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Wednesday December 23 9:56 AM ET
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli police announced Wednesday they had uncovered a crime ring that forced illegal immigrants from Ukraine into prostitution and crime.
Gang members working in the Ukraine forged passports from Jewish couples who did not intend to go to Israel and gave them to other couples, police spokeswoman Linda Menuhin said.
When those couples arrived in Israel, they would be forced to work for the gang, with the women being pressed into prostitution. The crime ring also fraudulently collected government subsidies meant for new immigrants to Israel.
On Wednesday, police arrested a man and woman in the northern city of Haifa for links to the gang. The woman had been trying to flee the prostitution ring, Menuhin said.
She said more arrests were expected.
Stories about sex slavery in Israel began surfacing shortly after the mass immigration of Soviet Jews began in 1989, which eventually brought nearly 800,000 newcomers to Israel.
Russian-based crime gangs used the influx as a cover to sneak in an estimated 10,000 prostitutes over the past decade. The sex trade in Israel has grown into a $450 million-a-year business, with women often finding themselves virtually enslaved by crime bosses.
Degussa case shouldn't be settled - victims' attorney
FRANKFURT, Dec 23 (Reuters) - A lawyer representing Holocaust victims suing Germany's Degussa AG in a U.S. class action suit said on Wednesday that he would encourage his clients to take the case to trial and not settle.
``This is a case that should be tried. It's not a case to settle,'' attorney Ed Fagan told reporters in front of the Frankfurt headquarters of Degussa, a chemicals and metals group.
Fagan said that though the final decision on whether to settle rests with his clients, his own view was that Degussa was ``unique'' in the role it played in helping the Nazis, and that the case should therefore be pursued to the full extent.
``The jury will decide how much this company has to pay,'' Fagan said, adding that it would be a ``very high amount.''
The lawsuit, which was filed by four Holocaust survivors in U.S. District Court in New Jersey last August, accuses Degussa of profiting from precious metals taken from Nazi victims and asks for unspecified damages.
Chief Executive Uwe-Ernst Bufe said last week that the company's lawyers had determined the case was ``without substance.''
Calling Degussa's position ``incredible,'' Fagan released a declassified U.S. Army report from 1945 that quotes Albert Thoms, the chief of the Reichsbank precious metals department, saying he didn't think Degussa records in Berlin were destroyed in Allied attacks.
``Thoms believes the vaults were not destroyed and that important records would have been kept there,'' the report says.
Fagan said those records, which he believes Degussa still has, would prove that the company was guilty of smelting gold from teeth pulled from the mouths of concentration camp victims, as well as from their personal possessions.
``This is a man in a position to know what was going on,'' Fagan said of Thoms, who has since died.
A Degussa spokeswoman did not comment on Fagan's statements or on the report he released except to say that the company was familiar with Thoms and that historians commissioned by the company were looking into its wartime history.
``It's up to the historians to judge such documents,'' she said. ``Thoms has been dead for a long time.''
Fagan, who is involved in a number of class-action suits brought by Holocaust survivors including one seeking $18 billion from Deutsche Bank AG and Dresdner Bank AG, dismissed critics who have charged he is exploiting victims for his personal gain.
``It's the only way the clients have to get what's coming to them,'' he said, adding that his main critics were opposing lawyers.
Fagan said the next court date in the case will be on January 7.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Berlin street name behind gravestone attack-police
BERLIN, Dec 23 (Reuters) - Berlin police said on Wednesday they had received a letter from a group claiming to have bombed the gravestone of former German Jewish community leader Heinz Galinski in protest against a street being been named after him.
A spokesman for the city's justice ministry said authorities were trying to determine the authenticity of the letter. The letter was also said to have stated that the attack on Saturday night had nothing to do with Germany's political far-right.
``The letter claims the deed was more to protest the re-naming of the street after Galinski,'' the spokesman said. He was referring to a street in the working class district of Wedding which was changed from Schule Strasse (School Street) to Heinz-Galinski-Strasse.
Berlin on Tuesday offered a 20,000 mark ($12,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of the bombers. The Berlin city government said it would pay the restoration costs of the marble gravestone.
Galinski, a survivor of the Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camps, was chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany between 1988 and his death in 1992. He led the Berlin Jewish community from 1949 to 1992.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder condemned the attack and said the nation was appalled by the crime.
($1-1.676 Mark)
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Russian extreme nationalists vow to demonstrate
MOSCOW, Dec 23 (Reuters) - An extreme Russian nationalist group vowed on Wednesday to stage mass demonstrations if it does not win permission to hold a meeting in Moscow.
Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said last week he would not allow Russian National Unity (RNE) to stage a congress in the capital.
But appearing behind red flags that bore the group's modified swastika symbol, RNE leader Alexander Barkashov told a news conference that Russia's constitution guaranteed the organisation's right to gather.
``In America, blacks whose civil rights are denied, unable to find any other means, organise a march of one million men, blacks, to Washington,'' Barkashov said, referring to a 1995 action organised by Louis Farrakhan, militant leader of Nation of Islam in the U.S.
``Our constitution allows the possibility...to stage a similar march of our organisation and all those who believe their rights are being denied,'' he said.
``Therefore, certainly, if the problem will not be solved in constitutional fashion, if court procedings continue to violate the legal norms of our state, then we will turn to other methods, say, demonstrations, manifestations of the masses.''
Senior Russian officials have backed Luzhkov's ban on the RNE congress, saying the group had not been legally registered and had little chance to win registration with its charter openly calling for introduction of a totalitarian regime in Russia.
Of Russia's numerous ultra-nationalist organisations, RNE distinguishes itself by its paramilitary blackshirt uniforms, swastika-like symbols and stiff-armed salute, all of which its opponents say have been borrowed from the German Nazi movement.
On its Internet site RNE describes itself as a ``national socialist'' group, but denies it is fascist.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Holocaust Survivor William R. Perl Dies at 92
Although Dr. Perl's exploits in wartime Europe were frequently honored abroad, he was better known in the United States as a spokesman for militant Jewish causes and a leader of protests and demonstrations at the old Soviet Embassy in Washington. The militant Jewish Defense League targeted the Soviet Embassy to symbolize its fight for the emigration rights of Russian Jews.
In recent years, however, Dr. Perl, a retired D.C. psychologist and expert on juvenile delinquency, lived a quiet life in a simple brick ranch-style house, still haunted by the nightmares of the genocide but surrounded by memorabilia of his heroic efforts. He won citations from President Ronald Reagan and Congress and numerous humanitarian service awards. In 1990, he was honored in Israel during a 50th-anniversary reunion of the passengers of the Sakarya, a ship he chartered that carried 2,175 Jewish refugees from Constanta, Romania, to Palestine.
"I guess I've been a militant almost all my life," Dr. Perl said in an interview with The Washington Post in 1978. "I always believed that it only takes a few people to accomplish something."
Dr. Perl, who was born in Prague, grew up in Vienna and had been a militant Zionist since his school days. In the 1930s, Dr. Perl, a follower of militant Zionist Revisionist Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, was a young Jewish lawyer and teacher in Vienna. Realizing what Adolf Hitler's rise to power meant, he began organizing the voyages to Palestine in the 1930s.
Persuading people to flee their homes in those early years was difficult, Dr. Perl said. The Jewish establishment "thought more would be accomplished by cooperating, by staying within the law," Dr. Perl recounted.
Despite being questioned and threatened by German officers, he continued with the clandestine voyages, using cattle boats and ramshackle freighters. In other cases, bribes were paid and forged documents were used because Britain stopped the legal immigration of Jews into Palestine in 1939. The other problem was Mother Nature. "Many ships never reached Palestine," he said.
The most painful memory was the job of selecting the evacuees for the limited space aboard the ship. Denying people access was, in effect, sentencing them to death, he said.
According to British statistics, about 20,000 Jews entered Palestine illegally from 1939 to the end of World War II. Dr. Perl said thousands more were rescued before 1939. By his calculations, the operation helped 40,000 Jews escape Europe.
His own escape from Europe was perilous. In 1940, he was arrested in Greece and placed on a train bound for Berlin. While on the train, he faked a suicide by cutting his wrists and, after being taken to a country farmhouse in Yugoslavia for medical treatment, he escaped to Lisbon. He then boarded a ship for Baltimore in 1941.
In the United States, he enlisted in the Army and eventually landed in Army intelligence. While serving as an adviser at the war crime trials at Nuremberg, he returned to Vienna to search for his wife, Lore, who escaped from a concentration camp in Ravensbruck late in 1944, when the Russians pushed into East Germany.
They were reunited and settled in Beltsville years later. After leaving active military duty in 1958 and armed with a doctorate degree in psychology from George Washington University, Dr. Perl began a 10-year career with what is now the D.C. Department of Health and Human Services, retiring in the late 1960s. He also worked as a professor of psychology at George Washington University in the 1960s and as a psychologist in private practice.
In 1971, Dr. Perl formed the Washington branch of the Jewish Defense League and became enmeshed in a number of controversial incidents. He was arrested and convicted on charges of conspiring to shoot into the Prince George's County apartments of two Soviet Embassy officials in 1976.
The conspiracy conviction was later overturned on appeal, but he was sentenced to three years' probation for illegal receipt of a firearm and attempting to damage property.
Dr. Perl focused on scholarly pursuits, writing books and articles on the Holocaust. His books include "The Four Front War," "Operation Action" and "Holocaust Conspiracy." Shortly before his death, he completed a collaboration on a biography.
Survivors include his wife, Lore Perl of Beltsville; two sons, Raphael Perl of Silver Spring and Solomon Perl of Olney; and four grandchildren.
Paris court gives Holocaust doubter tougher sentence
PARIS, Dec 16 (Reuters) - A Paris appeals court handed down a tougher sentence on Wednesday for controversial writer Roger Garaudy after finding him guilty of racial libel, questioning the Holocaust and provoking racial hatred.
The appeals court fined Garaudy, 85, 160,000 francs ($29,000) and gave him suspended six-month and three-month prison sentences.
A court in February had found him guilty only of questioning World War Two crimes against humanity. It fined him 120,000 francs ($21,700) and imposed no jail sentence.
Garaudy's lawyers had asked the appeals court to overturn the lower court ruling but a public prosecutor urged that he be given a jail term along with a smaller fine.
The appeals court did not immediately explain its decision.
The legal case in France against Garaudy's book, ``The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics'' has made him a hero in some Middle Eastern states though the work has sparked a storm of protest in the West.
