The 'Iranian Schindler' who saved Jews from the Nazis

Thousands of Iranian Jews and their descendants owe their lives to a Muslim diplomat in wartime Paris, according to a new book. In The Lion's Shadow tells how Abdol-Hossein Sardari risked everything to help fellow Iranians escape the Nazis.

Eliane Senahi Cohanim was seven years old when she fled France with her family. She remembers clutching her favourite doll and lying as still as she could, pretending to be asleep, whenever their train came to a halt at a Nazi checkpoint.

"I remember everywhere, when we were running away, they would ask for our passports, and I remember my father would hand them the passports and they would look at them. And then they would look at us. It was scary. It was very, very scary."

Mrs Cohanim and her family were part of a small, close-knit community of Iranian Jews living in and around Paris. Her father, George Senahi, was a prosperous textile merchant and the family lived in a large, comfortable house in Montmorency, about 25km (15.5 miles) north of the French capital.

'Trembling'

When the Nazis invaded, the Senahis attempted to escape to Tehran, hiding for a while in the French countryside, before being forced to return to Paris, now in the full grip of the Gestapo.

"I remember their attitude. The way they would walk with their black boots. Just looking at them at that time was scary for a child, I think," recalls Mrs Cohanim, speaking from her home in California.

Like others in the Iranian Jewish community, Mr Senahi turned for help to the young head of Iran's diplomatic mission in Paris. Abdol-Hossein Sardari was able to provide the Senahi family with the passports and travel documents they needed for safe-passage through Nazi-occupied Europe, a month-long journey that was still fraught with danger.

"At the borders, my father was always really trembling," recalls Mrs Cohanim but, she adds, he was a "strong man" who had given the family "great confidence that everything would be OK."
Unlikely hero

The 78-year-old grandmother has lived for the past 30 years in California with her husband Nasser Cohanim, a successful banker. Mrs Cohanim has no doubt to whom she and her younger brother Claude owe their lives.

"I remember my father always telling that it was thanks to Mr Sardari that we could come out. My uncles and aunts and grandparents lived there in Paris. It was thanks to him they weren't hurt. The ones that didn't have him, they took them and you never heard about them again."

Of Mr Sardari, she says: "I think he was like Schindler, at that time, helping the Jews in Paris."

Like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories, Sardari was an unlikely hero.
Nazi propaganda

In his book In the Lion's Shadow, author Fariborz Mokhtari paints a picture of a bachelor and bon viveur who suddenly found himself head of Iran's legation house, or diplomatic mission, at the start of World War II. Although officially neutral, Iran was keen to maintain its strong trading relationship with Germany. This arrangement suited Hitler. The Nazi propaganda machine declared Iranians an Aryan nation and racially akin to the Germans.

Iranian Jews in Paris still faced harassment and persecution and were often identified to the authorities by informers. In some cases, the Gestapo was alerted when newborn Jewish boys were circumcised at the hospital. Their terrified mothers were ordered to report to the Office of Jewish Affairs to be issued with the yellow patches Jews were forced to wear on their clothes and to have their documents stamped with their racial identity.

But Sardari used his influence and German contacts to gain exemptions from Nazi race laws for more than 2,000 Iranian Jews, and possibly others, arguing that they did not have blood ties to European Jewry. He was also able to help many Iranians, including members of Jewish community, return to Tehran by issuing them with the new-style Iranian passports they needed to travel across Europe.

A change of regime in Iran, in 1925, had led to the introduction of a new passport and identity card. Many Iranians living in Europe did not have this document, while others, who had married non-Iranians, had not bothered to get Iranian passports for their spouses or children.

When Britain and Russia invaded Iran in September 1941, Sardari's humanitarian task become more perilous. Iran signed a treaty with the Allies and Sardari was ordered by Tehran to return home as soon as possible.

Racial purity

But despite being stripped of his diplomatic immunity and status, Sardari resolved to remain in France and carry on helping the Iranian Jews, at considerable risk to his own safety, using money from his inheritance to keep his office going.

The story he spun to the Nazis, in a series of letters and reports, was that the Persian Emperor Cyrus had freed Jewish exiles in Babylon in 538 BC and they had returned to their homes. However, he told the Nazis, at some later point a small number of Iranians began to find the teachings of the Prophet Moses attractive - and these Mousaique, or Iranian Followers of Moses, which he dubbed "Djuguten," were not part of the Jewish race.

Using all of his lawyer's skill, he exploited the internal contradictions and idiocies of the Nazis' ideology to gain special treatment for the "Djuguten", as the archive material published in Mr Mokhtari's new book shows.

High-level investigations were launched in Berlin, with "experts" on racial purity drafted in to give an opinion on whether this Iranian sect - which the book suggests may well have been Sardari's own invention - were Jewish or not. The experts were non-committal and suggested that more funding was needed for research.

Lonely death

By December 1942, Sardari's pleas had reached Adolf Eichmann, the senior Nazi in charge of Jewish affairs, who dismissed them, in a letter published in Mr Mokhtari's book, as "the usual Jewish tricks and attempts at camouflage". But Sardari somehow managed to carry on helping families escape from Paris, at a time when an estimated 100,000 Jews were deported from France to death camps.

The number of blank passports in Sardari's safe is estimated to have been between 500 and 1,000. In his book, Mr Mokhtari suggests that if each was issued for an average of two to three people "this could have saved over 2,000 individuals".

Sardari never sought recognition for his work during his lifetime, insisting he had only been doing his duty. He died a lonely death in a bedsit in Croydon, south London, in 1981, after losing his ambassador's pension and Tehran properties in the Iranian revolution. He was posthumously recognised for his humanitarian work in 2004 at a ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.

Mr Mokhtari hopes that by telling his story, through the testimony of survivors, including Mrs Cohanim, he will bring it to a wider audience but also shatter "popular misconceptions" about Iran and the Iranians.

"Here you have a Muslim Iranian who goes out of his way, risks his life, certainly risks his career and property and everything else, to save fellow Iranians," he says. "There is no distinction 'I am Muslim, he is Jew' or whatever."

He believes the story illustrates the "general cultural propensity of Iranians to be tolerant" which is often overlooked in the current political climate.

BBC

Thanks to Zaahid for the heads-up

Dismay of BNP Nazi’s WW2 hero grandad

Shocking...Chris Hurst gives salute

Disgraced BNP chief Chris Hurst's war hero grandad has disowned him over his Nazi salute.

