Remarkable nonsense

Nazi war criminal, expelled from US, is living in UK

Vikram Dodd

Thursday January 20, 2000

The Guardian

www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,237326,00.html

An SS guard at a concentration camp where more than 80,000 people were gassed, worked to death or died after being subjected to experiments is living in Britain and receiving a state pension, the Guardian has learned.

[…]

For three years he was a member of the SS “death’s head” unit at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

It is rare to get documentary evidence of alleged war crimes. But in a document seen by the Guardian, which Mr Schweidler signed during the war, he details how he gunned down two prisoners. He wrote that they were trying to escape in broad daylight in the report he submitted to the SS.

But testimony from another guard, seen by the Guardian, reveals that SS troops would chase prisoners so that guards could use them as target practice.

Yesterday he denied murdering prisoners. […]

[…]

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Interview by Eve-Ann Prentice

The tattoo has faded with the passing of the years, but memories of the hell that was Auschwitz are as sharp as ever for Anne Frank’s stepsister. The smudged, blue numbers — A/5272 — were indelibly etched on Eva Geiringer’s lower left arm soon after she and the rest of her family arrived at the notorious Nazi twin concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 after being deported in cattlewagons from The Netherlands…

Now, as one of the few concentration camp survivors, Eva hopes that discussing her experiences will ensure that the evils of race will never rise again. She is promoting a play featuring her own story. She is also helping to launch a series of exhibitions about Anne Frank, the teenage Jewish diarist who chronicled her family’s life in hiding in Amsterdam before being captured and deported to Bergen-Belsen, where she died of typhoid…

Life in the camp was brutal and precarious. Eva caught the typhoid that killed Anne Frank, was forced to break stones and plait ropes for 14 hours a day in the bitter cold of the East European winter, and lived under the constant threat of being “selected” — or sent to the gas chambers if she became too weak to work. “You could smell the incinerators and see the flames shooting out of the top when they had a particularly heavy day burning bodies,” she says.

Eva’s feet became infected with open sores caused by frostbite and she and her mother almost starved to death on the meagre rations of black bread and vegetable water that passed as soup. “It was more than 50 years ago, but I can see everything in front of me today. I remember very, very clearly.”…

The Times, January 18, 2000

Getting It Very Wrong

How and why the L.A. Times failed in its report on Holocaust deniers

By Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor

Balanced Coverage?

In its article on “Danger in Denying the Holocaust?”, did the Los Angeles Times exercise the traditional journalistic canon of presenting both sides of a contentious issue, or did the paper fall into the trap of giving obvious falsehood equal space with the truth?

To survivors and experts on the Holocaust, there is little doubt that the Times and reporter Kim Murphy gave credence to the lies of the deniers in the name of journalistic impartiality.

“It is a sign of immaturity, and inexperience on the reporter’s part, to try and balance everything, because there are some things that can’t be balanced,” says Arthur Stern, a veteran of Bergen-Belsen and a Jewish Federation lay leader.

[…]

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, faults the Times’ report on the same basis, and also charges that the article suffered from a glaring omission.

“The reporter left out the most crucial element, namely the confessions of the war criminals themselves,” says Cooper. “The Nazis left an extensive paper trail and there are any number of quotes and statements by Himmler, Goebbels and Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, clearly documenting the extent of the Holocaust.”

[…]

Source:

The Jewish Journal (Los Angeles)

COVER STORY | | January 14, 2000

www.jewishjournal.com/cover.tt.1.14.0.htm

Published Tuesday, November 23, 1999

San Jose Mercury News

JERUSALEM — The topic for the day in one Israeli army classroom was the status of women in Judaism. Sixty soldiers sat awaiting the lecture, part of an education series where attendance is mandatory.

The instructor, Lt. Gamliel Peretz, began by citing the traditional morning blessing in which, he said, all Jewish men thank God for not making them women. One young soldier, the teenage daughter of a Reform rabbi, raised her hand to challenge him. Not all Jews say that, she said. Some use an alternative blessing, which thanks God for making people as they are.