Garaudy went to Iran in April where he met and received support from supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Since his initial conviction in France, he has written a second book entitled ``The Trial of Israeli Zionism.''
A university professor, Garaudy was born a Protestant and converted to Catholicism before becoming a leader of France's Communist party following World War Two.
He was forced out of the party during one of its periodic witch hunts and converted to Islam in the 1970s.
During his initial trial, Garaudy denied being anti-Semitic but acknowledged he opposed the Jewish state of Israel.
He said he did not deny there had been Nazi gas chambers during the war but said there was ``a doubt'' about their existence and he merely hoped his book would prompt an ``historic debate'' on the matter.
But the appeals court cited passages in the book which state that the Holocaust was invented to justify Israel's creation and that the ``Jewish lobby'' controls the media.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Bertelsmann launches probe into ``Nazi'' past
By Fiona Fleck
BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Bertelsmann AG, the world's largest publisher of English-language books, has become the latest German company to come under fire over its alleged links with the Nazi regime.
Independent researcher Hersch Fischler said in an interview Wednesday that recent findings showed that Bertelsmann, which in the past had insisted it actively opposed Nazi rule from 1933 to 1945, had mass-produced titles reflecting Nazi ideology.
Following the lead of other German companies facing a slew of lawsuits accusing them of profiting from the Holocaust, the German media company announced Tuesday it had appointed a panel of historians to probe its past, too.
Fischler said Bertelsmann ran a lucrative publishing business by working closely with the Wehrmacht army and air force to produce escapist literature for the troops ``that glorified war'' and stressed the superiority of ``the Aryan master race.''
The company said in a statement that: ``Bertelsmann recognizes its responsibility with regard to the company history. We are appointing an independent panel of experts. ... They will from time to time present their findings and answer questions.''
The statement, issued jointly by Chief Executive Thomas Middelhoff, supervisory board head Mark Woessner and chief shareholder Reinhard Mohn, acknowledged the publications existed.
``Fischer's selection is one-sided because it deals only with problematic titles,'' it said, adding that the Nazi authorities had also banned a large number of their theological texts.
In March, Bertelsmann bought the largest U.S. book publisher, Random House Inc., for an estimated $1.3 billion, in one of a current wave of German corporate mergers and acquisitions.
One of these, a bid by Germany's largest commercial bank, Deutsche Bank AG to acquire New York-based Bankers Trust Corp., could even face a delay because of its wartime past.
U.S. regulators have said Deutsche should first settle an $18 billion lawsuit filed by Holocaust survivors accusing it and Dresdner Bank AG of profiting from trading in gold looted from death camp victims.
Fischler's findings suggest Bertelsmann, which until recently described itself as a ``thorn in the flesh'' of the Nazi regime in a company history on its Internet Web site, did not escape the influence of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
``Bertelsmann produced nationalistic and racist literature very early on, literature which reflected Nazi views,'' he said. ``Later they mass-produced Nazi propaganda for troops in the field which glorified war.''
Fischler said this literature included titles such as: ``With Bombs and Machine Guns over Poland.''
Another title: ``Sterilization and Euthanasia: A Contribution to Applied Christian Ethics'' supported the Nazi belief that people they regarded as inferior, such as the disabled and mentally ill, should not reproduce and were better off dead.
A branch of Bertelsmann was closed down by the Nazis during World War II and some of its employees were jailed. The company always said this was because it had opposed the ruling ideology.
But Fischler said he had documentary evidence to show that this was because the publishers had bought more paper than permitted and hoarded it for use after the war.
The company said in its statement it would examine the circumstances under which this branch was closed down.
Bertelsmann, which was founded in 1835 as a printer of Bibles and specialized in theological texts for many years, is the world's third largest media conglomerate after Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Bundestag speaker wants Holocaust memorial debate
By Robert Mahoney
BONN, Dec 16 (Reuters) - Lawmakers said on Wednesday they would begin next month to pick a Holocaust memorial for Berlin, ending a row symbolising modern Germany's difficulty in coming to terms with the Nazi extermination of Jews.
Parliament speaker Wolfgang Thierse said he wanted to initiate an ``intense and dignified debate'' about what kind of memorial to Europe's six million slain Jews should stand near the city's landmark Brandenburg Gate.
The row is not only about the design of the monument but also its purpose.
It comes as intellectuals and historians argue about how young Germans should be told of the horrors of Auschwitz and other death camps.
Surveys this summer showed between 20 and 30 percent of youngsters did not know what Auschwitz was.
The row is also playing out against a backdrop of highly publicised lawsuits by Holocaust survivors and slave labourers seeking compensation and restitution from Germany's top banks and industrial giants that worked with the Nazis.
``We want a place of remembrance of the murder of European Jewry in the centre of the capital, Berlin,'' Thierse told SWR radio. ``What this should look like is still the subject of dispute.''
Thierse, who belongs to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic party, said he would convene parliamentary party leaders, the house committee on culture and government ministers in January to work out a timetable for the debate.
He expected the Bundestag (lower house) to choose a design in a free vote by June.
Thierse said the debate should be above party politics and kept out of campaigning for city elections in Berlin next fall.
But the designs are already split along partisan lines.
Schroeder, in power for just two months, opposes the plan by New York architect Peter Eisenman for a sprawling monument, which was favoured by ousted chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Eisenman wants to erect some 2,700 concrete pillars over two hectares (five acres), resembling a cemetery.
Schroeder's culture minister Michael Naumann rejected the design on Monday, calling for an interactive museum and research centre rather than a ``place for laying wreaths.''
This added fuel to the fire with politicians and Jewish leaders attacking Naumann's proposal, saying Berlin already had plenty of Nazi archive centres.
``We do not need a new Holocaust museum,'' said Peter Steinbach, historian and head of the Museum of the German Resistance in Berlin.
``The existing institutions have served the purpose of documentation and memory,'' he told DF radio.
Schroeder got support on Wednesday, however, from the head of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
``In our experience building monuments is not the best way to keep memory alive,'' Miles Lerman said.
``In Washington we have found that the best way of doing this is with a living museum that serves education, research and art,'' he told Berlin's InfoRadio.
The outcome of the debate is still open since members of Schroeder's own SPD party back the Eisenman project.
SPD member Elke Leonhard, chairwoman of the Bundestag culture committee, said Naumann's proposal enriched the debate but she supported Eisenman.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
D'Amato Gets Role In Holocaust Suits Against Banks
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Outgoing Sen. Alfonse D'Amato, who pressured Swiss banks into a $1.25 billion accord with Holocaust victims' families was named Wednesday to oversee talks to settle stolen asset lawsuits against German and Austrian banks.
D'Amato, a conservative Republican from New York who lost his re-election bid last month, will start his position as special master in the Manhattan federal court litigation on Jan. 4.
U.S. District Judge Shirley Wohl Kram named D'Amato to help with litigation filed by Holocaust survivors and their families. Defendants in the cases are Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Bank Austria AG and its Creditanstalt AG subsidiary and about 100 other unnamed German and Austrian banking institutions.
Under the order, D'Amato will oversee talks to resolve two class action lawsuits filed in Manhattan federal court. The order does not apply to cases pending in other jurisdictions including Brooklyn federal court, where much of the Holocaust related litigation has been filed.
U.S. District Judge I. Leo Glasser, who is overseeing the related cases in Brooklyn, had no immediate comment as to whether he was considering appointing a special master.
Several lawyers in the litigation believe that the cases will eventually be consolidated before one federal judge.
``The senator is eminently qualified for this appointment and we welcome his designation,'' said Gerald McKelvey, a U.S. spokesman for Bank Austria and Creditanstalt. ``We trust he will effect the expeditious resolution of these cases that Bank Austria and Creditanstalt have been seeking for the last several months.''
The lawsuits allege that the banks conspired with the Nazi regime to convert and profit from assets stolen by force from Holocaust victims. These assets included cash, securities, precious metals, art and jewelry.
Wohl Kram said that she had determined that a special master would be instrumental in ``focusing the parties on the critical issues'' and reaching a resolution prior to trial.
``The special master is directed to supervise and conduct settlement discussions as soon as possible,'' Wohl Kram said in her order.
D'Amato was defeated last month by Democrat Rep. Charles Schumer after a bitter, expensive campaign.
D'Amato, known for his often abrasive personality and colorful campaigning style, was at the forefront of efforts to force secretive Swiss banks to release the stolen assets of Holocaust victims, many of them residents of New York state.
As chairman of the Senate banking committee, the tough-talking D'Amato had presided over hearings in 1996 that exposed in detail the banks' wartime dealings with Nazis.
D'Amato played a major role as mediator and negotiator in the August $1.25 billion compensation agreement between Swiss banks and Jewish groups representing Holocaust survivors and their relatives.
As special master, D'Amato will be paid $350 an hour plus expenses.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
French Banks Pledge Continuing Support for Government-Led Initiatives for Holocaust Victims in France
PARIS, Dec. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- The undersigned French banks (the "Banks") are actively participating in efforts in France led by the French government and other interested parties, including leaders of the French Jewish community, to address issues related to the confiscation of assets during the Vichy regime and the Nazi Occupation of France. Those efforts are well under way, and show every promise of achieving equitable, transparent, and global resolution of the issues being addressed. Against that background, the French banks regret the decision by the British bank Barclays PLC to work outside the comprehensive efforts being vigorously pursued in France by making a financial settlement with class action lawyers in the United States.
The Banks believe the only way to reach a true and lasting resolution of this matter on a historical and moral basis is to work with the independent, government-appointed Matteoli Commission until completion of its tasks. The Prime Minister of France, Lionel Jospin, recently expressed his desire for the Matteoli Commission to finish its work by the end of 1999 and committed additional government funds to ensure that this objective is achieved. He also announced the creation of a body responsible for examining individual claims brought by victims of the Occupation or their descendants. The Banks strongly support these initiatives and have substantially completed the tasks assigned to them by the Matteoli Commission with respect to their internal banking records.
In light of the considerable progress being made in France,the Banks continue to believe that the U.S. litigation is counter-productive and harmful to the goal of open global and equitable resolution.