The 91-year-old spent five years fighting Hitler in World War Two. And he wept when he saw photos in The Sun of his grandson's vile antics at a fascist rally in Hungary. Hurst, 22, gave the straight-arm "sieg heil" salute to a singer whose hate lyrics inspired Anders Breivik's massacre in Norway.

The old soldier, who is so ashamed he begged us not to name him, said: "It's the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I can't believe he's done this. It was disgusting. I'm horrified - what the hell's wrong with him? I don't know if he got into the wrong crowd or what. I tried to talk him out of the BNP. I was worried something like this would happen."

Hurst was London Regional Secretary for the far-right BNP. The party booted him out after his Nazi shame was revealed in The Sun. But he was a key figure in the hierarchy and his departure has thrown their election strategy into disarray.

He told an undercover reporter the BNP was targeting disillusioned white Tory voters. But proof of his twisted extremism hits hopes of building a veneer of respectability.

The Sun

BNP "honours" Japan criminals who murdered Brit POW'S

WARNING - distressing images in video

Driving back home to the Smoke (London) from Auld Reekie (Edinburgh) today I was incensed to listen to a news report on Radio 4 "PM" about a senior full time official of the BNP (British Nazi Party) Adam Walker, who is attending a meeting of fascists in Tokyo organised by an extreme right wing nationalist party who deny that Japan committed atrocities during the Second World War.

They are all also even going to visit "Yasukuni, a Shinto shrine in the capital that honours Japan's war dead, including 14 class-A war criminals".

I listened to this mumbling apologist for the mass murder, torture and starvation of British and Commonwealth 2nd World War prisoners (and the murder and rape of countless millions of other victims of Japanese racist aggression) as he tried to defend the indefensible. By coincidence on Thursday I visited the three military museums in Edinburgh Castle and can vividly remember the many harrowing accounts and pictures of Japanese executions and deliberate cruelty to Scottish Prisoners of War.

Putting aside mere common decency and humanity for the moment - how on earth can anyone who claim to support our armed forces and be a patriotic Brit possibly support the BNP after this latest crass exposure of its deep rooted Nazi cultism?

Hat-tip to Paul for YouTube video.

John's Labour blog

Thanks to Old Sailor for the heads-up.

BNP under fire as veterans challenge claims made by 85-year-old ‘war hero’ supporter

Bob Head, far right, on a BNP poster. Look closely at those medals.

The BNP are facing embarrassing questions over the authenticity of a D-Day veteran featured on their website pledging his support and acting as a ­recruiting sergeant

Bob Head, 85, who describes himself as a hero and Normandy veteran, issued a statement last week calling on his “fellow patriots” to “fight against the destruction of our beloved Britain”. But since then apparent inaccuracies in Mr Head’s account of his involvement in the Second World War have come to light.

Last night the BNP were accused by anti-fascism campaigners and Second World War veterans’ associations of using the British armed forces to promote their own extremist politics, and of duping the public in advance of the General Election. Despite repeated requests, the far-right party refused to answer any questions about Mr Head’s wartime career, or to allow him to be interviewed.

The Sunday Herald repeatedly asked BNP communications officers to put us in touch with Mr Head. However, the party – despite promoting him online and putting him on posters as part of their election campaign – refused to put us in contact. Nick Griffin, the party’s leader, also refused to answer any questions about Mr Head’s military claims.

The questions are about:

Mr Head’s service

In his message of support to the BNP, Mr Head says he was “attached to the 51st Highland Division” and that “at just 20 years old I was involved in the Normandy invasion”. But there is confusion over the precise nature of Mr Head’s role in D-Day, and whether he took part in the initial invasion or arrived in France some time later. The 51st Highland Division only landed in France in the second wave of fighting in Normandy, after D-Day.

Mr Head also claims his division took part in Operation Market Garden, which included the attempt to take the Rhine bridges at Arnhem. But this was not the case: the 51st division was not involved.

George Batts, the national secretary of the Normandy Veterans Association, said the BNP should be “treated with the contempt they deserve” if untruths had been told about Mr Head’s role.

Mr Batts, 89, said: “A few of my fellow veterans had seen Mr Head on the BNP website and asked me if I knew of him, as they had never heard of him. There are thousands of veterans but it is odd that not one person remembers him or knows who he is. If he does exist, he is an idiot and he will not get much support from any Normandy veterans I know. I really would rather not see this kind of thing from one of our own. We could all now be tarred with the same brush.”

Mr Batts served with the Royal Engineers and landed in France on D-Day in June 1944. He said no “decent, legitimate party” would knowingly deceive the public over such an important event. “The best thing we can do is ignore both Mr Head and the BNP,” he added.

Mr Head’s medals

A photograph of Mr Head on the BNP website, which is also being used on billboard posters, shows him wearing nine medals. However, doubts have been raised about the way they are being worn. Military historians claim the top three medals are recognised as from the Second World War. However, there is confusion about the provenance of the lower set and how he is wearing them.

Maurice Cousins, a researcher for the campaign group Nothing British, which opposes the BNP, was one of a number of critics of the party who raised concern about the medals. James Bethell, director of Nothing British, added his voice to the concerns. “Time and time again the BNP seeks to hijack the memory of our military values and fallen heroes to promote their racist and extremist agenda,” he said. “Veterans up and down the country are revolted by the BNP’s tactics.

“No self-respecting soldier who fought the Nazis would lend their name to a party which promotes racism, homophobia, misogyny and anti-semitism. Griffin should sack any BNP member who masquerades with medals they do not deserve.”

Mr Head’s commander

Mr Head’s online message of support says he was “under the command of the legendary General Bernard Montgomery, or Monty as he was affectionately known”. However, General Montgomery was the overall British commander of the 21st Army Group. The 51st Highland Division was commanded firstly by Major-General Charles Bullen-Smith and then by Maj-Gen Tom Rennie.

Referring to concerns about Mr Head, Diana M Henderson, research director of the Scots At War Trust, said: “To be honest, the whole thing is just a bit sad. Many veterans are still here today and will no doubt be disappointed by this. But most will just shake their heads – after all, they were actually there.”

The source of Mr Head’s words

Last week, another Second World War veteran, Kenneth Riley, appealed for people to sign up to the Hope Not Hate campaign, which fights against the BNP and their policies. Hope Not Hate claim that, within hours, some of Mr Riley’s words were put into the mouth of Mr Head.

