Ryan Paul
Archive for the ‘Nazi News Stories’ Category
Copies of Nazi files transferred
The keepers of a vast archive of Nazi documents on the Holocaust have transferred copies of millions of files to museums in Israel and the US. The electronic transfer is part of an agreement to open up the Bad Arolsen archive, overseen by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The files, kept in Germany, were found in concentration camps and other Nazi prisons at the end of World War II.
Several countries have not yet ratified the agreement, delaying full access.
The archive will only be fully opened to the public when the 2006 protocol is ratified by Italy, France and Greece. That is expected later this year.
The ICRC says the archive has now transferred many documents from the archive to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in the US and to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Centre in Israel.
Chilling details
The 47 million files stored in the spa town of Bad Arolsen hold meticulously recorded information on forced labourers, concentration camp victims and political prisoners. They take up 26km (16 miles) of shelving.
Historians believe many more details about the Nazis’ murder and brutal exploitation of millions of Jews, Roma (Gypsies) and other victims will be revealed.
“After a long political process, we can now give researchers and the public access to the files,” said Reto Meister, director of the ICRC’s International Tracing Service (ITS).
So far, 12 million documents have been digitised for electronic transfer, the ICRC says.
In grey, bureaucratic language the Nazis kept records on the smallest details – from the number of lice on a prisoner’s head to the exact moment of their execution.
The archive has been used to help people trace their relatives. But access has been restricted to protect victims’ privacy.
The archive is controlled by an 11-nation treaty signed in 1955 and amended by the 2006 protocol. The countries are: Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and the US.
The secret history of the Nazi mascot
Alex Kurzem came to Australia in 1949 carrying just a small brown briefcase, but weighed down by some harrowing psychological and emotional baggage.
Tucked away in his briefcase were the secrets of his past – fragments of his life that he kept hidden for decades.
Alex was forced to keep his Jewish identity hidden |
In 1997, after raising a family in Melbourne with his Australian bride, he finally revealed himself. He told how, at the age of five, he had been adopted by the SS and became a Nazi mascot.
His personal history, one of the most remarkable stories to emerge from World War II, was published recently in a book entitled The Mascot.
“They gave me a uniform, a little gun and little pistol,” Alex told the BBC.
“They gave me little jobs to do – to polish shoes, carry water or light a fire. But my main job was to entertain the soldiers. To make them feel a bit happier.”
Painful memories
In newsreels, he was paraded as ‘the Reich’s youngest Nazi’ and he witnessed some unspeakable atrocities.
But his SS masters never discovered the most essential detail about his life: their little Nazi mascot was Jewish.
“They didn’t know that I was a Jewish boy who had escaped a Nazi death squad. They thought I was a Russian orphan.”
His story starts where his childhood memories begin – in a village in Belarus on 20 October 1941, the day it was invaded by the German army.
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When the shooting stopped I had no idea where to go so I went to live in the forests, because I couldn’t go back. I was the only one left 
“I remember the German army invading the village, lining up all the men in the city square and shooting them. My mother told me that my father had been killed, and that we would all be killed.”
“I didn’t want to die, so in the middle of the night I tried to escape. I went to kiss my mother goodbye, and ran up into the hill overlooking the village until the morning came.”
That was the day his family was massacred – his mother, his brother, his sister.
“I was very traumatised. I remember biting my hand so I couldn’t cry out loud, because if I did they would have seen me hiding in the forest. I can’t remember exactly what happened. I think I must have passed out a few times. It was terrible.”
False identity
“When the shooting stopped I had no idea where to go so I went to live in the forests, because I couldn’t go back. I was the only one left. I must have been five or six.”
“I went into the forest but no-one wanted me. I knocked on peoples’ doors and they gave me bits of bread but they told me to move on. Nobody took me in.”
He survived by scavenging clothes from the bodies of dead soldiers.
After about nine months in the forest, a local man handed him over to the Latvian police brigade, which later became incorporated in the Nazi SS.
