Britons sympathetic to refugees

Two thirds of Britons are sympathetic to refugees coming to the country, according to a survey.

The poll for the Refugee Council found that 74% of women and 61% of men were sympathetic to those fleeing persecution to seek protection in the UK. It also found that most people "wildly overestimated" the numbers of refugees who were accepted to stay in the country.

The survey of more than 2,000 people by Opinium Research found that 44% of respondents believed 100,000 or more refugees were accepted in 2009. A further 33% thought the number was around 25,000. In fact, the true figure of those granted refugee status was 4,175.

The research also revealed significant misunderstanding around what a refugee is. Many respondents confused refugees with economic migrants from Poland and Eastern Europe.

The vast majority of Britons (84%) were "proud to be British" while 82% believed that protecting the most vulnerable was a core British value.

2011 marks the 60th anniversary of UN Convention for Refugees, which British lawyers played a key role in drafting. Donna Covey, Chief Executive of the Refugee Council, said: "British soldiers gave up their lives in World War II fighting to build a better world and protect others from persecution.

"It is a legacy that all British people should be proud of, and should serve to remind us that Britain still has an important role to play in offering safety to those forced to flee their homes to escape violence, torture and war in countries around the world today.

"How encouraging that, 60 years after the UN Convention for Refugees was created so many people remain sympathetic to refugees coming here, and that the majority believe protecting the most vulnerable is an intrinsic part of being British."

Copyright (c) Press Association Ltd. 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Guardian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Observer

German riots on 65th anniversary of Dresden bombing

Neo-nazis beaten back by anti-fascists at Dresden

More than 1000 neo-Nazis were confronted by around 10,000 of their left-wing opponents as they protested in Dresden on the 65th anniversary of the Allied bombing at the end of World War II.

More than 5,000 police were dispatched to try to prevent the groups from clashing but there have been scuffles on the streets and damage to property.

Tristana Moore has been tracking the day's events from the German capital Berlin. Watch the BBC report here.

Thanks to Sue for the heads-up. :-)

Polish police find stolen Auschwitz gate sign

The Auschwitz 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign - damaged but back where it belongs

Police said today that they have found the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign that was stolen on Friday from the gate of the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.

Police spokeswoman Katarzyna Padlo told The Associated Press that the sign was found in northern Poland. She said police also detained five men aged between 25 and 39 who are being transported to Krakow for questioning. Another spokesman, Dariusz Nowak, said the sign was cut into three pieces, each containing one of the words. He said the police were planning a news conference in Krakow this Monday.

The police refused to divulge any details of the circumstances in which the sign was found or to speculate on the motive of the perpetrators. Krakow police are in charge of the investigation because they are the regional command for the area including the Auschwitz museum.

The sign that topped a main gate at the Auschwitz memorial site was stolen before dawn on Friday. State authorities made finding it a priority and appealed to all Poles for assistance. More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Gypsies,Poles and others, died in the gas chambers or from starvation and disease while performing forced labor at Auschwitz which Nazi Germany built in occupied Poland during World War II.

The camp, which became the world's largest Jewish cemetery, was liberated by the Soviet troops on Jan.27, 1945. The museum is preparing for solemn observations of the 65th anniversary of liberation.

Independent

Hunt for Auschwitz Arbeit Macht Frei sign thieves

Polish police are using a sniffer dog in their search for thieves who took the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign over the entrance to Auschwitz.

Detectives and other police officers were sent to the site of the former Nazi camp where more than one million people, mostly Jewish, were murdered. A replica of the sign, which translates as "Work Sets You Free", has been put up temporarily.

The theft on Friday has caused outrage in Israel, Poland and elsewhere. The theft of such a symbolic object is an attack on the memory of the Holocaust, and an escalation from those elements that would like to return us to darker days," said Avner Shalev from the Yad Vashem memorial centre in Jerusalem. "I call on all enlightened forces in the world who fight against anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and the hatred of the other to join together to combat these trends."

In Brussels, European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek, a former Polish prime minister, appealed to the thieves to return the sign. "Give it back out of respect for the suffering of over a million victims, murdered in this Nazi camp, the biggest cemetery of humankind," he said.

