BONN, Feb 1 (Reuters) - The number of anti-Semites in Germany has not risen in recent years but those who dislike Jews are no longer as likely to conceal their views, the leader of Germany's Jewish community said on Sunday.
About one-third of the population harbours some negative feelings towards Jews, Ignatz Bubis told Sueddeutsche Rundfunk radio.
He said the number of German anti-Semites has not risen in recent years even though the number of people who openly admit they don't like Jews has increased.
"What was once at most only whispered behind the hand by some people to friends is now being openly articulated," Bubis said.
"This is also a reason that there has been an increase in the acts of violence and right-wing incidents. There has not been an increase in the number of extremists."
Bubis said he estimates about 15 percent of the population harbours "manifestly" anti-Semitic beliefs while another 15 percent hold "latent" feelings of disdain towards Jews.
There are about 50,000 Jews living in Germany today, a small fraction of the 530,000 who lived in the country before the Nazis took power in 1933 and decimated the Jewish community in concentration camps.
Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Historians estimate as many as 50 million people died during World War Two.
Germany was plagued by an upturn in right-wing racism that swept the country in the wake of its unification in 1990.
The attacks, aimed mainly at foreigners, included a firebombing attack on a Luebeck synagogue in 1994 that evoked memories of the 1938 "Kristallnacht" when Hitler's Nazis ransacked thousands of Jewish shops and burned hundreds of synagogues.
Bubis said he believes the construction of a central Holocaust memorial in Berlin in the next few years will help reduce tensions in German-Jewish relations. REUTERS
BONN, Feb 4 (Reuters) - A convicted neo-Nazi terrorist took his seat in the public gallery on Wednesday as a parliamentary committee tried to discover how he was allowed to address a training course for German army officers.
Photographers and camera teams swarmed around Manfred Roeder, who spent eight years in jail for neo-Nazi crimes, as he entered the parliament building and walked to the committee room. He told reporters the inquiry was a farce.
"They're not interested in explanations," he said. "They just want to spread propaganda."
Roeder, a former lawyer, was convicted in 1982 of leading a terrorist group and attempting to incite murder. He was also found guilty of responsibility for several bomb attacks.
He was released in 1990 and has remained active on the right-wing extremist scene.
Members of parliament launched the probe after it emerged in December last year that the army's prestigious staff training college in Hamburg had asked Roeder to give a lecture in 1995.
Committee members did not invite Roeder to testify as a witness, saying they did not want to give him a platform. But they were powerless to prevent him turning up to the public hearing as a spectator.
Rear Admiral Rudolf Lange, the academy's head who who took over after the Roeder incident, said mistakes had clearly been made in allowing the extremist to speak to the army elite.
"Things went wrong there," he told the committee.
Asked about if he could explain how Roeder's appearance at the academy could fail to set alarm bells ringing, and why it took so long to come to light, Lange replied: "I can't explain it. I don't think it's good."
The inquiry committee is probing a series of incidents linking soldiers and right-wing extremism which have badly damaged the modern German army's image over the past few months. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, Feb 5 (Reuters) - The German government said on Thursday it would not abandon plans for a Berlin Holocaust memorial despite an appeal to Chancellor Helmut Kohl from 19 prominent writers to reconsider the project.
Germany's best known living writer, Guenter Grass, was among the signatories of the open letter sent on Wednesday.
It was addressed to Kohl, parliamentary speaker Rita Suessmuth, Berlin city authorities and a private group who initiated the project led by German television personality Lea Rosh.
A government spokesman said none of the addressees had changed their position.
"They have all agreed firstly that there will be a memorial to the Jews murdered in the Holocaust," he said.
"Secondly it will be on a plot of land set aside for this and thirdly, the decision on the form of the memorial will be one of the four blueprints which we have before us."
The planned memorial has been at the centre of an increasingly heated debate which goes to the heart of Germany's efforts to come to terms with its Nazi past.
What is certain is that it has been allocated a plot of land in Berlin's new federal government quarter, a 15 million mark ($8.4 million) budget and the groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled to take place on January 27, 1999 -- 54 years to the day after the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
But after years of deliberations over concept and design, critics began to question whether it should go ahead at all.
The blueprint that won the first competition to find a design was firmly rejected by politicians, historians and Holocaust survivors and the search began all over again.
The final results of a second competition will be announced in mid-March, but the signatories of the letter insisted none of the options was suitable and that the memorial was not a must.
"We do not see how an abstract installation of oppressively vast proportions -- on the field the size of a sports stadium -- can ever become the place of quiet grief and commemoration," the letter said.
The letter listed other Berlin memorials which it contended had succeeded in ensuring Germans do not forget the darkest chapter in their history.
The Wannsee Villa, outside Berlin where Nazi leaders drew up plans in 1942 for the Final Solution to exterminate Europe's Jewry, is today a study centre.
A historical documentation centre on the grounds where the feared Gestapo secret police headquarters stood was cited by the writers as another example.
"We fear, in comparison to these substantial places for remembrance, a gigantic 'national' memorial will be erected as a distraction and will remain a cold abstraction," they said.
"There is no compulsion, nothing should be automatic in this matter," it said.
The open letter also seemed to snub the design which Kohl had appeared to favour most last month at a public viewing of the four finalists.
The entry by U.S. artists Peter Eisenman and Richard Serra calls for a landscape of 4,000 concrete pillars each measuring 0.92 metres (three feet) wide by 2.3 metres (8.5 feet) long and with varying heights ranging up to 7.5 metres (24.5 feet).
The overall effect is that of a graveyard-like labyrinth that can be entered by the visitor from any of its four sides.
The first competition to find a design held in 1995 produced a short-list of two. After long deliberations, the panel picked a design by local artist Christine Jackob-Marks that featured a huge concrete slab engraved with some of the names of the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
But Kohl accused it of "gigantism" and the project, which also unleashed other strong opposition, was soon abandoned. ($ - 1.791 German Marks) REUTERS
By Fiona Fleck
BERCHTESGADEN, Germany, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Adolf Hitler gloried in Berchtesgaden's dramatic Alpine views, celebrated his greatest victories there and later used it as a refuge from the chaos of war.
Now, U.S. troops have left the mountainside retreat after four decades and authorities must finally tackle a thorny issue; how to develop the largely ruined complex without creating a shrine for neo-Nazis.
Plans to modernise the resort overlooking Berchtesgaden have already upset a Jewish group and raised doubts that the site where Hitler's official summer residence once stood will ever emerge from the shadow of its past.
"No matter what you do, you will always be accused of trying to make money out of the Nazis," said Wolfgang Illner, of the Berchtesgaden authorities.
The area, already a draw to neo-Nazis, is such an embarrassment that even the most popular tourist destination in the former Nazi complex, the Eagle's Nest, is not mentioned in official tourist board brochures.
Today a state-run cafe 1,834 metres (6,000 feet) above sea level, the Eagle's Nest was built as a present for Hitler's 50th birthday. It is one of only a handful of surviving Nazi buildings on the mountain.
MUSSOLINI, CHAMBERLAIN STAYED AT BERGHOF
Former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini were among state guests at Hitler's chalet, the Berghof, on the slopes of the Obersalzberg.
Photographs and film show Hitler lounging informally on the spectacular terrace here enjoying the view and laughing with other Nazi leaders and with his mistress, Eva Braun.
It was, however, also a place for business. Hitler is said to have planned Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union on the heights of Berchtesgaden.
In early 1945, however, he refused the pleas of some followers that he abandon Berlin in the face of a Soviet Army advance and make a last stand in the Bavarian Alps.
Allied bombers reduced the Berghof and chalets of top Nazis Hermann Goering and Martin Bormann to ruins. In 1952, U.S. military authorities razed these ruins and used the remaining buildings and grounds as a leisure complex until they withdrew in 1995.
The Bavarian government unveiled plans last year to build a historical documentation centre not far from where the Berghof once stood and commissioned Munich's Institute of Contemporary History to organise the exhibition. It is due to open in 1999.
The concept was approved by a panel of some of Germany's most respected historians, including Andreas Nachama, then head of a similar centre on the site of the Gestapo secret police headquarters in Berlin. Nachama has since become the head of Berlin's Jewish community.
"The centre should counteract the rather emotive, mystical portrayal of history. This cannot be done by destroying all traces of the past or by putting up a memorial," the Bavarian Finance Ministry, in charge of the project, said in a statement.
"Only a documentation centre can achieve this. It is necessary to put local history into its historical context."
HOTEL PLAN ANGERED WIESENTHAL CENTER
But a parallel scheme to convert three former Nazi buildings, which were later used by the U.S. military, into a four-star hotel complex and conference centre, angered the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center.
The centre's European director Shimon Samuels attacked what he called a scandalous concept to create a "luxury holiday resort," saying it trivialised the Nazis' crimes.
Investors have not shown much enthusiasm. The southern state of Bavaria has so far failed to find takers willing to risk the 80 million marks ($43.7 million) needed to convert the dilapidated Platterhof Hotel, which the occupying Americans renamed Hotel General Walker, in return for a lease of only 60 years.
Retaining control of the property is the only guarantee its Nazi past will not be used as a dubious selling point, Illner says.
"The main precondition is no Nazi motifs. We don't want a hotel with Adolf Hitler's or Eva Braun's bedroom," he said.
A living example of what the Bavarian authorities do not want can be seen at Hotel zum Tuerken, the only private property on the six- hectare (15-acre) plot of land Illner administers.
Its owners were hounded off their property in 1933 when the Nazis expropriated much of the mountainside. After the war they reclaimed it.
Hotel zum Tuerken does a brisk trade in books about Hitler and Eva Braun's life at the Berghof in six languages with colour photos, postcards of the Nazis' chalets and videos of old footage with titles such as "Hitler -- the unknown painter."
Historians compiling a catalogue for the planned historical documentation centre frown on these as "tasteless" at best, "politically suspect" and "dangerous" at worst.
Illner says the hotel and local publishers responsible had been warned in the past and since changed their approach. But some of the material comes close to violating Germany's strict laws banning any suggestion that the Holocaust did not take place.