Caisse Nationale de Credit Agricole
Credit Agricole Indosuez
Credit Lyonnais
Natexis
Paribas
Societe Generale
Contact in France: Robert de Bruin
Tel. 33-1-48-00-50-01
Fax 33-1-48-00-55-10
Contact in the United States: Michael Freitag or Jason Lynch
Kekst and Company
Tel. 212-521-4800
Fax 212-521-4900 SOURCE Caisse Nationale de Credit Agricole, Credit Agricole Indosuez, Credit
Lyonnais; Natexis, Paribas, Societe Generale
Copyright 1998, PR Newswire
Most French far-right Euro MPs side with Le Pen
PARIS, Dec 17 (Reuters) - Nine of the National Front's 12 European parliamentarians pledged on Thursday to continue backing veteran leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in a power struggle that has split his far-right party in two.
The nine said in a statement that the three others, including the Front's rebel deputy leader Bruno Megret, no longer represented the National Front in Strasbourg, home to the European legislature.
Le Pen's leadership and strategy have come under fierce attack from Megret and his supporters just before campaigning begins for June 1999 European parliamentary elections.
Each of the two factions is now expected to run its own slate of candidates in the Euro-poll.
A Sofres opinion poll said 54 percent of National Front menmbers believed Le Pen would get the upper hand, to 35 percent who saw Megret coming out on top.
The general public gave the opposite forecast, with 36 percent saying Megret would win control of the far right to 27 percent who believed Le Pen would win.
Only one third of the 1,000 people questioned said the Front would disappear while 61 percent believed it would survive.
Le Pen, seeking to keep control of the party, has expelled the dissidents from the movement he founded 26 years ago.
But Megret and his backers say they have gathered enough signatures of party members to convene an extraordinary party congress next month in southern France.
Le Pen has denounced the move as ``subversive,'' but the dissident faction says it will use the meeting to reinstate all those thrown out by Le Pen. It also threatens to vote Le Pen out of office if he refuses to attend.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Barclays Bank settles suit over Nazi-era assets
By Grant McCool
NEW YORK, Dec 17 (Reuters) - Barclays Bank, one of several banks sued in the United States a year ago by Jewish customers over their conduct during the 1940-44 Nazi occupation of France, reached a $3.6 million settlement on Thursday for the restitution of assets held by the bank, attorneys said.
The settlement by Barclays, a British-based bank that operated offices in France, is subject to court approval but effectively ends one part of the so-called French bank litigation brought to the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn in December 1997.
The lawsuit against the French banks mirrored those filed by Holocaust survivors or their relatives in New York against Swiss banks. Those banks and Jewish groups representing survivors and their relatives reached a $1.25 billion compensation agreement in August.
``We believe that the settlement is fair and appropriate, especially since, according to research conducted by Barclays, it only had approximately 335 depositors in 1941 who may have been Jewish,'' plaintiffs' attorney Kenneth McCallion said.
The lawsuit continues against Credit Lyonnais, Societe Generale, Banque Paribas, Banque Nationale de Paris, Credit Commercial de France, Credit Agricole Indosuez and Banque Francaise du Commerce Exterieur. A case against Banque Worms Capital Corp. was discontinued.
Chris Duncan, international and private banking director of Barclays, said in a statement that after reviewing its own archives in France and Britain and external archives in France, ``we are able to say that in France today Barclays holds no accounts of Holocaust victims.''
John Varley, chief executive for retail financial services, said: ``We at Barclays remain committed to bringing to light all facts relating to bank assets of victims of the Holocaust. The fund created today is one of many examples of Barclays commitment to shedding light on these issues.''
The settlement calls for Barclays to pay $3,612,500 to a fund for the payment of claims of any Jewish customer during the Nazi occupation of France during the Second World War.
After the fund is used, any money left would be donated to a French institution engaged in research into the Holocaust.
Court approval was expected in about four months.
``Unlike the other defendants, Barclays did not move to dismiss the case but engaged instead in a serious and extensive research effort designed to shed light on the activities of its bank in France during World War Two,'' McCallion said.
Two Jewish women who survived the Holocaust under the Nazi-backed Vichy government of France and are now residents of New York were the original plaintiffs in the case. They sued for an accounting of money seized during the war.
One of them, Fernande Bodner, 69, now a Brooklyn dress shop owner, escaped from a home for Jewish children during the Occupation and joined the Resistance. Anna Zajdenberg, 64, who lives in Manhattan, survived the war as a ``hidden child'' living with a Christian family. Her parents and sister were killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
German Deserter Deadline Extended
Friday, December 18, 1998; 11:20 a.m. EST BONN, Germany (AP) -- Germany on Friday gave World War II deserters and their families another year to apply for compensation.Parliament offered a one-time payment of $4,500 in May 1997 to men convicted by the Nazis of fleeing Hitler's army, after years of debate about whether they were heroes or traitors.
Since then, 2,124 people have applied. The Finance Ministry said it did not expect many more applications, but was extending the original Dec. 31 deadline by a year.
``Victims of Nazi military justice had to wait especially long for rehabilitation and compensation,'' said Karl Diller, a senior ministry official.
``People who refused to take part in an illegal war of aggression and therefore were wrongly branded as traitors should under no circumstances be denied compensation by a short deadline,'' he said.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Germany Remembers Gypsy Victims
Friday, December 18, 1998; 5:58 p.m. EST BONN, Germany (AP) -- Germany's upper house of parliament held a service Friday to commemorate Gypsy victims of the Holocaust.``The murdered people are only really dead if no one remembers them anymore,'' said Hesse state Gov. Hans Eichel, president of the Bundesrat.
On Dec. 16, 1942, Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the deportation of all Gypsies, also known as Roma and Sinti, in Germany and Austria to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in Poland.
Of the roughly 1 million Roma living in Europe at the time of World War II, historians estimate the Nazis and their allies killed between 25 percent and 50 percent, including 21,000 at Auschwitz.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Poland Votes to Open Police Files
By Tom CohenWARSAW, Poland (AP) -- A bill that will allow victims of Poland's communist-era repression to see their secret police files was signed into law Friday after years of wrangling.
President Aleksander Kwasniewski called the bill a ``bad law'' but signed it because lawmakers had overridden his veto.
The 282-164 vote in the Sejm, the lower parliament chamber, to override Kwasniewski's veto gave the governing Solidarity-led coalition rooted in Poland's anti-communist movement a major victory over the former communist elected president in 1995.
More importantly, it forces Poland to confront its communist past after almost a decade of arguing over whether that would help or harm the country.
Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek said the law will give Poles a ``chance to make up for a lot of harm.''
``I'm convinced that it was a vote for the future because you cannot think about the future, organize it, without setting your past in order,'' Buzek said.
Few issues reveal the bitterness of Poland's divided history as much as the question of how to deal with decades of human rights abuses under communism.
During the communist era, the secret police used informers to monitor virtually all aspects of daily life and routinely cracked down on people suspected of anti-government activism. Accusations of who may have collaborated in the past continue to hound people throughout society, including top government officials.
Approved by parliament on Sept. 22, the bill creates an Institute of National Remembrance to collect communist files from 1944-89, as well as documents of Stalinist and Nazi crimes.
Besides making files available to victims, the institute can launch investigations to establish those responsible for persecution or political murders.
Kwasniewski vetoed the bill Dec. 12, saying it would give too much power to the institute managing the files. He also said all Poles, not only victims of totalitarian regimes, should be allowed to see their records.
Former communist officials say the files are incomplete and full of misinformation, which would cause chaos in the form of false accusations and witch hunts. But Solidarity figures, including former President Lech Walesa, say the past must be confronted despite those dangers.
Kwasniewski signed the bill saying he had not changed his opinion.
``This is a bad law,'' he insisted.
Years of debate and political maneuvering had failed to produce a credible way for Poland to open its communist files as has occurred in some other former Soviet bloc countries.
Poland's first attempt to open secret files was in 1992 by the rightist government of Prime Minister Jan Olszewski. But after lists of alleged secret agents were leaked, the government was toppled on a no-confidence vote.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Israel presses for removal of crosses at Auschwitz
WARSAW, Dec 18 (Reuters) - A senior Israeli official on Friday pressed Poland to remove crosses erected by radical Roman Catholics near the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz, which he said bordered on anti-Semitism.
``Polish officials very sharply criticised those who erected the crosses. This is a controversy and misunderstanding which fringes on anti-Semitism,'' Israeli Parliament speaker Dan Tichon told reporters at the end of his three-day visit to Poland.
Over the last five months radical Catholics have put up more than 200 crosses around a 21-foot (seven-metre) cross, under which the Polish-born Pope John Paul II prayed in 1979.
Poland's centre-right government and Catholic Church want the papal cross to remain at the site but want the additional crosses removed.
The crosses stand in a field outside Auschwitz, a camp where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished during World War Two.
The radicals have said their action is meant to defend the large cross from removal as wanted by Jewish groups, who seek to eliminate all religious symbols from Auchwitz, the Holocaust's largest graveyard.
``We are against all the crosses erected at the site, but we hope that in the first stage all but the big one will be removed,'' Tichon said. ``There will still be time to talk about the large cross,'' he added.
The government has started legal action aimed at regaining control of the field outside the camp, now leased by a little known War Victims' group which encourages the cross planting.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Barclays Creates Holocaust Fund
Friday, December 18, 1998; 5:44 p.m. EST LONDON (AP) -- Barclays Bank has created a fund for the repayment of assets that were held in its French bank during World War II and not recovered by the rightful owners after the war.The bank said Friday that any unclaimed money left in the fund, which currently stands at 2 million pounds ($3.2 million), would be donated to a French institution engaged in Holocaust research.
The announcement followed Barclays' agreement Thursday to settle its part of a class-action suit filed in the United States against the bank's French operation during World War II and seven French banks.
Barclays, the only one of the eight to settle, said it would pay $3.6 million to Jews whose assets were seized from its French branches during the war.
Barclays estimates it had about 335 Jewish depositors at those branches. The bank will attempt to trace them through advertisements and other means.
The bank also agreed to make historic documents available relating to how its branches operated in France during the Nazi era.
``We at Barclays remain committed to bringing to light all facts relating to bank assets of victims of the Holocaust,'' said John Varley, chief executive of Barclays' retail financial services division.
In August, Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to compensate tens of thousands of Jews whose assets were seized during World War II.
Earlier this week, outgoing U.S. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato of New York was chosen to mediate a similar class-action lawsuit against German and Austrian banks.
The World Jewish Congress said Thursday that it has entered into discussions with Chase Manhattan Bank, which has acknowledged seizing accounts held by Jews in its Paris branch during World War II.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Ukraine Holocaust survivors get $400 from Swiss fund
By Olena Horodetska
KIEV, Dec 18 (Reuters) - The Swiss-based Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust on Friday began paying out $400 each to 3,200 Jewish survivors of World War Two genocide in Ukraine.