The wrought-iron sign was half-unscrewed, half-torn off from above the death camp's gate between 0330 and 0500 on Friday, said a police spokeswoman. Investigators say at least two people would have been needed to steal the 5-m (16-ft), 40-kg (90-lb) sign.

Police said they were reviewing footage from a surveillance camera that overlooks the entrance gate and the road beyond but declined to say whether the crime was recorded, The Associated Press news agency reports.

Auschwitz museum spokesman Jaroslaw Mensfelt said it might have been too dark for the camera to have captured images. He said the thieves apparently carried the sign 300m (yards) to an opening in a concrete wall. The opening was left intentionally to preserve a poplar tree dating back to the time of World War II. Four metal bars that had blocked the opening had been cut and footprints in the snow led from the wall opening to the nearby road, where police presume the sign was loaded on to a vehicle.

Another police official said earlier that while all leads were being considered, police were focusing on a theft ordered by a private collector or a group of individuals. It is the first time the sign, made by Polish prisoners, has been stolen since it was erected in 1940. A 5,000-zloty ($1,700; £1,050) reward has been offered for information leading to the capture of the thieves.

Auschwitz, which receives more than a million visitors a year, has been run as a state museum since 1947. Germany recently pledged 60m euros ($86m) to an endowment fund to help preserve the camp.

BBC

Shoes And Nazi Bazookas - The Prehistory Of Adidas And Puma

During World War II, industries big and small all over Germany became part of Hitler's massive war machine. The change even affected the predecessor of footwear legends Adidas and Puma, which - oddly enough - manufactured Germany's version of the bazooka.

When the starting shot rang out, the athletes surged forward. Jesse Owens dug his spikes deep into the racing track of Berlin's Olympic Stadium - and the best sprinter of his day dominated the 100 meters race to win a gold medal at the 1936 Olympic Games. America's black superstar took home a total of four gold medals. And each of his victories represented minor triumphs for two German brothers as well - Adolf ("Adi") and Rudolf Dassler - the manufacturers of the sprinting shoes that carried the sprinter of the century from victory to victory.

Of course, success did not come as a total surprise. Herzogenaurach, the Dasslers' home town in Bavaria, has a long tradition as a center for shoe making. In 1922, for example, it boasted 112 shoe makers drawn from a population of 3,500. It was here, in 1924, that Adolf and Rudolf Dassler founded the "Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory" to specialize in athletic shoes. During the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, a German sprinter wearing Dassler spikes took the bronze medal. But it was the legendary shoes of Owens that established the Dasslers' worldwide reputation and laid the foundation for two exceptional careers. After the war, Adi and Rudolf went their separate ways. Each would build up one of West Germany's showpiece sports companies - one Adidas, the other Puma.

The history of the Dasslers - who both joined the Nazi Party in 1933 - wouldn't be complete without one chapter from World War II: In 1944, there was suddenly a spike in the number of Allied tanks being blown apart by German fire. The culprit was the latest anti-tank rocket launcher, nicknamed the "Panzerschreck" ("Tank Terror"). This extremely effective weapon petrified Allied tank crews - and it was manufactured in the same factory that had developed Owens' shoes only eight years earlier.

Welding Replaces Stitching

This little-known excursion into the war industry by the two famous shoemakers was hardly an isolated case. Hitler's regime used many small and medium-sized companies to produce military equipment and armaments. "For the 'total war' proclaimed by Goebbels in early 1943, the Nazis needed a total war economy," explains Lutz Budrass, a business historian at the University of Bochum.

Similar things were happening all across the country - and German industry increasingly resembled one big military machine. The Hugo Boss textile factory, for example, in the southern German town of Metzingen, was also a military supplier. Beginning in late 1944, instead of suits and leather jackets, workers on the production floors of the future fashion czar were making ball bearings. Germany's flagship airline Lufthansa manufactured radar equipment for the Luftwaffe, Germany's air force, and furniture companies made parts for fighter jets like the Heinkel He 162, one of the first military jets in the world. Given the scarcity of metal, the jet was primarily made of wood.

