Mar 13, 2010
Vandals sprayed anti-Semitic graffiti on Holocaust memorials at a former Nazi concentration camp in Poland, desecration that authorities discovered Saturday and are investigating.

Words including “Jude Raus” — German for “Jew Out” — and “Hitler Good!” in English, were found in red paint Saturday on a large monument at the former Plaszow camp near Krakow. A smaller memorial plaque was also painted with a swastika and “Jude Raus.”

The vandalism was discovered a day before a planned memorial march marking the 67th anniversary of the liquidation of Krakow’s ghetto.

On March 13, 1943, German soldiers started a two-day action in which they emptied Krakow’s ghetto of its estimated 16,000 Jewish residents, shipping them to Plaszow and to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

The news agency PAP quoted a police official, Anna Zbroja, as saying authorities are on the spot trying to determine when the vandalism occurred.

The Plaszow camp featured in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Oscar-winning film “Schindler’s List,” which chronicled efforts by German industrialist Oskar Schindler to save Jews by having them work in his Krakow factory.

SAN FRANCISCO — A long-running dispute over a Nazi salute given by an activist at a Santa Cruz City Council meeting in 2002 will get another look from a federal appeals court in San Francisco.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals announced Friday that an 11-judge panel will reconsider a ruling in which a smaller panel of the court last year dismissed a free-speech lawsuit filed by Robert Norse.
No date has been set for a hearing before the expanded panel.
Norse, a homeless rights activist, gave a silent Nazi salute at a council meeting exactly eight years ago, on March 12, 2002, after then-Mayor Christopher Krohn told a woman who wanted to speak that the time for public comment was over.
After Councilman Tim Fitzmaurice called attention to the salute and Norse came to the podium to make comments challenging Fitzmaurice, Krohn ordered Norse ejected from the meeting.
Norse was arrested, jailed for five and one-half hours and then released and cited for disrupting a council meeting.
Later that year, he filed a federal lawsuit in federal court in San Jose against the city, the mayor, the council and the arresting officer, claiming that his constitutional First Amendment free-speech rights were violated.
Lawyers for the city contend that the officials acted reasonably to enforce the rules of the meeting in the face of disruption.
Norse appealed for the review by an 11-judge panel after a three-judge panel by a 2-1 vote in November agreed with the city’s position and dismissed the lawsuit.
The court majority on the smaller panel said, “Our well-settled law gives great discretion to presiding officers in enforcing reasonable rules for the orderly conduct of meetings.”
Norse’s lawyer, David Beauvais, said today, “We are really glad the court agreed to reconsider the case.
“This is a good case for First Amendment principles to be applied and upheld. I think that in this case (the officials) did go over the line,” the attorney said.
Beauvais said Norse’s salute was “quiet, symbolic speech and didn’t disrupt anybody.”
The city’s lawyers have argued in court papers, however, that Norse was ejected not only because of the salute but also because of “repeated approaches to the podium and challenges of Councilmember Fitzmaurice” at a time when public comment was closed.
“I think you have to take the two together,” said George Kovacevich, a lawyer for the city. Kovacevich noted that Norse was not ejected when he gave Nazi salutes during public comment periods at other council meetings before and after the March 12, 2002, incident.
The current set of appeals is the second round before the 9th Circuit.
Earlier, a majority of a three-judge panel in 2004 overturned a ruling in which U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte dismissed the lawsuit. The panel ordered Whyte to reassess whether the mayor acted reasonably.
After reviewing the evidence, including a videotape of the meeting, Whyte again dismissed the lawsuit in 2007 and Norse filed a new appeal with the 9th Circuit.
Kovacevich said the case is “eight years and counting.”

Germany is fighting to keep sealed the Eichmann files detailing the years the Holocaust’s chief logistics organiser spent on the run before he was captured by Mossad agents.

Those hoping to have a 50-year secrecy order overturned believe the government is embarrassed by details within that may prove German and Vatican officials colluded in his escape and freedom.

The secrecy order is being challenged in a benchmark court case against the BND, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, which wants the 4,500 pages of documents on Adolf Eichmann to remain out of the public domain. The service claims that intelligence agencies in other countries will be “frightened off” in future data-sharing if they are disclosed, Der Spiegel reported.

Critics believe this is a smokescreen designed to avoid official embarrassment both in Berlin and the Vatican. It is well documented that German Bishop Alois Hudal in Rome operated postwar “Ratlines,” getting passports for wanted Nazis to allow them to escape justice.

Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp, admitted to British Nazi expert Gitta Sereny that Hudal helped him get away after the Nazi defeat in 1945.