According to army records, the lieutenant, who is Orthodox, then said, “The Reform and Conservative are not Jews to me.” When the teenager and a friend stood to leave, the lieutenant reportedly followed them.

“The Reform and the Conservative caused the assimilation of 8 million Jews,” he continued, “and this was worse than the Holocaust, in which only 6 million people were killed.”

Monday, not even a week after the incident, the Israeli Defense Forces suspended Peretz and said he would be discharged from the military.

It was an unusually swift and resolute response, in which the Israeli army drew a clear boundary between acceptable and unacceptable discourse on religious pluralism, a sensitive issue in Israeli society.

This boundary is not often drawn in the Jewish homeland, where the state religious authorities are ultra-Orthodox and do not recognize the liberal Jewish movements to which most American Jews belong. And so representatives of Reform and Conservative Judaism expressed surprise and delight that their rights had been defended.

“Even in Israel, where there is such inequality in status between different streams of Judaism, it is, it seems, possible to go too far,” said Rabbi Richard A. Block, president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders do not believe that Reform and Conservative Judaism branches are Judaism at all, since they liberate Jews from the divine commandments and allow them individual autonomy in their religious observance.

The movements are so liberal, they say, that they have caused millions of Jews to disengage from Judaism, to assimilate and to intermarry.

Reform and Conservative leaders, who also fret about assimilation and intermarriage, contend that by adapting religion to modern life they are instead giving millions a way to remain Jewish.

Jonathan Rosenblum, a spokesman for an Orthodox media resource center, said he does not consider the lieutenant’s statements on assimilation to be “extreme” but condemned his comparison to the Holocaust.

“Holocaust metaphors should be basically out of bounds,” he said. On the other hand, Rosenblum said he detected “an aura of witch hunt in the rapidity with which Lieutenant Peretz was tried, expelled from the army and classified as some sort of pariah forever.”

In a statement issued Monday by the army, Brig. Gen. Elazar Stern said the lieutenant had apologized for the reference to the Holocaust but remained “steadfast” in his view that liberal Judaism had caused more damage than the Nazis to the future of the Jewish people.

“I explained to the officer that when an Israeli army officer uses the term Holocaust to describe phenomena that occur within the Jewish people, he makes it clear he doesn’t understand what the Holocaust is, what the Jewish people is, what the state of Israel is, or what the Israeli Defense Forces stand for,” the general said.

No ‘Mein Kampf’ But Adolf Cartoon Fine

Updated 9:57 AM ET October 15, 1999

FRANKFURT (Reuters) — “Mein Kampf” may have been voted one of the 100 books that shaped the century — but it was no show on Friday for Adolf Hitler’s seminal work at the world’s biggest book fair.

There was no such problem, however, for Adolf the best-selling cartoon character who donned his German helmet time machine to travel “Back to the Future” from Paraguay to Sarajevo.

“Mein Kampf,” which Hitler wrote in prison several years before he led the Nazi party to power in 1933, is banned in Germany as hate literature.

The book trade quarterly Logos had chosen “Mein Kampf” as one of the century’s most influential books even though “it displays utter disdain for freedom and civil morality, virulent anti-Semitism.”

Logos editor Gordon Graham decided to display all 100 influential books in Frankfurt.

“Then a German friend told me you cannot exhibit ‘Mein Kampf.’ We took legal advice and were told it can only be exhibited under locked glass. So we have it hidden now. It is significant this should be happening after 50 years,” Graham said.

Suicide Drama To Be Staged Posthumously In London

LONDON (Reuters) — A leading London theater is to stage the last play of one of Britain’s most controversial writers — the tale of a suicide that Sarah Kane finished just one week before killing herself.

The 26-year-old playwright rose to fame and notoriety in 1995 with her first play “Blasted” that contained graphic scenes of sex and violence. “It is a feast of filth,” said one critic.

Her last work — “4:48 Psychosis” — was completed only a week before Kane took an overdose and then hanged herself in hospital with her own shoelaces.