"They tend to portray Hitler and the Nazis as private people," said Volker Dahm, a historian from the Munich institute. "We want to combat this by offering a better alternative putting the Obersalzberg in its historical context."
Hotel zum Tuerken also offers a unique side-show, the chance to visit part of the Nazis' bunker system of over four km (2.5 miles) of tunnels burrowed by an army of slaves through the mountain.
NEO-NAZIS MAKE BIRTHDAY PILGRIMAGE EACH YEAR
The walls are regularly painted white, but not often enough to cover all the neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic scrawl across them. You do not have to look far to find the authors.
Every year hordes of neo-Nazis make a pilgrimage to mark Hitler's birthday on April 20 here, but a stream of "pilgrims" continues throughout the year. They range from gangs of skinheads to elderly English gentlemen, Illner said.
"You can't deny it, people are interested in the bunker," said Illner.
The planned documentation centre would provide access to part of the underground complex which the German authorities have until now kept strictly off-limits.
Work on the bunker started in the late stages of the war in December 1943, said Iller: "It was not part of the Nazis' ideology. Hitler did not believe in building defences because this called into question his certain victory." ($ - 1.829 German Marks) REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
By Andrew Gray
BONN, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Germany's upper house of parliament on Friday approved a change in the constitution that gives police greater surveillance powers than at any time since the Nazi era.
Members of Chancellor Helmut Kohl's ruling coalition hailed the move as an important step in the battle against organised crime. The opposition Greens declared it was a "black day for civil rights."
The measure allows police, once they have obtained approval from a judge, to eavesdrop over an extended period on private homes using sophisticated surveillance devices such as directional microphones linked to transmitters.
Electronic surveillance is currently only allowed in Germany if there is an overwhelming suspicion that a crime is on the verge of being committed.
"This is about fighting professional crime committed by gangs," Interior Minister Manfred Kanther told the Bundesrat or upper house, which groups representatives from Germany's 16 regional states.
Civil rights groups hit back.
"One of the pillars of our free state based on the rule of law has been damaged -- the basic right that the home is inviolable," commented Ilse Bechtold, spokeswoman for one rights group, the Gustav Heinemann Initiative.
In a concession to the outraged rights lobby, the Bundesrat asked a parliamentary committee to look at possible exemptions from the eavesdropping law for groups such as journalists and lawyers.
The decision followed weeks of soul-searching by Bundesrat members, keen to fight organised crime but wary of the legacy of both Hitler's secret police, the Gestapo, and communist East Germany's Stasi.
The spectre of the Gestapo prompted West Germany's founding fathers to build strong human rights guarantees into the Basic Law, which became the constitution of united Germany.
But supporters of the amendment said the growing threat of organised crime meant it was time to give the state more power.
"The citizens of this country are demanding a signal from you that we are prepared to defend our country," Justice Minister Edzard Schmidt-Jortzig said. "This law is such a signal."
In the Bundesrat, each state receives a share of the 69 votes according to its size. The constitutional change scraped through the chamber with 47 votes in favour -- just above the two-thirds majority needed.
Support for the change, which has already been approved by the lower house, had looked shaky in the Bundesrat until the city-state of Bremen decided to back it on the eve of the vote.
Bremen mayor Henning Scherf agreed to cast his three votes in favour of the measure, provided parliament's mediation committee looked again at examptions for certain professions.
Journalists, doctors and lawyers have all insisted police should not be able to bug their conversations as this would compromise their position with informants or clients.
The German Journalists' Association said it was sceptical as to whether the committee would come up with an improvement.
"It's too early to talk of even a semi-success," said Hermann Meyn, the association's president.
As it currently stands, the draft exempts only priests in confessionals and parliamentary deputies from bugging. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
PARIS, Jan 30 (Reuters) - France's far-right National Front on Friday expelled seven of its 15 municipal councillors in the eastern Alsace region from the party "for treason and felony."
A statement issued by the anti-immigrant party of Jean-Marie Le Pen said the seven had made "slanderous comments" when they protested last week at being left out of the party's slate for regional elections due on March 15.
"They have just been excluded from the National Front for treason and felony," the party said.
The councillors had accused the Front's leadership of being anti-democratic in failing to consult them in making up the election slate, and six had already resigned from the party.
One of them, Aldo Zasio, also protested because Le Pen placed the brother-in-law of one of his own aides on the party's slate in Alsace.
He had criticised Le Pen for repeating last month in Munich that gas chambers used by the Nazis in the Holocaust were a mere detail in the history of World War Two.
Le Pen had been heavily fined for making the comment in France a few years ago. French human rights groups are seeking damages for the latest statement and prosecutors in Germany are pondering whether he can be prosecuted. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
PARIS, Feb 6 (Reuters) - France's Constitutional Council on Friday invalidated the electoral victory last year of Jean-Maire Le Chevallier, the only National Assembly deputy for the far-right National Front, officials said.
The council ruled that Le Chevallier, who is also mayor of the southern city of Toulon, had misused a municipal newsletter to attack his conservative rivals.
The extremist National Front, a law-and-order party that wants to deport immigrants from France, enjoys 15 percent support among the voters but usually fails to get the majority needed under the French system to win a parliamentary seat.
Le Chavallier's election last June was a rare victory on the national level for the Front, which otherwise has won seats only in local and regional councils.
A new election must now be held, from which Le Chevallier will be barred. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
By Bernard Edinger
PARIS, Feb 1 (Reuters) - The trial of accused Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon took yet another dramatic turn on Sunday when lawyer Arno Klarsfeld unexpectedly dropped a threat to ask for presiding judge Jean-Louis Castagnede's removal.
Klarsfeld and his father, Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld, had declared themselves "at war" with Castagnede because he released Papon on bail for the length of the trial and they said they suspected him of wanting an acquittal.
The flamboyant Arno Klarsfeld, who roller-blades to court and regularly appears as an escort to beautiful film stars and top models, had said he would request Castagnede's removal in court on Monday.
He had cited the Klarsfelds' own discovery that Castagnede was distantly related to Jews deported from Bordeaux during the war and whose fate the court was to discuss.
But after a cascade of condemnation and incomprehension from other lawyers for the civil plaintiffs and families of Holocaust victims, Arno Klarsfeld issued a curt two-sentence communique saying he would leave it to Castagnede himself to decide how best to ensure that proceedings remained orderly.
Papon is being tried for crimes against humanity over his role in the deportation of more than 1,500 Jews from the Bordeaux region of Nazi-occupied southern France during World War Two.
Klarsfeld, nearly always available for the press with whom he is often on friendlier terms than with fellow lawyers, was not available for further comment.
Some experts noted the turnaround had come shortly after France's Central Israelite Consistory, the main body handling Jewish religious affairs, said it deplored the controversy.
The Consistory, like major anti-racist groups, said there were no grounds to suspect any partiality.
Such powerful opposition was believed to have swayed the Klarsfelds, whose fellow lawyers frequently complain that they fail to coordinate their tactics with them.
The umbrella body for French Jewish groups, CRIF, said it hoped the trial would now continue "with all necessary serenity."
The controversy began when Arno Klarsfeld disclosed that the judge had an uncle whose Jewish sisters-in-law and parents-in-law were deported from Bordeaux when Papon was an official in the collaborationist Vichy government there.
Castagnede, who is not Jewish, made no direct comment on the controversy. But he said through friends that he was unaware of the Jewish connection since he had lost contact with that side of the family since his father died.
The trial, first hailed as a major act in France's quest for the truth about its wartime conduct, suddenly swerved out of control on Friday into a family drama reminiscent of a French 19th-century novel.
Klarsfeld said Castagnede had shunned his uncle and his uncle's wife because they were both deaf-mute and poor, and possibly because of their Jewish background.
Castagnede made no mention of the controversy when the trial was in session on Thursday. But he suspended proceedings for four days without explanation after only an hour. REUTERS
PARIS, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Two widely acclaimed heroes of the French Resistance during World War Two asked a Paris court on Thursday to ban a book suggesting that they secretly helped the Nazis.
Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, who joined the Resistance when Germany invaded France in May 1940, were the subject of a popular feature film which came out last year.
It focused on the 1943-44 period when Lucie, pregnant with their second child, risked her life to rescue her husband from jail.
But French historian Gerard Chauvy questioned their Resistance record in a book, entitled "Aubrac, Lyon 1943," which was published last year.
It suggested that the couple were Nazi collaborators who betrayed fellow Resistance hero Jean Moulin to Klaus Barbie, then chief of the Nazi Gestapo in Lyon.
Barbie, who was tracked down in Bolivia after the war and given a life sentence in 1987 for wartime crimes against humanity, died in a Lyon jail in 1991.
The Aubracs, who flatly deny any role in Moulin's arrest, want the book taken off the market. They also seek one million francs ($165,000) in damages. Raymond Aubrac is now 83 and Lucie is 85.
Chauvy told the court he had not intended to portray them as traitors but rather to raise questions. "It is the historian's role to ask questions. I do not go any farther than that. There are shadowy zones, explanations are needed," he said.
Judge Jean-Yves Monfort questioned whether the author had given too much weight to a document supposedly drafted by Barbie in 1990 naming the Aubracs as his agents.
The judge said the document might have been drafted by Barbie's lawyer in order to play down his client's role in the death of Moulin, France's most legendary Resistance hero.
The trial was expected to continue until next Thursday.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
By Mike Cooper
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (Reuters) - Investigators probing the fatal bombing of an Alabama abortion clinic said Friday they were seeking a man whose truck was seen parked near the site.
A material witness warrant has been issued for Eric Robert Rudolph, a 31-year-old white male from Marble, North Carolina, U.S. Attorney Doug Jones said. He stressed Rudolph was only wanted as a witness, not a suspect.
An off-duty policeman guarding the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic near downtown Birmingham was killed and a nurse was critically wounded by the explosion of a homemade bomb early Thursday morning.
Rudolph's gray Nissan truck was seen near the clinic, Jones said.
"The investigators have not jumped to any conclusions. The media should not jump to any conclusions," Jones said. "(The truck) was seen in the proximity around the explosion site. We want to talk to Mr. Rudolph about the truck."
