By DAVID RISING,AP
Posted: 2008-04-29 23:17:24

BADEN-BADEN, Germany (April 29) – Karl Lotter, a prisoner who worked in the hospital at Mauthausen concentration camp, had no trouble remembering the first time he watched SS doctor Aribert Heim kill a man.

It was 1941, and an 18-year-old Jew had been sent to the clinic with a foot inflammation. Heim asked him about himself and why he was so fit. The young man said he had been a soccer player and swimmer.

Then, instead of treating the prisoner’s foot, Heim anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second, Lotter said. The victim’s head was removed and the flesh boiled off so that Heim could keep it on display.

more.

READ IT
HERE

By LYDIA AISENBERG

INMATES OF the Kaufering camps were forced to work in industry, agriculture and in building massive underground bunkers to be used by Messerschmidt to manufacture planes.

ETCHED IN MEMORY. The Yiddish writings in the Landsberg Haggada include translations of songs from Hebrew to Yiddish, a short report from the Warsaw Ghetto fighters, and a translation of the Song of the Partisans, as well as notices that had been pinned up in the last days of Dachau.

The Kaufering, known as the ‘cold crematoria,’ were the last camps in Germany to be liberated by the Americans

In l946, Holocaust survivors in a displaced persons camp in the Bavarian town of Landsberg penned a Pessah haggada, telling the story of their people’s freedom from a previous slavery.

MORE.

By JENNY LING – The Dominion Post | Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Holocaust survivor Inge Woolf is on a personal mission to combat racism and intolerance after an attack on her husband’s grave.

The 73-year-old semi-retired Wellington resident is dedicated to teaching others about the dictatorship that murdered millions of people, including Jews, homosexuals and the disabled, during World War II.

MORE.

By HAVIV RETTIG

The Claims Conference is withholding funds for Jewish Agency programs until agency head Ze’ev Bielski recants his assertion that the conference is failing to distribute money to Holocaust survivors, according to leaks to the media on Thursday.

For several years, joint efforts by Israeli survivors’ organizations, Bielski and Pensioners Affairs Minister Rafi Eitan have tried to change the way Holocaust-era restitution funds held by the Claims Conference are distributed.

The conference is composed of two-dozen organizations, including many Israeli and survivor groups, but Israeli groups want a larger number of Israeli representatives on the board in order to funnel more funds to survivors here.

In the context of this fight, the instigators of the effort have said that the conference possesses some $1 billion which it is refusing to disburse to the deserving and aging survivors. However, this claim, published last year in a report commissioned by Eitan and the Jewish Agency, is inaccurate.

“After we checked into it comprehensively, I can say the Claims Conference does not have a billion dollars sitting somewhere that they aren’t distributing,” said Jewish Agency Treasurer Hagai Merom. “They have a three-year plan for disbursing the remaining funds in a planned way.”

Documentation of the Claims Conference shows that funds are mostly spoken for by heirs as they complete the restitution process and by an assessment of future needs.

According to the conference, funding has been frozen on three Jewish Agency educational projects – some 20% of the conference’s funds go to education projects rather than survivors’ welfare – whose value is $378,000.

Now, press leaks are trying to link the freezing of these projects – out of several million dollars in allocations given to the agency from the conference – to “a demand by the conference that Bielski apologize.”

The Jewish Agency itself did not deny the contents of the leak, saying Bielski “would continue to act for survivors’ welfare and transparency in organizations dealing with them,” and “does not have any contact with the Claims Conference regarding his opinions or statements.”

Conference officials completely denied the allegations, and sources familiar with the conference’s operations said it was unclear why Bielski, who is also vice president of the conference, would support the assertion in the first place.

Published in Europe, the claims have reportedly hurt ongoing negotiation efforts for more aid to survivors.