Four years into World War II, not much Olympic glory was left among the shoemakers of Herzogenaurach. The German army was on the retreat on virtually all fronts, bombs were raining down on German cities and resources were running short. December 1943 marked the final blow for the town's shoe production. Hitler's regime ordered a halt to all civilian business operations, and the shoe-making machines in the Dassler Brothers' production hall were replaced with spot-welding equipment for making weapons. Before long, nearly everyone in Herzogenaurach was working for the military. The local lederhosen factory stopped making the traditional Bavarian leather shorts and, instead, started producing bread bags and rucksacks for soldiers. A nearby family business made torpedo parts for the navy.

A Completely Militarized Industrial Landscape

The German army fashioned the Dasslers' Panzerschreck after the American bazooka: a shoulder-fired steel tube; weight 9.3 kilograms (20.5 lbs); length 164 centimeters (5.4 feet); with a range of up to 180 meters (590 feet). A rocket fired from the Panzerschreck could penetrate steel armor 20 centimeters (8 inches) thick.

Responsibility for actually producing the new weapon lay with the military contractor Schricker & Co., located in the nearby town of Vach. Given the increasingly devastating British and American air raids on German cities, Schricker decided to transfer assembly operations to Herzogenaurach. Freight cars filled with parts for the "Stove Pipe" - as the Panzerschreck was popularly called on account of its simple construction - came to Dassler by rail.

Inside the plant, shoe seamstresses - who had quickly been given makeshift training to work in the armaments industry - welded sights and blast shields onto the pipes. French forced laborers were also on the production line. "The construction of the Panzerschreck was so simple that, given a little practice, even unskilled workers had hardly any problems manufacturing it," one former employee told local historian Manfred Welker. Yet, even with the simple design, German army inspectors still found themselves discarding many of the weapons made by Herzogenaurach's amateurs on account of their flaws. The complicated and dangerous production of the rockets, though, continued to be handled by the professionals in Vach.

An Answer to the Tank, Too Late

On the front, German soldiers eagerly awaited the Dassler weapon. Despite its exceedingly simple design, it was still remarkably effective. "The Panzerschreck represented a quantum leap for the infantry in terms of anti-tank defense," explains Christian Hartmann, a military historian at the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ). "It was the first weapon that German infantrymen fighting on their own could use to destroy tanks from a distance."

In view of the rapidly advancing Allied armies, which were vastly superior in terms of sheer numbers, the Nazis increasingly propagated the idea that anyone could knock out tanks using only the Panzerschreck or its little brother, the single-use "Panzerfaust" ("Tank Fist"). An illustrated field booklet entitled "Der Panzerknacker" ("The Tank Buster"), for example, included awkward rhythms meant to help German soldiers recognize and combat enemy tanks, such as: "Notice first the fine design / sloping armor and curving line / five road wheels, study it well / that's the T-34, and that's how you tell."

Wherever the specially trained "tank-destroying detachments" made an appearance, there was a significant increase in the number of enemy tanks knocked out. In March 1945, there were some 92,000 Panzerschrecks being used on the crumbling fronts, but the weapons had arrived too late to have a major influence on the war's outcome. It wasn't until 1944 that Panzerschrecks and Panzerfausts could be deployed on a large scale, but by then the military's initial good fortune had long since run out. "If large numbers of Panzerschrecks could have been deployed during the Russian campaign in 1941, Moscow would have probably fallen," says Hartmann. As it turned out, the "stove pipe" was just one of many newly developed weapons that, at best, postponed the collapse of the fronts - and thereby only prolonged the horror of the war.

A Stroke of American Luck

The Dasslers' brief career as weapons manufacturers nearly proved their undoing. In April 1945, when the Americans marched into Herzogenaurach, U.S. tanks pulled up in front of the factory. The soldiers were still debating whether they should destroy the building when Adi's wife, Kathe, walked out and charmingly convinced the G.I.s that the company and its employees were only interested in manufacturing sports shoes.

What's more, after the factory was saved, the occupying forces turned out to be a blessing for the two shoemakers. The U.S. Air Force set up its own operations at the former military air base in Herzogenaurach. When the sports-crazy Americans got wind of the fact that the Dassler brothers had produced the shoes that Jesse Owens had run in, they started buying all the products the company could produce. Large orders for footwear for basketball and baseball (and hockey) soon rolled in and gave the company its first boost on the road to becoming a worldwide success story.