"We are looking for Mr. Rudolph only as a material witness," added Joe Lewis, special agent in charge of the FBI in Birmingham.
The homemade bomb was placed a few feet in front of the clinic entrance, investigators said.
Clinic owner Diane Derzis said police officer Robert Sanderson was killed as he escorted nurse Emily Lyons to the front door to open the clinic.
Lyons remained in a hospital in intensive care Friday, recovering from severe leg, abdominal and facial injuries. Doctors said she has lost sight in one eye.
Derzis said the clinic, which advertises that it offers to abort fetuses up to 22 weeks after conception, would continue to operate. "As soon as they finish the crime scene, we will reopen," she said.
James Cavanaugh, agent in charge of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) office in Birmingham, said the bomb was packed with nails, but gave no further details.
"We do feel confident that we will be able to reconstruct to some degree the explosive device," Cavanaugh said. "We have had a very aggressive, thorough certainly, indeed microscopic examination of the crime scene."
Federal authorities called in experts who have been trying to solve three bombings that have occurred in Atlanta, including one at a women's health clinic Jan. 16, 1997 that injured seven people.
Investigators have said that last year's bombing of a gay nightclub in Atlanta and the explosion that killed two people and injured 111 others during the Olympics July 27, 1996, were probably linked to the Atlanta clinic bombing.
"It's too early to make determinations on whether this device is connected to that or any other device," Cavanaugh said. "It would be speculation, at best."
ATLANTA, Feb. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Claims from those that know a sought after material witness in the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing focus on his anti-government views and Holocaust denial ideas. A recent Anti-Defamation League (ADL) survey of today's anti-government extremists finds that these types of views are found in groups that pose a significant threat of violence and disorder in our society. Jay Kaiman, ADL Southeast Regional Director, observed:
"We hope law enforcement can locate Mr. Rudolph to see what he witnessed in Birmingham. Whatever this investigation uncovers, we are concerned with reports from his neighbors and teachers regarding supposed views that he believed the Holocaust did not happen. One press report quoted his English teacher's claim that his view of the Holocaust was weird but 'the paper was well-written ... He was intelligent.' Giving legitimacy to these types of conspiratorial views, simply because they are couched in an academic atmosphere, is disturbing."
The ADL report "Vigilante Justice" discusses the ever-increasing cross- fertilization between various strands of the extremist group, blurring the lines between them. Political and religious extremist views have come closer together finding common ground in pseudo-religious, racist doctrines. Their brand of extremist violence should cause concern, continuing to adopt the tactic of "leaderless resistance" in putting their views in the headlines.
The Anti-Defamation League, founded in 1913, is the world's leading organization fighting anti-Semitism through programs and services that counteract hatred, prejudice and bigotry.
SOURCE: Anti-Defamation League
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (Reuters) - Federal investigators Wednesday issued photographs of a North Carolina man sought as a material witness to the fatal bombing of an Alabama women's health clinic and warned the public he should not be approached if seen.
The FBI issued four photographs of 31-year-old Eric Robert Rudolph and a more detailed description of Rudolph and his pickup truck, which witnesses saw near the New Woman All Women Health Care clinic after it was bombed last Thursday.
"Although Mr. Rudolph is being sought only as a witness, due to the violence associated with this crime he should not approached by anyone outside of law enforcement," the FBI said in a statement.
The agency said Rudolph is a white male who has brown hair, blue eyes, is 5-feet and 10-inches tall and weighs 150 pounds. His birthdate is September 19, 1966.
The FBI, which had previously identified Rudolph's vehicle as a gray Nissan pickup truck, said it was a 1989 model with a white camper shell on the back.
The Murphy, N.C., man is named in a material witness warrant issued by a federal magistrate the day after the bombing of the clinic, where abortions are performed.
The FBI said anyone with information on Rudolph's whereabouts should contact investigators at 1-888-ATF-BOMB.
The Birmingham Post-Herald reported Wednesday that Rudolph registered his pickup truck using the address of a doctor who performs abortions at an Asheville, N.C. clinic owned by the same family that owns the Birmingham property where the New Woman clinic is located.
The newspaper said a brochure that has been circulating among abortion protestors for ten years lists several properties owned by the Harris Family Trust of Asheville, including the Asheville and Birmingham clinics.
The Birmingham explosion killed police officer Robert Sanderson and seriously injured clinic nurse Emily Lyons.
Lyons underwent 10 hours of surgery on the day of the bombing, during which her left eye was removed. She underwent over two hours of surgery to her remaining eye yesterday. Doctors said they are optimistic she will be able to see again.
Lyons also suffered severe leg, abdominal and hand injuries.
Letters sent to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Reuters in Atlanta on the day of the bombing claimed that an anti-abortion group called the Army Of God was responsible.
REUTERS
By Lloyd Rose
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 7, 1998; Page B08
Taking a leaf from Spike Lee, Richard Rashke's play starts with the actors reciting a list of ethnic and racial slurs. (The students were particularly entertained by the delivery of "white [obscene word for Oedipus]!") Soon we get to the particular ethnic slur with which this play is concerned, as the actors surround young Esther (Makela Spielman) and shout, "Jude! Jude! Jude!"
Also onstage is the present-day Esther (Marilyn Hausfeld), a woman in her sixties who is addressing a gathering of high school students. The play consists of arguments between her and her younger self about her memories, and the re-creation of those memories as scenes. This is the Holocaust-play-as-therapy: "Today's the beginning of hope, of healing," young Esther tells her older self.
"Dear Esther" isn't much of a play. What it has is extraordinary source material. Esther Terner Raab's experiences in and escape from the death camp Sobibor are terrible, piercing, impossible not to respond to. And her observations are often not what you'd expect, as when Esther says of war, "It's not so bad. Soldiers fight in the woods. They bring their wounded into town. You pray. You mind your own business. Then after a while they go away." She testifies to the importance of witnessing, noting that the deaths in Sobibor reached "a million -- and the historians give it a paragraph. Because if it's not in writing, it doesn't exist."
In spite of nice performances by Hausfeld and Spielman, the play is so weak that anyone out of adolescence would do better to read Rashke's book "Escape From Sobibor."
Dear Esther, by Richard Rashke. Directed by Leslie Jacobson. Set, Carl Gudenius; lights, Helena Kuukka; costumes, William Pucilowsky; original music, John Ward. With Taunya L. Martin, Stan Kang, Naomi Uyama, Daniel Eichner, Wyatt Fenner. At the Jewish Community Center of Northern Virginia through Feb. 22. Call 703- 323-7965.
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
The subject of a dry, scholarly new book is hardly bestseller material--the story behind the draft of a papal encyclical, commissioned nearly 60 years ago by a pope who did not live long enough to publish it. But the book is fueling a persistent and painful debate: Did the Vatican remain silent during the Holocaust and, if so, why?
Publication by Harcourt Brace of "The Hidden Encyclical of Pope Pius XI," written by two Belgians--a Benedictine monk and a Jewish historian--comes as that haunting question makes headlines. In recent months, a former Roman Catholic priest writing in the New Yorker condemned the church's wartime pope, Pius XII, for his alleged silence. But a cover story in the independent conservative magazine Inside the Vatican reported he is smoothly on the path to canonization.
Not long ago, the Catholic bishops of France publicly acknowledged, and apologized for, the silence of the church as the Nazis sent French Jews to death camps. The International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation recently asked the Vatican to open its wartime archives in their entirety to scholars.
Late last year, Pope John Paul II said that a new document about the church and the Holocaust--first mentioned to Jewish leaders during the 1987 furor over the pope's meeting with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi--is still not ready.
"Now it's 10 years and we're waiting," said Rabbi A. James Rudin, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.
These events underscore the incendiary nature of the "silence" issue more than 50 years after the end of the war. Now the book by Georges Passelecq, the monk, and Bernard Suchecky, the historian, examines the question's prewar roots. It focuses on Achille Ratti, who in 1922 became Pope Pius XI and under whom Vatican City in 1929 became an independent state.
In 1933, Pius XI made an agreement with the Nazis to protect the church in Germany. And in 1938, in the face of the Nazi threat, he commissioned the draft of an encyclical on the evils of racism and anti-Semitism. The encyclical, with its potential for explaining the church's conduct during the Holocaust, remained virtually unknown for three decades because, for reasons unknown, his successor, Pius XII, chose not to publish it.
Its story began to emerge in 1967 when Thomas Breslin, a Jesuit seminarian, was readying some papers of the late Rev. John LaFarge for some future biographer. LaFarge's convictions about the evils of segregation had been shaped while serving predominantly African American rural parishes and, beginning in the '20s, he had written extensively on the issue for the Jesuit magazine America. His 1937 book, "Interracial Justice," a condemnation of segregation, further enhanced his reputation as a Catholic committed to racial reconciliation.
An unassuming man, despite his Harvard education and his family's friendships with, among others, Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton and Henry James, LaFarge nonetheless sensed the importance of his writings and, Breslin said, "He saved everything."
Breslin, now 53 and a vice president at Florida International University in Miami, entered the Society of Jesus only a year before LaFarge died, and they never met. He knew LaFarge by reputation but knew nothing about a long document in French that he found among LaFarge's papers, except that it was clearly important: It was marked as a draft encyclical, the most influential form of communication between popes and the universal church. Nor did Breslin understand the mysterious references to "Fisher Senior" and "Fisher Junior" in an accompanying series of letters.
As Breslin was meditating on the Gospel passage in which Jesus tells Simon (later Peter), a fisherman, to fish for people (proselytize), it dawned on him that Fisher Senior was Pius XI, Fisher Junior his successor.
Breslin worked on the papers into 1968, when he won a history fellowship to the University of Virginia and soon became enmeshed in his studies. But in the summer of 1972, when Breslin was a doctoral candidate, he read an article in the National Catholic Reporter about the recently deceased Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, prefect of the Vatican Library. It reported that, in a break with Vatican protocol, Tisserant's secretary had taken the cardinal's papers back to his native France, saying they contained intriguing information.
