Remarkable nonsense

In his previous job as editor of the British monthly _Loaded_, James Brown created a publishing success by unapologetically pandering to the sensibilities of young, male party animals. Now his taste for outrage has lost him his new job — he’s been doing it for a year — as editor of _British_GQ_. His mistake? To include the Nazis on a list of the 20th century’s best-dressed men. The Newhouse family, which owns the magazine, didn’t think his joke was funny. Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Conde Nast, said in a statement yesterday that Brown’s resignation was by “mutual consent,” adding Brown “is a talented editor … Unfortunately, philosophical differences have arisen between James and Conde Nast.” Brown upset people on both sides of the pond by hailing the style sense of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and the Nazi army. Ken Jacobson of the Anti-Defamation League told the _New_York_Daily_News_ that the gimmick was “outrageous.” When you do something like this, there’s the possibility of making it hip. People, especially young people, might say, ‘They’re not so bad. Look how well they were dressed.'” Lord Janner, chair of the Holocaust Education Trust, told Britain’s _Leicester_Mercury_: “The image of this general alongside some of the world’s most gifted actors, musicians, and designers makes decent people want to vomit.”

ARTS | Fascist Fashion

_National_Post_ ([email protected])

February 22, 1999, p. D4

[…] One of the most distressing moments in the Holocaust was when the Nazis decreed that no Jew could have a pet. Fathers lined up with the family dog, mothers with the cat, little old ladies with their budgerigars in order to have them registered and handed over to the Third Reich. Toronto’s bylaw isn’t the Third Reich, but it has this in common: The new animal bylaw has nothing to do with sanitation or a better quality of life for citizens. Its purpose is to regulate and persecute citizens. Existing laws were sufficient to deal with any problem this new bylaw addresses. What Toronto Councillor George Mammolitti (who originally asked that all cats be walked on a leash) wants to do is accustom us further to the idea that our habits, pastimes and property — animate or inanimate — are the business of the authorities and not under our own control. He and his kind want more power to inspect and interfere with our lives. They create and nourish the neighbourhood busybody and informer, without whom no tyranny can exist.

February 19, 1999 | Barbara Amiel | National Post ([email protected])

The Public: Fighting the Republicans on Impeachment

By GINGER THOMPSON

As she watches Republicans in Congress push ahead with impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, Ellen Mendel of Manhattan says she feels the same despair that she did as a girl in Nazi Germany when the efforts of a stubborn group of leaders snowballed, crushing the will of the people.

[…]

Monday, January 25, 1999, The New York Times

GENEVA (AP) — In August 1942, he tried to alert the West about the Nazi plan to annihilate Europe’s Jews. No one responded.

Now, more than half a century later, Gerhart Riegner says the world is still unwilling to accept reports of brutality and mass killings. And worse, he says, the world is still reluctant to act.

“News of the extermination of Jews was so awful that people didn’t believe it. Even people who did know were very reluctant to do anything.

“It’s the same today,” Riegner said, in reference to recent horrors like the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which an estimated half million people were killed.

Riegner, 87, spoke to a small group of journalists recently about his newly published memoirs, which he wrote to show how difficult it was to get the public to accept the truth.

The 680-page book, “Ne Jamais Desperer,” (Never Give Up Hope), describes his life as a World Jewish Congress official, including the dispatch of the now-famous “Riegner cable,” which contained his early account of the systematic killing that became known as the Holocaust.

He maintains that many of the 6 million Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps could have been saved if the United States and Britain had acted when he sounded the alarm.

Although there had been earlier reports of deportations and slayings of Jews, Riegner’s telegram was the first authoritative word that the Nazis actually had a coordinated extermination plan.

“Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment, powerlessness and loneliness as when I sent messages of disaster and horror to the free world and no one believed me,” Riegner wrote.

Born into an intellectual Jewish family in Germany, Riegner’s first experience of anti-Semitism came at age 5, when another schoolboy called him a “dirty little Jew.”

Years later, in 1933, Nazi thugs stood outside his parent’s Berlin house yelling “Jews out! Jews out!” while Riegner sat in the bath, frozen in terror.

Eventually, Riegner, a trained lawyer, moved to Geneva and staffed the office of the newly founded World Jewish Congress.

He was in neutral Switzerland during the war, with a “rucksack filled with basics ready to flee into the mountains” in case of German attack, a false Bolivian passport and an emergency visa for the United States.

Then, on July 29, 1942, Riegner received reliable intelligence from a top German industrialist about Hitler’s plan to deport an estimated 4 million Jews to the East to kill them.

On Aug. 8, 1942, Riegner gave the cable to U.S. representatives in Switzerland, with details of the plan.

U.S. Vice Consul Howard Elting immediately relayed the cable to Washington. But the State Department said it would not transmit telegrams from private sources and so refused Riegner’s request to forward the news to World Jewish Congress President Stephen Wise — a personal friend of then-President Franklin Roosevelt. Because of wartime restrictions, Riegner had no direct contact with the Jewish Congress.