Such phrases as “Today, the war isn’t being fought on the battlefield – but in the ballot box” and “If I had my health I would be out there with them. But I can’t – so I’m writing to ask you to volunteer for me” appear in both of the men’s statements.

A statement on the Hope Not Hate website said Mr Riley was “furious when he was told that the BNP had taken his own words … and used them in a fundraising email”. It continued: “Ken fought the Nazis … He continues to fight the Nazis, in the guise of the BNP, today.”

After refusing to offer any information about Mr Head’s record and refusing the Sunday Herald the right to interview him, Paul Golding, communications officer for the BNP, said: “Unfortunately Mr Head is approaching 90 years old and I think it would be unfair on him to pester him with media interviews.”

Sunday Herald

Spitfire is not BNP's to use, says Sikh pilot who fought the Nazis

One of the last surviving Indian Second World War fighter pilots has launched an attack on the BNP after it used images of a Spitfire in its campaign.

Mohinder Singh Pujji hit out at the far-Right party, and urged all British ethnic minorities not to shun the forces. The 92-year-old RAF Squadron Leader flew a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain and also met Sir Winston Churchill. He was one of only 18 Indian pilots in the RAF in the war, and the only Sikh to fly wearing his turban.

Sqn Ldr Pujji said he was outraged at the way the BNP has used imagery from the war: "The BNP are wrong to use the Spitfire as representative of their party. They forget people from different backgrounds helped in the Second World War. I am proof of this - I was flying a Spitfire. I also met Winston Churchill. Even in those days, there were ethnic minorities fighting for the British. I would recommend the armed forces for young people, regardless of race."

Sqn Ldr Pujji was born in Shimla, India, and volunteered for the RAF in 1940 after qualifying as a pilot in 1937.He was shot down twice and flew missions in North Africa and Burma, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war he flew commercial airlines, settling in Newham before moving to Gravesend. He was made a freeman of Newham in 2005.

Last week BNP leader Nick Griffin announced his intention to contest the Barking constituency, in Newham's neighbouring borough, at the election.

London Evening Standard

EasyJet apologises for trivialising the Holocaust in in-flight magazine

Berlin's Field of Stelae Holocaust Memorial which
commemorates the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide

EasyJet yesterday withdrew all copies of its in-flight magazine after it published pictures of designer-clad models posing in Berlin's Field of Stelae Holocaust Memorial which commemorates the six million Jewish victims of Nazi genocide. After Jewish campaigners accused the airline of 'trivialising the genocidal massacre of Jews', easyJet withdrew all copies - estimated at 250,000 - and issued a 'profuse apology'.

Labour MP Denis MacShane, who heads the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism, said: 'This is further evidence of the banalisation of anti-Semitism.'

The Field of Stelae Memorial is a 19,000 square metre site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs or 'stelae' arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field. It is designed to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. It is run by the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which said it does not permit commercial shoots and 'grants permission only to projects which are related to the memorial, the Holocaust or some aspect of commemoration'. The Foundation Memorial said it will be contacting the airline 'in order to clarify the circumstances of the photo shoot'.

A spokesman for easyJet said it 'profusely apologises to anyone who may be offended by the inappropriate fashion photo shoot at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin featured in this month's issue of the in-flight magazine.

'The magazine is produced by INK, an external publishing house, and easyJet were not aware of the images until they appeared in print. As a consequence we are now reviewing our relationship with the publisher and are withdrawing this month's issue from all flights.'

The airline said it was 'appalled by this insensitive and inconsiderate photo- shoot, the aim of which was to highlight some of Berlin's iconic landmarks and certainly no offence was meant'. The memorial, which cost £22million, was inaugurated on May 10, 2005, 60 years after the end of the Second World War.

Daily Mail

Lee Barnes: Jewish Bolsheviks to blame for Holocaust

When Lee John Barnes, legal officer of the British National Party, proclaims on his blog, “WW2 – Time To tell The Truth” you wonder if at long last the BNP leadership is simply going to tell its followers that Nazism was a uniquely hideous ideology; and that its innumerable crimes against humanity were epitomised by the Holocaust. But then you read the article, (penned as a response to Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express) and once again the grim reality of the BNP hits you between the eyes: because this is a poisonous and revealing article that depicts the Holocaust as a defensive action against “Jewish Bolsheviks”.

“…The Holocaust was the price ordinary Jews of Europe paid for the actions of the Bolshevik Jews in Russia after the Russian Revolution.

The fear of the Bolshevik threat, and the fact that so many Jews were Bolsheviks, allowed Hitler to link Jews with Bolshevism.

Therefore the Holocaust lays at the feet of those Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia and Germany whose actions allowed ordinary people, and ordinary Germans, to link Bolshevism with Jews.

Hitler used this linkage between Jews in Russia and the ideology of Bolshevism as the basis of his anti-Jewish propaganda, and this in turn led to the Holocaust itself.

Those like Rosa Luxemberg, a Jewish-Polish Bolshevik, were used by Hitler to create the perception that Germany was threatened with a Judeo-Bolshevik threat in Germany that linked Jews, Russia and Bolshevism – and this was, unfortunately, correct.”

The fact that Bolshevik scum like Rosa Luxemberg have statues erected in their honour in todays Germany shows how sick and degenerate Germany has become.

She would have turned Germany into a death camp like the Soviet Union, a charnel house of horror and murder with gulags filled with Germans, Jews, democrats and nationalists.

It was the actions of Bolshevik filth like Rosa Luxemberg in Germany during the Spartacist Uprising that allowed Hitler to equate Jews and Bolshevism – and thereby prepare the way for the Holocaust.

The issue that never gets debated in the media or the Hollywood movies is why did ordinary Germans participate in the Holocaust.

There are two reasons ;

1) They were ordered too [sic] as they would have been shot if they did’nt eg the troops involved in killings and shipping prisoners to concentration camps and concentration camp guards

2) They were terrified of Jewish Bolshevism as they saw what scum like Rosa Luxemberg did in Germany after WW1 and they feared that if the Communists took power, what happened in Russia would happen to them.

The Holocaust was not the product of ‘evil’ Germans, it was a product of the fear installed in ordinary Germans by the Russian Revolution and the actions of Jewish Bolsheviks like Rosa Luxemberg in Germany itself…”.