Those papers contained "two bombshells," Breslin recalled: The assertion that Pius XI had ordered the drafting of an encyclical against anti-Semitism, and the claim that Mussolini had arranged for the murder of the pope to prevent him from publishing it. Breslin has no inside information about the latter claim--the pope's death was officially attributed to a heart attack--but, he reasons, if Tisserant was right, and Pius XII knew that his predecessor had been killed, it could help explain his "silence."
Pius XII, born Eugenio Pacelli, was a lifelong diplomat accustomed to working quietly in the background as Pius XI's closest aide.
"If he suspected or knew that there had been a murder . . . if Pius XI could have been murdered, why not Pius XII?" Breslin asked. A few weeks after the National Catholic Reporter ran its Tisserant story, it published a report that the Vatican was moving quickly to deny both of the Tisserant claims. Breslin, "infuriated," wrote to the newspaper, verifying existence of the draft.
The Catholic Reporter interviewed Breslin and, in December 1972, broke a story that included a small excerpt from the encyclical.
"The Vatican basically kind of pooh-poohed it," said Breslin, who, for unrelated reasons, had by then left his order before ordination.
Intrigued, Passelecq decided to investigate, but had made little progress when, in 1987, he began working with Suchecky on a scholarly history of the encyclical that was to become their book. Breslin gave them microfilm of the draft encyclical and accompanying documents but, with little church cooperation, the two were unable to uncover much more.
What they have done is develop background that helps put the encyclical in context. This includes other public statements by Pius XI, including a 1937 encyclical, "Mit Brennender Sorge" ("With Burning Sorrow"), written in German and read from every Catholic pulpit in the Nazi Reich. It denounced anyone who "exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State . . . and divinizes them to an idolatrous level." But the encyclical's primary concern was not racism, but Nazi violations of the 1933 concordat, or agreement, between the Vatican and the Reich.
In later years, critics of Pius XII would call him a Germanophile who cozied up to the Nazis. But Eugene Fisher, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs, National Conference of Catholic Bishops, points out that the pope had sent him to Germany to protect the church's interests there and enforce the concordat.
What caused Pius XI "burning sorrow" was the violation of that concordat. Passelecq and Suchecky emphasize that "Mit Brennender Sorge" was neither a broad-brush condemnation of Nazism nor an expression of solidarity with its victims. "Neither was it a protest against anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews in Germany, which the text does not mention at all," the book says.
In 1938, the Italian government began imposing racial legislation on Jews. In response, Pius XI publicly denounced anti-Semitism as "a deplorable movement, a movement in which we, as Christians, must have no part." That same year, he privately commissioned drafting of his encyclical on racism. The man he chose for the task: John LaFarge. His instructions: Just say "what you would say if you yourself were pope."
LaFarge and three other Jesuits worked through the oppressive heat of Paris in the summer of 1938. They called their draft "Humani Generis Unitas" ("The Unity of the Human Race") and late in 1938 LaFarge went to Rome to deliver it. But a few weeks later, on Feb. 9, 1939, Pius XI died.
The draft deplored "a struggle for racial purity" that clearly targeted the Jews and its "systematic cruelty." But it condoned "the authentic basis of the social separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity," based on religious differences, and cited "the spiritual dangers to which contact with Jews can expose souls."
With its "theology of condemnation," it was severely flawed, said Eugene Fisher, key advisor to America's Catholic bishops on relations with the Jews, and allowed for "restrictions on Jews that we would never allow in this country."
"It's probably just as well that it never did get out," Fisher said, as it would have impeded Catholic-Jewish dialogue and probably would not have impacted the course of history.
Others argue that publishing the encyclical would only have enraged the Germans and brought further reprisals against Jews, as happened in the Netherlands when Catholic bishops spoke out.
But the American Jewish Committee's Rudin argues, "If one person had been saved, then it would have been worth it. And how much more angry would it have made the German Nazis?"
Had either Pius XI or Pius XII published it, Breslin believes, it might have injected confusion into Nazi ranks and "saved hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people's lives."
In tapping LaFarge to draft the encyclical, Pius XI had bypassed the Polish-born Jesuit superior general, Wladimir Ledochowski. Breslin suggests that Ledochowski "deliberately delayed it getting to [the pope's] desk," possibly hoping to keep the Germans friendly to the church as a bulwark against Bolshevism.
It is possible, too, that because of this delay Pius XI was finally just too ill to deal with it. But it seems clear that, when Eugenio Pacelli became Pius XII, he knew of the draft; he used some of its language in his first encyclical on the unity of human society.
Whatever Pius XII's reasons for keeping the encyclical a secret, there was little public criticism of him until the early '60s. His supporters contend that it is a question of attempting to find a culprit.
Indeed, at his death in 1958, Pius XII was praised by Jewish leaders, including Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
In his 1967 book, "Three Popes and the Jews," Israeli diplomat / journalist Pinchas Lapide wrote that "no pope in history has ever been thanked more heartily by Jews for having saved or helped their brethren in distress."
Lapide pointed out that when Israele Zolli, wartime chief rabbi of Rome, converted to Catholicism, he took the name Eugenio, presumably in gratitude for Pius XII's wartime succor to Jewish refugees. He estimates that Catholics saved as many as 800,000 Jews from the Nazis; others dispute the figure. But another book claims that Zolli converted to Catholicism out of pique after being removed from the chief rabbi post.
The controversy surrounding Pius XII seems likely to continue. There are Vatican documents still protected by its policy of waiting 75 years to make them public.
The American Jewish Committee, still waiting for that new Vatican document on the church and the Holocaust, wants the Vatican's wartime archives made available to teams of Jewish and Catholic scholars.
"That would put an end to all the charges and countercharges that are swirling," the AJC's Rudin said. "It's time for a final reckoning."
Copyright Los Angeles Times
By Jonathan Leff
VILNIUS, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Lithuanian prosecutors filed charges of genocide on Friday against alleged Nazi war criminal Aleksandras Lileikis, who is 91 and in poor health.
Lileikis, head of the Vilnius security police during the German occupation of Lithuania, is accused of handing over scores of Jews to Nazi death squads. He denies being a war criminal.
"Everything is going according to plan and I handed the case to the Vilnius district court today," Kazimieras Kovarskas, head of the Special Investigations Department at the General Prosecutor's Office, told Reuters.
The trial is likely to be in four to six weeks' time although no date has been set.
It would be the first trial for Holocaust crimes in the Baltic states since the three small countries quit the former Soviet Union in 1991 and comes amid pressure from Nazi-hunting opganisations and the Israeli parliament.
The penalty for genocide is five to 15 years in prison with confiscation of property, and in some cases a life sentence, but the prosecutor doubted a severe sentence would be imposed.
"He is sick, barely alive, and I doubt the court will give him a long punishment," said Kovarskas.
Lithuania had to change its penal code to allow the prosecution of individuals regardless of their state of health.
Lileikis had earlier escaped having charges brought against him as his lawyers and medical experts said he was too ill.
During World War Two, almost all of Lithuania's 220,000 pre-war Jewish community was wiped out by Nazi forces, who sometimes worked with local Lithuanians.
The prosecution says it has papers signed by Lileikis, authorising the transfer of more than 70 Jews into Nazi hands.
Lileikis' lawyer has said the papers were fakes made by the former Soviet security police, the KGB.
Lileikis fled Lithuania in 1944 and spent most of the past half-century in the United States.
In 1996, he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship for concealing his wartime activities and returned to Lithuania.
Nazi-hunters say Lithuania has stalled in prosecuting Nazi war criminals. Prosecutors maintain that it is nearly impossible to prove genocide five decades after the event.
Some 92 members of 120-strong Israeli parliament sent a letter to President Algirdas Brazauskas last February urging him to ensure the prosecution of alleged war criminals and members of the U.S. Congress have also urged Lithuania to act. REUTERS
VILNIUS, Feb 5 (Reuters) - A leading Nazi-hunting group on Thursday welcomed plans by Lithuania to charge and bring to trial an alleged war criminal but said it wanted quicker and further action.
Lithuanian officials on Wednesday said they would this week or early next week bring charges against 90-year-old Aleksandras Lileikis, saying he sent Jews to their deaths when he was head of the security police in Nazi-occupied Vilnius.
Lileikis denies that he is a war criminal.
"We welcome the declared intent of the Lithuanian government to press charges on Aleksandras Lileikis for genocide," said Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, one of the leading organisations which tracks down alleged war criminals.
"At the same time we urge the government to speed up the process given Lileikis' poor health and the length of time that has elapsed since his arrival in Vilnius," Zuroff added.
Lileikis returned to Lithuania in 1996 after being stripped of his U.S. citizenship for concealing his wartime activities from immigration officials.
Investigators allege that as head of the Vilnius region security police he handed over scores of Jews to death squads during the German occupation of Lithuania from 1941 to 1944.
Lithuania's 220,000-strong Jewish community was all but eradicated in the Holocaust.
"We also urge the authorities to initiate proceedings against all the other healthy Nazi war criminals living in Lithuania, in particular against Lileikis' deputy, Kazys Gimzauskas," Zuroff said.
An investigation into Gimzauskas, Lileikis' second-in-command, began last autumn but no charges have been filed.
Nazi-hunters say Lithuania has dragged its feet in bringing alleged war criminals to trial, while the Baltic state says it is difficult to bring a watertight case 50 years after the fact. REUTERS
By Abigail Levene
ROME, Italy, Jan 31 (Reuters) - The flamboyant leader of Italy's separatist Northern League has been ordered to stand trial for insulting the national flag after saying it belonged in the toilet, his spokeswoman said on Saturday.
Umberto Bossi urged a woman to "put the flag in the toilet, lady" after spotting the green, white and red tricolour hanging from her house during a Northern League rally in Venice last year.
"I've ordered a truckload of tricolour toilet paper to put in the toilet," he added. "There's a magistrate who says I can't have it...Come off it!"
Public displays of contempt for the Italian nation are a violation of the constitution and can carry a penalty of between one and three years in prison.
Bossi, who campaigns for an independent state in northern Italy, is already facing an array of charges including incitement to break the law and aggravated threats.
Scores of his supporters were massing in the northern Italian city of Bergamo on Saturday to protest against the accusations, League spokesman Nicoletta Maggi said.
"It's a demonstration against the magistrates, who have declared war on the Northern League. They are applying...a fascist code which needs to be changed," she told Reuters.