That very day, people were being lined up for execution, and Alex thought he, too, was about to die.
“There was a soldier near me and I said, ‘Before you kill me, can you give me a bit of bread?’ He looked at me, and took me around the back of the school. He examined me and saw that I was Jewish. “No good, no good,” he said. ‘Look I don’t want to kill, but I can’t leave you here because you will perish.
“‘I’ll take you with me, give you a new name and tell the other soldiers that you are a Russian orphan.’”
Joining the circus
To this day, Alex Kurzem has no idea why Sergeant Jekabs Kulis took pity on him. Whatever his motives, it certainly helped that Alex had Aryan looks. And together, they kept the secret.
“Every moment I had to remind myself not to let my guard down, because if ever anyone found out, I was dead. I was scared of the Russians shooting me and the Germans discovering I was Jewish. I had no-one to turn to.”
Alex Kurzem kept the secret from his wife and family for decades |
Young Alex saw action on the Russian front, and was even used by the SS to lure Jewish people to their deaths.
Outside the cattle trains which carried victims to the concentration camps, he handed out chocolate bars to tempt them in.
Then, in 1944, with the Nazis facing almost certain defeat, the commander of the SS unit sent him to live with a Latvian family.
Five years later, he managed to reach Australia. For a time, he worked in a circus and eventually became a television repair man in Melbourne.
All the time, he kept his past life to himself, not even telling his Australian wife, Patricia.
“When I left Europe I said ‘forget about your past. You are going to a new country and a new life. Switch off and don’t even think about it.’
“I managed to do it. I told people I lost my parents in the war, but I didn’t go into detail. I kept the secret and never told anyone.”
It was not until 1997 that he finally told his family, and along with his son, Mark, set about discovering more about his past life.
After visiting the village where he was born, they found out his real name was Ilya Galperin, and even uncovered a film in a Latvian archive of Alex in full SS regalia.
Spanish police hunt Austrian Nazi
Spanish police are hunting a former Nazi concentration camp doctor – known as Doctor Death – believed to be hiding in northern Spain. Aribert Heim, 91, who worked in the Mauthausen camp, is the second most wanted Nazi suspect alive.
Authorities in Catalonia province say he could be somewhere on the north eastern coast or the Balearic Islands.
A spokeswoman said Dr Heim’s exact location was not known, despite Israeli reports that an arrest was imminent.
A spokeswoman for Catalonia’s autonomous police, the Mossos d’Esquadra, told the BBC that an investigation was underway.
“They are looking for this person along the Catalan coast but it could be that he is Ibiza, Mallorca or Menorca,” she said.
“There is an extradition order out for him and if he is found that will be carried out.”
Austrian-born Dr Heim is wanted in Germany and Austria for the deaths of hundreds of inmates by lethal injection at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps.
Justice
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said at the weekend that an arrest was expected soon.
Dr Heim’s research included surgery without anaesthesia and injecting prisoners with gasoline, poison and lethal drugs to see how much their bodies could take before dying, the paper said.
He is listed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center as the second most wanted Nazi alive, after Adolf Eichmann’s top assistant Alois Brunner.
Dr Heim had worked in Germany after the war but disappeared in 1962 prior to plans to prosecute him.
German interior ministry spokesman Rainer Lingenthal declined to comment on the investigations to capture the doctor.
But he told the Associated Press: “You can imagine that, as far as all German authorities are concerned, there is the utmost interest in one of the last big notorious criminals possibly receiving his just punishment after all.”
Nazi past haunts ‘Aryan’ children
Between 1935 and 1945, around 10,000 German children and an estimated 9,000 Norwegian children with “Aryan” characteristics of blond hair and blue eyes were born into a Nazi-run programme called “Lebensborn” or “Fountain of Life”. It was part of the Nazis’ plan to create a “master race”. Sixty years later, many are still living with the psychological scars, as the BBC Radio 4 documentary “Fountain of Life”, discovered.
