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Gold9472
11-18-2006, 10:57 AM
More than 60 years on, details of the Holocaust keep unfolding

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/11/17/news/germany.php

By Arthur Max/The Associated Press
Published: November 17, 2006

BAD AROLSEN, Germany: The 21- year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate's office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks before.

"I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning," he said.

"I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire," he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and "Jews were thrown in and died there;" more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.

Today, the Holocaust is known in dense and painful detail. Yet the young Russian's words leap off the faded, onionskin page with a rawness that transports the reader back to April 1945, when World War II was still raging and the world still knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.

The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This vast archive in six nondescript buildings in a German spa town contains the fullest record of Nazi persecution in existence. But because of concerns about the victims' privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, doling out information in minimal amounts to survivors or their descendants on a strict need-to-know basis.

This policy, which has generated much ill-feeling among Holocaust survivors and researchers, is about to change.

In May, after years of pressure from the United States and survivors' groups, the 11 countries overseeing the archive agreed to unseal the files for scholars as well as victims and their families. In recent weeks the interim director of the ITS, Jean-Luc Blondel, has been to Washington, The Hague and to the Buchenwald memorial with a new message of cooperation with governments and other Holocaust institutions.

The ITS has allowed Paul Shapiro, of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, to look at the files and has also given some reporters extensive access on the condition that no names from the files are revealed unless they have been identified in other sources.

"This is powerful stuff," said Shapiro, leafing through the file containing the Russian's statement and about 200 other testimonies that take the reader into the belly of Hitler's death machine - its camps, inmates, commandants, executioners and trusted inmates used as low-level guards and known as kapos.

"If you sat here for a day and read these files, you'd get a picture of what it was really like in the camps, how people were treated," he said. "Look - names and names of kapos, guards - the little perpetrators."

Moved to this town in central Germany after the war, the files occupy a former barracks of the Waffen SS, the Nazi Party's elite military branch. They are stored in long corridors of drab cabinets and neatly stenciled binders packed into floor-to-ceiling metal shelves. Their index cards alone fill three large rooms.

Mandated to trace missing persons and help families reunite, the ITS has allowed few people through its doors, and has responded to requests for information on wartime victims with minimal data, even when its files could have told more.

It may take a year or more for the files to open fully. Until then, access remains tightly restricted. "We will be ready any time," said Blondel. "We would open them today, if we had the go-ahead."

When the archive is finally available, researchers will have their first chance to see a unique collection of documents on concentration camps, slave labor camps and displaced persons. From toneless lists and heartrending testimony, a skilled historian may be able to stitch together a new perspective on the 20th century's darkest years from the viewpoint of its millions of victims.

"The overall story is pretty well established, but many details will be filled in," said Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"There is a great deal of very interesting material on a very large number of concentration camps that we really don't know much about," he said. "It may contain surprises. We don't know. It has material that nobody's ever seen."

A visitor to the archive comes into direct contact with the bureaucracy of mass murder.

In a bound ledger with frayed binding, a copy of a list of names appears of Jews rounded up in Holland and transported to the death camps. Buried among the names is "Frank, Annelise M," her date of birth (June 12, 1929), Amsterdam address before she went into hiding (Merwerdeplein 37) and the date she was sent to a concentration camp (Sept. 3, 1944).

Frank, Annelise M. is Anne Frank.

She was on one of the last trains to Germany before the Nazi occupation of Holland crumbled. Six months later, aged 15, she died an anonymous death, one of about 35,000 casualties of typhus that ravaged the Bergen-Belsen camp. After the war, "The Diary of Anne Frank," written during her 25 months hiding in a tiny apartment with seven others, would become the most widely read book ever written on the Holocaust.

But most of the lives recorded in Bad Arolsen are known to no one but their families.

They are people like Cornelis Marinus Brouwenstijn, a Dutchman who vanished into the Nazi gulag at age 22 for illegally possessing a radio. In a plain manila envelope are his photo, a wallet, some snapshots and a naughty typewritten joke about women in the army.

After the war, his family repeatedly wrote to the Red Cross asking about him. In 1949, his parents received a terse form letter saying he died sometime between April 19 and May 3, 1945, in the area of a German labor camp. The personal effects, however, remained in Bad Arolsen, and with the family long deceased, there is no one left to apply for their return.

