Police investigate 14 suspected neo-Nazis

Published: 28 Apr 13 11:49 CET | Print version
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/national/20130428-49411.html

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Authorities in Germany are investigating 14 suspected members of neo-Nazi terror groups, news magazine Der Spiegel reports.

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Of those, 10 are in connection with the activities of the NSU neo-Nazi terror cell, which killed eight Turkish people and one Greek as well as a German policewoman over a period of seven years.

The figures have emerged in response to an information request issued by Germany’s Left Party. The number does not include the five people who are already due to appear in Munich’s Upper Regional Court in connection with the NSU killing spree.

One of the 14 people under investigation is Martin Wiese, who was arrested in 2003 for plotting a bomb attack on an opening ceremony for a Jewish community centre in Munich. He was later sentenced to seven years in jail for leading a terrorist organisation. He’s now being accused of conspiring with a terrorist group, a charge he denies.

Another man being investigated is Meinolf Schönborn, the former head of the banned Nationalistische Front (Nationalist Front) He’s accused of trying, with three others, to set up a new group called Neue Ordnung (New Order). He also denies the allegation. In northern Germany police are also investigating a handful of people thought to have helped supply weapons for attacks.

The trial of NSU member Beate Zschäpe has been marred by controversy after no Turkish media outlets initially gained accreditation to be in the courtroom to cover the trial. Though the court first refused to re-open the application process, an order from above ensured that Turkish, Greek and Persian-language media would be guaranteed seats at the trial.

Zschäpe's trial begins on May 6.

The Local/kkf

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WWII bomb disrupts Berlin main train station

A 100-kilo World War II bomb found near Berlin's main train station was successfully defused on Wednesday, but rail passengers still faced delays for the rest of the day.

Published: 3 Apr 13 08:16 CET

A police spokesman said explosive experts had managed to defuse the Soviet bomb where it was, lying near tracks close to Berlin's Hauptbahnhof in the centre of the city.

"The operation to defuse the device took about half an hour," the spokesman
told the AFP news agency. "Everything went according to plan."

But the bomb caused havoc to rail traffic in the German capital.

"Travellers should be prepared for delays and diversions in long distance train traffic," a Deutsche Bahn spokesman told the Tagesspiegel newspaper.

In particular, long-distance trains as well as those travelling between the capital and cities such as Hamburg and Rostock were expected to affected throughout the day.

Trains heading south from Berlin were diverted to other tracks which could lead to delays of up to half an hour, the spokesman said.

The suburban S-Bahn trains were not expected to be affected.

The bomb was found on Tuesday evening - near tracks which run north of the train station.

Several houses near the bomb were evacuated in the morning, with the evacuation zone set to be extended as experts move in to defuse the bomb. This is likely to include the closure of several roads.

The bomb was discovered during a routine munitions search in the area. Explosives from the Second World War are still regularly found across Germany.

DAPD/The Local/hc

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20130403-48903.html

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Study reveals shocking scale of Nazi camps

New research documenting the existence of tens of thousands of Nazi ghettos and camps in German-occupied wartime Europe has shocked Holocaust historians, who until now were only aware of a fraction of them.

Published: 2 Mar 13 16:03 CET

According to a report by New York Times due to be published on Sunday, US researchers have catalogued 42,500 Nazi-run camps which were set up in Germany and throughout occupied Europe – tens of thousands more than previously thought.

Previous postwar estimates had put the number of Nazi camps and ghettos at about 7,000, wrote the paper.

Holocaust historians were shocked by the scale of the revelations, the result of a thirteen-year investigation by researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Beginning in 2000, researchers set out to document all the sites in Europe where the Nazis imprisoned, tortured and enslaved their victims between 1933 and 1945.

"The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought," Hartmut Berghoff, director of the German Historical Institute in Washington told the paper.

"We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, but the numbers are unbelievable," he said. Until now, historical records of the Nazi camps had been fragmented - this is the first study to document them in their entirety.

The research also highlights the variety of the Nazi-run camp network, which by the end of the war spanned from France to Russia, with the majority of sites clustered in and around Poland and Germany, wrote the paper.

During the war, the Nazis used the network to systematically imprison, enslave and murder millions of European Jews, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe.

An estimated 15 to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the camps, lead researchers Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean told the paper.

Pulling together data from 400 contributors, researchers unearthed not only death camps and euthanasia centres, but also thousands of forced labour, POW and transit camps, along with centres where pregnant women were forced to have abortions and brothels where women were forced to have sex with German soldiers.

The camps began appearing in Germany almost as soon as the Nazis came to power in 1933. The sheer number of them – 3,000 in Berlin and 1,300 in Hamburg alone – meant there could be no doubt that the Germans had known about their existence at the time, head researcher Dean told the New York Times.

