'Antisemitic' House of Lords event condemned after audience 'blames Jews for Holocaust'.

'Antisemitic' House of Lords event condemned after audience 'blames Jews for Holocaust'. (JCA).

The Israel Embassy in London has condemned an event at the House of Lords at which audience members compared Israel to Daesh terrorists and suggested Jews were to blame for the Holocaust.

One man said Zionism was a “perversion of Judaism”, and then implied an American rabbi had provoked Hitler into murdering six million Jews in the Shoah, using quotes reportedly taken from a neo-Nazi website.

"If anybody is antisemitic, it's the Israelis themselves"; panel applauds; hard to believe, but this happened this week at House of Lords pic.twitter.com/L8v4cARnK8

— Yiftah Curiel (@yiftahc) October 26, 2016

Another speaker is shown announcing, to applause: "If anybody is antisemitic, it's the Israelis themselves."

The session was run by the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) and hosted by Baroness Tonge, the Liberal Democrat member and former MP who now sits as an independent peer.

It launched what the organisation calls the Balfour Apology Campaign, ahead of the centenary of the Balfour Declaration next year.

Video footage of the event shows Baroness Tonge listening to the audience member’s comments about Rabbi Stephen Wise, a leading figure in the United States in the 1930s.

The man – reportedly a member of the anti-Zionist strictly Orthodox Neturei Karta sect – claims Hitler was “pushed over the edge” by the rabbi’s comments, and goes on to talk about boycotts.

Baroness Tonge responds: “Thank you very much. I think it’s very important that the word boycott has come up. The BDS, the campaign to boycott Israeli goods and services, and divestment from Israel, most of us think is very, very important indeed.”

David Collier, a blogger who attended the session, said he was later physically sick.

He wrote: "I witnessed a Jew-hating festival at the heart of the British estate." Read the full story here.

UK baroness quits party that suspended her over anti-Israel rhetoric https://t.co/j15aP6bkVZ via @timesofisrael

— MFS - The Other News (@MFS001) October 28, 2016

Video - Israeli PM Netanyahu's Remarks at Yad Vashem

Video - Israeli PM Netanyahu's Remarks at Yad Vashem. HT: The Yeshiva world.

“My responsibility as Prime Minister of Israel is to ensure that the State of Israel will never again be threatened with destruction. My responsibility is to see to it that there will not be a reason to build additional memorial sites such as Yad Vashem.

The pending agreement with Iran is an agreement that endangers the State of Israel. It leaves Iran with the capabilities that will allow it to arm itself with nuclear weapons, one bomb at first and afterwards many atomic bombs. We cannot live with such an agreement; therefore, we oppose it. Even those who try to challenge us within our borders will discover that we are ready to respond with force. Israel views with utmost gravity the attack against it from Syrian territory. Those who play with fire will get burned.

Preserving the memory of the Holocaust is more important today than ever before.

We live in an age of resurgent and violent anti-Semitism, and commemorations like this ceremony remind us where humanity’s oldest and most enduring hatred can lead.

Many thought that after the horrors of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism would finally contract and disappear.

That has not happened.

Hatred of the Jews appeared to take a brief respite after World War II for a few decades.

It has now returned in full force.

Once again in Europe and elsewhere, Jews are being slandered, vilified and targeted just for being Jews.

This is taking place in the intolerant Middle East and in the very heart of the liberal and tolerant West.

It’s taking place in Tehran and Paris, in Gaza and Brussels. Around the world, Jewish communities are increasingly living in fear.

But it’s not just the Jewish people that is being slandered, vilified and targeted. It’s the Jewish state as well.

Israel is assaulted with the same slurs and libels that have been leveled at the Jews since time immemorial.

Islamist extremists have incorporated the most outrageous anti-Semitic calumnies into their murderous doctrine.

Take the Hamas Charter as one example of many.

It reads like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic forgery on which it is based. It calls for the murder of Jews and the destruction of their state.

Just as classic anti-Semites portrayed the Jew as the embodiment of all evil in the world, today’s anti-Semites portray the Jewish state in the same twisted manner.

And what do the so-called ‘enlightened’ organs of the international community do in response?

A quarter of a million people are slaughtered in Syria, poison gas is used against civilians, and who do the signatories to the Geneva Convention urgently meet to discuss? Israel.

Across the region, dictatorial regimes and brutal movements brutalize their peoples – suppressing women, lynching gays, forcing Christians to live in fear.

And who does the Human Rights Council of the United Nations condemn? Israel.

Hamas fires thousands of rockets at our civilians, deliberately targeting our people while hiding behind Palestinian civilians it uses as human shields.

And who does the ICC announce it will examine? Israel.

No rational examination of the facts could justify this assault on Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy, the most beleaguered democracy on earth.

This obsession with the Jewish people and their state has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism.

Some things just don’t change.

But I can tell you today what has changed.

We have changed.

The Jews have changed.

We are no longer a stateless people endlessly searching for a safe haven.

We are no longer a powerless people begging others to protect us.

Today we are an independent and sovereign people in our ancestral homeland.

Today we can speak out against the hateful voices of those seeking our destruction.

Today we can protect ourselves and defend our freedom.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The ayatollahs in Iran, they deny the Holocaust while planning another genocide against our people.

Let me be clear.

The Jewish people will defend itself by itself against any threat.

That’s what the Jewish state is all about.