``These payments are not compensation for suffering as it is not Switzerland's task to pay compensation. These amounts are not a restitution either. It is just help,'' Rolf Bolch, president of the fund, told a news conference.
``In Ukraine there are 3,200 Jewish and about 9,000 non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust,'' he said. Ukraine currently has a 500,000-strong Jewish population.
At one execution site, Babi Yar which is hidden in forests, over 100,000 people were exterminated by the Nazis. Jews comprised the overwhelming majority of those killed.
Bolch said his fund had come to Ukraine to help old people to improve their living standards and survive the harsh winter.
``We came in winter as people cannot wait until spring,'' he said. ``I hope our small contribution will help people to improve their living standards, probably, some of them will purchase necessary medicines.''
The fund was founded in March last year and currently has 273 million Swiss francs ($203.4 million) of donations from Swiss commercial banks, Switzerland's central bank and others. It has already paid out up to 6.8 million Swiss francs to more than 4,500 people in different countries.
The support goes to former prisoners of concentration camps, as well as those who lived through deportation or forced sterilisation by the Nazis.
Bolch said payments would be made only to Holocaust victims born before 1925. The fund is making its payments in Ukraine through Privatbank, one of the ex-Soviet state's largest.
The head of the board of directors of Privatbank, Olexander Dubilet, said that 200 branches of the bank would give help to the needy victims.
``The payments have already started,'' Dubilet said.
($1-1.342 Swiss Franc)
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Bonn wants decision on Holocaust memorial by mid-99
BERLIN, Dec 19 (Reuters) - The German government wants a final decision on plans for a central Holocaust memorial in Berlin by mid-1999, the senior official for cultural affairs, Michael Naumann, said in an interview published on Saturday.
``I hope very much that we can make a proposal which will make a decision possible in the first half of 1999,'' Naumann told the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel in a report released ahead of publication on Sunday.
A government spokesman confirmed media reports that Naumann met New York architect Peter Eisenman, whose design had been tipped to win a competition for the memorial and favoured by former chancellor Helmut Kohl.
The Eisenman design envisages a vast landscape of pillars in the heart of the future government quarter in Berlin.
But Naumann, since he was appointed in charge of cultural affairs for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's new government, has said he would prefer a Holocaust museum, possibly as a branch of the Shoah Foundation.
The foundation, set up by Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg, has thousands of personal accounts of the Holocaust in text and video to which visitors have access. Naumann has said the interactive aspect of such an alternative was vital.
The spokesman said Naumann and Eisenman had discussed possible alternatives to the monument. He declined to comment on the result of the talks.
``Mr Naumann will talk to other artists about this,'' he said.
Naumann described Eisenman's design as ``an abstraction which may not reach out to people in two or three generations time.''
Jewish groups in Germany have criticised the new government for seeking to drop plans for the memorial. But some Jewish groups outside Germany had criticised the previous scheme.
Plans for the memorial, initiated by a private group of sponsors, have been in the pipeline for more than 10 years.
The plans ran into controversy over the last few years and have sparked a debate in Germany over how best to commemorate the Holocaust in the land of its originators.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Germans Clash at Exhibit on Nazis
Saturday, December 19, 1998; 3:59 p.m. EST HANOVER, Germany (AP) -- Scuffles between German leftists and rightists Saturday at an exhibition on Hitler's military injured at least 14 people, including three police.About 150 young rightists showed up to demonstrate against the exhibit titled ``War of extermination: Crimes of the Wehrmacht from 1941 to 1944,'' and 2,500 anti-rightists held a counterdemonstration, police said. The opposing sides clashed on several occasions, police said.
About 150 leftists threw stones at the rightists and police, said Hans-Dieter Klosa, Hanover police chief.
Police used nightsticks to break up the clashes. At least 11 protesters and three officers received minor injuries, police said. About 150 demonstrators were arrested, and most were released after identity checks.
Klosa had banned the rightist demonstration, fearing violence. But the National Party of Germany appealed the ban and a court overturned it Friday.
The exhibit, which has been traveling to cities in Germany and Austria over the past three years, uses photographs and documents to show that ordinary German soldiers killed Jews and other civilians under Hitler's rule.
Many older Germans still view the Wehrmacht as an honorable force that fought for the homeland. Thousands of neo-Nazis demonstrated against the traveling exhibit in March 1997 during its Munich installation. However, it has often been displayed without incident.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
White Supremacists Get Cash Boost
By Nicholas K. GeraniosSANDPOINT, Idaho (AP) -- Two former California businessmen are pouring dollars into the often cash-strapped white supremacist movement, allowing it to reach out to thousands of households in northern Idaho.
Vincent Bertollini and Carl Story, who grew wealthy in California's computer industry, financed the mailing of racist and anti-Semitic posters and videos to some 3,000 homes this fall.
Human-rights activists are alarmed at the infusion of money into the movement and say they are scrambling to counter the mailings.
Bertollini and Story have adamantly refused interviews.
``Our message speaks for itself,'' Bertollini wrote in an e-mail response to an interview request. ``We do not grant interviews.''
Their message is a stew of quasi-biblical prose that attacks Jews and contends that ``Jesus said they were murderers and liars from the beginning.''
Calling themselves The 11th Hour Remnant Messenger, the two men paid to create and mail the glossy, 6-foot-long by 3-foot-wide poster with colorful artwork that purports to show ``The Adamic Race Pure Blood Seedline.''
The poster asserts that nonwhites are the product of sexual relations between Eve and Satan, who begat Cain, ``a hybrid, mongrel, bastard and soul-less child.''
It is the posters' quality as much as their message that alarms human rights groups. According to Bertollini, the posters cost $9.45 each to print and mail. By comparison, Kinko's in Spokane charges 80 cents a piece for 3,000 copies of a four-page color brochure.
``The difference is they've got money,'' said Bill Wassmuth, director of the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. ``That enables them to extend their message on a broader range.''
The Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Ala., which monitors hate groups across the country, expressed surprise at the quality and sophistication of the mailings. The center had never heard of the two men, said researcher Mark Potok.
``The problem of the white supremacist movement for decades has been financing,'' Potok said. It took Timothy McVeigh half a year to raise the $10,000 to buy the materials for the Oklahoma City bomb, he said.
The emergence of Bertollini and Story, and their money, is ``terribly important,'' Potok said.
The Remnant Messenger also paid for the recent production of a video mailed to Sandpoint homes showing Richard Butler, founder of Aryan Nations, explaining his views.
Additionally, Aryan Nations handed out copies of Remnant Messenger's poster at its parade through downtown Coeur d'Alene last summer and sent thousands more copies to people on its mailing list.
Northern Idaho has long been hospitable to white supremacist groups, with Aryan Nations headquartered in Hayden and the anti-government Militia of Montana based in Noxon, Mont., just across the border from Sandpoint. It counts several active congregations of Christian Identity, a white supremacist religion that considers white people the true Israelites and superior to Jews and nonwhites.
The region was also home to Randy Weaver, the white separatist whose wife and 14-year-old son were killed in an 11-day standoff with the FBI at Weaver's remote cabin in Ruby Ridge in 1992.
Bertollini, 59, and Story, 65, friends for 30 years, moved to Sandpoint in 1995. Despite their reluctance to speak with reporters, the two men have hardly kept low profiles in this lakeside tourist town of 5,200 people. They live in large homes in posh neighborhoods and are known to dine out often, frequently leaving $100 tips for waitresses.
Public records show Bertollini has performed at least one wedding in Bonner County as a lay minister for the Remnant Messenger.
The Spokesman-Review newspaper of Spokane, which has reported extensively on the two men's activities, says they used engineering and marketing skills to help build two California computer chip companies -- I.I. Industries of Cupertino, since absorbed by other firms, and Silicon Valley Group --into multimillion-dollar concerns. They formed The 11th Hour Remnant Messenger in 1990.
Gretchen Albrecht-Hellar, leader of the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force, said she was alarmed by the recent poster mailing and worried that the concentration of white supremacists in Idaho was serving as a magnet for others of like minds.
The task force charges just $1 for lifetime dues and cannot compete with the money behind Remnant Messenger, she said.
The Rev. Paul Graves, a Sandpoint city councilman, is organizing a January protest by area ministers.
``They're a flat-out distortion of scriptural record,'' Graves said of the posters. ``They totally distort Christianity.''
Bertollini was a surprise visitor at a recent meeting rally called by Sandpoint residents disturbed by the mailings. The only person in the crowd wearing a suit and tie, Bertollini arrived in the company of Richard Butler.
A Spokesman-Review reporter was covering the meeting and recorded the exchange with the press-shy Bertollini.
``Is there anything in our literature that says anything about hate?'' Bertollini asked the crowd. ``No. It just says we white people are different.
``Our intent is to bring truth to a world that believes a lie. It's a burden, a burden on my heart, and it's Carl Story's burden, too.''
Nonwhites ``have a special place on this planet,'' but white people ``are caretakers of the world,'' he told the reporter. ``Don't you see that? Isn't that simple? Isn't it obvious?''
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Schroeder condemns attack on Jewish leaders' grave
BONN, Dec 21 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Monday condemned a weekend bomb attack on the grave of the former leader of Germany's Jewish community and said the nation was appalled by the crime.
Schroeder said in a telegram to the widow of Heinz Galinski that the German government would do everything to support the police investigation in Berlin, where unknown assailants destroyed Galinski's gravestone with a bomb on Saturday night.
``The attack on the grave of your husband fills me with outrage,'' Schroeder said in the telegram. ``The local authorities will do everything they can to resolve this crime. I am certain that the vast majority of Germans are deeply appalled by this horrible crime. You can be certain of all our support.''
Galinski, a survivor of the Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camps, was the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany for many years until his death in 1992.
Berlin police said on Monday they were tightening security at Jewish facilities and expanding their investigation into the bomb attack.
State Interior Minister Eckart Werthebach said it appeared that the bombing which destroyed the gravestone was well planned. But authorities said they had no clues about who was responsible.
``This was evidently not a spontaneous attack,'' Werthebach said.
He said he agreed with the leader of the Jewish community in Berlin, Andreas Nachama, that the attack was not related to a controversial discussion in Germany about what form the proposed Holocaust monument in Berlin should take.
Plans to build a monument in the centre of the city have run repeatedly into opposition. The issue has been in the headlines for months.
