BERLIN – German police on Thursday raided the flat of an 88-year-old man suspected of having helped murder hundreds of thousands of Jews and others while a guard at the Nazi death camp Belzec, prosecutors said.

The man, named only as Samuel K., is suspected of having been a guard at the camp between in 1942 and 1943 and of personally shooting dead several Jews, prosecutors in the western German city of Dortmund said.

He admitted being a guard at Belzec in German-occupied Poland in World War II but he denied being personally involved in killing people, according to the statement. No incriminating material was recovered in the raid.   MORE>>>

MUNICH – Jewish prisoners had to unload decomposed corpses at the Nazi death camp at Sobibor and were forbidden to warn new prisoners that they would be gassed within the hour, a survivor testified Thursday at the trial of John Demjanjuk.

The Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old retired Ohio autoworker, is accused of serving as a low-level guard at the Nazi camp in occupied Poland and is charged with accessory to murder in 27,900 deaths. Demjanjuk rejects the charges, saying he never served in Sobibor or any other Nazi camp.

Sobibor survivor Philip Bialowitz told the Munich state court that Jews being brought from western Europe largely believed the Nazi ruse that they were being resettled and arrived at the camp relieved that their long journey was over. (more…)

LONDON – Hundreds of people have celebrated the winter solstice atStonehenge, braving snowy travel conditions and a morning fog.

About 700 people — including pagans and druids — saw the sun rise at the ancient rocks near Salisbury, England.

Peter Carson, Stonehenge’s director, said it “was really looking picture-postcard perfect.”

Carson said winter solstice can fall between Dec. 20 and 23. He said this year, winter solstice came after the sun set on Dec. 21, making Tuesday the shortest day of the year.   http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091222/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_winter_solstice;_ylt=AjOEnO3300VVr4OWa6wlqAOs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTFpMWZzYnF2BHBvcwMzOQRzZWMDYWNjb3JkaW9uX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDZHJ1aWRzcGFnYW5z

OSWIECIM, Poland – Polish authorities stepped up security checks at airports and border crossings and searched scrap metal yards Saturday as the search intensified for the infamous Nazi sign stolen from the Auschwitz death camp memorial.

The brazen overnight theft Friday of one of the Holocaust’s most chilling and notorious symbols sparked outrage from around the world, and Polish leaders have declared recovering the 5-meter (16-foot) sign a national priority.   MORE>>>

LONDON – The diaries of a British reporter who risked his reputation to expose the horrors of Stalin’s murderous famine in Ukraine were put on public display for the first time Friday.

Welsh journalist Gareth Jones sneaked into Ukraine in March of 1933, at the height of a famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Millions of people starved to death between 1932 and 1933 as theSoviet secret police emptied the countryside of grain and livestock as part of a campaign to force peasants into collective farms.

Jones’ reporting was one of the first attempts to bring the disaster to the world’s attention. (more…)

In February 1995, President George H.W. Bush and the Forum for International Policy invited British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and French president Francois Mitterrand to Colorado’s Broadmoor Hotel for a reminiscence of their decisions and doubts concerning the fall of the Berlin Wall and theunification of Germany.

Gorbachev: During the [former leader of the Communist Party, Konstantin] Chernenko funeral, when I spoke with George Bush (then vice president) and Margaret Thatcher, I was also talking with the leaders of the Eastern European countries, I said to all of them: “I want to assure you that the principles that used to just be proclaimed – equality of states and noninterference in internal affairs – will now be our real policy. Therefore you bear responsibility for affairs in your own country. We need perestroika and will do it in our own country. You make your own decision.” I said this was the end of the Brezhnev Doctrine. (more…)

VIENNA – Key members of an Austrian Holocaust research center have quit in a dispute with the city’sJewish community.

The Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies began provisional operations in January after being bogged down for years with funding problems. Its aim, among other things, is to give scholars from around the world unique access to roughly 8,000 files of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and to parts of a vast archive belonging to the Jewish Community Vienna. But reluctance by the Jewish community to provide full access to its trove of historic information had crippled the center over the past 10 months.

On Friday, frustrated by a lack of progress, Ingo Zechner, the institute’s business manager, announced he was quitting. (more…)

Twenty years ago, early in October, I found myself inEast Berlin observing one of modern history’s most incredible events.

The rulers of East Germany had called one of their regular demonstrations in favor of their particularly grotesque Communist regimen. There they stood, the leaders of this Potemkin police state, awaiting the usual applause in a lineup before East Berlin’s Rotes Rathaus or Red City Hall.