To critics who accuse them of being tight-fisted with their information, the Red Cross and ITS counter that they have to abide by German privacy laws and protect the reputations of victims whether alive or dead. They say the files may contain unsubstantiated allegations against victims, and that opening up to researchers would distract the ITS from its main task of providing documentation to survivors or victims' relatives.

One area of study that will benefit from the ITS files is the Lebensborn program, in which children deemed to have the "proper genes" were adopted or even kidnapped to propagate the Aryan master race of Hitler's dreams.

Another subject is the sheer scope of the Holocaust system. The files will support new research from other sources showing that the network of concentration camps, ghettos and labor camps was nearly three times more extensive than previously thought.

Postwar historians estimated about 5,000 to 7,000 detention sites. But after the Cold War ended, records began pouring out of the former Communist nations of East Europe. More sites were disclosed in the last six years in claims by 1.6 million people for slave labor reparations from a $6.6 billion fund financed by the German government and some 3,000 industries.

"We have identified somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 camps and ghettos of various categories," said Geoffrey Megargee of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, who is compiling a seven-volume encyclopedia of these detention centers.

The archive has about 3.4 million files of DPs - Displaced Persons. They include names like John Demjanjuk and Viorel Trifa, who immigrated to the United States and later became internationally known because their role in the Holocaust came into question.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi persecution grew to assembly-line proportions, slaughtering 6 million Jews and an equal number of Gypsies, homosexuals, mental patients, political prisoners and other "undesirables." Tens of millions were conscripted as forced laborers.

To operate history's greatest slaughter, the Nazis created a bureaucracy that meticulously recorded the arrest, movement and death of each victim. Sometimes even the lice plucked from heads in concentration camps were counted.

But as the pace of genocide stepped up, unknown numbers were marched directly from trains to gas chambers without being registered. In the war's final months, the bookkeeping collapsed, though the extermination continued.

What documents survived Nazi attempts to destroy them were collected by the Allies to help people find missing relatives. The first documents were sent in 1946 to Bad Arolsen, and the administration was handed over to the Red Cross in 1955.

Some 50 million pages - scraps of paper, transport lists, registration books, labor documents, medical and death registers - make reference to 17.5 million individuals caught up in the machinery of persecution, displacement and death.

Over the years, the International Tracing Service has answered 11 million requests to locate family members or provide certificates supporting pension claims or reparations. It says it has a 56 percent rate of success in tracing the requested name.

But the workload has been overwhelming. Two years ago it had a backlog of nearly half a million unanswered queries. Blondel, the director, says the number was whittled down to 155,000 this summer and will disappear by the spring of 2008. New queries have slowed to just 700 a month.

One of the ITS's critics is Sabine Stein, an archivist at the Buchenwald concentration camp 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, from Bad Arolsen. She says the archive's refusal to share its files has caused heartbreak to countless survivors and their descendants.

For instance, in 1989, Emilia Janikowska asked the ITS to trace her father, Ludwig Kaminski, a coal miner from Poland who was never heard from again after his arrest in 1939. It took more than three years to send her a standard form reporting that Kaminski had died in Buchenwald on Dec. 1, 1939.

But there was more she could have been told.

Documents copied by the U.S. Army before they went to Bad Arolsen, which were seen by a reporter at Buchenwald, include mention of Kaminski. They say that he was prisoner No. 8578, that he had arrived in Buchenwald six weeks earlier with 600 other Poles, and that had been placed in Camp 2. The known history of Buchenwald says Camp 2 was a wooden barracks and four big tents, jammed with 1,000 Poles and Vienna Jews. Dozens of inmates died from the cold that winter. The cause of Kaminski's death was pneumonia.

No one ever told his daughter any of this.

"We had no news from my father since the moment he was arrested," Janikowska said when contacted at her home in Krakow. She now wants more information for a compensation request.

Stein, the archivist, said: "Former inmates and their families want to see some tangible part of their history; they want to tell their stories. What I find most frustrating is that they have all these documents and they are just sitting on them."

Earlier this month, the ITS went some way to make amends, delivering a full inventory of its records on Buchenwald and promising to give priority in searching for 1,000 names that Stein had requested.

