Former neo-Nazi jailed for Auschwitz sign theft

Two-year sentence for Swede who masterminded the crime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Independent

Auschwitz hero Denis Avey in line for Israeli honour

A former British prisoner of war who helped a Jewish inmate survive Auschwitz is being considered for a major honour, the BBC has learned

Denis Avey, 91, who lives in Derbyshire, helped save Ernst Lobethall, a German Jew from Breslau. He is being considered for the title of "Righteous Among the Nations" by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. The story emerged following a recent BBC investigation.

Mr Avey said it would be "marvellous" if he were chosen for the title, which is awarded to those who helped save Jewish people. It is an accolade previously awarded to the likes of Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who is thought to have saved more than a thousand Jews from the Holocaust and whose story was immortalised in the Hollywood film Schindler's List.

Some 22,000 individuals, mostly from central and eastern Europe, have received the treasured title so far, but if he is successful Mr Avey will become only the 15th British citizen to be honoured in Jerusalem's Garden of the Righteous. The standard is high, the conditions are rigorous and their research is only now beginning. In the end a commission headed by a retired Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel has to make the decision.

The authorities at Yad Vashem took up the case after BBC viewers and listeners contacted them directly on hearing his moving story.

Mr Avey described the news that he was being considered for the award as "fantastic". He was no ordinary British soldier and he became an extraordinary prisoner of war. He had fought with special forces against General Rommel's Africa Korps behind enemy lines in the desert. He was wounded and captured by the Germans, and the ship transporting to him to captivity was sunk. He escaped into the sea and survived the explosion of depth charges close by.

After 20 hours in the water he made it to land in southern Greece. He then hiked the length of the Peloponnese before being recaptured and sent to Germany as a POW. After two spells in a punishment camp and being sent to work down a mine, he was transported to a compound for British prisoners connected to a sprawling concentration camp. Its name - then unremarkable - was Auschwitz.

There the "fiery" soldier with red hair and a Van Dyck beard saw at first hand the suffering of the Jewish victims of Hitler's slave labour programmes. Although in the British camp they enjoyed better conditions, by day they worked alongside the Jewish prisoners.

He told the BBC how he had hatched an audacious plan to swap clothes with a Jewish inmate to smuggle himself into their sector of the camp. He fully intended to get as far as Birkenau, where the gas chambers and crematoria were constantly in operation, belching acrid fumes. He only made it as far as Auschwitz III, where he spent the night on two occasions. Detection, he said, would have meant death.

"They'd have shot me out of hand", he said. "I took a hell of a chance."

He was determined to bear witness with the intention of telling the world after the war. He recalled the camp as being "evil" like "Hell on earth". But it is for his part in helping Mr Lobethall, later Ernie Lobet, that he could yet be honoured. Through letters to his mother, Mr Avey succeeded in contacting Ernst's sister Susana, who had escaped to England before the war.

He arranged for cigarettes - as valuable as gold in the camps - to be sent to him, which he then smuggled in to Ernst in the Jewish camp. But he had always assumed that his erstwhile friend had died in the icy death march when the camps were cleared by the SS as the Russians advanced. Only after the BBC investigation did Mr Avey learn that Mr Lobethall had survived and that it was his smuggled cigarettes that had given him his chance.

The evidence corroborating Mr Avey's story appeared in a video interview that Mr Lobethall had given to the Shoah Foundation, which gathers the testimonies of the camp survivors. He had recorded it towards the end of his life in 1995. In it he described the soldier he knew only as "Ginger" who smuggled cigarettes, chocolate and even a letter from his sister in England into the Jewish camp for him. He said it was like being given the "Rockefeller Centre".

Trading the cigarettes for favours, Mr Lobethall had heavy soles put on his boots, and that saved his life during the death march in 1945 when tens of thousands had died. Anyone who stumbled had been shot.

"They fell like flies," he recalled in the video.

A special commission in Jerusalem will determine on the basis of the evidence whether Mr Avey receives the honour and becomes one of the "righteous". Successful or not, his remarkable story is now getting the attention it deserves.

"This title is really a very high honour," says Irena Steinfeldt of Yad Vashem. "Apparently this story touched people. Denis Avey never knew this (Mr) Lobethall. He could just as well have said 'I am a prisoner of war, I don't know when I will see my family, I am in no position to help anyone else.'. It is a noble and extraordinary act."

