yet although the two countries provided the six MPs to form the block, they were merely reinforcing a fourteen member contingent of far-right MPs from Western Europe, including former UKIP MEP – now independent – Ashley Mote. Most of the rest come from Belgium’s Flemish Interest Party (3) and France’s National Front (7), supplemented by an Austrian and two Italians, one of whom is Mussolini’s granddaughter. Its worth noting that the two populations who have had most brutal brush with home-grown fascism, the Germans and the Spanish, don’t send the far right to the EU, though they certainly have their own problems with them.

Yet it is not just far-right parties that indicate fascist leanings in European society. Those who complain of our government’s authoritarian trend appear more vindicated week by week. Government policy on asylum seekers provides ample evidence of a nationalist turn. Though probably pandering to extremists rather than actually converting to them, British politicians help legitimise the far-right every time they hint that our ‘way of life’ is under threat. Phantom enemies at the gates have been pounced on by fascism in the past, whether they use communists or asylum seekers makes little difference.

Things are probably worse the further east you go: Poland has an anti-semitic authoritarian government with identical twins for a President and Prime Minister. When the murdered Russian dissident journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote in February 2003 that “Fascism is in fashion”, she wasn’t just referring to the 20,000 young people belonging to fascist or racist organisations in her home city of St Petersburg. Her murder suggests that the nationalist ruling party, United Russia, have interests worryingly close to that of the far-right and that neither the authoritarian government, nor the fascist organisations have refined their tactics very much.

The rise of fascism in Eastern Europe poses a slightly lesser conundrum than in the west. Economic deprivation and the breakdown of prior political structures clearly played a part in the rise of Fascism in the 30s. These are factors extremely relevant to the post communist countries, even in Russia which, despite its enormous natural resources and rapid recovery after the 1998 economic meltdown, still has millions of its citizens living in abject poverty, clearly disaffected with the advent of democracy and the particular brand of freedom the collapse of Communism has given them.

However the National Front’s prominence in France, Britain’s own contribution to the far-right with the BNP and others and the far-right around Western Europe, have thrived in recent years, despite a lack of the classic precursors of economic breakdown and hardship.

What then is driving sizeable chunks of the populations of relatively successful, developed countries into the arms of such organisations? Some have looked to globalisation and the increasing impotence of individuals in a multiplex world. Politics no longer challenges the status quo and it may be that it is now apathy, not hardship, that is promoting extremism. Whether or not this is the case, apathy certainly plays into the hands of the far-right, it has often found its supporters amongst the most aggrieved in society (though not often its leaders). When those of us with little to complain about don’t show an interest, the stage is left to those who do.

Apathy cannot be the whole story however, particularly if you link Europe’s growing far-right with reactionary extremism around the world. Islamic fundamentalism in the forms the west is so concerned with bears striking resemblance to European fascism. Though they oppose each other, they do so for pretty similar reasons. Cultural superiority, anti-globalisation and violent political action are cornerstones of both approaches to hating the ‘other’.

As a wider global phenomenon, right-wing extremism suggests an explanation at once both appealing and frightening. Post-modernism is the buzz word of our era. The modernism of the twentieth century gave us a global hegemony, a stable and entrenched political system that makes the ideology that formed it increasingly irrelevant. We are now united in one goal - progress. Yet progress is not as neutral as those who champion it may represent. That there are many left behind by it is well documented. That there are many who are disillusioned with it is obvious. To see far right extremism as a post-modern rejection of established concepts of the good is to hope for change, yet fear those who might end up changing it.

For those who see a global system that is unjust, there is a need for a radical option. Fascism has always offered, indeed has succeeded by offering, such an option. Yet if those prepared to fight for change are embracing it then we have to ask ourselves why? Why, when we are told that ideology should no longer dominate the future of the people of the world, are so many embracing the ideological views that gave us the worst ideological driven brutality we have ever seen? It’s a question with no definitive answer, one which will ironically be based on your own ideological perspective. But it does have to be asked. Otherwise, when they come for you, no one will speak out, not because there’s no one left, but because there aren’t any reasons left to get off the couch.

Student

Family of seven still search for peace after five years of race hate

Eight-year-old Khalid Mohamed was helping his parents move into their new home when some older boys on bikes started chasing his family and shouting racist abuse.