So, Barnes correctly plays the anti-antisemite card by repeatedly distinguishing between (bad, very bad) Bolshevik Jews and all other “ordinary” Jews, but how does this fit with his saying that Hitler was “unfortunately, correct” to link “Jews, Russia and Bolshevism”? There is no explicit condemnation in the article for the genocidal conclusions that Hitler and “ordinary Germans” (to use Barnes’s phrase) drew from this alleged Jewish/Bolshevik linkage. On the contrary, Barnes saves all of his hatred for one side only:

“…murdering Bolshevik scum…communist jackboot…Stalin, the insane butcher…[Jewish Bolshevik] blood frenzy…[Bolshevik] Jewish death cult…Soviet Union, a charnel house of horror and murder…Bolshevik filth…”.

The historical (in)accuracy of the article is another matter altogether. When an article correctly states that millions of Poles were murdered in WW2, you have to rub your eyes to believe that there really is no mention here of Nazis. Instead, its “the murdering Bolshevik scum that were murdering millions of Poles”. Indeed, when Barnes discusses who bears responsibility for WW2 and the mass murders of the period, the Nazis are once again invisible. Jews, however (especially of the Bolshevik variety) are certainly not:

“…The tragedy is that whilst the Bolsheviks from Russia were killing poles, the Jewish Bolsheviks in Russia that ran the secret police were killing millions of ethnic Russians, poles and their fellow Jews.

Stalin, the insane butcher that he was, was prepared to allow the Jewish Bolsheviks that ran the execution gangs and the secret police free rein to murder millions of his fellow ethnic Russians and Jews due to his insane paranoia.

These Jewish Bolsheviks were the driving force behind the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union, and they projected their self loathing upon not just Russians but also those Jews who were not militant atheists and Communists like them. In their blood frenzy anyone who was a nationalist, anti-communist, a democrat, religious, Jewish or non-Jewish, was regarded as an enemy…

…the secret police NKVD and other security units were primarily an Jewish death cult determined to liquidate as many Christians, religious Jews and non-Jewish Russians as possible.

The war has to be laid at the feet of the Bolsheviks, Stalin and the Jewish terrorists in the empire of horror created by Stalin and his willing executioners.

No Russian Revolution = No Hitler…”

Barnes is canny enough to know that he shouldn’t just be quoting Hitler on the Jewish-Bolshevik tie up. So, he plays the British patriot card and quotes Winston Churchill on the subject:

“Let us not forget the words of Winston Churchill himself.

In an article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8 1920, Winston Churchill asserted::

” There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews.”

For sure, the BNP has come a long way since the 1980s and early ’90s: when (then) BNP deputy leader Richard Edmonds would stand bedraggled on the corner of Brick Lane in his tatty green coat, peddling soggy copies of the antisemitic rag, “Holocaust News” to bemused locals. But it still hasn’t gone that far, and it is beyond chutzpah that Barnes should be quoting the one world statesman who consistently warned against Hitler and led the stand against Nazism. When the BNP is able to show even 1% of Churchill’s opposition to Nazism then perhaps they will have the right to quote him.

As for the other sources that Barnes has drawn upon for his noxious piece, he lists two at the end of the article:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1033.htm
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html

‘Information clearing house’ reads as if it’s a surplus store for left wing news, sort of where TK Maxx meets Indymedia. It’s a fairly typical amalgam of anti-Iraq and anti-Afghan War articles, and the compulsory attendant sneering at Israel and “Zionists”. (The fact that Barnes is referring his readers to it, says as much about the modern left as it does the modern right, but that’s another story…).

The letters ‘ihr’, however, will be brutally familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of the American far right and Holocaust denial scene. IHR stands for Institute for Historical Review and it was for many years the world’s leading supplier of Holocaust denial propaganda. It still trades in such filth, but the covers and titles of its propaganda are not quite as explicit as they once were. Still, when a senior BNP officer repeats the Hitlerite line that World War 2 and the Holocaust were defensive actions against Jewish Bolshevism – and he then links to the IHR website – you know that not too much has changed: even if Richard Edmonds is no longer hanging about on street corners.

CST

BNP's wreath laying branded 'insult to dead'

Members of the BNP party have been accused of 'insulting the war dead' by laying a remembrance wreath in Rugby.

That's the claim of two Labour councillors after the wreath was laid at the memorial gates in Hillmorton Road during last Sunday's remembrance service. Jim Shera, leader of the Rugby Labour party, said: "Given the BNP's fascist policies and the fact that their leader Nick Griffin has criticised Britain for going to war with Germany in World War Two, to lay a wreath with a BNP logo is an insult to so many who have given so much. It is also an insult to the values of human freedom and solidarity that our services have fought for.

"It may be that the individuals who laid a wreath with a BNP logo on were looking to remember people close to them as we all have friends and relatives who have been involved in conflict but party politics is not the way to do it."

Councillor Tom Mahoney, an ex-serviceman who fought in Northern Ireland, added: "Having served alongside people from all backgrounds, all of whom loved this nation and its values equally, the BNP's insensitive actions have left a bad taste. Surely they can't think that people are so stupid not to see the link between the BNP's politics of hatred based on race, ethnicity or background and what brave servicemen and women fought against in World War Two?"

However, Rugby's BNP organiser Ian Donaldson, the man who laid the wreath, said it was not a political decision.

"It was the first time we had laid a wreath in Rugby and it was simply to show our respects," he said. "If they are unhappy they are unhappy but everyone has a right to remember our war dead. People just hear myths about the BNP. They think we are all knuckle-dragging skin heads but that it is not the case."

Rugby Advertiser

Nazi collaborator living peacefully in Germany, avoiding arrest

A Lithuanian citizen convicted of collaborating with the Nazis and persecuting Jews during World War II is living peacefully in a small town in Germany.

As a member of the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Security Police, Dailide arrested Jews who were trying to escape the Vilna ghetto and handed them over to the Germans. He lied about his wartime activities on his U.S. immigration application after the war, was stripped of his American citizenship in the 1990s, and was ordered deported in 2003 following an investigation and legal proceedings that lasted more than a decade. Dailide fled arrest and settled here in Kirchberg, Saxony, where he has been living ever since.

Dailide is in ninth place on the the Simon Wiesenthal Center's most recent list of the 10 most wanted Nazis. A Vilnius court convicted him of war crimes in a trial that began in 2005, but he has remained free. Last month a high court in Lithuania ruled that he would not go to prison, partly because of his frail health. However, this Haaretz reporter saw him walking around town last week and carrying home his groceries.