After the war Mr Lobethall made it to the United States, and enjoyed a successful and prosperous life. And despite being drafted into the Korean War, he remained a man of "unfailing good cheer" until the end of his days, according to a life-long friend who also heard the original broadcast and contacted the BBC. He died in 2002 and never found out the real name of the soldier he called "Ginger" whose buccaneering spirit gave him a chance to live.

BBC

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

Arbeit Macht Frei sign stolen from Auschwitz

Sign that spanned entrance to former Nazi death camp in Poland removed overnight

Thieves removed the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that spanned the entrance to the former Auschwitz death camp

The iron sign bearing the Nazi slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" that spanned the main entrance to the former Auschwitz death camp was stolen before dawn today, Polish police said. The sign with the German words for "Work Sets You Free" is believed to have been stolen from the gates of the Auschwitz memorial between 3.30am and 5am, when museum guards noticed it was missing and alerted authorities, said a police spokeswoman, Katarzyna Padlo.

The five-metre-long, 40kg sign across a gate at the main entrance to the former Nazi death camp in southern Poland, where more than 1 million people died during the second world war, was unscrewed on one side and pulled off on the other, Padlo said. A spokesman for the Auschwitz museum, Pawel Sawicki, called the theft a "desecration" and said it was shocking that the tragic history of the site did not stop the thieves. In Brussels, the European parliament president, Jerry Burzek, appealed for the sign to be returned "out of respect for the suffering of over a million victims".

Another museum spokesman, Jaroslaw Mensfelt, said the thieves carried the sign 300 metres to an opening in a barbed-wire gap in a concrete wall. The opening had been left intentionally to preserve a poplar tree dating back to the time of the war.

Fifty criminal investigators and a sniffer dog were sent to the grounds of the vast former death camp, where barracks, watchtowers and the ruins of gas chambers stand as testament to the atrocities inflicted by Nazi Germany on Jews, Gypsies and others. The sniffer dog led police to a spot outside the wall where the sign left an imprint in freshly fallen snow, then to a roadside where the sign appeared to have been loaded on to a getaway vehicle. A 5,000-zloty (£1,000) reward has been offered to anyone who can help track down the perpetrators.

Padlo said there were no suspects but police were pursuing several theories. Another police spokesman told TVP Info television: "The whole area is under surveillance. There are many cameras there. We are now analysing the film. I hope we will find the trail."

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem, told Reuters the theft was "an attack on the memory of the Holocaust". Noach Flug, president of the International Auschwitz Committee in Jerusalem, said it "deeply unsettles the survivors" and the sign "has to be found".

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, said the thieves were guilty of desecrating a site of immense importance.

"If they are pranksters, they'd have to be sick pranksters, or someone with a political agenda. But whoever has done it has desecrated world memory," he said. "Auschwitz has to stand intact because without it, we are without the world's greatest physical reminder of what we are capable of doing to each other."

Sawicki said the museum authorities had already replaced the sign with a replica, which was used briefly a few years ago when the original was being repaired.

The original sign was made in the summer of 1940 by non-Jewish Polish inmates of Auschwitz in an iron workshop at the camp. After occupying Poland in 1939, the Nazis established the Auschwitz I camp in the southern Polish city of Oswiecim and initially used it for German political prisoners and non-Jewish Polish prisoners.

"We believe that the perpetrators will be found soon and the inscription will be returned to its place," said Sawicki.

The slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" was used at the entrances to other Nazi camps, including Dachau and Sachsenhausen, but the long, curving sign at Auschwitz is perhaps the best known. More than a million people visit the Auschwitz site every year, but the barracks and other structures are in a state of disrepair and Polish authorities have been struggling to find the funds to carry out conservation work. This week, Germany pledged €60m to an endowment that will fund long-term preservation work – half the amount that Auschwitz memorial museum officials say is needed.

Guardian

German Newspaper Gives Blueprints for Nazi Death Camp to Israel

Sketched on yellowing parchment, the 29 blueprints presented to Israel's prime minister
Thursday lay out the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in chilling detail, with gas chambers,
crematoria, delousing facilities and watch towers drawn to scale.

"There are those who deny that the Holocaust happened," Benjamin Netanyahu said as he accepted the documents as a gift to Israel's Holocaust memorial, where they will go on display next year. "Let them come to Jerusalem and look at these plans, these plans for the factory of death."

Netanyahu lingered over the large sheets spread on a table. Stamped with the Nazi abbreviation for concentration camp "K.L. Auschwitz," one of the largest featured multi-colored sketches, with barracks and even latrines drawn in detail. Other smaller sheets showed architectural designs of individual buildings, drawn from various angles.