Nonetheless, we appreciate the support of our friends around the world who reject the spreading twin diseases of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. They’re one in the same.

We are especially grateful for the bipartisan support for Israel across the United States, our great ally.

We share a special bond with the United States, which is built on common values and it’s reflected in our expansive cooperation, especially on matters of security.

Yet it is the Government of Israel that holds the ultimate responsibility for the security of the one and only Jewish state.

And here we must speak out and must speak our mind about the dangers to our people and our state. This is something we could not do at the time of the Holocaust.

Israel will reject any agreement that leaves Iran as a nuclear threshold state.

Regrettably, our understanding is that the offer made by the P5+1 does exactly that.

It would enable Iran to breakout to a nuclear weapon within a few months and many more bombs within a short time.

The capabilities of Iran to produce enriched uranium for atomic bombs are left intact.

Such an agreement is sure to spark a nuclear arms race in the region that would turn the Middle East into a nuclear tinderbox.

And such an agreement is simply unacceptable to Israel. We will oppose it and we will oppose it vigorously.

On this day of Holocaust remembrance, I pledge to you what we could neither say nor do 70 years ago.

Israel will always do what needs to be done to ensure the security of the Jewish people and the one and only Jewish state. That is the significance of this day.

Thank you.”

Russia - Putin visits Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center in Moscow, hints at Ukraine collaboration with Nazis.

Russia - Putin visits Jewish Museum & Tolerance Center in Moscow, hints at Ukraine collaboration with Nazis.(Kremlin).

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Soviet Army, Vladimir Putin visited the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in Moscow.

The President saw the exhibition Man and Catastrophe dedicated to the mass annihilation by Nazis of concentration camp inmates. Accompanying him was the Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar and the President of the Federation of Jewish Communities Alexander Boroda.

The UN General Assembly declared January 27 – the date when Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945 – International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

* * *

Speech at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre

PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA VLADIMIR PUTIN: Friends,

70 years ago, Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp where the Nazis slaughtered millions of people. By the decision of the United Nations Organisation this day, January 27, was declared International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The Holocaust – one of the deadliest crimes against humanity – has become a symbol of grief and pain, of unbridled cruelty and neglect for human life.

It is hard to imagine that real death factories, mass shootings and deportations were a reality of the 20th century, that they were organised in cold blood in what then seemed to be a civilised Europe. Yes, they were planned, organised in cold blood. We have now seen the exhibition that you have seen as well – this was a planned, deliberate operation to destroy people. Incredibly simple.

However, as history has shown wherever ideas of ethnic or racial supremacy are put into people’s heads and the seeds of inter-ethnic hatred are sown, wherever traditional human values are destroyed and trampled upon, civilisation is quickly and inevitably replaced with barbarity, while peace is replaced with cruel conflicts, war and aggression.

The Nazis threatened to enslave the peoples of our multi-ethnic state. They were to be either assimilated by force and turned into slaves or destroyed to create so-called living space for some ’higher race’.

According to the materials of the Nuremburg trials, six million Jews were killed in Europe during the Holocaust. These numbers are unfathomable. They did not die in battle, but were simply destroyed – burnt in furnaces or shot. Among those millions are hundreds of thousands of our compatriots.

Such crimes do not and should not have a term of limitation. They can be neither forgiven nor forgotten. Any attempts to hush up these events up, distort, ‘rewrite’ history are unacceptable and immoral.

Frequently such attempts cover up the desire to conceal one’s shameful behaviour – cowardice, hypocrisy and treason, and to justify one’s direct or indirect, silent collusion with the Nazis in implementing their criminal policy.

However, historical facts are irrefutable. Thus, they show that Banderites and other collaborationists and Hitler’s henchmen were themselves involved in the destruction of the Jewish people, in the destruction of Jews in Lvov, Odessa, Kiev and other Ukrainian towns and cities, while the Nazis in the Baltic states conducted ethnic cleansing in Vilnius and Riga, in Kaunas and Tallinn.

On this tragic day we honour the memory of all those who were tortured by the Nazis and their henchmen in concentration camps and ghettoes. We grieve for the millions who died in the flames of the bloodiest of wars in the history of humankind.

I would like to note that on the initiative of public and religious organisations, and not only Jewish organisations, Russia is conducting a search for and tending to mass burial grounds of Holocaust victims and we are recovering the names of those victims. This effort deserves special support and will definitely be continued.

Today we pay tribute to the courage of those who survived the horrors of occupation, violence and humiliating forced labour, those who survived these inhuman trials and remained unbroken.

In this connection, I cannot help recalling another date – today we mark the anniversary of the liberation of Leningrad from the Nazi blockade. This was yet another example of the criminal massacre organised by the Nazis, who were destroying in cold blood the civilian population of Leningrad by bombing raids and direct artillery attacks.

We bow to the heroic feat of the Red Army officers and men who defeated Nazism and stopped the terrible annihilation machine. It was not only their Motherland that they protected from the aggressors. Their great liberation mission became a deed of honour for our entire people.

In this connection, I would like to say that as we have just recalled, Russians bore the brunt of the battle against Nazism. Seventy percent of all the Red Army officers and men were Russians, and the Russian people made the largest sacrifice in the name of victory.