Dailide, 87, lives with his wife in a modest apartment at Torstrasse 13, across the street from the town hall. His name is on the mailbox and intercom at the entrance. Dailide's German-born wife, whom he met in 1945 after escaping Lithuania, has relatives in Kirchberg, a town of 7,000 in what was formerly East Germany.

They live on his wife's German pension of 300 euros a month, and the remaining profits from the sale of their house in the U.S. Dailide's American Social Security privileges were revoked.

Dailide's conviction for war crimes relied on documents and testimony concerning a certain October 1941 night, when Dailide arrested 10 Jews who were attempting to escape from the ghetto, and another occasion on which he arrested two Polish Jews. What happened to those he arrested is not known, but it is safe to assume they were murdered along with 94 percent of Lithuanian Jewry, which numbered 220,000 people before the war.

Dailide's name surfaced in documents found in Lithuania's archives, which were examined after the Baltic state won independence. The Vilnius court rejected Dailide's protestations of innocence, and ruled he had lied in his testimony. Despite that, the court refrained from sentencing him to prison, as is permissible by law. The prosecution appealed this leniency, but the appeal was rejected last month. Jewish organizations say this is typical of Lithuania's refusal to punish Nazi collaborators.

Efraim Zuroff, who heads the Wiesenthal Center's Israel office, yesterday called the court's failure to sentence Dailide to prison scandalous, "and attests to the manner in which the Lithuanian government refuses to deal with the past."

Zuroff, who worked steadily to bring Dailide to trial in the U.S. and later in Lithuania, said the case is "a classic example of how a lack of political willingness to contend with the crimes of the past, along with extenuating circumstances stemming from advanced age, are letting Nazi criminals off the hook."

More than a dozen Lithuanian collaborators have been tried, but not one has gone to prison, a fact Zuroff says contributes to rising anti-Semitism in the Baltic country.

'I'm innocent'

Last Wednesday, Dailide opened the door to his apartment and invited this Haaretz correspondent and a local reporter to come in. Dailide's wife, who suffers from Alzheimer's and cancer, was reclining in her bedroom. Taking care of her is one of the reasons Dailide has remained free. He said he uses a tube to feed her.

During our hour-long meeting Dailide exhibited an excellent memory for details, but had trouble concentrating at times. The walls of the darkened apartment are decorated with photos of his family in the U.S. - his two sons live there - and of himself and his wife during the decades they spent in Cleveland, Ohio, and Florida. On the couch were numerous self-help books, a daily newspaper and dictionaries.

Dailide insists he is innocent. The documents used against him are misleading, he contends, based on a colleague's erroneous record in October 1941. In the other case, he had signed an arrest warrant on behalf of a policeman who was illiterate, he said.

He recounted his escape to Germany in 2004, when he was afraid U.S. authorities were going to arrest him. "I took my car, packed a few things and fled the house. I slept in motels and used phone cards to contact my family. A neighbor drove my wife to meet me periodically. A priest from Cleveland contacted a priest in Toronto, who agreed to put me up. I didn't use credit cards, I put our house up for sale, and I managed to cross the border into Canada using my Lithuanian passport. My wife met me in Toronto, and we flew from there to Frankfurt, took a train to Zwickau and arrived in Kirchberg."

Dailide revealed that despite the Lithuanian court's ruling that he undergo a new medical examination following his conviction, he has never been reexamined. "Last year my lawyer in Lithuania received a letter from the court demanding that I come to Lithuania for medical examinations. They noted that the trip would cost about 500 euros. We replied that we do not have the money - and they dispensed with the examination."

All of the information regarding the state of Dailide's health evidently stems from a few check-ups he had at his lawyer's recommendation during the trial in 2005. "Naturally I wanted to be acquitted in the trial, but nobody wants to go to prison in any case," he said.

He claims he suffers from chronic back pain and arthritis, and that he takes medication for high blood pressure.

A spokeswoman for the Lithuanian court said in response: "A medical board that convened for two years ruled that Dailide's state of health does not allow for his incarceration."

She said she would need to check whether the court had refrained from reexamining him. The results of her inquiry had not arrived as of press time.

'Everyone collaborated'

How is it that someone convicted of collaborating with the Nazis can live in Germany?

A German lawyer who specializes in immigration cases explained that the European Union's Nice Treaty gives everyone - even if convicted - the right to choose where to live. The treaty stipulates that Germany can deport an EU citizen only if he or she is causing "significant damage" to the public. Dailide apparently does not meet this criterion.

Dailide's neighbors became familiar with his story six months ago when a local paper ran a photo of the house under the banner "War Criminal in Kirchberg." A store owner in the adjacent building said she was shocked at first, but calmed down after she inquired into the details.

"He didn't shoot anyone, right? So he collaborated, so what? Everyone collaborated in that period," she said.

Haaretz

Sophie Scholl - The Final Days

Sophie Scholl - The Final Days sneaks almost unheralded into the Channel 4 schedule on Monday night (or Tuesday morning, if you want to be pedantic). One of a sequence of important modern German films dealing with its Nazi past, Sophie Scholl - The Final Days tells the tragic but ennobling story of The White Rose, a small anti-Nazi resistance group founded in Munich at the height of the Second World War. The film premiers on Channel 4 after midnight Monday November 5th at 00:30.

Synopsis:

In 1943, as Hitler continues to wage war across Europe, a group of college students mount an underground resistance movement in Munich. Dedicated expressly to the downfall of the monolithic Third Reich war machine, they call themselves the White Rose. One of its few female members, Sophie Scholl is captured during a dangerous mission to distribute pamphlets on campus with her brother Hans. Unwavering in her convictions and loyalty to the White Rose, her cross-examination by the Gestapo quickly escalates into a searing test of wills as Scholl delivers a passionate call to freedom and personal responsibility that is both haunting and timeless.

Click here to see trailer (requires Quicktime)
Click here for book
Click here to read more on the White Rose at Denise's personal blog

Sick yobs daub Nazi slogans on D Day veteran's house

War hero Arnold Holland was devastated after yobs daubed his home with swastikas and the words 'Nazi'.