The Israeli leader was accompanied by his wife, Sara, whose father was the only member of his family to survive the Nazi genocide that killed 6 million Jews during World War II. She watched somberly as the documents, which date from 1941 to 1943, were unfolded. Also present was Yossi Peled, an Israeli Cabinet minister and former general whose father was killed by the Nazis and whose mother survived Auschwitz in one of the barracks detailed in the blueprints. Peled himself was hidden until age 7 by a family in Belgium who raised him as a Christian. He discovered his Jewish roots in 1948 and was taken to Israel two years later.

In Germany for a visit that combined talks on the Mideast conflict with acknowledgments of the painful past that binds the two countries, Netanyahu drew a clear parallel between the events of the Nazi era and the present day. The world did not do enough to stop the murder of Europe's Jews, he said, and must be careful now to take rapid action against "armed barbarism."

"We cannot allow those who wish to perpetrate mass death, those who call for the destruction of the Jewish people or the Jewish state to go unchallenged," Netanyahu said.

Though he did not explicitly mention Iran, his comments were a clear reference to the Tehran regime and its nuclear program, which Israel sees as a grave threat and wants blocked by stronger international sanctions. Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be "wiped off the map."

Axel Springer Verlag, the publisher of the mass circulation Bild newspaper, obtained the Auschwitz blueprints last year from a German man who said he found them when cleaning out an apartment in what was formerly East Berlin. The publisher and Germany's federal archive have confirmed the documents' authenticity.

Numbering found on the back of the plans indicates they may have been taken from an archive, possibly the collection of documents on the Third Reich kept by the Stasi.

The documents were displayed for several weeks earlier this year in the lobby of Bild's headquarters in Berlin. The newspaper's editor, Kai Diekmann, said the publisher decided to give the sketches to Israel to ensure that as many people as possible could see them.

"These plans have an important function — they remind us of a crime that, with the passing of time, seems ever more incomprehensible," Diekmann said. "It is of the utmost importance to continue to be reminded of it."

While they are not the only original Auschwitz blueprints that still exist — others were captured by the Soviet Red Army and brought to Moscow — they will be the first for Israel's Yad Vashem memorial, its chairman, Avner Shalev, told The Associated Press.

"This set is a very early one, which was found here in Berlin, from the autumn of '41," Shalev said. "It brings a better understanding of the whole process, and the intention of the planners of the complex, and from this perspective it is important."

Shalev said the sketches will be on display in Jerusalem beginning Jan. 27 as part of a special exhibit marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The blueprints include general plans for the original Auschwitz camp and the expansion of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where most of the killings were carried out. They were initialed by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess.

One of the drawings, dated Oct. 14, 1941, shows plans for construction of a "Waffen SS prisoner of war camp" with rows of what appear to be barracks. A notation in the bottom right says it was drafted by a prisoner identified only by his number: "Nr. 471."

German historian Ralf Georg Reuth, who reviewed the documents after they were discovered, noted that it was common to have prisoners draw up the plans for gas chambers where they would later be killed. More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died in the gas chambers or through forced labor, disease or starvation at Auschwitz, which the Nazis built after occupying Poland.

Later Thursday, Netanyahu visited a house on Berlin's Wannsee Lake that was the site of an infamous Jan. 20, 1942, meeting at which top Nazis formalized plans for the systematic killing of Europe's Jewish population.

Germany and Israel, which was established three years after the Nazi defeat, today enjoy close ties. On Thursday, Chancellor Angela Merkel underlined Germany's special commitment, saying it was her country's obligation to "defend Israel always."

After those statements, she and Netanyahu shared a spontaneous and warm handshake.

Fox News

Jane Haining, Scotland's Schindler

Campaigners urge recognition for the missionary who sacrificed her life in Auschwitz to stay with the Jewish children in her care.

A British woman who sacrificed her life by refusing to leave Jewish orphans in her care is being hailed as one of the forgotten heroes of the Holocaust. Jane Haining's story of personal sacrifice and bravery is emerging only now, nearly 65 years after her death. She is among a list of British people whose selfless heroism during the Second World War should be recognised posthumously in the honours list, campaigners say.

A Presbyterian missionary, Miss Haining is one of only 10 Scottish people believed to have been killed in a Nazi death camp. After the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944, she was ordered to leave the school in Budapest where she worked and return to Scotland. But the 47-year-old refused, saying: "If these children need me in the days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in the days of darkness?"