As the bewildered Somali family tried to settle into their new house in north London, adult neighbours joined in the heckling. "Fuck off Pakis. We don't want you here," they yelled. "We will burn the house down."

Since that day five years ago, the Mohamed family - who fled war-torn Mogadishu before Khalid was born - has barely gone 48 hours without enduring abuse. Stones are thrown at their house at night; lit cigarettes pushed through their letterbox. Khalid's father, Abdalla, 46, has been grabbed around the throat in front of his severely disabled daughter and terrified wife. His car has been vandalised on three occasions. His wife, Asha, is called a "baldy Paki" because she wears a scarf.

Two men were arrested on separate occasions, one of whom was found to be carrying a knife. Both were released without charge and continue to live close by.

The family lives trapped inside, fearfully awaiting the next attack and convinced that one day their tormentors will fulfil their promise to torch their home. The five children, the youngest of whom is seven, cannot even play in the garden.

As his parents can speak little English Khalid, now 13, has grown used to being called out of class at school so that he can telephone the police to report the latest attack. "We are petrified. We don't sleep at night because we are scared something is going to happen. It happens on a daily basis and all night. My mum cries every day. She believes them when they say they are going to burn down the house. They look like they could do it," he explained.

Today, the sombre-faced youngster will speak at a conference to highlight an alarming rise in hate crimes across Europe and the launch of Coalition Europe, a new human rights network. Alongside an impressive array of leading politicians and campaigners from 13 different nations gathered at the House of Commons, the nervous, slightly built boy will talk of the terror and abuse his family has endured.

In Britain, 48,000 racist incidents are reported to the police each year - almost 14,000 in the London area alone - and the figures are rising steadily. The rest of Europe has seen an even more dramatic rise, even though they do not record cases as stringently as Britain has since the Stephen Lawrence inquiry.

Suresh Grover, of The Monitoring Group, which supports victims of racism, said: "These violent acts range from desecrations, damage to property and physical assaults and murder. The racist killing of Dr Nithesh Kumar in St Petersburg last September was a shocking reminder of the growth of racial violence aimed at any 'dark skinned' individuals living in Russia. The country has recorded 84 racist murders in the past four years, 54 in 2006 alone, with a 17 per cent rise in racist incidents to 537."

Similarly, the growth in hate crimes has been a major problem in Germany since unification in 1990. It is estimated that over 100 people have been killed by neo-Nazi groups since then. Last year the German government recorded 958 hate crimes, a 10 per cent rise. But campaigners believe that - as these countries do not have the same comprehensive recording procedure as Britain - most attacks go unreported.

Donatella Linguiti, the Italian undersecretary of state for equal rights, will join the prominent human rights lawyers Peter Herbert and Imran Khan and other figures from across Europe to call for a more stringent examination of the problem so that far more can be done to tackle it.

Mr Grover said: "Over the last few years the police have recorded an average of just over 45,000 racially motivated attacks annually, now up to 48,000. Community groups across Britain have witnessed an alarming growth of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism since 11 September. This unique pan-European initiative will demand action from all European governments and that they bury their inertia on this issue."

For Khalid and his family, the drive to combat racist abuse is painfully close to home. The attacks have become so frequent that Mr Mohamed has set up CCTV on his house to try to gather evidence as the police have repeatedly refused to prosecute. He has multiple locks and an alarm. His children all carry mobile telephones in case of attack.

At night he watches and waits for the groups of men who stand outside his house hurling rocks and abuse, terrifying his youngest children in particular.

"Even though my dad stays awake all night, there are five locks on the door. He just sits there waiting for something to happen," explained Khalid. The family of seven has begged the housing association to move them, but to no avail.

"We are seriously scared. We are always telling the police this is really serious but they don't treat it as serious. They treat it as if we are lying," said Khalid, who wants to be a mechanical engineer, but says he now has problems concentrating on school work and maintaining good grades.

"Since all this started, I don't get as much chance to learn. We are all so scared. We just want to move away. Dad pleaded with the housing association. He said we would all live in a one-bedroom flat but they said that would be illegal," he said.

Last night, London and Quadrant Housing Association said: "We confirm that Mr Mohamed has made a number of allegations of racial harassment against residents. We have investigated all these but neither we nor the police have been able to obtain sufficient evidence to support the allegations at present."

Independent