The dark chapter as a wartime weapons manufacturer was quickly forgotten at the successor companies, Adidas and Puma. Today, both firms are corporations owned by investors spread across the world. In the quiet community of Herzogenaurach, though, it was a legacy that would be felt for many years to come - and seen, in the pipes put to use all over town as gutters and fence posts rather than as the Panzerschrecks they had originally been meant for.

FIP

France responsible for sending Jews to concentration camps, says court

Jews arriving at Pithiviers, one of the French
camps from which they were deported, in 1941.

First legal admission of country's collaboration in Nazi atrocities

France's highest court put an end to decades of legal timidity and moral taboo yesterday when it issued a ruling recognising the state's responsibility in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during the second world war.

Citing "mistakes" made by the collaborationist Vichy regime, the council of state said the government's share of blame was clear in acts which had not been forced on it by the occupiers and which "allowed or facilitated the deportation from France of victims of antisemitism".

The ruling, which will be recorded in the official state legislative journal, marks the first time any French judicial body has acknowledged in such stark terms the government's role in Nazi-era atrocities.

Calling for a "formal admission of the state's responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered", the court said it had concluded that acts such as the arrest, internment and dispatching of Jews to transit camps were clear indicators of the government's guilt. "As they led to the deportation of people considered Jewish by the Vichy regime, the acts and activities of the state ... became its responsibility," it added.

The move was welcomed by historians and Jewish groups, many of whom have expressed disbelief at France's unwillingness to face up to its actions. From 1942 to 1944 a stream of Jews were rounded up by Vichy authorities, and by the end of the war some 76,000 had been deported to Nazi concentration camps. Although under the overall control of the SS, the main transit camp of Drancy, from which 63,000 people were sent to their deaths, was run by Paris's police force.

"It is a decision with which I am content," Serge Klarsfeld, the leading French historian of the Holocaust, told Le Figaro. "France is showing now that she is at the forefront of countries which are confronting their past, which was not the case even in the 1990s."

For decades after the war, the suffering of French Jews at the hands of their countrymen was buried, along with the shame of collaboration, at the back of national consciousness. François Mitterand, president from 1981 until 1995, insisted France "was never involved" in ill-treatment of its Jewish population, and it was not until Jacques Chirac in 1995 that a head of state admitted France's "inescapable guilt".

Yesterday's ruling, issued in connection with the individual case of a deportee's daughter requesting damages, did however find that the current French state had largely made up for the sins of its past. Apparently ruling out any reparations for victims or their families, the court said the acts had been "compensated for" through various means since 1945.

Klarsfeld, whose postwar research was the first to reveal the extent of France's complicity in the deportations, agreed that enough had been done in recent years. "The people asking now for other forms of compensation have often already got something with the measures in place," he said.

Guardian

BNP To Stand In Southport

The British National Party have selected Liverpool woman Carol Atherton to stand in the Norwood ward. However she faces stiff competition from sitting Liberal Democrat councillor Frank Rimmer.

Despite fighting several local council elections in the resort, the BNP have yet to win a single ward. Previous candidates include Michael McDermott who is fighting in the south of the borough on Thursday, May 3.

Sefton Trade Union Council (TUC) has condemned the presence of BNP candidates in the forthcoming local elections.

Secretary Danny McGowan stated: "The BNP have attempted to soften their image and hide their racist and violent criminality to win votes. But, like wolves in sheep clothing, they remain a fascist organisation opposed to the democratic process they are seeking to exploit.

"Half a century after we defeated fascism in World War 2, racist graffiti and swastikas are now seen again in our community, in areas like Litherland and around South Road, Waterloo. It’s an unlikely co-incidence that this has accompanied recent BNP campaigns in these areas.

"The BNP spread lies, fear and hatred wherever they go. We are confident, however, that local people will not ‘swallow their poison’ and our community will not be divided. Sefton trade unionists are joining with other local people and anti-racists in a broad based campaign to ensure hope wins over hate here.”

Champion Newspapers