Gisela Heidenreich (left) and Brigitta Rombeck (photo: All Out Productions) |
“My uncle always called me an ‘SS silly person’ and I did not understand why,” says Gisela Heidenreich from Munich.
“I always remember feeling that there was something wrong with me. I felt guilty, but no one would explain that I was a Lebensborn child.”
Gisela Heidenreich was born out of an affair with an SS commander. Her mother also worked as a secretary for Lebensborn.
Heinrich Himmler, leader of Hitler’s SS encouraged affairs between SS soldiers and “Aryan” women, to increase the stock of “racially valuable” Germans in response to falling birth rates.
At a time in Germany when illegitimate children were a social taboo, Himmler formed 10 Lebensborn homes in Germany and nine in occupied Norway, to provide comfortable and safe accommodation for the unmarried pregnant women.
Many Lebensborn homes were set up in houses confiscated from Jewish families by the Nazis or in former homes for the elderly or mentally handicapped.
While some mothers kept their babies others left them in the care of Lebensborn, while a “good” German family was found to adopt the child.
Gisela has twice been back to the former Lebensborn home where her mother worked. I joined her on her second visit to Steinhoering. An hour form Munich, Steinhoering sits in rolling fields with the snow-capped peaks of the Alps in the distance. At Steinhoering, her mother played a key role signing babies off for “adoption”.
‘Victim of Hitler’
The former home’s gates, with the Nazis SS symbol clearly visible, are still propped up against a stable. The gates, along with a Nazi statue of an “Aryan” mother breastfeeding her baby, are a reminder of the home’s dark past.
Gisela is touched though to find that the home is now a centre for the disabled.
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Maria Heinich |
“It is so moving to see these happy children playing on swings,” she says. “They would not have lived during the Third Reich, because of Hitler’s crazy racial policy.”
Gisela says she has found evidence in Lebensborn records to suggest that disabled children born into the programme were killed or sent to concentration camps.
Maria Dorr, another Lebensborn child – her mother Norwegian and father a soldier in the German Army – now lives outside Frankfurt in Germany. Maria considers herself to be a victim of Hitler.
As a baby she was transported from Norway to the Koren Salis Lebensborn home near Leipzig, before being adopted by a German family.
Holding back tears, Maria relays the moment she realised she was adopted.
“I was a schoolgirl when a woman came up to me and told me I was not German. So I started to secretly look through my adopted mother’s things, but it was not until I was an adult that I found my Lebensborn file and discovered the real truth.
“I can’t help feeling like a Lebensborn child. I feel damaged and the disturbance it has caused me has damaged my life.”
‘No Nazi’
In a small flat half an hour from Leipzig, Maria Heinich looks proudly through her photo album which dates back to 1942, when she worked as a secretary at Koren Salis Lebensborn home.
Maria Heinich does not remember Maria Dorr, but she has kept in touch with some of the other Lebensborn children she met at the home.
Many Lebensborn homes were confiscated properties (photo: All Out Productions) |
Looking at me with her steely eyes, Maria is adamant that although she worked at the home she was not a Nazi.
“I was young then, I did not think it was alright what we did, but I really enjoyed my work there. I really did not have anything to do with it proper, I was just a little secretary, I did not have any connection to the Lebensborn headquarters in Munich.”
Gisela Heidenreich explains that many women who worked for Lebensborn, including her own mother, face difficulties in accepting the role, however small they played, in supporting Hitler’s racial policy.
The BBC also discovered that in 1943 Heinrich Himmler ordered children meeting racial “qualification” to be abducted from homes and streets in conquered east European countries. Those stolen children were taken to Lebensborn homes to be “Germanised” before adoption.
Reunions
In 1945, Gitta Sereny joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. It was her job to find and transport stolen children back to their homeland.
“I took several truckloads of children back to Poland. It was so touching to see their parents on the platforms when the train arrived. Many of them had said goodbye to babies but they never failed to recognise their children.”