It was a lovely fall day, and I was standing protectively near the back of the crowd when “it” started. The crowd of East Germans began to hiss and boo at their “leaders,” to shake their fists, and finally to laugh at them and mock them. The lineup of cold-blooded men physically cringed. This had never happened before.

I thought to myself that day, “It’s over; it’s finally all over.” And it was. I went back to the Grand Hotel on Unter den Linden, the East’s premiere luxury hotel, and had a glass of wine, which had the contradictory effect of only sobering me up. (more…)

ROME (AFP) – Romans don’t have to wait for Halloween to enjoy the macabre. The spirit of Halloween stalks the city’s myriad churches, from skeletons galore to mummified monks, embalmed papal hearts to a purported piece of John the Baptist’s head.

A good place to start is the Church of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Via Veneto.

The ghosts of La Dolce Vita are quickly forgotten when the visitor enters the church’s crypt, elaborately adorned by the earthly remains of hundreds of Capuchin monks. (more…)

Many Americans, engrossed in immediate events like health care and the Afghan war, doubtless are not thinking about the dramatic events of 20 years ago this fall in Germany — but they soon will be.

Yes, it was two decades ago that the Berlin Wall came down. On Nov. 9, 1989, long-angry Germans literally clawed the hated wall to its end. This was followed by the nearly unbelievable reunification of East and West Germany, the liberation of all of Eastern Europe from communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anyone given to depression need only look at this period for the kind of geopolitical “fix” that history too occasionally provides for us.

The real celebrations in the new Berlin, today one of the most exquisite architectural and artistic cities in the world, will begin in full force in November. But there have already been some surprising revelations that bear serious scrutiny.

Newly published documents released by the British Foreign Office in September, for instance, show the surprising depth of the antipathyBritish leader Margaret Thatcher and French leader Francois Mitterrandheld toward the changes in Germany. At their worst, they said that they feared a united Germany would endanger Europe and even foreshadow another kind of Hitlerism! (more…)

A new cemetery has been opened in central Russia, but this one is a bit different from others across the country: The site honors the German soldiers killed in Russia during World War II.

However, the decision to build the cemetery was not easy, the governor of the Kursk region Aleksandr Mikhailov told Vesti TV Channel. He noted that the Nazi occupation of Kursk destroyed over 300 villages in the region, leaving thousands dead or homeless.

(more…)

Researching a book about literary hoaxes led me to investigate a sub-section of the misery-memoir genre which often left me reeling in amazement: the Holocaust hoaxers. Special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe, but they have certain duties too.

It is their right to write how and when they want (perhaps many decades later, if they are ready) and, as with Elie Wiesel, with their own definitions of truth and fiction. It was he who said that “Some stories are true that never happened.”

However, those memoirists who think that they can pretend they were there when they weren’t ought to remember that hijacking the experiences of others for selfish ends will only end in ignominy. Their motivations were, as so often in life and letters, a combination of pain, hope and greed, and they were emboldened by a marketplace in thrall to the misery memoir. (more…)

Launching an Auschwitz Facebook page might have seemed like a good way to reach out to a web-savvy younger generation and help keep alive the memory of the most notorious Nazis death camp.

But after gaining around 2,000 online followers in two days, the Facebook page launched by the Polish Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum was taken down todaywithout explanation.

The Auschwitz museum, set up in 1947 as the official memorial to the camp in which more than 1 million people, mostly Jews, died, has been active on the internet for more than 10 years. (more…)

MOSCOW – A Russian court ruled against Josef Stalin’s grandson Tuesday in a libel suit over a newspaper article that said the Soviet dictator sent thousands of people to their deaths.

A judge at a Moscow district court rejected Yevgeny Dzhugashvili’s claim that Novaya Gazeta damaged Stalin’s honor and dignity in an April article that referred to him as a “bloodthirsty cannibal.”

The case essentially put Stalin on trial more than 50 years after his death. A ruling against the newspaper would have been seen as an exoneration one of the 20th century’s most notorious autocrats. (more…)

The careful conservation of pre-industrial villages in Transylvania is Europe at its best, guarding the relics of its diversity

Between the collapse of the Ceausescu regime in December 1989 and the spring of 1990, half a million indigenous so-called “Saxons” fled Romania for West Germany. It was the most astonishing, and little reported, ethnic migration in modern Europe. In the seven towns and 250 villages of Saxon Land in southern Transylvania, no less than 90% of the German-speaking population packed its bags and committed eight centuries of history to memory. They drove west to a country few of them knew, enticed by the notorious “return to the fatherland” speech of the German politician, Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

The exodus left behind a deserted landscape the size of Wales, hundreds of square miles of rolling beech woods, bears, lush pastures and wild flowers, once home to the Dracula legend. Across it are dotted medieval grid-planned villages, with Lutheran churches, schools, dignified houses, barns and smallholdings, their customs and exclusivity reminiscent of the Pennsylvania Dutch. For 800 years since being invited by the Magyar kings to form a bulwark against the infidel, the Transylvania Saxons guarded their Germanic tradition. They spoke a High German said to be similar to ancient Luxembourgish. They embraced the Reformation and resisted Ceausescu’s concrete communism. All this ended abruptly in 1990. (more…)

This article is written by someone selling books about Nazis fleeing Europe so don’t take it too seriously.