Miss Haining was ordered to sew yellow Stars of David on the clothes of the orphan girls. A month later she was arrested for "offences" that included spying, working with Jews and listening to the BBC. She admitted to all but political activity and was deported to Auschwitz, tattooed with the number 79467, along with some of her wards. She was gassed in August that year.

Gordon Brown has praised Haining's bravery in his latest book, Wartime Courage: Stories of Extraordinary Courage by Ordinary Men and Women in World War Two, and he spoke about her on his first trip to Israel as Prime Minister this summer.

A film of her life is in production, drawing comparisons to Oskar Schindler, the industrialist who saved more than 1,200 Jews and whose story was portrayed in the 1993 film Schindler's List. BBC Scotland will broadcast a programme about her on 29 December.

The personal acts of resistance of Miss Haining and others like her are also being remembered on Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January, whose theme in 2009 is "Stand Up to Hatred". The Holocaust Educational Trust is campaigning for the Government to change the honours system to allow posthumous knighthoods and honours to be awarded to British rescuers such as Frank Foley, the MI6 spy who is known as the "Stourbridge Schindler" for saving thousands of Jews.

Miss Haining's name is inscribed near to Schindler's on the Holocaust memorial at Yad Vashem in Israel.

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: "Jane Haining was a remarkable woman who took a stand during the Holocaust by refusing to leave the Jewish orphans in her care in Budapest, defying calls for her to return to Scotland. Her form of resistance ultimately ended with the sacrifice of her own life and today stands as an example of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things that make such a difference to others' lives.

"At the Holocaust Educational Trust we believe that the time is right to raise awareness of British Holocaust heroes and heroines. Their brave acts have never been appropriately recognised in this country, so we are calling on the Government to review the statutes governing the honours system so these British heroes can receive a posthumous honour they truly deserve."

Miss Haining, from the village of Dunscore in Dumfries and Galloway, worked in Glasgow before volunteering to become a matron of a girls' home in Budapest at the age of 35. She was on holiday in Cornwall when the Second World War broke out and immediately returned to Budapest.

According to her death certificate, she died in July 1944 at Auschwitz of "cachexia following intestinal catarrh", yet it is almost certain she was gassed with a group of Hungarian women on 16 August 1944.

One of Miss Haining's wards who survived the war said later: "I still feel the tears in my eyes and hear the siren of the Gestapo motor car. I see the smile on her face while she bade me farewell. I never saw Miss Haining again and when I went to the Scottish Mission to ask the minister about her I was told she had died. I did not want to believe it, but a long time later I realised that she had died for me, and for others."

The only memorials to Miss Haining in Britain are a stained glass window in Queen's Park church, Glasgow, where she once worshipped, and a tiny plaque in the Dunscore kirk.

The Church of Scotland said of her life: "Typical of all that is best in the Scottish tradition of missionary service, she gave the best years of her life to enhancing that tradition, and at the last gave life itself."

IoS

Call to honour El Salvador's rescuer of Jews after war role rediscovered

José Castellanos

He was El Salvador's equivalent of Oskar Schindler, a man who was given a chance to do something about the Holocaust - and took it.

Now, six decades after José Castellanos helped to save 25,000 Jews by granting bogus nationality certificates, the story of the central American nation's consul general to Switzerland during the second world war has been rediscovered.

"The memory of our father is out of the desk, out of the drawers and on the table again," Frieda Garcia, one of the diplomat's daughters, told a news conference at El Salvador's embassy in Washington this week, amid calls for Castellanos to be honoured posthumously by Israel.

Castellanos, an army colonel, served as a diplomat in Liverpool and Hamburg before being posted to Geneva in 1942 where he befriended a Romanian Jew, Gyorgy Mandl. To protect Mandl he appointed him to the fictitious post of first secretary and amended his name to the more Latino-sounding George Mandel-Mantello.

The two men set about issuing blank nationality certificates for Jews in German-occupied central Europe, especially Hungary. To make them seem more authentic the documents, signed by Mantello, were stamped by other consulates in Geneva before being spirited over the border to grateful recipients who filled in their details.

The so-called "freedom papers" afforded protection against deportation to Nazi extermination camps and gave meaning to the name El Salvador, which means The Saviour. Many of the documents were sent to Budapest where Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul, provided sanctuary to thousands of Jews at an abandoned glass factory known as his "Glass House".

Neither Castellanos nor Mandl had the authority to issue the documents, and El Salvador had sided with the allies against Germany, but the papers offered some protection from Nazi round-ups. It did not matter that few recipients would ever travel to their supposed homeland, a tiny country of rainforest and Pacific coast 6,000 miles away, wedged between Guatemala and Honduras, and that possibly few had even heard of it before.