However, here within the confines of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre I would like to recall that Jewish citizens of the Soviet Union made an enormous contribution to the victory over our enemy. More than half a million Jews fought in the Red Army, over 40 thousand were members of partisan units. Almost a third of them (27 percent) were volunteers. Almost 200 thousand were killed in battles for their Fatherland.

The heroism of representatives of all ethnic groups, their selfless love for their homeland, their readiness for self-sacrifice will always remain in our memory, in the thankful memory of the peoples of Russia.

As we celebrate this year the 70th anniversary of the Great Victory we will again and again address words of our warmest gratitude to our dear veterans, including those present here, those who gave themselves for the freedom and independence of their Motherland.

Friends, as we pay tribute, we should look ahead into the future. Crimes similar to the Holocaust should not be repeated. This is our common duty and without exaggeration the most important and pressing task for the entire world community.

True, there has been significant change on the world arena in the past decades. However, we see that antihuman ideas are still alive.

We continue coming across attempts at dividing humankind on ethnic, racial or religious grounds and demonstrations of anti-Semitism, Russophobia and aggressive intolerance of other ethnic groups, cultures and traditions.

Nazis made use of these primitive instincts back in their times, while now they are used by neonationalists, extremists and terrorists in a number of countries and regions.

We have to counter these threats together, to protect the peace and freedom of the people together, defend the right of states and peoples to choose their own development path.

History has shown what terrible abyss claims at world supremacy could lead humanity to; what tragedy may result from attempts at putting pressure on sovereign states or failure to respect their rights.

We all know how dangerous and destructive double standards and indifference to others may be. Take, for instance, the current tragedy in the southeast of Ukraine, where the peaceful population of Donetsk, Lugansk and other towns and cities have been shot for months in cold blood.

I would like to repeat that today, in the 21st century it is important to enhance the efficiency of the collective security system and to promote the values of humanism and cooperation and to always bear in mind the lessons we learn from history.

In conclusion, dear friends, I cannot help sharing my own impressions of the film we saw. Of course, we all know about those death camps and we often use such words as antihuman and crime, and we know what Holocaust is about. However, as how cruel as this may sound – sometimes these words are abused and lose their initial meaning.

And when you see such documentary evidence it all comes back with renewed force. One tends to realise what we had to deal with, what humanity and people had to deal with back then. We honour all those who died and all those who put an end to this massacre.

Thank you.

Holocaust Survivors Return to Auschwitz to Mark 70 Years of Liberation.

Source

Holocaust Survivors Return to Auschwitz to Mark 70 Years of Liberation.(Matzav).

Auschwitz, Poland - Fifteen Auschwitz survivors, aged 80-94, returned this morning, Monday January 26, to the infamous death camp, Auschwitz, some for the first time.

Ahead of the 70th anniversary celebration of the Auschwitz liberation on January 27, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), the USC Shoah Foundation, organized the historic visit of the survivors and their offspring, who came from across the world.

“When I arrived in Poland, the tall trees made me immediately anxious. They reminded me of my arrival to Auschwitz — the same day my mother and little sister were gassed,” said Johnny Pekats, 80, one of the American survivors who returned to the death camp for his first time.
“For years I refused to return to this horrible place, but I finally decided to come back with my son. I wanted to say Kaddish with him there,” said Pekats.

“This is my first and last visit to Auschwitz and my message for the word is that it’s not enough just to remember; we have to make sure that this never happens again.”

More than 100 Auschwitz survivors from at least 19 countries arrived in Poland on Monday as part of the World Jewish Congress’ delegation to participate in the upcoming ceremony and events. From the United States, 21 American survivors of Auschwitz will participate in the January 27 observance of the 70th anniversary of the camp’s liberation for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Given the age and conditions of the survivors and the heavy emotional experience, the WJC also arranged a special medical team of 12 doctors, psychologists and nurses who will accompany the survivors throughout the visit.

“I deeply admire the courage of these survivors,” said Ron Lauder, WJC President, who joined the survivors today at Auschwitz. “For some of them, this was the first time they returned to the place of their nightmares. Each survivor is a living testament to the triumph of good over evil, of life over death, and they are my heroes.”

Lauder has been involved in the restoration and preservation of Auschwitz-Birkenau for more than 20 years and has helped to raise $40 million from 19 countries to ensure that the camp forever be preserved for future generations. He also financed the creation of the conservation laboratory at the Auschwitz Memorial, which preserves every shoe, every document, and every building that remained at the site.

“The World Jewish Congress is humbled and honored that so many of these aging survivors will travel with us to Auschwitz,” said Robert Singer, Chief Executive Officer of the WJC. “This may be the last major anniversary we will be able to remember with those who experienced the Holocaust firsthand. From this historic event, their voices will echo across the generations.”

The ceremony will host state leaders from Poland, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, The Netherlands, Croatia, and other countries. Other notable guests will include film director Steven Spielberg, founding chair of the USC Shoah Foundation; Israeli-American businessman Haim Saban; and other Auschwitz 70th anniversary committee members.

During the Holocaust, Auschwitz was the largest site of extermination of Jews in Europe since 1942. The Nazi Germans killed at least 1.1 million people there, most of whom were Jewish but also Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of other ethnicities.

On January 27, 1945, the death camp was liberated by Soviet troops.

Video - An Alfred Hitchcock documentary on the Nazi Holocaust

The Stockholm Declaration.

Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust.