However, Ingrid Von Oelhalfen, who was eight months old when she was stolen from Slovenia and taken to Germany, was not returned after the war.
Tears stream down her face as she explains the devastating effect Lebensborn has had on her life. “I have never been loved,” she says.
Israel recognises ‘new Schindler’
A German army officer who saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazi Holocaust in Lithuania has been honoured at a ceremony in Israel.
The story of Maj Karl Plagge was unearthed by a US doctor, Michael Good, who began searching in 1999 for the Nazi who had saved his mother.
Maj Plagge sheltered about 1,200 Jews at a vehicle workshop while the SS annihilated the Vilnius ghetto.
Plagge, who died in 1957, was honoured by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.
It is unusual for Yad Vashem to bestow the “Righteous Among the Nations” title on a German who was part of the Nazi war machine, the memorial’s chairman Avner Shalev told the BBC News website.
“He asked for more and more workers and tried his best to keep the conditions relatively more humane,” Mr Shalev said.
Plagge, who served in Vilnius from June 1941 to June 1944, ran a repair facility for German army (Wehrmacht) vehicles, where hundreds of Jews worked.
Yad Vashem’s Certificate of Honour and medal were presented to Professor Johann-Dietrich Woerner, President of Darmstadt Technical University, where Plagge was once a student.
Plagge had no surviving relatives.
Mr Good and his parents attended the ceremony along with about 30 survivors.
“I spent a lot of time thinking and obsessing about my quest, learning about him and getting him recognised,” Mr Good said.
The search for evidence was difficult, as Mr Good had to collect testimonies from survivors scattered across the globe.
Mr Shalev said some of Plagge’s key letters to the German high command were discovered in archives only recently.
“We wanted to be sure he hadn’t committed any crimes against humanity – that’s why it took so long… All the survivors said he had saved their lives.”
Plagge hired about 1,200 Jewish workers from the ghetto – 500 men, and the rest women and children, Mr Shalev said.
Plagge told the high command that keeping families together would boost the workers’ motivation – thereby defying the SS troops, who were killing Jews en masse.
As the Red Army approached and the extermination of Jews intensified, Plagge hinted at the fate awaiting his workers – enabling about 250 of them to flee.
Despite his efforts, the SS took away the Jewish children.
Plagge joins 20,757 men and women recognised by Yad Vashem for rescuing Jews from annihilation by the SS.
Of them, only 410 are German and few of them were German soldiers.
Yad Vashem approved the honour for Plagge last July.
It had twice rejected Mr Good’s petitions because it required evidence that the officer had taken a “considerable and conscious risk” to save Jews.
He joined Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler in the roll of honour at Yad Vashem.
Schindler, hero of a 1993 movie called Schindler’s List, saved up to 1,200 Jews by employing them in his munitions factory during the war.
Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, saved many Hungarian Jews.
Mr Good recently published a book called The Search For Major Plagge: The Nazi Who Saved Jews.
WWII Nazi murder suspect on trial
A former Nazi commander accused of ordering mass killings in occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II has gone on trial in Munich.
Ladislav Niznansky, 86, is charged with the murder of civilians in the final months of World War II.
He was a member of a Nazi unit that hunted down Slovak resistance fighters and Jews.
Mr Niznansky, a Czechoslovak who took German citizenship, denies having participated in the killings.
He is accused of having headed the Slovak section of a Nazi unit codenamed Edelweiss, after the Germans crushed an uprising against Slovakia’s Nazi puppet government in 1944.
Mr Niznansky is accused of ordering the executions of the entire populations of two villages – Ostry Grun and Klak – that had been helping the partisans. Most victims were women and children.
Prosecutors say he gave the order, before the shooting began, that no-one be allowed to escape, and personally killed 20 people in Ostry Grun.
He is also accused of ordering the shooting of 18 Jewish civilians who were found hiding in underground bunkers.