Castellanos and Mandl persuaded suspicious Swiss and Hungarian officials that the documents were genuine and that there was indeed a sizeable Salvadorean diaspora in this corner of Europe. The initiative evoked the efforts of Raul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, and Schindler, a German industrialist, who separately risked their lives and fortunes to save thousands of Jews.

After the war Castellanos lived a quiet life and played down his role, said Garcia. "He said whoever was in his place would have done the same. For him it was not heroic nor spectacular."

The writer Leon Uris tracked down the retired diplomat in 1972 and Castellanos gave a brief radio interview in 1976 but otherwise he remained anonymous and his contribution went unrecognised. He died in 1977, three years after Schindler's equally low-key passing.

Until now Latin America's best known role in the Nazi genocide was the "rat lines" which spirited wanted war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann to Argentina and Klaus Barbie to Bolivia. Castellanos's story has been brought to light by a new documentary film called The Glass House, directed and produced by Brad and Leonor Marlowe, and a campaign in El Salvador by the foreign ministry and the country's small Jewish community.

"This is the story of a man with great courage who stood up against a system," Ricardo Moran Ferracuti, a Salvadorian official, told the Cox News Service. The campaign has urged Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum to confer the title Righteous Gentile on Castellanos.

Guardian

Israeli neo-Nazi ring caught after attacks on synagogues

Police in Israel have uncovered a neo-Nazi ring which was responsible for vandalising synagogues and carrying out attacks on Jews and foreign workers in Israel, a court was told yesterday.

The group of eight Russian immigrants aged between 18 and 21 appeared in court following an 18-month investigation into attacks on two synagogues in which swastikas were painted on the walls of the buildings. The men covered their heads with their shirts during the hearing, revealing arms tattooed with Nazi imagery.

More than a million people from the former Soviet Union have emigrated to Israel, which has a population of seven million, since 1990, taking advantage of Israel's Law of Return which allows anyone to claim citizenship if they have a Jewish grandparent. Many of the new immigrants have little connection to Judaism and emigrated for economic reasons.

Many Russians live in large communities in Israel's cities in which they have little interaction with other Israelis.

They have their own supermarkets where pork is available, unlike in the majority of stores. Russians feel they are victims of discrimination in Israel and many are denied the right to marry by the Jewish authorities. Police named the leader of the neo-Nazi gang as Eli Boanitov, 19, from Petah Tikvah, a city next to Tel Aviv.

Boanitov, who was known as "Eli the Nazi", told police: "I won't ever give up. I was a Nazi and I will stay a Nazi, until we kill them all I will not rest." In one conversation recorded by the police, Boanitov tells one of his fellow gang members: "My grandfather was a half-Jewboy. I will not have children so that this trash will not be born with even a tiny per cent of Jewboy blood."

During the investigation, police seized video recordings of the suspects attacking foreign workers. One of the videos shows the gang members attacking a Russian drug addict, striking him until he bled and forcing him to ask forgiveness of the Russian people for being a Jewish drug addict.

The search also revealed photographs of the suspects wearing Nazi clothing, using the Nazi salute and calling for the burning of Jews. Explosive materials were found in the home of one of the suspects.

Police also found recordings of conversations between gang members, in one they planned how to celebrate the Führer's birthday, and in another they planned a Nazi ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.

The Anti Defamation League, a New York-based group that fights anti-Semitism, praised the arrest of the neo-Nazis but warned Israelis not to stigmatise the whole Russian community for the actions of a few members.

"The suspicion that immigrants to Israel could have been acting in praise of Nazis and Hitler is anathema to the Jewish state and is to be repelled," the organisation said in a statement. "Members of the group were reportedly from the former Soviet Union and were religiously identified as Christians.

"They were allowed to immigrate to Israel on the basis of law of return which grants even grandchildren of Jews sanctuary in the Jewish state.

"The tragic irony in this is that they would have been chosen for annihilation by the Nazis they strive to emulate." The ADL said that the phenomenon appeared to be marginal and was more a reaction to anti-Russian discrimination in Israel.

Israeli politicians reacted with anger to the revelations and proposed several changes in the law to prevent a repeat of neo-Nazi actions. Effi Eitam of the National Religious Party said he would propose a bill in the Knesset that would restrict the rights of non-Jews to emigrate to Israel.

Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, said that the case illustrated the absurdity of Israeli laws which give extensive rights to newcomers from Russia while denying them to Arab residents who had lived in the region for generations.