The Holocaust (Shoah) fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization. The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning. After half a century, it remains an event close enough in time that survivors can still bear witness to the horrors that engulfed the Jewish people. The terrible suffering of the many millions of other victims of the Nazis has left an indelible scar across Europe as well.

The magnitude of the Holocaust, planned and carried out by the Nazis, must be forever seared in our collective memory. The selfless sacrifices of those who defied the Nazis, and sometimes gave their own lives to protect or rescue the Holocaust's victims, must also be inscribed in our hearts. The depths of that horror, and the heights of their heroism, can be touchstones in our understanding of the human capacity for evil and for good.

With humanity still scarred by genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, anti-semitism and xenophobia, the international community shares a solemn responsibility to fight those evils. Together we must uphold the terrible truth of the Holocaust against those who deny it. We must strengthen the moral commitment of our peoples, and the political commitment of our governments, to ensure that future generations can understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences.

We pledge to strengthen our efforts to promote education, remembrance and research about the Holocaust, both in those of our countries that have already done much and those that choose to join this effort.

We share a commitment to encourage the study of the Holocaust in all its dimensions. We will promote education about the Holocaust in our schools and universities, in our communities and encourage it in other institutions.

We share a commitment to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust and to honour those who stood against it. We will encourage appropriate forms of Holocaust remembrance, including an annual Day of Holocaust Remembrance, in our countries.

We share a commitment to throw light on the still obscured shadows of the Holocaust. We will take all necessary steps to facilitate the opening of archives in order to ensure that all documents bearing on the Holocaust are available to researchers.

It is appropriate that this, the first major international conference of the new millennium, declares its commitment to plant the seeds of a better future amidst the soil of a bitter past. We empathize with the victims' suffering and draw inspiration from their struggle. Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity's common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice.

- See more at: http://hmd.org.uk/page/stockholm-declaration#sthash.43zuknCm.dpuf

NEVER AGAIN!

Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Launches Virtual Tour of NAZI Death Camp.

Auschwitz virtual tour

Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum Launches Virtual Tour of NAZI Death Camp.(Algemeiner).

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum this week launched a virtual tour on its website, where visitors can wander around the former death camp and view high-quality, panoramic images of the booths and camp exhibits, Israel’s NRG News said Wednesday.

The virtual tour project was under development in recent years, and was completed in time for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp complex by the Red Army, which will be commemorated this coming January.

Auschwitz served the Nazis as an extermination camp, from June 1940 to January 1945, and held some 150,000 inmates at any given time.

“Historians and analysts estimate the number of people murdered at Auschwitz somewhere between 2.1 million to 4 million, of whom the vast majority were Jews.

The majority of prisoners held at Auschwitz were killed in the various gas chambers though many died from starvation, forced labor, disease, shooting squads, and heinous medical experiments,” according to the Jewish Virtual Library. Read the full story here.

NAZI "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler's missing archive emerges in Israel.

The 'Great Mufti' el Husseini and "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler

NAZI "Reichsführer SS" Heinrich Himmler's missing archive emerges in Israel. (DieWelt).

"Die Welt" exclusive: 69 years after Heinrich Himmler's suicide his private letters and photographs have surfaced in Israel.

They provide insight into the life of one of the main orchestrators of the Holocaust.

"Die Welt" obtained copies of the previously unpublished documents that have been kept in the private home of an Israeli Jew for a very long time. Eventually they came into the possession of a private archive and are now stored in a bank vault in Tel Aviv. 

In addition to the letters Himmler wrote to his wife Margarethe (Marga) from 1927 to five weeks before his suicide in 1945, there are many previously unknown photographs, and the estate of Himmler's foster son and other papers such as recipe books.

According to the German Federal Archive's (Bundesarchiv) expert assessment, there is verifiable proof that the documents are authentic. 

President Michael Hollmann told "Die Welt": "We are sure about these documents." In the expert opinion of the world's most important institution dealing with the written legacy of the "Third Reich", it says: "There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the documents in Tel Aviv. "

Read and see the full story here.

Alfred Hitchcock's unseen Holocaust documentary to be screened .

Warning video contains 18 + , graphic violent images

Alfred Hitchcock's unseen Holocaust documentary to be screened.(The Independent).

The British Army Film Unit cameramen who shot the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 used to joke about the reaction of Alfred Hithcock to the horrific footage they filmed.

When Hitchcock first saw the footage, the legendary British director was reportedly so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week. Hitchcock may have been the king of horror movies but he was utterly appalled by "the real thing".

In 1945, Hithcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen.

"It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British," suggests Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum. "Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there."

The film took far longer to make than had originally been envisaged. By late 1945, the need for it began to wane. The Allied military government decided that rubbing the Germans' noses in their own guilt wouldn't help with postwar reconstruction.

The restored version of the concentration camp film, retrospectively titled 'Memory of the Camps', will be released later this year.Read the full story here.

Art Dealer to the Führer: Hildebrand Gurlitt's Deep Nazi Ties

Art Dealer to the Führer: Hildebrand Gurlitt's Deep Nazi Ties. HT: Spiegel.