German police are routinely stationed outside Jewish schools and community centres. Police officials did not elaborate on how they planned to tighten existing security arrangements.
Unknown assailants damaged Galinski's grave by planting a small bomb at the Charlottenburg Jewish cemetery late on Saturday night.
German President Roman Herzog sent a telegram to Galinski's widow, condemning the attack.
``This is the work of a sick mind and a confused loner,'' Herzog wrote. ``I learned of the desecration with disbelief and anger.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Berlin police raise security for Jews after attack
BERLIN, Dec 21 (Reuters) - Berlin police said on Monday they were tightening security at Jewish facilities and expanding their investigation into the weekend bomb attack on the grave of the former leader of Germany's Jewish community.
State Interior Minister Eckart Werthebach said it appeared that the bombing which destroyed the gravestone of Heinz Galinski was well planned. But authorities said they had no clues about who was responsible.
``This was evidently not a spontaneous attack,'' Werthebach said.
He said he agreed with the leader of the Jewish community in Berlin, Andreas Nachama, that the attack was not related to a controversial discussion in Germany about what form the proposed Holocaust monument in Berlin should take.
Plans to build a monument in the centre of the city have run repeatedly into opposition. The issue has been in the headlines for months.
German police are routinely stationed outside Jewish schools and community centres. Police officials did not elaborate on how they planned to tighten existing security arrangements.
Unknown assailants damaged Galinski's grave by planting a small bomb at the Charlottenburg Jewish cemetery late on Saturday night.
German President Roman Herzog sent an open telegram to Galinski's widow, sharply condemning the attack.
``This is the work of a sick mind and a confused loner,'' Herzog wrote. ``I learnt of the desecration with disbelief and anger.''
Galinski, a survivor of the Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camps, was the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany for many years until his death in 1992.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Berlin Tightens Jewish Site Security
Monday, December 21, 1998; 10:39 a.m. EST BERLIN (AP) -- Berlin authorities today ordered tighter security at the city's Jewish sites after a bomb blast destroyed the grave of a former German Jewish leader.City officials said there were no immediate suspects in the Saturday night attack, which blew up Heinz Galinski's marble tombstone in a Jewish cemetery in western Berlin.
Berlin's interior minister, Eckart Werthebach, said the home-made bomb was packed into the steel cap of a gas canister for maximum explosive impact.
Galinski headed Germany's Central Council of Jews from 1988 until his death in 1992. He had headed Berlin's Jewish community since 1949.
Ignatz Bubis, who succeeded Galinski as head of the central council, visited the gravesite today and blamed the attack on rightist extremists. Federal agents were helping investigate the bombing as a potential political crime.
A similar attack on Galinski's grave three months ago caused minor damage. Police have no suspects in that explosion.
Police patrols at the cemetery and other Jewish sites in Berlin are being stepped up, said Interior Ministry spokesman Martin Strunden.
Many Germans reacted with horror to the attack.
Volker Beck, a lawmaker for the Greens Party, said it showed anti-Semitism continued to fester in the country.
In a telegram earlier to Galinski's wife, Ruth, President Roman Herzog called the attack ``the result of crazy minds and the work of confused loners,'' and said he wanted to express his sadness and pain over the attack.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Bosnian Groups Clash Over Treasure
By Aida Cerkez-RobinsonSARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- After carving up Bosnia's territory, the rival ethnic groups are now fighting over one of the country's cultural treasures -- a 600-year-old Jewish holy book.
The Sarajevo Haggadah, handwritten on bleached calfskin, dates back to the once-thriving Jewish community in Spain. A Haggadah tells the story of the exodus of the Jews from ancient Egypt, and Jews recite from it during the Passover holiday.
The 109-page Sarajevo Haggadah was carried to Italy in 1492 after King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain expelled the country's Jews. It was brought to Bosnia by a rabbi and passed down through his family until a descendant, Joseph Kohen, sold it to the National Museum in 1894.
As part of the museum's collection, the priceless manuscript belongs to the government of Bosnia-Herzogovina.
The 1995 Dayton peace agreement, however, effectively partitioned the country along ethnic lines -- Serb, Muslim and Croat.
Now the Bosnian Serbs are demanding one-third ownership of the manuscript and are insisting it be exhibited in Banja Luka, capital of their mini-state, every third year.
In principle, the Haggadah would also be exhibited every third year in Mostar, the unofficial Bosnian Croat capital. The Muslims would prefer the Haggadah be kept in what had been its traditional home -- the National Museum in Sarajevo.
But the National Museum was heavily damaged during the wartime siege of Sarajevo, and the bullet-scarred structure from the Austro-Hungarian era has not been rebuilt. For now, the manuscript is kept in the vault of the National Bank.
Jakob Finci, the head of Sarajevo's Jewish Community, wants the manuscript to remain in the national capital. Finci says Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat nationalists have a record of destroying cultural and religious monuments of rival groups during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.
``They (the Serbs) blew up the Ferhadija, the others (the Croats) blew up the Old Bridge,'' Finci said, referring to an ancient mosque in Banja Luka and the world-renowned Ottoman bridge in Mostar, which were both more than 400 years old. UNESCO had designated the span a ``world heritage site.''
``Bosnia's body is our common history. But they are now building -- let me use a Jewish expression -- three ghettos,'' he said bitterly. While Western Europe is moving rapidly toward unity, ``only we are going in the other direction,'' he said.
The Sarajevo Haggadah has become a symbol of Bosnia's long struggle against the forces of religious, cultural and ethnic division.
During World War II, when the city was occupied by German troops, a Nazi general demanded that the National Museum surrender the volume. A museum director, a Catholic Croat, and the Muslim curator lied, telling the general another German officer had confiscated the manuscript that morning.
The curator then wrapped the Haggadah in newspapers and delivered it to a Muslim preacher who lived deep in the Bosnian mountains. The preacher buried the Haggadah under the doorstep of the village mosque until the end of the war.
In 1992, when Bosnian Serbs began shelling Sarajevo, the museum's Muslim director, Enver Imamovic, and three volunteers braved shell and sniper fire to enter the museum. With the help of a Bosnian Serb, they broke into the museum vault, removed the Haggadah and brought it to the National Bank, where it has been kept ever since.
Although foreign donors and the joint Muslim, Serb and Croat parliament have made funds available to reconstruct hotels, shops and government buildings, money has not been provided for the National Museum.
``Now, everybody wants his own museum and because of it, it's a shame, but all museums in this city are closed,'' Finci said.
``The Haggadah is proof of the multi-ethnicity in Bosnia,'' Finci said. ``It is a testament that even in worst of times other's values were not destroyed.''
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Brazil searches for Nazi-looted works of art
By Mary Milliken
SAO PAULO, Dec 22 (Reuters) - A Brazilian commission has launched a search for a Picasso and other works looted by the Nazis and possibly taken to South America, joining a fresh international push to recover art seized during the Holocaust.
``We were told there were great possibilities that these works are in Latin America,'' commission member and Sao Paulo Senior Rabbi Henry Sobel told Reuters on Tuesday.
The most famous of the 10 works targeted by the commission is a Pablo Picasso pastel from 1925 entitled ``Pierrot au Masque,'' taken from a French Jew in Paris in 1941.
The government-supported Commission for the Search of Nazi Monies in Brazil hopes art collectors in the region will see reprints of the Picasso and shed light on its whereabouts, as one Brazilian family did in another case earlier this year.
Sobel said the Catholic family, which he refused to identify, had turned over to the commission a Picasso and a Monet, valued together at $2.2 million.
Although the commission has not yet found any proof that the two small paintings were previously owned by Jews, Sobel said they had passed through a Swiss gallery which had specialised in selling art looted during the Second World War.
The commission is also tracing the moves of one Austrian dealer who sold ``an incredible amount of looted art'' to Brazilian and Argentine families, Sobel said.
An international conference on assets seized from Holocaust victims held this month in Washington D.C. drew up nonbinding guidelines for countries to identify and publicise stolen works so the original owners could claim them, a move which delegates said would have a big impact on the international art world.
The art guidelines follow a landmark agreement in October with six insurance firms to set up a $90 million humanitarian fund to aid Holocaust victims and to conduct an audit of their books to identify unpaid Holocaust-era claims.
Sobel called the art recovery effort ``a last chance before the chapter closes ... survivors are ageing.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Berlin police offer reward for cemetery bombing
BERLIN, Dec 22 (Reuters) - Berlin police on Tuesday offered a 20,000-mark ($11,930) reward for information leading to the arrest of bombers who destroyed the gravestone of former German Jewish community leader Heinz Galinski at the weekend.
The Berlin city government also said it would pay to restore the marble gravestone that was blown up on Saturday night.
Galinski, a survivor of the Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camps, was chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany between 1988 and his death in 1992. He led the Berlin Jewish community from 1949 to 1992.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder condemned the attack and said the nation was appalled by the crime.
Berlin's Interior Minister Eckart Werthebach said that the number of far-right criminal acts in Berlin had risen by 20 percent in 1998 from 1997. He said the city government in January would investigate this increase.
City police said on Monday, without elaborating, that they were tightening security at Jewish facilities. German police are routinely stationed outside Jewish schools and community centres.
($1-1.676 Mark)
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Germany Chided for Nazi Pensions
Tuesday, December 22, 1998; 7:58 p.m. EST BONN, Germany (AP) -- A Jewish group criticized a German court Tuesday for granting World War II veterans' disability benefits to two former Nazi SS members.The Simon Wiesenthal Center said the verdict seemed to contradict an amendment passed last year by parliament that allows courts to strip veterans of disability rights if they ``violated the principles of humanity or the law'' during the Third Reich.
``It was our understanding that any person who served in the SS or in other units which carried out crimes against civilians fell under that category,'' Efraim Zuroff, the center's director for Israel, said in a statement.
The Federal Social Court in Kassel last week overturned lower court rulings that had denied benefits to two Latvians who served in the elite Waffen SS during World War II.
The court said membership in the Waffen SS by itself was not a valid reason for Germany to strip a World War II veteran of benefits. It sent the case back to a lower court.
A court spokeswoman refused to give details of the case, including the identity of the men.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Berlin Holocaust Museum Plan Backed
Tuesday, December 22, 1998; 10:19 a.m. EST BONN, Germany (AP) -- Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, in remarks published Tuesday, defended his government's proposal to build a Holocaust museum and research center in Berlin instead of a memorial sculpture.German Jewish leaders have criticized the plan unveiled last week by culture minister Michael Naumann as not powerful enough to commemorate the killing of 6 million Jews by the Nazis. But Schroeder insisted the idea was ``good.''