The first hearing is scheduled to be held in the Venetian magistrate's court on December 15, Italian media reported.
Earlier this month Bossi received a one-year suspended sentence for urging his supporters at a 1995 rally near Bergamo to hunt down followers of the far-right National Alliance party.
"If you know of someone who voted for the National Alliance, take down their names. I'm not joking about this. When the time comes, if necessary, the League will go from house to house and take them," Bossi had told the rally.
The firebrand leader was also ordered to stand trial for attacks made on Italian magistrates at a demonstration in 1996.
Those rulings came one day after the Chamber of Deputies, parliament's lower house, gave the green light to another investigation against Bossi for charges of incitement to violence, aggravated threats and defamation related to a 1995 rally in the northern town of Tolmezzo.
On that occasion, he was widely reported to have told his supporters to "identify and pursue, house by house, the members of the National Alliance" whom he branded "dirty fascists." That trial is set for March 27.
Bossi has already been sentenced to five months' imprisonment for defamatory remarks directed at a judge and to eight months for illegal party financing. But under Italian law, sentences of less than two years are rarely served, and he has served neither.
Bossi also faces trial in Milan for comparing Italy's devout president, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, to Rasputin, the shadowy monk who captivated Russia's last tsarina. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
By Rolf Soderlind
VIENNA, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Austrian far-right opposition leader Joerg Haider said on Wednesday that the European Union's enlargement plans amounted to a declaration of war on Austria.
He said enlargement would spark a wave of immigration from eastern Europe that would wreck the Austrian social and economic structure, with Austrians losing their jobs to cheap labour from former communist states.
"This is a declaration of war on Austria," said Haider, leader of Austria's largest opposition group, the Freedom Party, told a news conference.
"This is a declaration of war on all industrious and hard-working people here. We demand that the question of enlargement be removed from the EU agenda for now."
Haider said the EU should examine the consequences of massive immigration from eastern Europe before embarking on enlargement negotiations.
Austria shares borders with entry candidates Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The EU will begin negotiations with six front-runners -- Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus -- at the end of March.
"Cheap labour will enter the country. At least 700,000 will come here," Haider said. "How are they all going to find work? Austrians will lose their jobs."
The figure would represent about one-fifth of the Austrian work force.
Haider, whose party became the second largest grouping on the city council in Graz in weekend elections, said tens of thousands of Austrian farms would be driven out of business by an onslaught of cheap agriculture products from the east.
He urged Chancellor Viktor Klima's government not to pursue membership talks when Austria assumes the EU presidency in the second half of this year.
"The government must make sure that the eastward expansion is postponed because Austria would have to carry most of the burden," he said.
Klima's government last week asked the European Union for regional grants to cushion its border areas from the economic impact of East European countries joining the community.
Austria officially supports enlargement but many industrialists fear domestic companies could lose business to low-cost, low-wage competitors in former communist countries.
Foreign Minister Wolfgang Schuessel said last week that industrial wages were 10 to 15 percent lower in the neighbouring former communist countries than in Austria.
Some five million of Austria's eight million people live within 100 km (60 miles) of their borders. REUTERS
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
JERUSALEM, Feb 2 (Reuters) - The European Union said on Monday it would give Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum more than $500,000 to prepare a publication on non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Nazi genocide.
The book, titled "The Lexicon of the Righteous Among the Nations," will constitute "an invaluable resource," the EU said in a statement released in Jerusalem.
The Righteous Among the Nations is the term used to describe some 14,000 non-Jews who helped save Jews during the Holocaust.
The grant is part of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership which was launched in Barcelona in 1995 to advance security, economic and social cooperation between the EU and Mediterranean countries. REUTERS
By Duncan Shiels
BUDAPEST, Feb 5 (Reuters) - More than 4,000 elderly Hungarian Jews out of an eligible 19,000 have been paid their first instalment from a $280 million Swiss bank fund for Holocaust survivors, a Jewish charity said on Thursday.
"About 4,000 people have already got their 400 dollars through the post," Israel Sela, Hungarian representative of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JOINT) told Reuters.
"The first instalment was given to the oldest people and eventually everyone will get their payment," he added.
The fund was set up last year amid a growing chorus of allegations that Switzerland used its neutrality to profit from the war.
Swiss banks were also heavily criticised for not doing enough to track down the holders of dormant bank accounts, which hold funds deposited by Holocaust victims.
An official ceremony marking the handover of the $2 million first instalment will held on February 12.
Hungarian, Israeli and Swiss dignitaries attending will include Jewish Agency head Avraham Burg as well as 99-year-old Hilda Barinkai, who re-opened JOINT's Budapest office on the day the Soviet Union entered the city in January 1945, Sela said.
Hungary's Jewish community, estimated to number up to 130,000, is by far the largest in Eastern Europe, mainly because World War Two Nazi deportations started later than elsewhere.
Sela said the logistics of contacting and paying the 19,000 Holocaust survivors were made easier by a public foundation set up by the Hungarian government last year to distribute four billion forints ($19.5 million) in monthly pensions.
"Hungary is the only country which has set up a public foundation to deliver compensation so we already have the computer system, the data base, and the mailing system to quickly deliver the money," he said.
Sela said the aim was for every victim to receive $1,000 once the full amount of money was in place and the total number of eligible beneficiaries was known.
About $11 million from the $280 million fund have been earmarked for eastern European Holocaust survivors, who have never received any compensation for their suffering.
Latvia handed over the first $400 cheque in November. ($ - 204.9 Hungarian Forints) REUTERS
Tuesday, January 27, 1998; 5:55 p.m. EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Organizations that assist Holocaust survivors would share up to $25 million under a bill the House sent President Clinton on its first day back to work Tuesday.
The measure, approved by voice vote, also authorizes an additional $5 million for archival research to help with the restitution of assets that were looted or extorted from Holocaust victims.
The funds would be distributed over a three-year period.
Rep. James Leach, R-Iowa, the House sponsor, said the measure will provide some "material redress" for the inadequate restitution of assets belonging to Holocaust victims that were seized by the American government during World War II.
"But most of all, this measure is a reminder (that) the past must never be forgotten and that it is often more controversial than issues of the present," Leach said.
The Senate passed the bill last November.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
NEW YORK, Jan. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- "'Right to life' does not mean the right to cause death," declared the American Jewish Congress today, condemning today's bombing of an abortion clinic in Birmingham.
In his statement, AJCongress Executive Director Phil Baum called on "responsible leaders" of the Right to Life movement to "vociferously condemn today's bombing and to make it clear that they will not tolerate any further outrages."
The full text of the statement is as follows:
Once again, a "Right to Life" zealot has inflicted indiscriminate death.
The clinic that was bombed in Birmingham today has long been the site of protest demonstrations by anti-abortion zealots. Now, however, protests which are protected by constitutional guarantees of free speech have turned to indiscriminate violence. The judicial system has been swift and stern in its punishment of those responsible for abortion clinic violence elsewhere. We hope and pray that this example will be followed here.
It has been said that since the slavery issue was settled, abortion has been the greatest cause of discord on the American political agenda. Responsible disagreement is the American way of dealing with differences. Therefore, responsible leaders of the Right to Life movement must vociferously condemn today's bombing of an abortion clinic in Atlanta and make it clear that they will not tolerate any further outrages. "Right to life," they must say, does not mean the right to impose death.
The American Jewish Congress, founded in 1918 by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Justice Louis D. Brandeis and other distinguished Jews, specializes in combating all forms of bigotry through law and legislation. Considered the legal voice of the American Jewish Community, it works to safeguard Jewish interests, protect basic freedoms enshrined in the American Bill of Rights and to advance the security of Israel.
SOURCE: American Jewish Congress
WASHINGTON (AP) -- An elderly Illinois man accused of participating in a massacre of Jews at a Nazi slave labor camp during World War II has lost a second court battle to retain his U.S. citizenship, the Justice Department said Tuesday.
A federal appeals court affirmed a lower court's decision to revoke the citizenship of Bronislaw Hajda, 73, a retired factory worker living in Schiller Park, Ill., the department said, citing court papers filed last Friday. The department is seeking to deport him.
Hajda denied the allegations during his trial, declaring, "I never killed anyone."
But the three-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said there was sufficient documentary evidence that Hajda served as an armed guard at SS Training Camp Trawniki and the Treblinka labor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II, activities he concealed when applying to immigrate to the United States after the war.
His attorney did not immediately return a call seeking comment on whether Hajda would appeal the latest decision.
A federal judge in Chicago stripped Hajda of his citizenship in April after finding that he participated in a July 1944 massacre of hundreds of Jewish prisoners at Treblinka, served in the SS Streibel Battalion guarding forced Polish laborers building fortifications against the Russian advance and then hid those actions. Those activities made him ineligible to enter the United States and ineligible for citizenship.
He came to America in 1950, the Justice Department said.
Hajda is one of 60 people who have lost their U.S. citizenship because of Nazi activities after being investigated by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, created in 1979. Forty-eight have since been removed from the United States.
The office is investigating about 300 others.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
NEW YORK, Jan. 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Deploring what it called the "politicization of the judicial appointment process," the American Jewish Congress today urged leadership in both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the full Senate to quickly approve or reject President Clinton's nominations for federal judgeships and to put an end to the gridlock in which 82 of 846 positions on the federal bench -- nearly 10 percent -- remain vacant.
"We believe that partisanship surrounding the vacancies throughout the federal judiciary must stop, as justice delayed is too frequently justice denied," AJCongress said, while also calling on President Clinton to increase the pace of his judicial nominations.
In a resolution approved unanimously on the "Slowdown in Judicial Confirmations," the AJCongress Governing Council, the organization's highest legislative and policy-making body, seconded the comments of Chief Justice William Rehnquist who recently declared that the confirmation process gridlock in the United States Senate cannot continue "without eroding the quality of justice that traditionally has been associated with the federal judiciary."
AJCongress agreed, noting that 17 of the 26 judgeships for which President Clinton has nominated candidates have remained vacant for 18 months or longer and are considered "judicial emergencies." In some cases, the resolution noted, the Senate Judiciary Committee never takes up the nomination; in others, the Committee approves the nomination but the full Senate is denied the opportunity for a floor debate and vote.