Arnold, 85, a torpedo man with the Royal Navy throughout World War Two, survived but saw friends die as he protected vital convoys for the war effort. And yesterday he said : "I wonder now if it was all worth it. To have swastikas and 'Nazi' painted on my home is the final insult to someone who fought against Hitler and all he stood for. The ignorant idiots who did are even so ill-educated they don't even know which way the swastika emblem goes they painted it on the wrong way round." The graffiti is the latest attack on the home where Arnold lives with Annie, 84, his wife of 64 years who was born in the house in Normanton Springs, Sheffield.

And so far police have been unable to trace the vandals despite a series of incidents including: bitumen daubed on windows, breeze blocks hurled through windows, false adverts being placed saying the house is for sale.

But with angina, arthritis, only one lung and extremely severe digestion problems frail Arnold feels he can't bear to begin the latest clean-up operation.

He said: "We just don't know where to turn any more. We are in our eighties we shouldn't have to live like this, It's terrible and it's making us ill. I don't know why we are being picked on. We've lived here since we were married and until the last few years there was never any problem. But we can't put up with this all the time. We're really at the end of our tether. These people are just cowards who come in the night and do the damage. I don't know what they are trying to achieve."

Added Annie: "We rely on the law but it doesn't seem to get any better. We are just so fed up and now the swastikas are there for everybody to see."

Inspector Colin Mcfarlane of South Yorkshire Police said: "This is a serious matter and we are currently pursuing all possible lines of enquiry to identify the persons responsible. We are urging anyone who knows who is responsible to come forward."

Daily Mail

Release of Nazi war criminal angers Romans

A court ruling that a 93-year-old Nazi war criminal can leave house arrest every day to work has angered Italians and Jewish groups.

Former SS Captain Erich Priebke was jailed for life by a military court for the massacre of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves near Rome during the Second World War. The killings were in reprisal for a partisan attack on Germans. He was extradited to Italy in 1995 from Argentina, where he fled after the war.

Mr. Priebke is allowed to serve his time under house arrest for health reasons, in a Rome flat lent by a lawyer who campaigned for his freedom. A military court ruled he can also work at the office of the lawyer, who told reporters that Priebke would begin work next Monday using his knowledge of German, Spanish, English and French to do translations and work as a clerk.

The ruling lets him go to the office "every day, freely" and "go out to satisfy, at nearby places and for the time strictly necessary, the indispensable necessities of life" — meaning he can pop out for lunch.

Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni reacted by expressing his solidarity with "all the victims of Nazi fascist barbarianism, their families and the Jewish community".

"Rome cannot forget," he said.

Nazi hunters at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said the ruling "insults the family and friends of those murdered by Mr. Priebke and his cohorts" and was "based on a totally false assumption that, as an elderly person, Mr. Priebke deserves a measure of sympathy".

The president of Rome's ancient Jewish community, Leone Paserman, questioned why military tribunals believed Mr. Priebke was too old to be kept in a prison, but not too old to work.

"They should abolish life sentences if not even those who have committed crimes against humanity have to serve them," he said.

Politicians from the ruling centre-left alliance called for the city of Rome to stage a protest. Lawyer Paolo Giachini, who has given Mr. Priebke a home and now a job, defended the decision to grant him privileges, saying to Reuters: "All prisoners are equal and they deserve to be treated equally. We live in a state of law".

But in Rome's historic Jewish Ghetto, home to many of the Ardeatine Caves victims, banners appeared saying "Priebke Assassin" and "We don't forgive our killers."

Marco di Porto, whose grandfather died in the massacre, said real justice for Mr. Priebke "would be to treat him like his colleagues who were condemned in the Nuremberg trial in 1947."

Mr. Priebke admitted he participated in the massacre but said he was obeying orders on pain of death. In Argentina, he lived for half a century as a schoolmaster in the Andean town Bariloche.

Globe and Mail

Letter reveals Wodehouse's pain at being branded a collaborator

The emergence of a previously unpublished letter has given a fresh insight into the pain that was felt by PG Wodehouse at his depiction as a wartime traitor.

The reputation of Wodehouse, the creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, was hugely tarnished by a series of ill-advised broadcasts from Nazi Germany following his capture during the Second World War. Amid the subsequent furore, the much-loved author was compared in Parliament to the notorious Nazi propagandist, William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw.

Following an investigation, Wodehouse was cleared of any wrongdoing but chose to live out the rest of his days in self-imposed exile in America.

The letter, written to his publisher, David Grimsdick in 1953, gives fascinating access to Wodehouse's thoughts on the affair as he battled to salvage his career in the post-war years. Clearly, the legacy of the broadcast continued to occupy his mind more than a decade later.

Abandoning his usual humorous style, the author lambasts the security services, branding his MI5 interrogator a "priceless ass".

With the occasional hand-written addition in the margin the text also responds to Grimsdick's idea that the scripts of the Berlin broadcasts be published in book form to help redeem his character. He writes: "I certainly agree that we ought to print the broadcasts exactly as they were spoken."

After war broke out in 1939, Wodehouse, who had no interest in world affairs, failed to realise the seriousness of the conflict and remained at his seaside home in France. As the Germans swept into northern town of Le Touquet, less than a year later, he was shipped off to a civilian internment camp in Upper Silesia, now in Poland.

At the time he quipped: "If this is Upper Silesia, one must wonder what Lower Silesia must be like?"

While at the camp, he entertained his fellow prisoners with witty dialogues. Then, after being moved to Berlin a few months short of his 60th birthday, he was asked by German agents to use those dialogues as a basis for the series of radio broadcasts. But wartime England was in no mood for light-hearted banter and the five shows led to accusations of Nazi collaboration.

The journalist William Connor, Cassandra on the Daily Mirror, was commissioned to denounce him both in print and a primetime radio address. Gauging the furious public reaction libraries began banning his work from their shelves and politicians were quick to denounce him. In the House of Commons, Quintin Hogg, who later became Lord Hailsham, demanded he should be punished as a traitor and shot. His most bitter detractor was A A Milne a former classmate and friend.

Milne's attacks on Wodehouse led the author to later comment: "Nobody could be more anxious than myself ... that Alan Alexander Milne should trip over a loose bootlace and break his bloody neck."

After the liberation of Paris, Wodehouse was interrogated by officers from MI5 who found no sign of treasonable conduct and cleared him of any wrongdoing. In a letter to the Home Secretary in September 1944, Wodehouse admitted he had been "criminally foolish" but said the broadcasts were "purely comic" and designed to show a group of captured Englishmen keeping up spirits. But he failed to shake off the stigma of traitor and he spent the rest of his life in Long Island, America.