The American army had a special unit to handle such cases, the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section. Their job was to search for art stolen by the Nazis, they were called The Monuments Men

When Captain Robert K. Posey and his assistant, Private Lincoln Kirstein, known as "Monuments Men," inspected the castle in early May they found an enormous art warehouse. It contained paintings and sculptures from the museum in nearby Bamberg and a picture gallery in the central German city of Kassel, whose directors had sought to protect the works from Allied bombs. They also discovered suspicious private property, some 13 crates of artworks marked as belonging to Heribert Fütterer, the commander of the German Air Force division for Bohemia and Moravia. The estate chapel contained suitcases and bags full of art, which Ewald von Kleist, the former commander of Army Group A of the Wehrmacht, had left there. Captain Posey declared the estate a restricted area and had signs reading "Off Limits" posted at the property.
A few days later, a Monuments Man noted: "In addition, rooms containing paintings, tapestries, statues, valuable furniture and documents from the belongings of two notorious German art dealers were found in the castle." They were the collections of Karl Haberstock and a certain Hildebrand Gurlitt, who had also lived in the castle with his family since their house in Dresden was burned down.
A note dated May 16 reads: "A large room on the upper floor with 34 boxes, two packages containing carpets, eight packages of books … one room on the ground floor containing an additional 13 boxes owned by Mr. Gurlitt." Most of these boxes contained pictures and drawings.

'Connections Within High-Level Nazi Circles'
In the following months and years, the American art investigators wrote letters, memos, inventory lists, reports and dossiers to clear up the origins of the art. With regard to Haberstock, they wrote: "Mr. Karl Haberstock, from Berlin, is the most notorious art collector in Europe. He was Hitler's private art collector and, for years, seized art treasures in France, Holland, Belgium and even Switzerland and Italy, using illegal, unscrupulous and even brutal methods. His name is infamous among all honest collectors in Europe."

Gurlitt, they wrote, was "an art collector from Hamburg with connections within high-level Nazi circles. He acted on behalf of other Nazi officials and made many trips to France, from where he brought home art collections. There is reason to believe that these private art collections consist of looted art from other countries." For the Monuments Men, Gurlitt was also an "art dealer to the Führer."

Now, almost 70 years later, what the Monuments Men discovered at Aschbach Castle in May 1945 has shown a spotlight on Germany's past once again. Customs officials found an enormous treasure trove of artworks from the Third Reich in an apartment in Munich's Schwabing district. It includes 380 pictures that the Nazis had dubbed "degenerate art" in 1937 and removed from museums. The Schwabing find also included 590 other artworks that the Nazi regime and its henchmen may have stolen from Jewish owners. The owner of the apartment is Gurlitt's son Cornelius, the current heir of the collection, who was 12 and living in Aschbach at the end of the war.
Consequences of Munich Discovery
With the origins of the individual pictures still unclear, a task force appointed by the German government is investigating the history of each artwork. It will be a lengthy effort. But a search performed by SPIEGEL staff, in such places as the French Foreign Ministry archives and the National Museum in Wroclaw, Poland, has revealed the substantial extent to which Gurlitt dealt in looted art and how ruthless his practices were.
A Hollywood film about the Monuments Men will be screened for the first time at next year's Berlin Film Festival. George Clooney produced and directed the film, in addition to playing the main role: a US soldier who is part of a special unit made up of art historians, museum experts and other assistants, whose mission is to recover art stolen by the Nazis and rescue it from destruction in the final days of the war. Apparently the film depicts the historical events with some degree of accuracy.
But perhaps what happened in Aschbach in those last few days of the war and the first few months of peace would make for a more interesting film: an enchanted castle in Upper Franconia owned by a baron who had joined the Nazis, and who served during the war in Paris, where he worked with art dealers with dubious reputations, some of whom he eventually harbored in his castle near the end of the ill-fated Third Reich.
It would be a film about the country's elites, who benefited from the crimes of the Nazis, a story about culprits who quickly transformed themselves into supposedly upstanding citizens and, in a new Germany, became the pillars of society once again.
In a bizarre twist, for several months after the war Schloss Aschbach housed a group of young Jews who had survived the Holocaust. Ironically they, and not the Nazi baron, lived in the castle's elegant rooms before leaving the land of the Shoah for good. Read the full story here.

Dutch school Located in a heavily Muslim area stalls Shoah memorial to avoid vandalism

Easter play 2013 Paul KrugerSchool

Dutch school Located in a heavily Muslim area stalls Shoah memorial to avoid vandalism.(TOI).

THE HAGUE (JTA) — A school in a heavily Muslim neighborhood of The Hague delayed plans for a Holocaust monument over vandalism fears.

Gerard Brasjen, a spokesman for the Paul Kruger School, told JTA on Tuesday that the Christian-affiliated school’s board had discussed a plan to place a commemorative plaque on the school facade, but the plan stalled “not because of the Jewish-Muslim issue but because it may not be wise in the neighborhood, which is not a peaceful place.”

Before the Holocaust, the building of the Paul Kruger School, in the Schilderswijk neighborhood, housed the Joodsch Lyceum, a Jewish high school. Kruger was an Afrikaner national leader.

Last week, the De Telegraaf daily reported that the school dropped the plan following objections by local residents who said a Holocaust plaque might not be acceptable to some members of Schilderswijk’s sizable Muslim population, but Brasjen said he was not aware of such objections.

The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, a Hague-based watchdog on anti-Semitism, wrote in a statement Monday that “it seems that the school feared there would be protests,” but “there is little reason to fear violence against memorial monuments for Jewish children in the area.”