``It not only helps recall the horror of the Nazi era but also allows young people to learn something,'' he said in an interview with the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung daily.
Last weekend's bombing of the Berlin grave of a former German Jewish leader, Heinz Galinski, ``shows how important this remains,'' he said.
Germany's best-known author, novelist Guenter Grass, said he would back the museum if it is dedicated to all victims of the Nazis, not only Jews.
Half a million Gypsies were killed by the Third Reich as well as homosexuals and political prisoners, the author of ``The Tin Drum'' noted in an interview with the weekly Die Woche.
German politicians and intellectuals have debated plans for a national Holocaust memorial for 10 years. A plot in central Berlin has been set aside for it.
The leading design had been a cemetery-like field of 2,500 concrete pillars designed by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman.
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the project's biggest backer. But Schroeder, a Social Democrat who defeated Kohl in September elections, has expressed doubts about the monument. Parliament is to decide how to proceed next year.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Jewish group delays advice on Deutsche Bank merger
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A key Jewish group weighing whether to advise New York City to fight Deutsche Bank AG's proposed acquisition of Bankers Trust Corp. Tuesday said it delayed until January a report on how the German bank was handling Holocaust issues.
``We are not in a position today to offer policy guidance to Mr. Hevesi,'' Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, said.
The Jewish organization had planned to send its report this week to New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who last year organized a group of state and local finance officials. That group's threat to boycott Swiss banks helped persuade them to reach a $1.25 billion settlement with Holocaust victims.
Alan Hevesi's spokeswoman said only: ``We're waiting and watching the situation.'' The city comptroller in early December called for delaying the $10.1 billion merger between Deutsche Bank and Bankers Trust until the resolution of claims that the German bank looted bank accounts and personal assets from Holocaust victims.
Deutsche Bank, along with other German and Austrian banks, faces billion-dollar class-action lawsuits filed in U.S. court in New York which also charge that the banks ``played an integral role in the Nazi Holocaust and war effort.''
Steinberg declined further comment. A Deutsche Bank spokesman referred calls to the bank's Frankfurt headquarters.
A source at the World Jewish Congress charged that Deutsche Bank so far had failed to provide enough assurances about how it plans to handle Holocaust claims. ``They simply have not committed themselves to the kind of process that would enable (the WJC) to say that concrete progress is being made,'' said the source, who preferred anonymity.
He added: ``The WJC is not in receipt of either a memorandum of understanding or a commitment to the kind of investigative commission or any of the mechanisms they indicated in the discussions that would be the appropriate vehicles by which to resolve the questions.'' The WJC views bilateral negotiations or perhaps a new international commission as possible approaches.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
General Motors Commissions Historian To Research Company's World War II Activities
DETROIT, Dec. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- General Motors Corporation (NYSE) today announced that it has retained Yale University Professor Henry A. Turner, a leading scholar and expert on the history of Nazi Germany, to undertake, while on a year-long leave of absence from Yale, a research project pertaining to the activities in Germany of GM and its wholly owned subsidiary, Adam Opel A.G., during World War II and the period immediately preceding it.
Professor Turner and a team of research assistants will locate, copy and catalog documents bearing on the subject from the period January 1933 to May 1945. They will review documents in the United States and Europe, and will receive unrestricted access to GM records and personnel files. As part of this undertaking, Professor Turner will provide GM with findings on various issues that have been raised about GM's activities in Germany during that period.
"GM is committed to having Professor Turner examine any materials that have become available since our initial review for a Senate subcommittee in 1974, as well as reviewing the material available at that time," said John F. Smith, Jr., GM chairman and chief executive officer. "Dr. Turner's work will help us achieve our goal of a complete accounting of GM's and Opel's activities during the World War II period, and to assess our responsibilities."
Professor Turner's research is in addition to and will be coordinated with the work of Professor Hans Pohl, who currently is leading a project commissioned by Opel on the same subject. General Motors will release any pertinent information resulting from these studies whether or not it is consistent with GM's prior review, which concluded that GM did not support the Nazi war effort.
Professor Turner plans to draw upon the collected materials to write and publish a comprehensive history of this subject. That study will be free of editorial scrutiny, any subsidization, or other control by General Motors. Upon completion of his use of the materials, a copy of the collected documents will be donated to Yale University's archives where they will be available for scholarly research.
Professor Turner is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University, where he has taught since 1958. Among his works on Germany and the Third Reich are "German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler" and "Hitler's Thirty Days to Power." SOURCE General Motors Corporation
Copyright 1998, PR Newswire
On Show: Riefenstahl Redux
By Anne ThompsonPOTSDAM, Germany (AP) -- For the first time in Germany, a museum has organized a retrospective of the controversial work of Leni Riefenstahl, filmmaker, photographer and Nazi-era propagandist.
The show has brought record numbers of visitors to the Film Museum, which was crowded on a recent weekday with people of all ages checking out the stages of Riefenstahl's life and career: Her early obsession with mountain climbing. Her fascination with Adolf Hitler's charisma. Her artistic innovations and quest for visual perfection, which reached a high point with the Nazi masterpiece, ``Triumph of the Will,'' renowned and despised as the best propaganda film ever made.
Riefenstahl was a pariah after the war but regained respect with her photographs of the African Nuba tribe. Now 96, she remains under scrutiny for her past. Was she a fascist or a visionary, an artist ignorant of politics, as she claims, or a knowing aide to the terror of the Third Reich?
Fifty years after the war, enough time has passed for a comprehensive exhibition that lets Germans decide for themselves.
Other German exhibits have showcased Riefenstahl's work, mostly alongside other Nazi propaganda or art from the Nazi period. A private art gallery in Hamburg last year mounted a show of her Nuba photos without reference to her work for Hitler, drawing protests from Jewish groups that the gallery was glorifying a Third Reich criminal.
So far, the show at the Film Museum in Potsdam, a city on the outskirts of Berlin, has been protest free -- apparently because of its bald presentation of Riefenstahl's Nazi films in context with her entire career.
Some observers see the exhibit as part of a discussion going on in Germany about how the nation can be ``normal,'' conscious and reflective of its fascist past without feeling defined by guilt. Centered mostly on plans for a national Holocaust memorial, the discussion got louder with the recent election of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the first leader too young to be burdened with memories of World War II.
``It has become normal to deal with the Nazi period the way historians do -- neither pointing to the guilt nor making it a perverse, sensationalized attraction,'' says Bernhard Schulz, cultural editor of the daily Berlin newspaper Tagespiegel.
Organizers of the Film Museum show say it gives older Germans a chance to consider Riefenstahl anew while at the same time introducing her to younger generations that might know her name but not her work.
The rarely seen ``Triumph of the Will,'' for example, is one of four Riefenstahl films being shown from start to finish on televisions at the beginning of the exhibit.
Her idealized depiction of the 1934 Nazi party rally at Nuremberg -- with its tremendous goose-stepping parades and round-cheeked children giving flowers to Hitler -- is banned in Germany unless presented with facts of the Holocaust. The museum offers one of the first public viewings of a film until now seen almost exclusively in postwar Germany in university classrooms or excerpted in documentaries.
Show coordinator Ines Walk says she was looking for ways to explore the relationship between art and politics when she started planning the Riefenstahl exhibit two years ago. She also was thinking of the year 2000 and how Riefenstahl's extraordinary life reflects the passing century.
Riefenstahl was a dancer -- with swooping, Isadora Duncan-like moves -- when she saw one of Arnold Fanck's silent films set in the mountains. She presented herself to him as his new star, and he accepted, as much for her high-cheekboned beauty as her daredevil spirit. She rock climbed barefoot for the camera and was buried in an avalanche for the death scene in the 1926 film ``Mountain of Destiny.'' Soon, she was making her own films, fairy tales celebrating Germany's Alpine mystique in which she was star, screenwriter and director. She heard Hitler speak for the first time in 1932 and wrote to him -- again, offering her talents to a powerful, inspirational man. She believed, almost until the end, that he was helping the country.
As the Fuehrer's filmmaker, she was the only woman to help shape the rise of the Third Reich. And yet she insists, against all plausibility, that she knew nothing about the Holocaust while it was happening. This has always been her claim: She was an artist not a Nazi.
She made ``Triumph of the Will'' only because Hitler asked her; she tried to resist, but how could she? She also made ``Olympia,'' about the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, a gorgeous meditation on muscle and movement suggesting the athletic master race of Hitler's fantasies. It also presented the Nazis to the world as peaceful and tolerant.
Riefenstahl says she regrets those films, largely because they made her life miserable. She never made another film after the war, turning instead to still photography in Africa and under the sea, taking up scuba diving at age 72. The Allies and eventually Germany cleared her as a Nazi, yet she is widely held responsible for helping Hitler seduce the German public with her hypnotic films.
Despite -- or perhaps because of -- her notorious image, Riefenstahl has a certain pop star status outside of Germany. She photographed Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and his wife, Bianca, in the 1970s. Clips from ``Olympia'' appear in music videos. Leni Riefenstahl computer screen savers can be found on the Internet. She attended Time magazine's 75th anniversary gala earlier this year and has received several honors for lifetime achievement.
With 500 visitors a day, the Film Museum show could signal that Riefenstahl's popularity is growing in her native country. Some visitors say the exhibit's many historical documents and photos from the war increased their empathy for Riefenstahl.
``It's so easy for us to judge today, but you really have to try to put yourself back in those times,'' says Uta Kutzer, 60, of Berlin. ``How do you know you'd have done any better? How do you know you wouldn't have done the exact same as Leni Riefenstahl?''
Today, Riefenstahl lives just outside Munich but has not yet seen her first German retrospective. Her health is poor, and she wanted to make sure the show was well-received by the public before coming to Potsdam, show coordinator Walk says.
For now, she appears at the Film Museum in the 1993 documentary about her life, ``The Power of Pictures: Leni Riefenstahl,'' which is on view. (Shown in the United States, it's called ``The Wonderful, Terrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.'')
At the end, documentary-maker Ray Mueller tells Riefenstahl he thinks the German public is still waiting for her to apologize, to admit guilt for her role in the Third Reich.
``What am I guilty of?'' she asks, angered. ``No words of anti-Semitism ever passed my lips, nor did I write any. I was never anti-Semitic and never joined the Nazi party. So what am I guilty of, tell me that?''