Compounding the delay in releasing the files is the cumbersome makeup of the governing committee. Any decision on their future requires the assent of all 11 member nations - Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and the United States.

The agreement last May to open the archive stipulates that it will remain off- limits until formal ratification by the 11 governments. After that, each of the 11 countries can have a digital copy of the files and decide who has access to it.

But some delegations are worried that the process will take too long, at a time when elderly survivors are dying every day.

"What victims of these crimes fear the most is that when they disappear - and it's happening very fast now - no one will remember the names of the families they lost," said Shapiro of the Washington museum, who was a delegate to the talks. z "It's not a diplomatic timetable, and not an archivist's timetable, but the actuarial table. If we don't succeed in having this material public while there are still survivors, then we failed."

AuGmENTor
11-19-2006, 08:21 AM
This is a very interesting piece. I've always been fascinated with the holocaust. Not from a morbid perspective, but the angle of how people KNEW what was going on, and did nothing to stop it. Also, the mentality behind the perpetration of the awful crimes. Human beings have no limit in their capacity for evil, and goodness. I think it more of a miacle that so many people turn out good with the world the way it is.

Partridge
11-19-2006, 09:28 AM
Muslim leader sent funds to Irving

Islamic activist admits he donated cash to jailed historian who denied the Holocaust

Jamie Doward , home affairs editor
Sunday November 19, 2006
The Observer (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329636696-102285,00.html)

One of Britain's most prominent speakers on Muslim issues is today exposed as a supporter of David Irving, the controversial historian who for years denied the Holocaust took place.Asghar Bukhari, a founder member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), which describes itself as Britain's largest Muslim civil rights group, sent money to Irving and urged Islamic websites to ask visitors to make donations to his fighting fund.

Bukhari contacted the discredited historian, sentenced this year to three years in an Austrian prison for Holocaust denial, after reading his website. He headed his mail to Irving with a quotation attributed to the philosopher John Locke: 'All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good people to stand idle.'

In one email Bukhari tells Irving: 'You may feel like you are on your own but rest assured many people are with you in your fight for the Truth.' Bukhari pledges to make a donation of £60 to Irving's fighting fund and says that he has asked 'a few of my colleagues to send some in too'. He also offers to send Irving a book, They Dare to Speak Out, by Paul Findley, a former US Senator, who has attacked his country's close relationship with Israel. Bukhari says Findley 'has suffered like you in trying to expose certain falsehoods perpetrated by the Jews'.

In a follow-up letter, Bukhari writes: 'Here is the cheque I promised. Good luck, if there is any other way I can help please don't hestitate to call me. I have also asked many Muslim websites to create links to your own and ask for donations.'

Bukhari confirmed sending the letters in 2000. 'I had a lot of sympathy for anyone who opposed Israel,' Bukhari told The Observer said. 'I wrote letters to anyone who was tough against the Israelis - David Irving, Paul Findley, the PLO."I don't feel I have done anything wrong, to be honest. At the time I was of the belief he [Irving] was anti-Zionist, being smeared for nothing more then being anti-Zionist.

'The pro-Israeli lobby often accused people of anti-Semitism and smear tactics against groups and individuals is well known. I condemn anti-Semitism as strongly as I condemn Zionism (in my opinion they are both racist ideologies). I also believe that anyone who denies the Holocaust is wrong (I don't think they should be put behind bars for it though).'

At his trial this year, Irving said he had been 'mistaken' to say the gas chambers did not exist. He had been due to attend a conference hosted by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, questioning the 'truthfulness' of the Holocaust.

'David Irving was described by a High Court judge as a falsifier of history and a false denier,' said Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust. 'I can't understand why anyone would want to support his views, let alone encourage and influence others to sympathise with them. I'm appalled.'

Earlier this year, speaking on behalf of MPAC, Bukhari said a march in London in protest at the publication of satirical cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad should not have gone ahead. 'We believe it should have been banned and the march stopped,' Bukhari said. 'Freedom of speech has to be responsible.'

MPAC was banned from university campuses in 2004 after being branded 'anti-semitic' by the National Union of Students. It is becoming increasingly influential within the Muslim community. At the last election the organisation drew up a list of Labour candidates with links to Israel, whom it urged Muslims to vote out. One MP, Lorna Fitzsimons, lost her seat to the Lib Dems by 400 votes.