"We might disagree with the outcomes," the resolution said, "but it is the Senate's obligation to hold hearings on nominees, and then accept or defeat their nominations either in the Senate Judiciary Committee or on the Senate floor. But it is wholly unacceptable to deny a nominee his or her hearing year after year. There is no valid justification for partisan stalling tactics that threaten the functioning of the federal judiciary."
According to AJCongress Executive Director Phil Baum, in 1997 the Senate Judiciary Committee held only nine hearings -- an all-time low. Seven nominees have been waiting for Senate action since 1995, he said, one since 1992.
The AJCongress resolution also noted that the White House has been slow to send up candidates. "The President must increase the pace of his judicial nominations," declared the Governing Council. The resolution made clear, however, that Senate inaction is the major problem, citing the case of Margaret Morrow, the former President of the Los Angeles and California Bar Associations, whose nomination to the Central District of California has been stalled on the Senate floor for three years.
"We strongly urge the Senate Judiciary Committee and, through the Senate leadership, the full Senate to practice their key role -- advice and consent, not stall and dawdle -- without further delay," declared the AJCongress resolution.
"Given Chief Justice Rehnquist's comments," added Executive Director Baum, "the time is ripe for the Senate to clear up the backlog and to restore to the federal judiciary the capability of serving justice in as timely a fashion as possible, to the benefit of all Americans."
The full text of the resolution is as follows:
As of the end of 1997, 82 of 846 judgeships -- almost 10 percent -- remain vacant. Chief Justice William Rehnquist recently commented that the confirmation process gridlock in the United States Senate cannot continue "without eroding the quality of justice that traditionally has been associated with the federal judiciary."
This erosion is most apparent in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, where 10 out of 28 appellate judgeships remain vacant. Unfortunately, this situation has resulted in fewer oral arguments, cases being decided by semi-retired judges pressed into service, and cases being decided by judges from other parts of the country.
To be sure, as Chief Justice Rehnquist pointed out, the White House is not without blame in the current logjam, as the White House has not yet put forth nominees for 40 out of the 82 vacancies. But 17 of the posts for which nominees have been named (26 posts in total) have remained vacant for 18 months or longer, earning these vacancies the label "judicial emergencies." And for this the U.S. Senate is clearly to blame.
We might disagree with the outcomes, but it is the Senate's obligation to hold hearings on nominees, and then accept or defeat their nominations either in the Senate Judiciary Committee or on the Senate floor. But it is wholly unacceptable to deny a nominee his or her hearing year after year, or as in the case of Margaret Morrow, from the Central District of California, and others to repeatedly report the nomination favorably out of committee, only to be deny that nominee a vote on the Senate floor. There is no valid justification for partisan stalling tactics that threaten the functioning of the federal judiciary.
This politicization of the judicial appointment process, which we deplore, manifests itself in other ways as well. The appearance of fundraising letters on behalf of conservative political organizations and conservative candidates further threatens our vital tradition of an independent judiciary. And where political fights once broke out only over controversial and highly-visible Supreme Court nominations, they now surround nominations throughout the federal judiciary, down to district judgeships.
But the story of the increasingly political nature of this process is best told by the numbers from comparable years during each of the past three presidencies: In 1988, a Democratic Senate approved 41 of President Reagan's 64 nominees, and in 1992, it confirmed 66 of President Bush's 75 nominees. By comparison, in 1996, a Republican Senate confirmed only 20 of President Clinton's 48 nominees. This partisanship has also dealt a blow to diversity in the federal judiciary, as 13 of the 15 nominees delayed the longest are women or minorities.
We believe that this partisanship surrounding the vacancies throughout the federal judiciary must stop, as justice delayed is too frequently justice denied. The President must increase the pace of his judicial nominations. We strongly urge the Senate Judiciary Committee and, through the Senate leadership, the full Senate to practice their key role advice and consent, not stall and dawdle without further delay.
The American Jewish Congress, founded in 1918 by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Justice Louis D. Brandeis and other distinguished Jews, specializes in combating all forms of bigotry through law and legislation. Considered the legal voice of the American Jewish Community, it works to safeguard Jewish interests, protect basic freedoms enshrined in the American Bill of Rights and to advance the security of Israel.
SOURCE: American Jewish Congress
DETROIT, Jan. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- The Zionist Organization of America and three other Jewish organizations have asked the New York Times to publicly explain its news policy as it relates to coverage of the Middle East.
In a letter to the Times' chairman, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the organizations said they were appalled and shocked to learn that the Times uses a dual standard of morality in defining what is news in the Middle East.
The organizations were reacting to a letter written by Times news editor, William Borders, to a reader who had complained about bias against Israel in the Times' reporting. In his letter, Borders wrote:
"The whole point is that torture by Israel, a democratic ally of the United States, which gets huge support from this country, is news. Torture by Palestinians seems less surprising. Surely you don't consider the two authorities morally equivalent."
When the reader, in a second letter expressed shock at Borders' reply, he received a response from Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor, who supported Borders' position.
In the letter to Sulzberger from the Zionist Organization of America, the Zionist Organization of America of Metropolitan Detroit, the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit and La'Asot (To Do), the organizations wrote:
"We want to indicate how shocked and appalled we are to learn that the New York Times applies a dual moral standard to its news coverage of the Middle East.
"This policy violates every principle of objectivity supposedly followed by the New York Times and the media, and is an insult to Israel. Israel is held to a 'higher moral standard' than others -- whatever that means. We know of only one moral standard -- and we believe Arabs should be insulted as well because your paper does not expect moral behavior from them.
"Further, the policy means you publish a flawed product since readers do not know that you accentuate violations by Israel and ignore or play down those of the Palestinians, since abuses by the Palestinians are 'less surprising.'
"Obviously, this policy has many other serious implications as it pertains to influencing public policy and public opinion.
"We respectfully request an immediate review of your policies defining news, particularly as they pertain to the Middle East, and look forward to a public statement on this policy.
"Given the seriousness of your policy, we are issuing a press release on this letter to you.
"We respect and revere the First Amendment; we have no quarrel with the Times' right to use a dual moral standard. But if that is the case, then we believe you will agree, the public has a right to know the criteria for the Times' decision-making processes in the reporting of news in such a volatile area such as the Middle East.
"We look forward to hearing from you on this vital issue."
SOURCE: Zionist Organization of America of Metropolitan Detroit
HARRISBURG, Pa., Jan. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- On behalf of Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, Insurance Commissioner M. Diane Koken announced today that the state Insurance Department will host a special forum next month for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust and their heirs.
Recent published reports have cited evidence the former Nazi government in Germany defrauded victims of insurance proceeds. The forum will explore that issue and related concerns.
"Although it pales by comparison to the millions of lives that were lost in the Holocaust, Gov. Ridge believes the financial ruin that was inflicted on victims and survivors should not be ignored," Koken said.
The forum will be held Feb. 6 from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Penn Tower Hotel, Civic Center Boulevard, in Philadelphia. The event is sponsored by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners' (NAIC) Holocaust Insurance Issues Working Group.
The working group, of which the Pennsylvania Insurance Department is a member, was formed to explore how to resolve outstanding claims, and to develop a strategy for dealing with the insurance industry.
The NAIC estimates that there are more than 1,700 Holocaust survivors who are citizens of Pennsylvania, but the actual number may be higher. Pennsylvania volunteered to host a meeting of the working group, in part, because of its large population of survivors.
SOURCE: Pennsylvania Insurance Department
NEW YORK, Jan. 27 (UPI) _ United Nations Ambassador Richard Butler is slated to discuss the status of the U.N. inspection program with a New York Jewish group this afternoon. Event organizers say the executive chairman of the U.N. Special Commission is expected to speak with members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations at a luncheon in Manhattan this afternoon.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Assicurazioni Generali invited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Israel to begin agreed upon coordination on the transfer of Holocaust information between the two organizations. Mr. Guido Pastori, the company's Vice Director General, has invited museum Chief Information Officer Mr. Michael Lieber to the company's offices in Trieste to "witness the process and discuss the computerization and programming of retrieval of data for Yad Vashem's purposes."
In a letter praising Generali on a number of fronts, Rabbi Abraham Ravitz, Chairman of the Knesset's Finance Committee, noted the "positive spirit and good will" in Generali's ongoing efforts to computerize historic materials in the company's Trieste archives. (see attached) Ravitz also praised Generali for inviting Yad Vashem to Trieste in advance of completing the data input process. (see below)
Technical coordination with Yad Vashem comes in the context of the agreements by Generali executed in Israel in June, 1997 upon the purchase by Generali of Israel's Migdal Insurance, the largest ever foreign investment in an Israeli financial institution. Once the process of computerizing the company's archives is complete -- in mid-to late February -- Yad Vashem representatives will begin collecting information from Generali as part of the museum's ongoing effort to compile names of Holocaust victims.
This material is distributed by Chlopak, Leonard, Schechter and Associates, Inc., 1850 M Street, NW, Suite 550, Washington, D.C. 20036, on behalf of Assicurazioni Generali, S.p.A., Piazza Duca degli Abruzzi, n. 2, 34132, Trieste, Italy. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.
Rabbi Abraham Ravitz, Chairman of the Finance Committee of Knesset, sent the following letter, dated Jan. 29, to Assicurazioni Generali, S.p.A.:
re: Agreement with Generali Company
I noted your statement that the process of the manual computerization of the materials in your archives in Trieste which required many months is to be completed in accordance with your estimate within a month.
I greatly appreciate that you have invited a representative of "Yad Vashem" to Trieste to observe the process of manual feeding and computerization even before it has been completed. This invitation reflects good will on your side and a readiness to cooperate with "Yad Vashem" as had been agreed with you.
I know that Generali transferred the amount designated to fund the Trust to an account which has been opened by Fund Trustees within 2 days from the day on which the Trustees designated to it the bank account of the Trust, thus fulfilling its part in the agreement.
I wish to note the positive spirit and the good will of Generali, which found its expression also in its readiness to place at its disposal of the fund established by it, an amount to cover the start-up and administrative activities of the Trustees during the first year, beyond its obligation under the agreement.