Anat Harel, a co-organizer of a Holocaust commemoration event May 4 at the school, told De Telegraaf that a poster advertising the event could not be placed outside the building “because of concerns regarding kids hanging around the school.”

Following the publication, the anti-Muslim Party for Freedom asked Security and Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten to research anti-Semitism among Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands.

The De Telegraaf report came on the heels of a story in the Trouw daily that said a part of the Schilderswijk neighborhood had turned into a “Sharia area,” where police dare not enter and non-Muslims are regularly harassed — claims that city officials have denied.Hmmmm......It was never about land, time to call a spade a spade.Read the full story here.

Germany.......Finally ‘tracks down 50 suspected Auschwitz guards’

Germany.......Finally ‘tracks down 50 suspected Auschwitz guards’.(RT).The former Auschwitz guards, who’ve never faced prosecution for their posts, were tracked down by the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg.

The suspects may be charged with accessory to murder. The investigators possess the names and location details of the suspects, men in their 90s, who originate from all over Germany, the chief prosecutor Kurt Schrimm confirmed to WAZ-Mediengruppe on Friday.

He did not specify where the suspects are, but said some possibly moved to South America with the help of the Catholic Church. The federal law enforcement body is set to launch a preliminary investigation into the issue in the coming weeks.

The sentencing in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at Sobibor concentration camp, set a precedent that allows authorities to bring proceedings against former concentration camp guards, even if the investigators cannot prove their direct involvement in the crime due to lack of witnesses, Schrimm told Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.

"From now on, any activity in a concentration camp is enough to stand trial for complicity in murder," the chief prosecutor said.

Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, lived in the United States after the war, but was stripped of citizenship and deported to Germany, where he was convicted of accessory to murder of about 28,000 people who died at Sobibor concentration camp based in occupied Poland. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison in May 2011.

The Munich Court then held that, although Demjanjuk cannot be imputed to any specific criminal acts, he “was part of the machine of destruction,” according to the verdict. He died in March last year in before the ruling came into effect.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp operated by the Third Reich in occupied Poland was the largest Nazi concentration camp during WWII. It was established by Third Reich's Minister of the Interior Heinrich Himmler as the place of the "final solution” in the policy to annihilate the Jewish people in Europe.

There the Nazis killed about 1.3 million people of diverse nationalities, around 90 percent of whom were Jewish, according to data given by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Those not killed in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.

The center for solving crimes of National Socialism in Ludwigsburg was founded in 1958. Since then it has tracked down a total of 7,485 Nazi criminals, according to Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.Hmmmm......May God give them a swift and fitting eternal punishment.Read the full story here.

Israel prepares for Holocaust Remembrance Day - Preparations begin for 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Israel prepares for Holocaust Remembrance Day - Preparations begin for 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.(JPost).Preparations are underway across the country for the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which begins on Sunday evening.

The central theme of this year’s ceremony is defiance and rebellion during the Holocaust, Yad Vashem announced, marking 70 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Memorial activities will begin with a state ceremony at Yad Vashem’s Warsaw Ghetto Square at 8 p.m., during which President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will deliver addresses. Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird will also be in attendance.

Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev will light a memorial torch, followed by Holocaust survivors Otto Pressburger, Eliezer Eizenschmidt, Miriam Liptcher and Baruch Kopold who will light torches. Sima Hochman will light the first torch in place of her husband, Peretz, who passed away last week.

Chief Rabbis Shlomo Amar and Yona Metzger will recited traditional Jewish prayers of mourning and remembrance and Cantor Azi Schwartz will sing a prayer for the souls of the martyrs.

The theme of heroism will be on further display at the Ghetto Fighters’ House in the Galilee on Sunday, with another six survivors lighting memorial torches at a ceremony that organizers believe will draw 10,000 attendees.

The survivors chosen to light torches are:

Dr. Lucien Lazare, a former member of the French underground;

Aviva Blum Waks, the daughter of Warsaw Ghetto fighter Avraham Blum; 

Semion Rozenfeld, a captured Red Army soldier who took part in an uprising in the Sobibor concentration camp; 

Yehuda “Poldek” Maymon, a member of the Polish resistance and a retired Israeli naval officer who was interned in Auschwitz; 

Julian Zanoda, an Algerian Jew who at age 10 took part in the underground revolt that facilitated the American invasion and prevented the destruction of Algerian Jewry; 

and Shimon Zuckerman, the son of Yitzhak “Antek” Zuckerman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and deputy to Mordechai Anielewicz.

Yad Vashem chief archivist Dr. Haim Gertner told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday that he believed that he and his researchers would “come close” to compiling the names of all six million Holocaust victims within the next three years.Hmmmm......'Never again'.Read the full story here.

Video - Over 250 children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of SS officers and WWII German army soldiers went on an a seven day "March of the Living"

Exposé : Iranian and Syria's Nerve Gas is Made in Europe.

Exposé : Iranian and Syria's Nerve Gas is Made in Europe.(INN).HT: IsraelMatzav.

"Nothing keeps a German or French firm - and a British, Italian or Swiss one - from making a good profit. And if it puts the Zionist state in danger, no problem."