'Getting into bed with Holocaust revisionists who are the heroes of racist organisations which use Islamophobia to divide communities on racial and religious grounds is just extraordinary and very, very sad,' Fitzsimons said.

MPAC, which strongly denies allegations that it is anti-semitic, accused The Observer of 'twisting an innocent gesture of support (even if gravely mistaken) into more than it is'. The story was 'just another Islamaphobic attack aimed at undermining and harming the brave individuals who support the Palestinian cause and the cause of Muslims within Britain.'

Partridge
11-19-2006, 09:36 AM
Israeli-Arab activist in mission to tackle Iran over Holocaust

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem

Published: 18 November 2006
The Independent (http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1993612.ece)

An Israeli-Arab lawyer plans to travel to Iran next month to preach his message at an official conference that all Muslims need to appreciate the true magnitude of the Holocaust.

Khaled Mahameed, who started the Arab world's first Holocaust museum in Nazareth, has been invited to address the conference, Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision, in Tehran on 11 and 12 December.

Mr Mahameed said yesterday his challenge to the questioning of the Holocaust by the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would be: "Do not deny or even argue about the authenticity of the Holocaust ... You are not helping the Palestinian people. You are hurting their cause."

Mr Mahameed was invited to attend the conference after sending copies of articles he had written on Jewish suffering in the Second World War to various Iranian contacts as a correction after the President's views were reported.

He has also established a modest private exhibition in the first floor of his house of 80 harrowing photographs purchased from Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial and museum to the victims of the Holocaust, in Jerusalem, with captions he has translated into Arabic. A leaflet he has written gives a sympathetic and factual account of the horrors.

He said he intended to ask for an interview with the Iranian President in which he would try to persuade him to change his views. He said he had sent a copy of his book, The Palestinians and the State of the Holocaust, to President Ahmadinejad four months ago.

A text on the wall of his museum declares: "The Palestinians are the only people in the world who for the sake of providing shelter to the Jews have paid their homeland as a price for the sins and the deeds of the Nazis."

But Mr Mahameed also believes that Arab understanding of the Holocaust is an important step to a lasting peace between the Palestinians and Israel. He is passionate in arguing that Palestinians cannot expect Jews to appreciate the suffering of Palestinians displaced or driven out of their homes in the war of 1948 unless they first start to understand what he is acknowledges is the far greater Jewish catastrophe of the Holocaust.

He also rejects the statement by President Ahmadinejad that Israel should "relocate" to Europe because of European guilt for their suffering. "Israel is a fact on the ground," he said. "You cannot end the problem by switching the button off to the time before the establishment of the Jewish state."

Mr Mahameed, preparing to face harsh criticism for his views when he visits Tehran, was studying the Koran for sympathetic references to the Jews. He said these included depiction of the Jews as victims of persecution by the Egyptian Pharoahs, who killed their children and took their women as slaves.

Mr Mahameed revealed in May last year that his decision to set up the museum, which has its own website, had meant the neglect of his legal practice, a start-up cost of £2,400, the ridicule of some fellow Muslims, the indifference of Nazareth's (Christian Arab) mayor and a deep rift with his own brother.

He said: "People say I am a crazy for making this issue the centre of my life. They should realise that I am serving the Palestinian cause. The world will not see our Nakba [the "disaster" or flight of Palestinians from their homes in 1948] before we could feel for their Holocaust."

Affirming that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, Mr Mahameed's website, www.alkaritha.org (http://www.alkaritha.org), says: "We believe that the Arabs have no adequate information about the Holocaust, or have minimal information ... And because of that the majority of the Arab people denies the Holocaust."

* President Ahmadinejad has told the Italian Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, that Iran is ready to consult with Italy on Middle East issues, Mr Prodi's office said yesterday. The letter came a day after France, Italy and Spain presented a Middle East peace initiative, asserting that Europe must try to end years of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.

MrDark71
11-23-2006, 12:47 AM
Who in hell needs evidence anymore? I know there are those "nazi's" that claim it's a hoax but c'mon.....that's like believing we faked Hiroshima with some fancy lighting and camera angles.