I hope that this will open the way for the commencement of the activities of the Fund in realization of the important agreement of its ex gratia payments to beneficiaries of policies of Generali issued before the Holocaust in Eastern and Central Europe and if possible -- to the eternalization of communities which have been eliminated and the extension of assistance to families of Holocaust victims: and other important purposes.
Assicurazioni Generali, S.p.A., sent the following letter, dated Jan. 29, to Mr. Avner Shalev the Chairman of the Board of Yad Vashem:
As you have been advised by Mr. Ben-Porath, the manual feeding of the information from the Archives into our computer system, at the Information Center, is expected to be completed soon.
Accordingly, we would like to coordinate with you a visit of your Chief Information Officer, Mr. Michael Lieber, to Trieste, to witness the process and discuss the computerization and programming of retrieval of data for Yad Vashem's purposes, as agreed.
We suggest that Mr. Lieber contact our Mr. Aldo Cappuccio or Mr. Daniele Di Loreto (tel. 39-40-671814 fax 39-40-671006) to make arrangements for the visit.
SOURCE: Assicurazioni Generali, S.p.A.
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Students at a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem want their rabbi dismissed because he was spotted at a nude bar dressed as a cowboy, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported on Thursday.
The mass-circulation tabloid said a customer recognized the rabbi at the bar, photographed him and distributed the pictures among his students.
The newspaper named neither the seminary nor the rabbi.
Seminary officials, who have been trying for two months to keep the incident quiet, described the rabbi's visit as part of an "educational mission."
"The rabbi gave up his soul and went to this abominable place to check whether students from the seminary tended to go there," the newspaper quoted one official as saying.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Three Americans convicted of violating Sweden's hate laws by giving Nazi salutes during a rock 'n' roll concert said prison won't change their views.
"I've never hurt a Jew in my life, but now I'm in prison for what the Nazis did in the Holocaust," Shawn Sugg, 30, of Otter Lake, Mich., said in an interview at Kronoberg Remand Prison.
Sugg is the author of songs titled "Romantic Violence," "White Man" and "Fight to be Free."
"The prosecutor tried to make me look like some evil guy, but I'm just a singer in the band," he said.
The Michigan-based group Max Resist appeared at a Jan. 3 concert outside Stockholm. They performed for free, with local sponsors reimbursing travel expenses, guitarist Andrew Miokovic said.
Police arrested about two dozen fans and band members after some began shouting the Nazi salute "Sieg Heil!"
Convicted with Sugg were Miokovic, 21, of Fort Wayne, Ind.; Danielle Reda, 26, of Royal Oak, Mich.; and Eric Dobbs, 23, a Swedish fan living in San Diego. Two other Swedes also reportedly await trial.
The one-month prison sentence ends Feb. 3. Defense attorney Lennart Hane filed an appeal to overturn the conviction, alleging the application of the law was politically motivated. The contention is scheduled to be heard on Feb. 3.
Dobbs, a clean-cut graphic designer, claimed he made no Nazi salute, but "even if I got two years (in prison), my views would have remained the same."
Miokovic, a construction worker with a swastika tattoo, admitted that some of his views were racist. His solution for America's economic and social problems is racial separation in a "semi-police state."
He said that authorities, in arresting him and the others, were only promoting his message.
"The courts didn't understand they were making us legends, doubling the number of our fans and record sales," he said.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) -- The sale by Dutch civil servants of valuables that belonged to Holocaust victims was legal but "insensitive," an independent commission reported Thursday.
Finance Ministry employees auctioned off -- among themselves and at bargain-basement prices -- jewelry and other valuables belonging to Dutch Jews killed in World War II Nazi concentration camps, the commission said in its report.
The 1968 sale came to light in December, shocking and angering the Dutch Jewish community and prompting the government to establish the panel to look into it.
"I can say that it was shortsighted ... and that there was an insensitivity," commission leader Frans Kordes said after presenting his report to Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm.
The former employees, who were not identified, worked for an agency that oversaw the return of Nazi spoils to Holocaust survivors or their heirs.
But because about three-quarters of Dutch Jews -- more than 100,000 people -- died in the Holocaust, many of the 200 items went unclaimed.
It was not immediately clear what became of the $900 in proceeds from the sale of watches, wedding rings, earrings and the like, many of them gold or silver.
Revelations about the sale came after journalists uncovered records from a Dutch bank used by Nazis during World War II as a repository for property stolen from Dutch Jews before their deportation.
Although the articles were not valuable, the very idea that they were sold deeply offended survivors of the Holocaust and relatives of victims.
"The behavior of the civil servants was immoral," said Ronny Naftaniel, a spokesman for a prominent Dutch Jewish organization, the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel.
The commission's report concluded that there was no way of returning the articles to relatives of the original owners because they would be too difficult to trace.
Instead, Kordes suggested, the government should initiate a broad discussion about the treatment of Jews in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation.
Zalm, the finance minister, supported the findings and said he would discuss the report with Cabinet colleagues.
Dutch history books generally focus on their country's resistance to the Nazis and efforts to hide Jews, including Anne Frank and her family.
Naftaniel said he was disappointed that the government had not made a symbolic donation of the sale proceeds to a Jewish welfare organization.
"It is only 1,800 guilders ($900). It's nothing. But it would have been a gesture," he said.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
"I urge an end to threats of sanctions against Swiss banks beyond just a postponement of those threats," Eizenstat told a news conference during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum here.
In December, U.S. local officials said they would postpone any economic sanctions against Swiss banks until the end of March but said the banks must act by then to address U.S. and Jewish concerns about their handling of Holocaust victims' accounts.
"We believe this moratorium (March 31) should become permanent in the months ahead," Eizenstat said. "Sanctions will not only retard further progress to come to closure, they are also unjustified based upon the concrete and courageous actions Switzerland and Swiss banks have taken."
Copyright © 1998 Reuters Limited.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- A year after Poland passed a law dealing with the return of Jewish cemeteries, synagogues and other communal property seized during World War II, work has begun on the first claims.
The first three cases were immediately adjourned Thursday because of poor preparation or missing documents -- illustrating just how difficult the task will be.
"The work will involve some difficulty, regardless of the good will of the people involved," said Pawel Wildstein, a Jewish community leader who sits on the committee set up last year to rule on the property claims.
The most difficult part, he said, was proving Jewish ownership of the property.
"Along with the people, everything that made up the documentation -- the written history of this community -- perished" in the Holocaust, Wildstein said in a telephone interview.
The first three cases in the southern city of Bielsko Biala involved a public school building the claimants say was once a Jewish school, court offices that were once a Jewish community center and an empty plot of land said to have contained a synagogue.
The committee, which acts as an arbitration court, adjourned the proceedings until March, said Andrzej Czochara, head of the Interior Ministry's religion department.
He said the committee will have to take into account whether the properties are currently in use and, if so, local authorities may offer alternative sites instead.
"When we have a hospital or a school occupying the building it is hard to close them down," he said.
The six-member panel of three government lawyers and three Jewish community representatives was set up under a February 1997 law that deals with communal property. Separate legislation is planned to cover Jewish private property that was confiscated.
So far, the committee has received 40 claims, but Jewish community leaders suggest as many as 2,000 could be filed.
About 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland before World War II. About 3 million perished at the hands of the Nazis. Many of the survivors left Poland in the 1960s amid a communist-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign. About 20,000 Jews live in Poland today.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- An exhibit on German resistance within the wartime army that opened here Sunday aids understanding of the Nazi period, the regional governor said Sunday, a day after clashes over a separate but related display.
Hundreds of leftists and neo-Nazis brawled Saturday on a train to Dresden, where a traveling show contains evidence that regular soldiers within Hitler's Wehrmacht army committed atrocities alongside special units like the SS.
Speaking at Sunday's opening here, Gov. Hans Eichel said: "It was more than simply victims and perpetrators. There were resisters."
"It's not true that there was nothing one could do at the time. There were those who did something, who stayed true to humanity."
The exhibit, "Rebellion of Conscience," was produced in 1984 by German army historians. It provides background on the failed assassination attempt of Hitler on July 20, 1944, and lists officers who refused to comply with orders to kill Jews or send them to their deaths. Accompanying documents show how commanders deemed such officers defiant of the Nazi regime's attempts to handle "the Jewish question."
The show also profiles resistance rooted in political groups, including communist ones, that drew soldiers as members, and examines motives for resistance.
For example, Lt. Gen. Theodor Groppe, a devout Catholic, is said to have had religious reasons for refusing Nazi orders. He spoke out against the Nazi regime in 1939 because it urged SS soldiers to father children out of wedlock to boost the country's potential for future soldiers.
The controversial exhibit in Dresden, which has been making the rounds among German cities for three years, drew more than 1,400 demonstrators for competing protests Saturday.
Right-wing critics argue that the exhibit unfairly brands the entire Wehrmacht, which they maintain simply fought the enemy.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
By Andrew Marshall
FRANKFURT, Jan 28 (Reuters) - German chemicals and metals group Degussa AG (DGSG.F) said on Wednesday it was making payments to former slave labourers who were forced to work in a Degussa factory in Poland during World War Two.
"Degussa is helping some individuals," a Degussa spokeswoman told Reuters, confirming a newspaper report. "They are former slave labourers from eastern Europe who during World War Two worked in the factory in Poland."
She declined to comment on the number of people who would receive compensation, or the amount of money involved. The nationality of the former slaves was also not released -- the spokeswoman would say only say they were eastern Europeans.
The spokeswoman made clear that Degussa did not consider the payments compensation, but rather humanitarian help.
The news came as Degussa marked its 125th anniversary on Wednesday with a statement reviewing its history, including the "difficult chapter" of the Nazi era.
Degussa did not mention the payments in the statement, but it said it was investigating its activities during World War Two, and would publish its findings.
The company acknowledged in June that it had melted down gold and silver taken from Holocaust victims during the Nazi era. It is co-operating with the Jewish World Congress to discover the whereabouts of precious metals taken from Jews during the 1930s and 1940s.
Degussa said it had also appointed U.S. historian Peter Hayes to investigate its chemicals activities during the war.