Syria threatens to use chemical weapons, including lethal gas and germs, against "external forces". And the unthinkable becomes much more concrete in Israel. The gas mask distribution centers have increased their activities in the last few days. Health authorities may start inoculation of soldiers and emergency care personnel against smallpox. Family drug kits, including antibiotics against anthrax, may be delivered door-to-door. The Education Ministry will prepare material for all students instructing them on the ABC's of chemical and biological warfare.
The message is clear: Israel should be prepared for the worst.
Already in May 2011, then US Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned about the possibility that Hizbullah is armed with chemical warheads. Syria's stockpiles could fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, which is involved in the fighting, a military faction, or a post-Assad regime controlled by Islamists. It's the worst kind of nightmare. What very few people know is that European companies and scientists gave Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq the material to attempt to kill the Jews, again. In 1992 a 100-page report, prepared by the Paris-based Middle East Defence News, listed about 300 European firms which the centre said it believed had "played a significant role in the unconventional weapons programmes in Iran, Syria and Libya".

Germany topped the list of suppliers with 100, the report said, then 29 French, 22 British, 13 Italian and 13 Swiss. German companies have played a crucial role in helping Iran to build a chemical weapons industry, and have illegally supplied nerve gas precursor chemicals," the report said.

It said France had played a "crucial role...in helping Syria to develop both a chemical weapons and a biological weapons capability". The West German firm Degussa supplied of chemicals to Libya used to manufacture poison gas. This company also owned a 42.5 per cent share in the Degesch company, which supplied the Zyklon B gas used in the death camps.

Degesch is the acronym for "Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Schaedlingsbekaempfung", a company for the extermination of vermin. 

It developed the method of using hydrogen cyanide, Zyklon B, as an ingredient in its fumigation gas for buildings and ships. The gas it supplied to Auschwitz was used in the killing of two million Jews.

 "For years, Iraqi officers had asked us how it had been with the gassing of the Jews." said Maj. Gen. Karl-Heinz Nagler, former head of the East German Army's chemical service, who had trained the Iraqi Army in chemical warfare for 15 years. 

The manufacturing of di-fluoro - from which nerve gas is obtained - requires resistant glass components. Two German companies gave these to the Syrians. French scientific institutes also played a role, through scientific exchanges. ... 

Today, again, Jews are described by Islamists as sub-humans, with expressions like “pig,” “cancer,” “filth”, “microbes” or “vermin”. Without the European chemical companies, there would be no Syrian and Iranian germs and gas' threat to Israel. 

 We can be partners in the Jewish struggle against the new apocalypse. Or we can be part of it. The European companies and scientists have made their choice.Hmmmm......"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.Read the full story here.


Related - Video: "And You Shall Tell Your Children" A powerful documentary on the legacy of faith and commitment of a special cadre of Holocaust survivors.

Israel marks Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day beginning Wednesday at sundown.

Israel marks Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day beginning Wednesday at sundown.(Israelhayom).By Yael Branovsky, Yori Yalon, Shlomo Cesana, Danny Brenner, Zeev Klein, Nitzi Yakov and The Associated Press.Israel marks Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day beginning Wednesday at sundown, with events scheduled across the country to memorialize the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The national day of commemoration – whose theme this year is "My Brother's Keeper: Jewish Solidarity During the Holocaust" – officially begins at 8 p.m. with the national ceremony at Warsaw Ghetto Square at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum. As in years past, six survivors will light six torches at the ceremony in memory of the 6 million who were murdered by the Nazis during World War II. President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin and Supreme Court President Asher Grunis will attend the ceremony, in addition to 2,500 Holocaust survivors, public figures and Israeli youth. The ceremony will be broadcast live on Israeli television and radio. Holocaust Remembrance Day events continue Thursday as the country grinds to a halt at 10 a.m., when sirens are set to wail across Israeli cities and citizens stand at attention in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. Other memorial ceremonies are scheduled at additional sites in Israel, such as the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz and Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, as well as schools, military bases, municipalities and other places of work. Throughout the day, both television and radio broadcast programs about the Holocaust. Some 200,000 Holocaust survivors currently live in Israel, about 70,000 of whom survived concentration camps and ghettos. Many of them live in poverty and previous governments have been criticized for not doing enough to allow them to live out their lives in dignity. However, the cabinet on Tuesday boosted its budget for assisting Holocaust survivors. The government said the basket of services for Holocaust survivors would rise to NIS 225 million ($60 million) for 2012, a 13 percent increase. An additional $13 million will be directed toward increasing monthly stipends for particularly needy survivors. Stipends currently range from $530 to $1,900 each month. Netanyahu told the cabinet that it was urgent to help survivors, adding that as time passes fewer survivors remain alive. "We want to remember those who perished, the 6 million brothers and sisters, and heed the lessons of the Holocaust in order to ensure the future of our people," Netanyahu said. Deputy Minister for Senior Citizen Affairs Lea Nass said many of the remaining survivors had not even tried to claim their government benefits. She said that in recent years, government officials had "succeeded in reaching 120,000 survivors." In 50,000 cases, "we went to their homes in order to help them utilize their rights and receive the government assistance to which they are due," Nass said. Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, attended Tuesday's cabinet meeting, which was called to review the government's assistance to survivors and its efforts to commemorate the Holocaust and to showcase examples of private collectibles that the public donated to Yad Vashem over the past year. The personal items were donated as part of the museum's program "Gathering the Fragments," a national campaign to rescue personal items from the time of the Holocaust. Since the campaign was launched this time last year, more than 51,000 items have been collected. At the start of the cabinet meeting, Netanyahu presented one of those items – a shirt belonging to 4-year-old Rafael Denty, who was murdered at Auschwitz. "These items are being collected into a single fabric that provides tangible documentation of the disaster that befell the Jewish people," the prime minister said. As in other years, Jewish teens from Israel and elsewhere will take part in the March of the Living trip to Poland, where they will march from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and then travel to Israel for Israeli Memorial Day and Independence Day. The march in Poland marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the educational journey, and this year will focus on allied soldiers who liberated the concentration camps 67 years ago. 
For the first time in March of the Living’s history, Israel Police Commissioner Insp. Gen. Yohanan Danino will take part in the event. He is scheduled to arrive in Krakow, Poland, on Wednesday and will officiate at the opening ceremony honoring the camps' liberators. Danino is expected to tell them, "I stand before you, the liberators of concentration camps and the saviors of the survivors, and in the name of the state of Israel and its people, army, and police forces, I thank you and salute you."
On Thursday, Danino will lead a delegation of 200 Israel Police officers on the march. Some 10,000 people are to take part in the march on Thursday, including Holocaust survivors, Jewish youths from 48 countries around the world, Tel Aviv's Chief Rabbi Meir Lau, and hundreds of World War II veterans from different countries, who fought against the Nazis. One of the participants from the Israel Police is Menachem Frenkel, 76, who was deported to a concentration camp from his home in Belgium when he was 4. Frenkel's father died at Auschwitz. "For me, marching in Auschwitz in an Israeli police uniform is like coming full circle," Frenkel said. Frenkel has been volunteering with the Israel Police for 11 years. He was born in Belgium, and his family fled to France after the Nazi invasion. As his family did not have French citizenship, they had no protection against Nazi forces. "Because of the great hunger, my father had to sign us up for food stamps," Frenkel said. "It didn't take long for the Nazis to find us and send us to a concentration camp, from which my father was sent to Auschwitz where he was murdered." Frenkel survived the war, as did his mother and sister, and they moved to Israel together. "The state has done a great deal for us and I decided I have to give something back," he said of his decision to volunteer for the police following his retirement. "I have already visited Poland since the war, but this year is different – I returned in a police uniform. I will march proudly to Auschwitz. It will be extremely powerful and emotional to arrive at the gas chambers in my uniform, knowing that my father was killed there."Read the full story here.