“You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labour camps, POW camps, and concentration camps,” said Dean. “They were everywhere.”

The Local/jlb

http://www.thelocal.de/national/20130302-48289.html

/thelocalgermany@thelocalgermany

Neo-Nazis blamed for stunting east Germany

Eastern Germany will never attract enough investment to start growing again if it fails to root out its neo-Nazi problem, a leading management consultant said this week.

Published: 21 Feb 13 07:14 CET

Roland Berger said east German far-right extremism was scaring off the immigrants who were desperately needed to boost the struggling economy.

Everything else was in place. "There is only one thing standing in its way," the 75-year-old consultant told Thursday's Die Zeit weekly newspaper.

"He who sees neo-Nazis marching through eastern Germany towns twice a week does not usually want to move there. And what should a migrant think?"

The fight against the far-right could only be won if culture in the east was given priority and hugely expanded, Berger said.

"One has to create other options. One must bring culture in the east to a shine."

The eastern states had beautiful old towns, but even in Weimar, historically a cultural centre, had "hardly any modern art and music," he said.

He said a city like Weimar needed "top class tourism managers with a suitable budget," and "more top class hotels." He said only then would demanding culture vultures be persuaded to stay for a few days.

The support of culture and education was also a fight against extremism, he said.

Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, which Berger founded in 1967, recently published a study which caused consternation by recommending that the former eastern German states needed €1 billion in investments to bring them up to western levels.

The Local/hc

http://www.thelocal.de/society/20130221-48091.html

Babe Ruth and the Holocaust

Babe Ruth and the Holocaust

By RAFAEL MEDOFF/JNS.ORG

12/20/2012 15:20

Seventy years ago, the names of 50 German-Americans appeared in a full-page advertisement in ten daily newspapers ‘in denunciation of the Hitler policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jews of Europe.’ The most prominent signatory was George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth.

Photo: George Grantham Bain

Babe Ruth is remembered for his home runs on the field and his hot dog binges and other peccadilloes off the field. But as the American public is about to discover, there was another Babe Ruth – one who went to bat for women and minorities, including the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1942, Allied leaders received a steady stream of reports about the Germans massacring tens of thousands of Jewish civilians.

Information reaching the Roosevelt administration in August revealed that the killings were not random atrocities, but part of a Nazi plan to systematically annihilate all of Europe’s Jews. In late November the State Department publicly verified this news, and on December 17, the US and British governments and their allies issued a declaration acknowledging and condemning the mass murder.

But aside from that Allied statement, the Roosevelt administration had no intention of doing anything in response to the killings. There was no serious consideration of opening America’s doors – or the doors of British-ruled Palestine – to Jewish refugees. There was no discussion of taking any steps to rescue the Jews. As quickly as the mass murder had been revealed, it began to fade from the public eye.

Dorothy Thompson was determined to keep that from happening. And Babe Ruth would help her.

Thompson (1893-1961) was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany. She was once described by Time magazine as one of the two most influential women in the United States, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt. In the autumn of 1942, Thompson contacted the World Jewish Congress with a novel idea: mobilizing German-Americans to speak out against the Nazi persecution of the Jews.

As a journalist, Thompson understood the man-bites-dog news value of German-Americans protesting against Germany – especially in view of the well-publicized pro-Nazi sentiment in some segments of the German- American community. Just a few years earlier, more than 20,000 supporters of the German American Bund had filled Madison Square Garden for a pro-Hitler rally.

The World Jewish Congress agreed to foot the bill for publishing Thompson’s anti- Nazi statement as a newspaper advertisement.

She drafted the text and set about recruiting signatories. Seventy years ago, on Dec. 22, the “Christmas Declaration by men and women of German ancestry” appeared as a full-page ad in The New York Times and nine other major daily newspapers.

“[W]e Americans of German descent raise our voices in denunciation of the Hitler policy of cold-blooded extermination of the Jews of Europe and against the barbarities committed by the Nazis against all other innocent peoples under their sway,” the declaration begins. “These horrors... are, in particular, a challenge to those who, like ourselves are descendants of the Germany that once stood in the foremost ranks of civilization.”

The ad goes on to “utterly repudiate every thought and deed of Hitler and his Nazis,” and urge the people of Germany “to overthrow a regime which is the infamy of German history.”

The names of 50 prominent German-Americans appeared on the advertisement.

There were several notable academics, such as Princeton University dean Christian Gauss and University of Maine president Arthur Mauck. Leading Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, news correspondent William Shirer and orchestra conductor Walter Damrosch appeared in the ad. So did Freda Kirchwey, editor of the political newsweekly The Nation, and Oswald Heck, speaker of the New York State Assembly.