The letter, whose sale price has been set at £1,600 by Nigel Williams Rare Books for this week's Antiquarian Book Fare at Olympia West London, had been held in a private collection in America.

It touchingly reveals a close friendship he formed with a fellow PoW named Herbert Haskins. He opens the letter with instructions to send a copy of each of his books to the man's address in Birmingham.

He comments: "He...was such a pal of mine in camp."

Robert McCrum, author of Wodehouse: A Life, hailed the letter as an important find: "First it shows his obsession with the issue of the broadcast and his time in the camp. Second, he refers to his MI5 interrogator as an ass, which is unusual because he normally never gives anything away and is usually diplomatic and insouciant. Third it's a letter without laughs and shows he's micro-managing the spin of his post-war life.

"Ten years on, he was still fighting a rearguard action against his detractors. I think he was really hurt by the row over the broadcasts, though of course being Wodehouse, the quintessential Englishman, he would never let on."

Wodehouse was made a Knight of the British Empire shortly before his death in 1975 at the age of 93. It is widely believed that the honour was not given earlier because of lingering resentment about the German broadcasts. In a BBC interview, he said that he had no ambitions left now that he had been knighted and there was a waxwork of him in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum.

Despite the furore he remained one of country's most popular and prolific authors producing more than 90 books, hundreds of short stories, plays and musicals.

Independent

Pledge is broken as 'Nazis' march again

War nostalgia enthusiasts have broken their promise never to dress again as Nazi officers . . . for a SECOND time

And their outrageous antics have drawn strong criticism from Holocaust survivors and Jewish community leaders.

The annual War Weekend took place last weekend at restored railway stations in Bury and Ramsbottom. But participants broke a pledge once more, strutting about in German uniforms at the war re-enactment events.

However, the chairman of the East Lancashire Light Railway, Peter Duncan, who organised the event, said they banned anybody from dressing up as SS officers. He told the Jewish Telegraph: "I honestly don't believe that Holocaust survivors could be offended by the sight of a swastika. We banned guests from wearing SS uniforms, but not German uniforms. If you're going to have someone wearing a German uniform from the Second World War, then it is going to have a swastika insignia."

Councillors Michelle Wiseman and Peter Redstone told the Jewish Telegraph they were assured by the organisers that SS and Gestapo uniforms would be banned.

Pilkington Park representative Mr Redstone said: "It is disappointing that people have once again decided to wear Nazi uniforms. I'm sure that they'll bring back horrific memories for Holocaust survivors."

Holocaust survivor Meyer Hersh, of Whitefield, said any right-minded person would find the uniforms offensive.

Polish-born Mr Hersh, who spent 18 months in Auschwitz, fumed: "Swastikas are symbols of hatred and German uniforms should be banned from this event totally. The very sight of them can bring back the most horrific memories for survivors and it seems to me that they are glorifying the Germans."

But the railway's marketing director Graham Vevers said that they made it perfectly clear it would not be acceptable for guests to dress up in SS uniforms.

"However, we did notice that some people were wearing certain German uniforms and we asked them not to wear them again," he added.

Jewish Telegraph

Holocaust denier David Irving expelled from Warsaw book fair

British historian David Irving, a convicted Holocaust denier, was escorted out of an international book fair in Warsaw where he was planning to display his books, Polish organizers said Saturday. Irving, who was arrested in Austria after his arrival on a visit in November 2005, spent more than a year in an Austrian jail for denying the Nazis organized mass murder of six million Jews during World War Two.

"We asked him to leave," said Grzegorz Guzowski, the book fair organizer. "Our employees helped him pack up his things, and our car drove him to the address he specified."

He said Irving's publishers did not send materials detailing his work to the fair until a few hours before the deadline, giving organizers too little time to prevent the self-taught historian from setting up a table at the exhibition. Unlike many European countries, Polish law does not expressly forbid Holocaust denial, Warsaw University law professor Piotr Kruszynski told Reuters.

"Polish laws prohibiting the promotion of fascism and defamation of people on racial and religious grounds could conceivably be extended to include Irving's writings," he added.

Irving plans to remain in the country for a few more days to visit Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in Poland.

"It's ironic that it's come to a situation like this in Poland, which fought against restrictions on speech for such a long time," Irving was quoted by daily Zycie Warszawy as saying.

Haaretz

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

Quilt recalls horrors of Nazi cruelty

Quilts are pieces of cloth sewn together that in many cases tell history. Not all are designed to remember happy times. For Rosa Freund, the quilt she recently completed looks back on when she and others lived through the tyranny of Nazism.

A Holocaust survivor who started her life in concentration camps when she was 17 years old, Freund gathered patches from friends and then created a quilt to be a silent witness of those terrible days more than six decades ago when she was taken from her home on the outskirts of Budapest, Hungary.

One of the patches is of blue and white stripes, the colors of the uniform she wore in one camp. On the patch is a pocket that bears a gold number 672. "That was my work number," the small-framed woman said.

Above the pocket is a candle of remembrance, which Freund said is important for her. It marks the horrors she saw at places such as Birkenau, Auschwitz and other death camps.

While 672 is a number she remembers, Freund almost had another number. She was one of about 800 people standing in line and was near the place where her arm would have been tattooed with a number. "They ran out of ink before they got to me," she said.

So, unlike untold hundreds of thousands who were "inked" crudely with a number, Freund was not. She also took an old photo of her brother, Moshe; her sister, Klara and her taken before they were sent to concentration camps and had it transposed on a white piece of cloth and sewn to the quilt. The photo was discovered after World War II and was in her brother's possession. He was living in Israel.

Perhaps the most telling of her personally designed patches is one of three smokestacks and the buildings that those who were to be killed entered.

"I lived three blocks from the crematoria," Freund said.

Years later, those days of being near the crematoria came back in a haunting way. Freund said she was at a doctor's office in the United States because of a skin problem. The doctor decided to burn off some of her dry skin. The smell of her own burning flesh rose to her nostrils, bringing back the stench of bodies being burned more than 60 years ago.

Freund was one of five Holocaust survivors who made a trip recently to Fort Huachuca and Sierra Vista to speak about the time of death and destruction unleashed against Jews and others in Europe by Germany's Nazi regime.