The State Department checked with the Vatican and Red Cross, who conceded they were aware of deportations and maltreatment of Jews but not of a plan to annihilate them.

In his book, Riegner criticizes the silence of the Red Cross in the face of atrocities. While he praised the courage of Roman Catholic bishops and priests in some countries, he denounced the failure of the Vatican and the Catholic church in Germany to take a decisive stand against the persecution of the Jews throughout the Nazi era.

By the fall of 1942, graphic witness accounts from a variety of sources and British intelligence helped convince even the skeptics in the State Department about the horrible truth.

But it was only in January 1944 that Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board to try to save Jews.

“Since my first telegram, 18 months had passed during which time the inexorable massacre continued and millions of Jews were sacrificed,” Riegner wrote.

The Earth Times

BOOK REVIEW

New book tries to illustrate the horrors of the Auschwitz camps

By ERIN TROWBRIDGE(c) Earth Times News Service

Witness: Images of Auschwitz Illustrations by David Olere

Text by Alexandre Oler

WestWind Press

North Richland Hills, Texas, 1998

112 pages

$36.00 hardcover

Those who survived the Holocaust say that to even attempt to describe or convey the absolute horror of Nazi Germany’s treatment of European Jews is impossible. The terror defies words and pictures. Yet few question the necessity of documenting the histories in whatever medium possible so that the ones who died will not be forgotten, the ones who killed will not think themselves absolved and the ones who survived will not feel that their life is without meaning.

“Witness: Images of Auschwitz” is David Olere and Alexandre Oler’s contribution to the growing catalogue of Holocaust testimony. David Olere was one of a handful of prisoners to survive the war who actually worked in the crematoria and gas chambers of Auschwitz. These workers, called Sonderkommando, endured one of the cruelest forms of punishment: collecting and disposing of the collapsed bodies of those who had been gassed in the Auschwitz “showers.” The typical life-span of the Sonderkommando ranged from a few hours to a few weeks.

David Olere, a Jewish artist from Poland, was arrested in 1943 in France and sent to Auschwitz for two years, until the war’s end in 1945. The 48 illustrations in “Witness” constitute the only known visual record of what actually went on within the crematoria and other places that no photographer entered until after the war. The text has been carefully recreated by Alexandre Oler, the illustrator’s son, based on his father’s experiences.

“David Olere is the only artist in the world who survived working in the crematorium of Auschwitz-Birkenau with the will and talent to deliver a visual and accurate testimony,” writes Serge Klarsfeld, a war-crimes investigator, in the foreword to “Witness.” He adds that the artist’s son “offers his altogether realistic and poetic comments about his father’s work.”

[…]

The illustrations, in their absolute accuracy, defy reason in their impact. A painfully despondent blue drawing of men sitting, heads bowed, packing long tresses of blonde curls into sacks is shot through with a white light emanating from a window behind the prisoners, assuring the reader that this illustration in its dark, murky colors is not a nightmare imagined. The reality, the light of day, bears down upon their bowed heads. Gruesome pictures showing the grotesque experiments prisoners were subjected to by Nazi doctors leave little doubt as to the absolute barbarity of Mengele and his cohorts.

“Witness: Images of Auschwitz” is not an easy book. Its contents demand consideration of the darkest or, perhaps, most banal characteristics of humanity that allowed the Nazis to kill, the Jews to die and the millions to stand by silently without raising a word of protest. Though the reality the book imparts is nothing less than brutal, it bears terrifying witness to one of the most extreme experiences suffered through the Holocaust. It may not let the reader sleep peacefully, but it ensures that the memory of the six million slain Jews will also not be easily forgotten. Perhaps accomplishing the most crucial and traumatic task a survivor could be asked to carry out. “Witness,” above all else, bespeaks courage in its telling.

Copyright © 1998 The Earth Times All rights reserved.

Shivitti: A Vision

[…]

From Publishers Weekly

Ka-Tzetnik 135633 […] is the pen name of Yehiel De-Nur, a pseudonym derived from the tattoo branded on his arm in Auschwitz. In an unusual footnote to the large body of Holocaust literature, the Israeli author describes the LSD treatments he underwent in 1976 under the supervision of a Dutch psychiatrist and specialist in the so-called Concentration Camp Syndrome. The hallucinogen incongruously prettifies some memories […]. But, for the most part, the drug allows De-Nur to combat his demons as it intensifies his recollection of grotesqueries that were the order of the day in Auschwitz, the “planet of death.” From the fragmented, impressionistic account emerge trenchant images of martyrs: […] a Dutch Jew covered in marmalade by Nazis and bitten to death in mass frenzy by fellow prisoners.

Continue reading →

[…]

(3) “Whoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or renders harmless an act committed under the rule of National Socialism … in a manner capable of disturbing the public piece shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than five years or a fine.”

Source: Strafgesetzbuch, StGB, November 13, 1998
Federal Law Gazette I, p. 945, p. 3322, Section 130 “Agitation of the People.”