Eichmann also escaped. He was the ultimate “desk murderer” of the Third Reich who, as head of department IVB4 of the SS in Berlin, was responsible for the trains that carried millions to their deaths at extermination centres in Nazi occupied Poland.

After the war he was captured but fled from Allied custody. As the victors scoured Europe and the world for the top officials of the regime, Eichmann’s name was barely known: it was only as more and more details of the Holocaust emerged that his pivotal role in it began to dawn on Nazi hunters.

For 15 years he lived, sometimes under his own name, in Argentina, raising his family while working at a VW car plant. In 1960, acting on a tip-off, a Mossad team was despatched to Buenos Aires with orders to kidnap him and bring him back to Israel for trial. He was seized, stood trial, found guilty and hanged on May 31 1962.

Now the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig, Germany, is studying the files about his getaway from Europe and life in Argentina to decide if they should be made public. The application for their release was made by German journalist Gabriele Weber.

The BND maintains that secrecy is necessary because “much of the information contained in the files was provided by an unnamed foreign intelligence service.” If released, the BND argues, it would “deter” other nations from sharing intelligence with Germany in the future.

But critics believe what the files will really reveal are the levels of assistance, succour and turning a blind eye to Nazi fugitives from officials in defeated Germany, together with details of Vatican assistance to top Nazis like him.

A decision on whether to release the files will be made in the next few weeks.

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – A Swedish court on Thursday allowed the extradition to Poland of a former neo-Nazi leader Anders Hoegstroem to face trial for the theft of a sign from the one-time Auschwitz death camp, a prosecutor said.

Hoegstroem, 34, was arrested on February 11 over the theft of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign which disappeared on December 18 from over the gate of the notorious World War II camp set up in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany.

Hoegstroem has three weeks to appeal, and if unsuccessful “the authorities have to come and get him and they have 10 days to do so,” she added.

Hoegstroem has told Swedish media he was supposed to act as an intermediary to pick up the sign and sell it to a buyer, but in the end he wound up informing Polish police about the people behind the plot.

Hoegstroem in 1994 founded the National Socialist Front, a Swedish neo-Nazi movement he headed for five years before quitting.

Polish police recovered the five-metre (16-foot) metal sign, whose German inscription means “Work Will Set You Free”, on December 20, two days after the theft. They arrested and charged five Polish men.

“The Stockholm court has taken the decision that he should be extradited to Poland and that he should remain in custody,” Agneta Hilding Qvarnstroem told AFP.

The sign, which had been cut into three parts — was returned by investigators to the Auschwitz museum on January 21 — less than a week before commemorations marking the 65th anniversary of the camp’s liberation by Soviet Russian troops.

The sign has long symbolised the horror of the camp where some 1.1 million people — one million of them Jews — were victims of Nazi German genocide from 1940 to 1945.

SKOPJE, March 10. The Macedonian Jewish Community marks Wednesday 67 years from the deportation of Macedonian Jews to Nazi camp Treblinka.

The anniversary from the tragic event will be marked in Stip and Bitola, where Jewish Community delegations will lay flowers at the monuments of deported Jews and fallen World War II fighters, along with signing of cooperation memorandums with the two municipalities.

The Skopje events will be held on Thursday with laying of flowers before the monument of Macedonian Jews and visit of Butel cemetery. Commemorative program will be held at the Drama Theatre in the evening, addressed by Macedonian Jewish Community president Bjanka Subotic and Israel’s ambassador David Cohen, followed by theatre play “Railroad for the Icy Spring” by Tomislav Osmanli, directed by Nela Vitosevic.

In the framework of the Holocaust observance, book “Jews from Monastir, Macedonia” by Schlomo Albocher was promoted in gallery Daut Pasin Amam on Tuesday evening.

Moreover, the Macedonian Holocaust Fund signed memorandums of cooperation with the City of Skopje and several institutions and organizations, aimed at providing assistance for the completion and structuring of the Skopje-based Holocaust Memorial Center.

Upon a decree by the Bulgarian government, almost all Jews, i.e. 98 percent of the Jewish population in Macedonia, were arrested on the night between March 10 and 11. They were taken to the place of the current Tobacco Company, which was then a temporary concentration camp. Majority of Jews came from Bitola, Skopje and Stip. After being stripped of their property, along with confiscation of jewelry and money, they were loaded into trains and transported to death camp Treblinka in occupied Poland, where they were immediately executed. According to estimates, about 900,000 people were killed in the camp during World War II.