In countless biographies of Adolf Hitler the story of his final hours is recounted in the traditional version: committing suicide with Eva Braun, he took a cyanide pill and then shot himself on 30 April 1945, as the Russians bombarded Berlin.

Some historians expressed doubt that the Führer had shot himself, speculating that accounts of Hitler’s death had been embellished to present his suicide in a suitably heroic light. But a fragment of skull, complete with bullet hole, which was taken from the bunker by the Russians and displayed in Moscow in 2000, appeared to settle the argument.

Until now. In the wake of new revelations, the histories of Hitler’s death may need to be rewritten – and left open-ended. American researchers claim to have demonstrated that the skull fragment, secretly preserved for decades by Soviet intelligence, belonged to a woman under 40, whose identity is unknown. DNA analyses performed on the bone, now held by the Russian State Archive in Moscow, have been processed at the genetics lab of the University of Connecticut. The results, broadcast in the US by a History Channel documentary, Hitler’s Escape, astonished scientists. (more…)

It’s an unprecedented find that could revolutionize ideas about medieval England’s Germanic rulers: An amateur treasure-hunter searching a farmer’s field with a metal detector unearthed a huge collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver artifacts.

The discovery sent a thrill through Britain’s archaeological community, which said Thursday that it offers new insight into the world of theAnglo-Saxons, who ruled England from the fifth century until the 1066 Norman invasion and whose cultural influence is still felt throughout the English-speaking world.

“This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue,” Roger Bland, who managed the cache’s excavation, told The Associated Press. “It will make us rethink the Dark Ages.” (more…)

It’s sick enough that a Colorado woman seems to have posed as a Holocaust survivor. But what’s almost as curious is the number of people who lined up behind her unlikely story.

RoseMarie Pence, a one-time Super 8 manager, has lived for at least five years in Longmont. She also goes by “Hannah.”

For the record, I’ve never met the 71-year-old and, despite my attempts, can’t find her since former admirers outted her as an apparent fake.

What I do know is that Windsor writer Jean Messinger was so inspired by her life that she took on the project of self-publishing Hannah’s biography.

“She didn’t come to me. I went to her,” she says. “I felt her story had to be told.”

The result was 143 pages of supposed nonfiction titled “Hannah: From Dachau to the Olympics and Beyond.” (more…)

On September 3, 2009, a debate sponsored by Intelligence Squared, at the Methodist Central Hall Westminster, in London, considered the question: “Resolved: Churchill was more a liability than an asset to the free world.”

Speakers for the motion: Pat Buchanan, Nigel Knight, political scientist and economist at Churchill College, Cambridge, and Norman Stone, historian and professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara.

Speakers against the motion: Antony Beevor, historian and author of the best-selling book Stalingrad; professor Richard Overy, historian, author of many books and articles on the Second World War and the Nazi regime; and Andrew Roberts, historian, who has spent 20 years writing, researching, and broadcasting about Churchill and the Second World War.

We publish below Pat Buchanan’s opening statement:

To borrow from Mark Antony’s funeral oration, we of the affirmative are not here to praise Mr. Churchill — but to bury him.

But, first, let us concede the greatness of the man.

In that finest hour of the British nation, 1940, Winston Churchill was indomitable, an inspiration to men everywhere.  He was the Lion who gave Britain’s roar of defiance in the face of Hitler’s Germany.  For that, he will be honored by peoples everywhere — and forever. (more…)

Harvard University, one of America’s premiere academic institutions, is coming under fire for running an advertisement in its campus newspaper questioning the reality of the Holocaust.

Recently named for the second straight year as the No. 1 school in U.S. News & World Report rankings of American colleges, Harvard is known for its rigorous scholarly standards and prestigious reputation.

On Tuesday, however, The Harvard Crimson, in what it said was an error, ran the Holocaust-questioning advertisement, which had been rejected by the paper over the summer.

In response to the commotion created by the ad, Crimson President Maxwell L. Child released a statement Wednesday citing three weeks of summer vacation between the submission of the advertisement and the publication of the paper as the explanation for why the ad “fell through the cracks.” (more…)