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Volkswagen Pays Nazi Slave Laborers
Wednesday, December 23, 1998; 5:08 p.m. EST HAMBURG, Germany (AP) -- German automaker Volkswagen has made its first payment to compensate slave laborers who worked in its factories during Nazi rule, the company said Wednesday.Out of a $12 million fund created by the company, payments of $6,000 each were made to 17 former slave laborers in Poland and 31 in the Netherlands, it said.
The fund, directed by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, recently took out advertisements in 22 countries publicizing the fund to inform former slaves how to apply for compensation.
Volkswagen estimates 17,000 forced laborers worked in its factories from 1941 to the end of World War II, although others charge the number was much higher.
More than 7 million people, most from Poland and the Soviet Union, were forced to work in Nazi Germany, and experts believe at least 500,000 are still alive.
Most German firms have refused to honor back wage claims, arguing the workers were forced on them by the Nazis and so the current government, as legal successor to the Nazi regime, should be responsible.
But Volkswagen, facing lawsuits in the United States, broke ranks this year and created the fund to provide ``humanitarian aid'' directly to survivors.
It also is one of several big firms involved in talks with newly elected German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to set up an industry-wide fund, administered by the government, to settle all slave labor claims and resolve all legal action.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
GM to Study Its Nazi Activities
Wednesday, December 23, 1998; 1:54 a.m. EST DETROIT (AP) -- General Motors Corp. has hired a Yale University professor to look into the company's activities in Nazi Germany.The Washington Post reported this month that lawyers and historians were compiling evidence for possible use in class-action lawsuits against GM and Ford in behalf of former prisoners of war.
The lawyers contend that the automakers helped the Nazis before and during World War II and profited from the use of forced labor at their German subsidiaries. Both GM and Ford have had German subsidiaries since the 1920s.
Both companies deny the charges.
GM said Tuesday that Henry Turner, an expert on the history of Nazi Germany who has taught at Yale since 1958, will take a yearlong leave of absence to research the activities of GM and its Adam Opel plants during the war.
GM said Turner and a team of research assistants will receive unrestricted access to GM records and personnel files.
GM said Turner's research will be coordinated with the work of Professor Hans Pohl, who is leading a project commissioned by Opel on the same subject.
Ford has asked for dismissal of a lawsuit brought by a Russian native who was forced to build military trucks for the Nazis at a Ford plant in Cologne, Germany. No such lawsuit has been filed against GM.
Ford has acknowledged that slave labor was used at the plant during the war, but said it lost control of its German operations before the United States entered the war.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Historian Influences Many
By Hillel ItalieCAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -- As the teacher talks to his students, his hands tell a story. They rise above his ears and point like knives. They chop the air in straight, swift lines, as if cutting through a wall of lies.
At a public high school near the Harvard campus, Larry Aaronson is calling for an alternative way of thinking about the Civil War.
``The war was not fought to free the slaves!'' he insists, hands coming down on every word. ``The war was fought to destroy the planter's control over the Southern states because the planters have taken the Southern states out of the Union!''
Seated before his class at the Pilot School, Aaronson talks about class conflict in the South and racism in the North. He emphasizes that the Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves and that it was late in the war before Lincoln's reasons for fighting changed.
``Only THEN it becomes a fight about ending slavery,'' he says. ``Lincoln sees there's only one way to get out of this: `I'm going to mobilize the entire black population. I'm going to overcome a lot of my resistance and I'm going to allow blacks into the military.'''
Aaronson is not departing from the text; he is teaching it. The students in this U.S. history course have been reading Howard Zinn's ``A People's History of the United States,'' a left-wing interpretation that has made some wonder how much they really knew.
``It makes me sort of question everything else I've learned because I've only learned one side before, the conqueror's point of view,'' said one student, Rowena Potts.
``In principle, I am sort of against having biased history books,'' said another student, Santiago Rohenes. ``But the chance of getting to read the other side of the story is important and unbiased books are sort of impossible to have.''
Published in 1980 with little promotion, ``A People's History'' has sold more than half a million copies and sales have accelerated over the years. Although Zinn was writing for a general readership, his book is taught in high schools and colleges throughout the country. Thanks to a couple of famous admirers, it may reach an even wider audience.
Matt Damon, the star and co-writer of the movie ``Good Will Hunting,'' is a family friend of Zinn's and a former student of Aaronson's. Damon gives Zinn's book a plug in the film -- his character calls it a ``REAL history book'' -- and now he and co-star Ben Affleck are working on a television dramatization of ``A People's History'' for the Fox network.
``It's all serendipity,'' said Aaronson, a former Civil Rights activist who has used Zinn's book in his classroom for several years. ``Both Matt's and Ben's moms are educators, progressive educators. And Matt's family used to live next door to Howard and his wife. Everyone shares similar ideals.
``Before I had Matt as a student, I had Matt's older brother, Kyle. I was teaching Howard's book. And he said, `Oh, my God. We know who this guy is.' And they were all excited and they got all excited about the book.''
At a time when few politicians dare even call themselves liberal, ``A People's History'' offers an openly anti-establishment narrative. It charges Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide and picks apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt. It celebrates workers and feminists and war resisters.
```People's History' was a really important historical event,'' said the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, a longtime friend of Zinn's whose book ``Manufacturing Consent'' also receives a compliment in Damon's film. ``It brought an alternative perspective about American history to a really substantial number of people.''
``Before Howard's book there was nothing like it,'' said Bill Bigelow, a history teacher at Franklin High School in Portland, Ore., and co-editor of the educational guide ``Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice.''
``So much of what is in traditional U.S. history textbooks start from the standpoint that this is the greatest country in the world, everything is fine and let's see how it got that way. Zinn's book starts from the premise, `Let's see what this country's history is really about.'''
In Aaronson's class, the book has influenced not only students, but parents. Rowena Potts said when she first told her mother what she had learned about Columbus, her mother refused to believe it.
``But now she's much more interested,'' Rowena said. ``She said there's so many facts that nobody had even told her. I thought it was kind of distressing, how she reacted at first, but now she's much more open to these ideas. She wants to read the book now. My father has started reading it.''
``It happens every single time,'' Aaronson said. ``Parents have gotten intrigued by the book and have actually gone out and bought it.''
Zinn's book has caused surprisingly little controversy in schools. Some historians, however, have objected, despite the book's extensive bibliography. ``I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary,'' said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a family friend of the Kennedys. ``And I don't take him very seriously. He's a polemicist, not a historian.''
Added Oscar Handlin, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and professor emeritus at Harvard University: ``He doesn't know anything. Scholarship? I wouldn't use that word for what he does.''
An admirer of Zinn's, Columbia University professor Eric Foner, has praised ``A People's History'' for its ``vivid descriptions of events that are usually ignored'' and called it ``a step toward a coherent new version of American history.'' But only a step. Reviewing the book in 1980 for The New York Times, Foner also criticized Zinn for a ``bottom up'' view of history that was as limited as history written from the top down.
``What is needed,'' wrote Foner, ``is an integrated account incorporating both Thomas Jefferson and his slaves, Andrew Jackson and the Indians, Woodrow Wilson and the Wobblies, in a continuing historical process, in which each group's experience is shaped in large measure by its relation to others.''
Zinn, who lives in nearby Auburndale with his wife, Rosyln, agrees with his critics on a couple of points. He was not trying to write an objective history and he was not trying to write a complete one. He calls his book a response to traditional texts, the first chapter -- not the last -- of a new kind of history.
``There's no such thing as a whole story; every story is incomplete,'' Zinn said during an interview at a coffee shop near Harvard Square. ``My idea was the orthodox viewpoint has already been done a thousand times. If we're going to have a free marketplace of ideas then we ought to look at the market and who's dominated it.
``I'm not writing it for people who are blank slates. Everybody in the United States who goes through junior high school, or even elementary school, gets some American history. So all I'm doing is wheeling my pushcart into the marketplace.''
The 76-year-old Zinn is an impressive looking man, tall and rugged with wavy silver-gray hair. An experienced public speaker, he is modest and engaging in person, more interested in persuasion than in confrontation.
He has always been a different kind of historian, one who has lived history as well as written it. He grew up poor during the Depression, flew bombing missions in World War II and taught in the South, at a black women's college, during the Civil Rights era. He helped Daniel Ellsberg leak copies to the press of the top-secret Pentagon Papers and helped anti-war activist Father Daniel Berrigan hide from the FBI.
Although retired from Boston University, where he taught political science for more than 20 years, Zinn continues to lecture at schools and to appear at rallies and on picket lines.
``He's been involved in everything,'' says Chomsky, who met Zinn in the 1960s. ``He's right in front, directly in the action.''
Born in New York in 1922, Zinn is the son of Jewish immigrants who as a child lived in a rundown area in Brooklyn and responded strongly to the novels of Charles Dickens. At age 17, urged on by some young Communists in his neighborhood, he attended his first political rally.
``There were all these people in Times Square, marching around with their banners. I think they were calling for an end to war,'' he said.
``Suddenly, I heard the sirens sound and I looked around and saw the policemen on horses galloping into the crowd and beating people. I couldn't believe that. And then I was hit. I turned around and I was knocked unconscious. I woke up sometime later in a doorway, with Times Square quiet again, eerie, dreamlike, as if nothing had transpired.
``I was ferociously indignant -- that here we were, in America, and I had been told and believed that we had the right to free assembly and freedom of speech and here were these people peacefully protesting and they were attacked violently by the police. It was a very shocking lesson for me.''
War was his next lesson. Eager to help wipe out the Nazis, Zinn joined the Army Air Corps in 1943 and even persuaded the local draft board to let him mail his own induction notice. He flew missions throughout Europe, receiving an Air Medal, but he found himself questioning what he was doing. Back home, he gathered all his medals and papers, put them in a folder and wrote on the folder: ``Never again.''
He had married Roslyn in 1944 and after the war they settled in lower Manhattan. Taking advantage of the G.I. Bill, which offered veterans government aid for education, he attended New York University and Columbia University, where he received a Ph.D. in history.
His first permanent teaching job came in 1956, in a place where history would soon violently arrive: He was offered the chairmanship of the history and social sciences department at Spelman College,an all-black women's school in the then-segregated city of Atlanta. One of his students was a confident, ``ironically polite'' Georgian named Alice Walker.