She wrote at night in intense bursts, confessing: “I hate it. I get no pleasure from writing. It kills me.”

The play, which is being staged by the ground-breaking Royal Court Theater as part of its new season, deals with the pain of love and ends with the heartbroken heroine killing herself.

“Being in love was like being in Auschwitz,” she said of the play’s theme.

Updated 10:58 AM ET September 21, 1999

Court Reporter Still Haunted

By ALEXIS CHIU

.c The Associated Press

BOSTON (AP) — When she was 21, Vivien Spitz embarked on a dark, two-year journey. Her destination: the Nuremberg trials of accused Nazi war criminals.

Spitz wasn’t a lawyer, a victim or a relative of the millions killed under Adolf Hitler’s regime. She was a court reporter whose job was to record the atrocities of the Third Reich.

Now a 75-year-old retiree, Spitz is still haunted.

“I have never really recovered from it,” said the Aurora, Colo., resident, in Boston on Thursday to address the 100th anniversary meeting of the National Court Reporters Association. “It was a horrific experience. We had to write sometimes with tears in our eyes.”

The Allies — the United States, Soviet Union, Britain and France — set up the international tribunal to bring Hitler’s henchmen to account. More than 200 Nazi military leaders, diplomats, government officials, industrialists and doctors were tried. Many were sent to prison, a few were sentenced to death and some were acquitted.

In all, the 13 trials produced 330,000 pages of testimony.

Spitz was one of 26 American court reporters who went to Germany in 1946. She used pen and paper, while others used stenotype machines.

Spitz sat through nearly two years of wrenching testimony and graphic evidence, including scores of photographs and videotapes depicting the dead and tortured.

One of the most dramatic moments for Spitz was in June 1947, as prosecutors were presenting evidence of the Nazis’ “sea water experiments,” conducted with the goal of finding a process to make the briny water potable.

“The victims were German, Czech and Polish gypsies deprived of food and given only sea water for weeks, which resulted in excruciating pain and foaming at the mouth and, in most cases, madness,” Spitz recalled.

One witness was a survivor of the experiment who, when asked to identify his torturer, darted toward the defendants’ section and leaped over a table, arms outstretched toward the German doctor. A guard later told Spitz authorities found a knife on the witness.

“This little man (was) futilely bent on delivering his own brand of justice,” said Spitz, who is half German, adding that the victim was later sent to jail for three months for contempt of court “after all of the torture he had already suffered.”

At Nuremberg, Spitz met an Army policeman she would marry. Since divorced, they have two grown sons.

Spitz went on to serve as court reporter in criminal and civil trials in Denver and in military courts around the country. She was a reporter of debates for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1972 to 1982 and, after another stint in Denver courts, retired in 1985.

Spitz said she reopened the wounds of Nuremberg when she learned a Colorado teacher reportedly told students that the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews, was a hoax.

“That fired me up so badly,” Spitz said. “I just hauled out my files and put together a prepared lecture. A mission has found me.”

In the last 10 years, Spitz has spoken about her experiences to more than 19,000 people in at least 30 states.

For years after Nuremberg, and occasionally since, Spitz had a recurring nightmare set in a concentration camp. In the dream, she is trying to escape with five small children through an underground tunnel, holding a candle for light and praying the Nazi guards above do not hear her.

She always wakes up before the ending, never escaping that tunnel — or her memories.

“I have not escaped to this day,” she said.

AP-NY-07-30-99 0123EDT

The Nazis Killed my Dinner

“My story begins in 1940. When I was nine years old, the Germans took me from my home in Krasnik, Poland. For five years I was a prisoner of the Nazis in 10 death camps, where I saw thousands of men, women and children brutally murdered and starved.

“I lived on bread crumbs, sawdust, human remains, and one small prayer for redemption or death — whichever was quicker.”

— Stephan Ross, “Holocaust Survivor Backs Flag Protection,” Manchester Union Leader, Saturday, June 12, 1999, pg. D8