The Jews who paid for their own WWII prison

Westerbork, Holland, Lighting of Hanukkah candles in the camp.A Jewish inmate, Rudolf Werner Breslauer, who enjoyed good relations with camp commandant Gemmeker, prepared this album, probably in early 1943.Belongs to collection:Yad Vashem Photo Archive.

Radio Netherlands:The Jews who paid for their own WWII prison.(AD). What was daily life in Westerbork concentration camp like? To find this out archaeologists are excavating the rubbish dump of the WWII Nazi detention and transit camp for Jews in the north east of the Netherlands.
Micha Schliesser is one of the Jews who survived the camp. Seeing all the recovered personal belongings brings back memories. I can't imagine my mother without her perfume bottle. She would have taken that with her. At first I thought it was an insane and stupid idea, but now I think there should be a permanent collection. Micha Schliesser was a baby only one and a half years old when his parents were moved to Westerbork concentration camp. He was one of the first Jews to live there.Number 128. My father was number 127, so I must have been 128. Both he and his parents survived the holocaust.The excavation of the personal belongings of the people in the camp brings back many memories - especially the display case with round spectacles and combs.It almost makes me cry. The people who left these things behind were alive. Four days later they were most likely dead.

Holocaust

Schliesser visits schools to teach the new generation about the holocaust. The excavated personal possessions bring to life what it was like in Camp Westerbork. Not much has survived of the transit camp, where 107,000 Jews stayed before being transported to German extermination camps.
In 1939, before the Second World War broke out in the Netherlands, Micha Schliesser and his parents came to the country as refugees. They were on their way to the United States. Although their visa was almost complete, they were picked up at the Dutch border and sent to barracks in Amsterdam. Schliesser's father was asked whether he and his family would 'voluntarily' go to Westerbork to help build the Jewish refugee camp.

Queen Wilhelmina

The Dutch government built the Westerbork refugee camp in 1939 in the north east of the Netherlands. The original location on the Veluwe in the eastern province of Gelderland was too close to the home of the Dutch royal family. Queen Wilhelmina refused to have a camp 15 kilometres from Palace 't Loo.The government didn't want to put any money towards the refugee camp. Therefore the Jewish community was asked to pay. So we paid for our own prison, sighs Schliesser.
After 70 years we're back to where we started, according to Schliesser. He can get very angry about the current Dutch government deporting people who came here as a young child.I would like those politicians to experience being stateless and not having a passport for protection for a year. What would they feel like then? Following the German invasion in May 1940, an attempt was made to evacuate the Jewish refugees to England. They didn't get very far. After deliberation with the Jewish community, the Dutch government decided the refugees should return to Camp Westerbork. Schliesser's father didn't want to flee, go into hiding or remain in Amsterdam illegally. In that respect my father was typically German. So the family returned to Westerbork. They didn't have much choice, says Schliesser:If you asked a farmer in the neighbourhood for help, he would pretend to help, but then return you to the camp the next day. He would receive two and a half guilders for doing so.Hmmmm...........“For how would a man benefit to gain the whole world but destroy his soul or lose it?”~ Luke 9:25.Read the full story here.