"In this area too, the National Socialist economic system determined the company's policy," Degussa said.
"Problem areas here include, among others, the acquisition of companies from Jewish ownership within the scope of Aryanisation, the use of forced labour, (and) the role of Degesch in which Degussa held an interest, in connection with the abuse of Zyklon B," the company said.
Zyklon B gas was used in the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps. Degesch was a company owned by the huge IG Farben chemicals group, which produced Zyklon B.
Degussa said it was also investigating its co-operation with the army's supreme command in connection with explosives and uranium.
Copyright © 1998 Reuters Limited.
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- A Vienna doctor accused of the Nazi-era killings of disabled children used the remains of the victims for research up to the mid-1960s, researchers said Friday.
The case of neurologist Heinrich Gross, who is being investigated on possible murder charges, was the subject of much of the discussion Friday at a conference on Nazi euthanasia in Germany and Austria.
Like many other professionals, Gross evaded punishment for his alleged crimes after the war and went on to achieve prominence in his field. His case has come to symbolize a fresh attempt by the Austrian capital to grapple with the Nazi past and decades-long attempts to protect those involved in its atrocities.
Gross stood trial in 1950 in connection with the euthanasia of some of the hundreds of children ordered killed by the Nazis at what is now Vienna's main psychiatric institute -- the site of the two-day symposium. But the case was thrown out on a legal technicality and the state prosecutor's office dropped the charges without explanation.
German historian Mathias Dahl said his research showed that Gross published five articles between 1955 and 1965 based on research using the preserved brains of children killed because they were deemed handicapped or anti-social. Six other articles published by him also likely used the same specimens, Dahl said.
Gross again was brought to trial in the 1980s, but evaded punishment because of a 30-year statute of limitations on manslaughter. After the war, he had gone on to head Vienna's main psychiatric institute and was sought as an expert witness at trials up to last year.
Gross lives just outside Vienna but refuses to talk to journalists. He has argued he was not present at the Vienna neurological hospital at the time in the 1940s when most of the children were killed.
But Austrian historian Wolfgang Neugebauer cited a letter in late 1944 from the head of the hospital asking for a bonus for Gross for coming to work at the hospital voluntarily while being on leave from the German Wehrmacht.
"This ... voluntary participation in children's euthanasia negates the argument of Dr. Gross that he was opposed to euthanasia and had reported to the Wehrmacht" instead, said Neugebauer.
Prosecutors are now investigating possibilities of a new trial on murder charges, which are not covered by a statute of limitation.
The new investigations were launched after the city last year publicized the existence of hundreds of preserved brains taken from the children after their death and used in medical research well into the post-war era. Their existence had not been widely known.
Austrians long were taught they were victims of Hitler's Germany, but many now believe that the country must shoulder a large part of the blame for the Holocaust and other Nazi horrors.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Israeli Finance Minister Yaakov Neeman is in Washington this week discussing a plan to phase out the annual $1.2 billion in civilian aid over 10-12 years. Israel would like half of this to be shifted to U.S. military aid, which currently stands at $1.8 billion a year.
"We welcome the Israeli government's initiative on this and we will be working closely with Israel and the Congress as the concept develops," State Department spokesman James Foley said.
Foley declined to discuss details of the plan, including the proposed increase in military aid, saying it was for the Israeli government to comment.
"But I would like to make clear that we reiterate our unshakeable commitment to Israel's security needs," he told a news briefing.
Neeman's talks with U.S. officials and members of Congress carry out a pledge by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech to Congress in 1996, to wean Israel from more than two decades of reliance on an annual infusion of U.S. funds.
The details of the gradual reduction are to be worked out over the next two months, after which Neeman will return to Washington to discuss the agreement, Israeli embassy spokesman Gadi Baltiansky said.
A spokeswoman for the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee, Elizabeth Morra, said Neeman's talks with members of the committee were "very constructive" and they had applauded Netanyahu for following up on his pledge.
Aid to the Middle East has come under close scrutiny by U.S. lawmakers who have seen the region consume a larger percentage of the shrinking U.S. foreign aid budget.
Egypt and Israel together receive $5.1 billion a year in military and economic aid, the largest shares of the $13 billion U.S. foreign aid package.
Copyright © 1998 Reuters Limited.
BONN, Germany (AP) -- Germans marked a national memorial day Tuesday for 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, and lawmakers and historians alike urged the country to take measures to prevent renewed Nazi-style racism.
First observed two years ago, the Day of Remembrance of Victims of Nazism marks the Jan. 27, 1945, liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, where more than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died at the hands of the Nazis.
Ceremonies at former concentration camps and schoolroom discussions of Nazism were among the day's events. Though not a legal holiday, the day is Germany's official tribute to victims of Adolf Hitler's regime.
Against a backdrop of rising anti-foreigner violence, especially in Germany's depressed eastern states, the day's speeches stressed the importance of educating every generation about Nazi horrors.
"We have to carefully watch developments in our country and defend against the first signs of trouble," said Ignatz Bubis, head of Germany's Central Council of Jews.
Bubis helped dedicate a memorial at the Berlin Grunewald train station, from which almost 56,000 Berlin Jews were sent to Nazi forced labor and death camps.
At a ceremony in parliament in Bonn, lawmakers heard a string trio perform music written by Holocaust victim Gideon Klein while he was at the Theresienstadt camp. Klein, a Jew, also spent time in Auschwitz and later died in a Nazi camp in what is now the Czech Republic.
Parliament speaker Rita Suessmuth urged Germans to reflect on "the roots of dictatorship and terror" and not to look away when they see racism.
"This remembrance causes pain," she said. "Auschwitz may have happened decades ago, but it remains with us."
One Israeli Holocaust scholar, Yehuda Bauer, said recent genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia indicated that the world has learned little from the Holocaust.
"Remembering the Holocaust is only a first step," he told parliament. "To teach and to learn about everything that happened in World War II, about racism and anti-Semitism is the next, responsible step."
More than five decades after World War II, how to deal with the Nazi legacy remains an almost daily topic in Germany.
Attacks by right-wing extremists -- especially despondent youths in former communist East Germany -- rose last year for the first time in five years. The German military has been under fire after revelations of neo-Nazi activities in its ranks.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, academics and artists have argued for years over the design of a planned Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, which will become Germany's seat of power again next year.
Critics used the occasion Tuesday to accuse Kohl's government of not giving enough compensation to frail Holocaust survivors in eastern Europe.
Instead, Germans and their politicians worry mainly "about esthetic aspects of remembrance such as the design of the Berlin Holocaust memorial," said the Association for the Information and Counseling of Nazi Victims.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
PARIS (AP) -- France's top Nazi hunter said Friday he will seek the removal of the chief judge in Maurice Papon's war crimes trial, who he contends is related to Jews caught in a roundup Papon allegedly ordered.
Serge Klarsfeld said earlier this week he has evidence that presiding Judge Jean-Louis Castagnade is related by marriage to a woman whose mother and two sisters died at Auschwitz after being sent there as part of a December 1943 roundup of Jews.
The woman, Esterina Benaim, went on to marry Castagnade's uncle, Klarsfeld says. Castagnade has made no public comment on the assertion.
Klarsfeld said he plans to enter a request Monday for Castagnade to step down. An appeals court will have one month to consider the request.
"Guilty or innocent, any verdict is colored if the judge handling the case is found to be related to a party in the trial -- in this case, to victims of the accused," Klarsfeld said in an interview.
Papon, 87, the highest-ranking official of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime ever to be tried for crimes against humanity, is alleged to have signed arrest orders that led to the deportation of 1,690 Jews, including 233 children, from Bordeaux. Most of them perished at Auschwitz.
Since his trial began in October, Papon has consistently claimed he only followed orders and was not directly responsible for the roundups and deportations.
Klarsfeld, and his German-born wife Beate, are top Nazi hunters who have brought many German war criminals to trial, including Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyon."
Their work in French and German wartime archives has led to a new understanding of the role former Vichy officials played in executing Hitler's Final Solution in France, and is largely responsible for the nation's postwar trials of Nazi collaborators.
Klarsfeld said Friday he believes Castagnede is steering jurors toward acquittal.
"He is indifferent to the victims and has been partial to Papon from the beginning," Klarsfeld said, referring to the judge's decision to release Papon from prison for the duration of the trial.
But the Klarsfelds stand alone in their attack on Castagnede's integrity. The defense, the state prosecutors and the other 26 civil party lawyers said Thursday they would not seek the judge's resignation.
"Castagnede ... is unquestionably impartial," said Adam Nossiter, an American author who has attended hearings daily since the trial opened Oct. 8 in Bordeaux.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
BERLIN (AP) -- Workers preparing the site for the future national Holocaust Memorial have uncovered what may be the long-forgotten bunker of one of the Third Reich's most virulent anti-Semites: Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
The three-room, 1000-square-foot underground space was apparently attached to an adjacent villa -- long since gone -- where Goebbels lived with his wife and six children.
Workers who broke through last week found rusted helmets, munitions and two empty safes. "Nothing special, unfortunately," project director Lutz Leupolt said in an interview Tuesday.
City officials say the discovery will not affect plans to build a national monument to the memory of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust on the site. The land was donated by the federal government for the memorial in conjunction with its return to Berlin from Bonn in 1999.
A new design is to be chosen in mid-March and the cornerstone for the $8.3 million project is to be laid early next year.
"I think it's very appropriate, even exemplary," city culture department spokesman Axel Wallrabenstein said of putting the Holocaust memorial over the Goebbels bunker. It was Goebbels' hate-mongering against the Jews that helped pave the way for the Holocaust.
Officials believe Goebbels and his family used the bunker during World War II. But as Soviet troops closed in, they moved in with Hitler in his bunker, a few hundred yards away.
Goebbels and his wife committed suicide -- after first killing their children -- in Hitler's bunker on May 1, 1945, a day after their leader.
The land where the Goebbels bunker was found was for decades part of the no-man's land of the Berlin Wall.
The city will decide whether the bunker will be blown up, filled in or turned into a museum.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
BONN, Germany (AP) -- Germany's Gypsies pushed the German government