Guardian

A closely guarded Holocaust archive opens its doors

Like other Holocaust victims, Noemi Ban has gone back numerous times to survey the ghostly field of chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland where she and her family arrived in July 1944, and she alone survived.

But last May, Ban got an even more jolting glimpse into her past, when she visited the Holocaust archive in this tranquil town in central Germany. There, filed in the labyrinthine shelves of records, was a faded scrap of paper that she remembers signing on the day she arrived at the camp from Hungary.

"I was shocked to see my handwriting," Ban, 84, said by telephone from her home in Bellingham, Washington State. "When I signed it, I had no idea why. Why they needed such precise data in that horrible place is amazing."

The Nazis kept meticulous records of their mass extermination during World War II, and much of it ended up here, in a closely guarded archive maintained by the International Tracing Service, which is administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Now, after more than six decades, the tracing service is opening its vast repository of information - not just to survivors like Ban, who have long had the right to see material here, but to scholars who are eager to plumb its depths for fresh insights into an unfathomable horror.

On Aug. 20, the archive plans to transfer digital copies of the first major trove of documents to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and to the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem.

The files cover 51 concentration camps and prisons, and include transportation lists, medical reports, entry documents - like the one signed by Ban - and Gestapo prison records. About 10 million documents in all, they will represent a third of the entire collection at Bad Arolsen.

Prying open the doors of Bad Arolsen has been a lengthy, politically fraught process, and it is not completely finished. Three of the 11 countries that oversee the institution have not yet ratified an amended treaty that would give historians unfettered access to the archive.

In May, though, the 11 countries, among them Germany and the United States, agreed to begin the electronic transfer even before the last three countries - Italy, France, and Greece - ratify the treaty.

"We have interpreted the decision in a way that there is no turning back," Reto Meister, the director of the tracing service, said. "It became very evident that the ITS had to change because the victims wanted it to change."

A tall, rangy Swiss national who has spent his career in places like Iraq and Lebanon for the Red Cross, Meister has made it his mission to dispel Bad Arolsen's reputation as a secret Nazi archive - a characterization he contends was always a bit exaggerated.

Outside experts on the Holocaust, who have long pushed for more access, said he had been remarkably successful.

"I have a good deal of admiration for how far he's moved the place," said Paul Shapiro, the director of advanced Holocaust studies at the museum in Washington. "He's dealing with a staff that, for a very long time, operated in a closed and secretive manner. He also has to balance multiple forces."

Among those is the German government, which pays nearly $20 million a year for the upkeep of the tracing service and its 320 employees. Until last year, Germany opposed granting wider access to the archive, contending that it would violate privacy standards.

The documents include confidential personal information, like reports of medical experiments carried out on prisoners, and accusations of murder and homosexuality made by the Nazis to discredit people.

Much of the material was discovered by Allied forces when they liberated the camps at the end of World War II. They dumped the files in a complex of vacated SS barracks in Bad Arolsen, which was conveniently located near the border dividing the U.S. and British occupation zones.

Few historians doubt there is a wealth of dramatic, wrenching personal stories in the archives. Shapiro said he expected enormous interest from researchers, who previously had to rely on documents in government archives in Washington, London and Moscow, which focused less on individual victims than on the Nazi system.

Among the files on displaced persons here is a sheaf of drawings and illustrations by a Latvian refugee who was conscripted into the German Army in 1944 and ordered to dig trenches in Germany.

Among those watching Bad Arolsen most closely are lawyers for Holocaust victims and their relatives. They cited the archive this year in opposing a settlement with an Italian insurer, Assicurazioni Generali, over unpaid claims on life insurance policies.

As part of the settlement in February, Generali agreed to give heirs of Holocaust victims until next August to uncover evidence of unpaid claims at Bad Arolsen. Officials there said no one had made inquiries.

The complexity of the archive, combined with the flood of inquiries, resulted in a huge backlog of requests - 450,000 at its peak earlier in the decade, causing a wait of several years for a response. The backlog is now down to 75,000, but officials say new requests are answered within eight weeks.

As records are transmitted to Washington and Jerusalem, part of this research burden will shift to the Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem. Shapiro said he expected a wave of inquiries. Some survivors have already complained that the museum is playing a gatekeeper role.

While it would have been nice to wait for new technology to organize the archive, Shapiro said, the advancing age of Holocaust survivors - many are over 80 - makes it vital to answer requests as soon as possible. "That's a big job, but it's one we're committed to doing," he said.

International Herald Tribune

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