But the signatory who was by far the best known to the American public was George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

Widely regarded as the greatest baseball player in the history of the game, Ruth, known as the Sultan of Swat, at that time held the records for the most home runs in a season (60) and the most home runs in a career (714) as well as numerous other batting records. Having excelled as a pitcher before switching to the outfield and gaining fame as a hitter, the amazingly versatile Ruth even held the pitching record for the most shutouts in a season by a left-hander. Not surprisingly, Ruth was one of the first players elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

By participating in this German-American protest against the Holocaust, Ruth used his powerful name to help attract public attention to the Jews’ plight. Timing is everything, both on the baseball field and beyond, and the timing of Ruth’s protest was crucial: precisely at the moment when US officials were hoping to brush the Jewish refugee problem aside, Babe Ruth helped keep it front and center.

In an era when professional athletes rarely lent their names to political causes, and when most Americans – including the Roosevelt administration – took little interest in the mass murder of Europe’s Jews, Babe Ruth raised his voice in protest. Ruth’s action is all the more memorable when one contrasts it with the other kinds of behavior that all too often land athletes on the front pages these days.

Filmmaker Byron Hunter and Ruth’s granddaughter, Linda Ruth Tosetti, have collaborated on a soon-to-be-released documentary, Universal Babe. Those who are accustomed to thinking of Ruth’s off-the-field activities in terms of binges and carousing will be pleasantly surprised to learn from the film of the slugger’s noble efforts on behalf of women’s baseball, the Negro Baseball Leagues and the Jews of Hitler’s Europe.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC.

 

http://www.jpost.com/Features/MagazineFeatures/Article.aspx?id=296730

Expellee Federation admits Nazi past

Editor’s note: This Shark finds a chilling comparison between the the miscreants of the Probate Court of Cook County and the members of the Expellee Federation. In both organizations, the misdeeds are hidden and protected from prosecution by "the system". The Sykes, Gore, Jones, Aunt Lydia, Cefalu, Faskowitz and Schwartz estates are prime examples of how the Probate Court of Cook County protects its miscreants. Lucius Verenus, Schoolmaster, ProbateSharks.com

Expellee Federation admits Nazi past

Published: 22 Nov 12 12:44 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.de/society/20121122-46327.html

The Nazi past of a post-war lobbying body for Germans driven from Eastern Europe after 1945 has finally been acknowledged by its current leadership, after a revised historical study spelled it out in no uncertain terms.

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Head of the Federation of Expellees (BdV) Erika Steinbach said she was "not surprised" at revelations that eight of the 13 members on the federation's first committee were former Nazi party members, and a further three had been close supporters of the regime, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said on Thursday.

Several of the federation's early leaders had even been members of the SS, according to the study by the German Institute for Contemporary History in Munich.

In at least one case, the authors believed it "very probable" that a committee member had been involved in the mass murder of Jews on the eastern front, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper said on Monday.
These admissions stand in stark contrast to a 2010 version of the study which played down the connections between the organisation and the Nazi party, said the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.

The revelations in themselves are not shocking, said Steinbach in a BdV press release. The Nazi pasts of early BdV founders would only surprise those who believed what she called the West German official state myth that government institutions had undergone a radical cleansing process after 1945, she argued.

It is widely known, for example, that former Nazis such as Hans Globke were employed in the first West German administration under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Even in East Germany, where de-nazification was supposedly pursued with fervour, 25 percent of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) were former members of the Nazi party in 1949, said Steinbach.

In addition, many heroes of the post-war cultural Germany such as Günter Grass or Walter Jens have had to "live with their not-so-flawless CVs since then," wrote Steinbach.

According to study author German historian Michael Schwartz, who helped investigate the backgrounds of the 1958 BdV committee members, 84 percent had openly supported the Nazis.

This proportion, he told broadcaster Deutschlandfunk on Wednesday, was "far above average" when compared to other West German post-war institutions.

Many of the expellees had been Nazi colonizers who volunteered to settle in regions acquired by the Third Reich in the late 1930s and invaded during the Second World War.

In the chaos of 1945, the settlers were driven out of the then mainly German-speaking Sudetenland - acquired by Nazi Germany in 1938 - on the German-Czechoslovakian border, along with ethnic Germans who had been living there for generations.

Settlers were also forced out of the now Polish regions of Silesia, East Prussia and Pomerania.

Having lost their belongings, homes and territory, in the post-war period the expellees insisted on presenting themselves as victims, a view frowned upon by the Western Allies.

Lobbying for the recognition of the expellees' suffering in the late 1950s and 1960s, the BdV called for compensation, an end to the policy of de-nazification and for the return of German territory lost in 1945, wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Still a powerful lobbying group today, the BdV continues to campaign for a controversial memorial foundation for those expelled after the war.

The Local/jlb

http://www.thelocal.de/society/20121122-46327.html