The program was part of an educational process of the Holocaust survivors of southern Arizona who meet weekly at the Jewish Family and Children Service of Southern Arizona. For the past five years, the group has come to the post to speak to military members, civilians and schoolchildren. This year's event was called "Children in Crisis, Voices of the Holocaust."

Exhibits about the Holocaust from the Afikim Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to furthering Jewish life, also are on display.

Freund completed the quilt just before April 15, Holocaust Day. The quilt's appearance at the fort was the first of many planned for outside Tucson.

Tucson Citizen

He will be sadly missed

A concentration camp survivor who made his home in Solihull and campaigned to ensure the horrors of the Holocaust never became a forgotten piece of history has died at the age of 78.

German-born Paul Oppenheimer visited nearly 900 schools, colleges and community groups to give talks about his terrible experiences during the Second World War and also wrote a book about his life. In a newspaper interview three years ago, he said: "During my talks with students, I ask them whether or not they think that a situation similar to the Holocaust could happen in Britain today, by linking it with the BNP and asylum seekers. It's all about raising awareness."

In the wake of the Nazis taking power, Mr Oppenheimer's Jewish family left Berlin in 1936 to settle in Holland, in the hope of escaping persecution. But after the German invasion four years later, they were detained and spent time in a Dutch transit camp before being transported to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Mr Oppenheimer and his brother and sister, Rudi and Eve, survived but their parents died.

As the Allies advanced into Germany in the spring of 1945, the three children together with other inmates were put on a train travelling east - apparently to another camp - but were freed by the Russian Army. Mr Oppenheimer emigrated to Britain later that year and after training as an engineer spent much of his working life at Lucas Girling in Birmingham.

He became a world expert on braking systems and was awarded the MBE for his services to the motor industry in 1990. His autobiography five years later, was called From Belsen to Buckingham Palace. He took part in Solihull's first Holocaust Memorial Day in 2004.

Mr Oppenheimer, who lived in Riverside Drive, Solihull, died last Thursday, leaving a widow, Corinne, three children and seven grandchildren. Mrs Oppenheimer said: "He will be sadly missed by us, his family, but also by many other people. He was a wonderful man. For 40 years Paul didn't talk about his wartime experiences. But then he decided that people - particularly younger people - should know exactly what happened during the Holocaust. It was a cathartic experience for him, telling his story, and his talks became a kind of second career."

icSolihull

Hungarian prosecutors to probe Nazi war crimes suspect

Hungarian prosecutors are investigating a man suspected of war crimes committed during World War II, officials said Wednesday.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish advocacy group, last year identified Sandor Kepiro, 93, as having been convicted in the 1940s but never punished for his role in the killing of more than 1,200 people by Hungarian forces in Novi Sad, Serbia, during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in World War II.

Efraim Zuroff, director of the center's Israel office, provided authorities with documents from the 1944 verdict and asked that Kepiro's 10-year prison sentence for that crime be enforced. Last month, however, the Budapest Municipal Court said the 1944 ruling could not be enforced because a retrial shortly afterward annulled the sentence.

Kepiro, then a gendarmerie captain, has denied the accusations, saying he was a scapegoat in a show trial. The Budapest Prosecutor's Office is now investigating Kepiro's case, spokesman Attila Morvai said Wednesday.

The investigation for violent crimes against the civilian population was expected to take several months and it was not clear whether Kepiro would be interrogated. For now, the investigation into Kepiro's case was targeting an unknown suspect, Morvai added.

"According to Hungarian law, concrete proceedings are launched against an individual only after reasonable suspicion has been established," Morvai said.

Kepiro, who moved back to Hungary in 1996 after living for decades in Argentina, was identified by the Wiesenthal Center's "Operation: Last Chance," which aims to capture hundreds of alleged Nazi war crimes suspects who are still alive.

The Jerusalem Post

Long hidden files reveal last gasp of Nazi regime trying to hide crimes

New archive material has revealed the final sadistic spasm of the Nazis, at the end of the Second World War as they ordered thousands of concentration camp inmates on "death marches" into the heart of Germany and away from the advancing Allied forces that would have saved them.

"A handover is out of the question. The camp must be evacuated immediately. No prisoner must be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive," says a handwritten note, referring to Dachau. It is signed by the Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler and dated 14 April, 1945.

After the war a copy of Himmler's order was delivered from the Dachau camp archive to the International Tracing Service, or ITS, a unit of the International Committee of the Red Cross which manages a repository of records in the resort town of Bad Arolsen.

Now this storehouse of Nazi papers, sealed from public view for 60 years, is the focus of intense diplomacy among the 11 nations governing the Tracing Service as they meet this week in The Hague to discuss how to open them up to researchers. Selected reporters were given access to the files on condition that victims are not fully identified.

Among the rarely seen papers are questionnaires to mayors of German towns asking whether marchers passed through their precincts and how many prisoners died there. Also in the files are statements by survivors and onlookers.

"A prisoner stuck out a cup and begged with his eyes for water," said one woman in a statement filed in the archive. When she brought him a drink, "a guard took it from me and threw it in my face... I went on my way because I could no longer watch what was happening."

Himmler's 14 April order came three days after Buchenwald - one of the largest camps - was liberated by US forces.

In one of the largest evacuations, an estimated 60,000 prisoners were herded from the Auschwitz /Birkenau extermination camp. The archive has three volumes of tables and maps retracing the routes of 74 marches.

One chart follows the departure of 3,000 prisoners on 18 January, 1945.

They trekked by foot and train 310 miles through 20 named towns to Geppersdorf in what is now the Czech Republic. At Mikolai, 35 miles from Birkenau, 300-400 prisoners were "probably killed," the chart records. Nearly three months later, only 280 of the 3,000 reached their destination.

Store holds names of 17 millions

Stored in six buildings in Bad Arolsen are some 17.5 million names of individuals who were caught up in the machinery of persecution, forced labour, displacement and death.

Last year the 11 governing states agreed to allow researchers for the first time to comb through the 30 million to 50 million pages, so far used mainly to track missing persons, reunite families and substantiate compensation claims. But that decision must go through a lengthy ratification process - frustrating ageing Holocaust survivors seeking to know more of their own histories.

The death march documents, bound with string, illustrate the kind of raw material waiting to be refined into historical narratives. Besides originals, the archive has assembled duplicated records from museums and municipal libraries scattered across Europe and from the US national archive.

The Scotsman