``He made us laugh at a time when so much made us cry,'' said the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, who remains friends with Zinn. ``Eventually, nobody cared if Howie was white and we even wondered if he really was. He treated us with such kindness and thoughtfulness.
``He was so funny. I remember he was addressing some very staid students and administrators at Agnes Scott College (in nearby Decatur, Ga.),'' Walker added with a laugh. ``Here he is, Jewish, and there we were, black, and there they are, trying hard not to think about all the big changes going on. And he gets up and starts out by saying, `I stand to the left of Mao Tse-tung!'''
With the Civil Rights movement growing, Zinn thought the best education was happening outside of the classroom. He encouraged his students to request books from the segregated public libraries and helped coordinate sit-ins at downtown cafeterias. Zinn also published several articles, including a then-rare attack on the Kennedy administration for being too slow to protect blacks.
He was loved by students but not by administrators. In 1963, Spelman fired him for ``insubordination'' (Zinn was a critic of the school's non-participation in the civil rights movement). His years at Boston University were marked by active opposition to the Vietnam War and by feuds with the school's outspoken president, John Silber. Zinn retired in 1988, spending his last day of class on the picket line with students in support of an on-campus nurses' strike.
``It seemed a fitting way to end my teacher career,'' he later said.
Besides ``A People's History,'' Zinn has written several books, including ``The Southern Mystique,'' the acclaimed ``LaGuardia in Congress'' and the memoir ``You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train.'' He also has written three plays, including ``Marx in Soho'' and ``Emma,'' a piece about the anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman that has been performed all over the world.
Zinn is a socialist who opposed the ``narrow nationalism'' of the Soviet Union, but still believes the United States needs a radical redistribution of wealth. Although he sees both major American political parties as controlled by the rich, he confesses to voting for President Clinton in 1992.
``I thought there might have been a chance he would turn out to be more decent than the others,'' Zinn said with an embarrassed smile. ``But that turned out to be wrong, very quickly.''
Despite all he has seen, he thinks people are basically good and that today's students are no less concerned about the world than the students of the '60s: They just need a great cause to unite them. And he still sees himself as a rebel, even if the establishment has sometimes treated him otherwise.
``That's the American system, one of the ways it sustains itself. If it fired everyone who was a subversive it would be a totalitarian state. ... It's a mildly liberal state which allows just enough openings and gives awards to just enough people to make the argument, `You see, we're not a totalitarian state.
``So here I am,'' he said, leaning back in his chair at the coffee house off Harvard Square, ``prosperous, drinking cappuccino. But when I read in the morning paper that a bunch of people were arrested at the state house for protesting welfare cuts, I become intensely involved. I wished I had been there.''
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Le Pen Seeks Ban on Party Name
Thursday, December 24, 1998; 5:21 p.m. EST PARIS (AP) -- Seeking to punish rebels he kicked out of his extreme-right party, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen asked a court Thursday to ban them from using the party name or emblem.Le Pen's complaint targeted nine people, chief among them Bruno Megret, the party's former No. 2 man who is leading the rebellion. On Wednesday, Le Pen formally excluded Megret and six others from the party.
The bitter feud has split the party. Megret plans to form his own slate for European Parliament elections next June, while Le Pen plans to lead the Front's ticket.
A hearing on Le Pen's complaint is scheduled for Jan. 12, less than two weeks before a planned party congress called by Megret. Megret's call for the congress led Le Pen to suspend him this month because he considered it a ploy to oust him -- a claim Megret never directly denied.
The National Front, which typically wins 15 percent of the national vote, advocates sending home France's millions of immigrants and reserving jobs and welfare for French-born citizens. It is widely accused of racism and anti-Semitism.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Nazi Suit Names Chase, J.P. Morgan
By Tom HaysNEW YORK (AP) -- Chase Manhattan Bank and J.P. Morgan & Co. readily joined the Nazis in the plunder of millions of dollars in Jewish assets during World War II, according to a class-action lawsuit.
The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn against those banks and seven French banks, accuses them of seizing accounts and safe deposit boxes from Jewish customers, then keeping the assets after the war.
Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan became the first U.S. institutions to be named in the dozen lawsuits still pending on behalf of Holocaust victims who were exploited or who lost assets during the Nazi era.
Chase Manhattan ``collaborated with the German authorities and displayed an excessive zeal in its enforcement of anti-Jewish laws,'' the suit alleged. A similar attitude by J.P. Morgan earned it the reputation of an ``international Aryan organization,'' it adds.
The suit does not seek specific damages. But it accuses all the banks of being involved in ``the systematic plunder'' of ``countless millions of dollars.''
A plaintiff attorney, Kenneth McCallion, said he hoped the banks would open their books, verify the losses and settle the claims out of court. Last week, Barclays agreed to settle its part of the same class-action suit by paying $3.6 million to Jews whose assets were frozen.
In a statement, Chase called the suit unnecessary. It said the bank is already working with Jewish leaders to investigate records and reimburse, with interest, any customers -- or their heirs -- who lost money. Fewer than 100 accounts are at issue, it added.
A J.P. Morgan statement said bank officials ``understand the seriousness of this issue, and we'll certainly look into these allegations with care.''
The suit relies heavily on an April 1945 report from the U.S. Treasury Department about U.S. banking activities during the war.
According to the report, the ``record of the (Chase) Paris branch is one of uncalled-for responsiveness to the desires of the Germans and an apparent desire to enhance its influence with them.''
Other American banks closed their offices in Nazi-occupied Paris, and Chase's home office initially ordered its Paris branch to do the same. But in February 1941, Chase replaced its American representative, S.P. Bailey, with a Swiss national, Carlos Niedermann, and the plan to liquidate the bank's French branch instead ``gave way in the better part of 1942 to a rapid expansion of deposits,'' the U.S. Treasury report said. Those deposits included accounts from the German government.
Likewise, the report found that the manager of J.P. Morgan's Paris office worked closely with the Vichy-French government of the Germans. The suit says the manager openly bragged of ``the anti-Jewish record and policies of J.P. Morgan.''
Similar claims against Swiss banks were settled last summer when the Swiss agreed to pay $1.25 billion in restitution to Holocaust victims who had been unable to recover assets lost in Swiss institutions.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Kremlin Vows End to Anti-Semitism
By Anna DolgovMOSCOW (AP) -- The Justice Ministry vowed Friday to put a stop to the virulent anti-Semitism being voiced at increasingly high levels of the Communist party.
However, it didn't say what steps it would take beyond its usual verbal censures.
The ministry, responsible for stopping nationalist incitement, recently demanded Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov take a stand against slurs against Jews made by his colleagues.
Zyuganov responded by accusing Jews of bringing on the ``extinction'' of Russia's people and causing the current economic disaster.
In his letter to the Justice Ministry, reported widely in the press, Zyuganov lambasted Zionism, a movement of support for the Jewish state of Israel. The term is often used by Russian anti-Semites to refer to a perceived Jewish conspiracy for world domination.
``Our people are not blind. They cannot fail to see that the spread of Zionism in the state government in Russia is one of the reasons for the current catastrophic condition of the country, the mass impoverishment and the process of extinction of its people,'' Zyuganov said.
The Communists make up Russia's biggest political party, and their faction dominates the lower house of parliament, the State Duma. Zyuganov finished second in Russia's presidential election in 1996 and is likely to run again in 2000.
President Boris Yeltsin's spokesman said Friday the frequent anti-Semitic slurs ``demonstrate that there is a clear political line by the party that is headed by Mr. Zyuganov.''
``This is not an accident, this is not a slip. They consistently continue their line. This reminds of some very bad times not only in (the history of) Russia, but in other countries as well,'' spokesman Dmitry Yakushkin said, referring to Nazi Germany.
The Justice Ministry said Zyuganov's response forced it to ``take immediate steps for preventing and thwarting statements and actions aimed at fueling tension in society,'' the Interfax news agency reported.
Several prominent Russian businessmen and politicians have called for banning the party, saying it had evolved into fascism.
``With his letter, Zyuganov emphasized that Communists purposely make anti-Semitism part of their ideology,'' Russia's chief rabbi, Adolf Shayevich, said Friday, according to Interfax.
© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press
Leaders: Russia Backs Anti-Semitism
By Anna DolgovMOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's Communist Party is intentionally pushing an anti-Semitic line, the Kremlin and Russian Jewish leaders said Friday.
Virulent anti-Semitism has been voiced at increasingly high levels of the party. The Justice Ministry, which is responsible for enforcing the law against nationalist incitement, recently demanded that party leader Gennady Zyuganov take a stand on his colleagues' statements.
Zyuganov responded this week by accusing Jews of bringing on the ``extinction'' of Russia's people and the country's economic woes.
In an open letter, Zyuganov complained of the ``aggressive, destructive role of Zionist (Jewish) capital in the collapse of Russia's economy and the pilfering of its national wealth,'' according to the Interfax news agency.
The Communists make up Russia's biggest political party, and their faction dominates the lower house of parliament, the State Duma. Zyuganov finished second in Russia's presidential election in 1996 and is likely to run again in 2000.
The Communists' anti-Semitic slurs ``demonstrate that there is a clear political line by the party that is headed by Mr. Zyuganov,'' Yeltsin's spokesman Dmitry Yakushkin said Friday.
``This is not an accident, this is not a slip. ... They consistently continue their line.''
``This reminds of some very bad times not only in (the history of) Russia, but in other countries as well,'' Yakushkin said, referring to Nazi Germany.
In his letter to the Justice Ministry, Zyuganov lambasted Zionism, a movement of support for the Jewish state of Israel. The term is often used by Russian anti-Semites to refer to a perceived Jewish conspiracy for world domination.
``Our people are not blind. They cannot fail to see that the spread of Zionism in the state government in Russia is one of the reasons for the current catastrophic condition of the country, the mass impoverishment and the process of extinction of its people,'' Zyuganov wrote in the letter, which has been widely quoted in the Russian media.
The Justice Ministry said Friday that Zyuganov's response had forced it to ``take immediate steps for preventing and thwarting statements and actions aimed at fueling tension in society,'' the Interfax news agency reported.
However, the ministry didn't specify what actions it intended to take. Previously, it has not gone beyond censorious rhetoric.
Several prominent Russian businessmen and politicians have called for banning the party, saying it had evolved into fascism.
``With his letter, Zyuganov emphasized that Communists purposefully make anti-Semitism part of their ideology,'' Russia's chief rabbi, Adolf Shayevich, said Friday, according to Interfax.
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© Copyright 1998 The Associated Press