His lawyer, Steffen Ufer, said in court Mr Niznansky was under orders from Nazi superiors and not present when the bulk of the shootings happened.
“He never gave an order to move against women and children, nor did he personally lift his hand against such persons,” Mr Ufer said in his opening statement.
Mr Niznansky denies being at Ostry Grun and Klak at the time of the killings, his lawyer added.
But a soldier who himself served eight years in prison in the 1960s for his role in the operation says he saw the defendant personally shoot 22 victims – including a three-month-old baby girl, says the BBC’s Ray Furlong.
In court, Mr Niznansky said he had never supported the aims of the Nazi party and only joined Edelweiss because he would have been thrown in a concentration camp otherwise, AFP news agency reported.
In absentia conviction
Mr Niznansky, who has survived two strokes, fled to West Germany following the war and lived unnoticed for years in Munich, where he used to work for Radio Free Europe.
He was arrested at his home in January. He faces life in prison if convicted.
Mr Niznansky was sentenced to death over the killings in his absence in the former Czechoslovakia in 1962, but by then he already had a Cold War career behind him.
Prosecutors are reported to have started investigating Mr Niznansky in 2001 after a request from the Slovak justice authorities.
The decision to move against him follows the reviewing of archives and court documents, and the questioning of witnesses.
The trial is also being closely watched in Slovakia, which recently celebrated the 60th anniversary of its uprising against the Nazis.
Nazi massacres suspect arrested
A former Nazi commander suspected of being involved in 1945 massacres in Slovakia has been arrested in Germany.
Slovakian-born Ladislav Niznansky, 86, is thought to have commanded a German unit fighting partisans in former Czechoslovakia, prosecutors said.
His unit is suspected of killing 146 people, including 70 women and 51 children, in the towns of Ostry Grun and Klak in January 1945.
He is also accused of ordering the execution of 18 Jews in Ksinna.
He was convicted over the killings in his absence in the former Czechoslovakia in 1962.
Mr Niznansky’s unit is also said to have been responsible for capturing a group of US and British officers on a mission in Slovakia in 1944, although he is not being investigated for this incident.
The allied soldiers, as well as Associated Press war correspondent Joseph Morton who was with them, were executed at a concentration camp in Austria.
‘Interpreter’
Prosecutors are reported to have started investigating Mr Niznanksy in 2001 after a request from the Slovak justice authorities.
The decision to move against him follows the reviewing of archives and court documents, and the questioning of witnesses.
Mr Niznanksy is said to have fled to Austria after the war and then moved to Munich.
He was granted German nationality in 1966 and worked for several decades at Radio Free Europe, a US-backed station in Munich that broadcast to the East Bloc during the Cold War.
Jozef Spetko, who worked with Mr Niznanksy, said the 1962 conviction was “no secret” around Radio Free Europe.
“He said he was innocent. He claimed he had only been an interpreter,” he told the Associated Press.
US arrests alleged Nazi guard
US authorities are seeking to deport a man accused of having served as a Nazi concentration camp guard.
Immigration officers found 77-year-old Johann Leprich hiding in a secret compartment beneath the stairs at his home in Clinton Township, Michigan, US Attorney General John Ashcroft said.
Leprich was apparently living in the United States illegally after his citizenship was revoked in 1987.
Then, a federal judge found that Leprich had served as an SS guard at the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Austria from 1943 to 1944.
“This arrest makes clear that those who participated in the atrocities of the Holocaust will not escape the determined reach of US law enforcement, regardless of how much time has passed,” said Mr Ashcroft.
“Nazi collaborators will not find a safe haven in the United States.”
‘Returned to US’
Leprich, who was born in Romania, immigrated to the United States in 1952 and became a US citizen six years later.
After his citizenship was revoked nearly 30 years later, his lawyers said he had left the country.
Leprich was reportedly seen in Windsor, Ontario, in Canada, just across the border from Michigan.
He was also reportedly a frequent visitor to Detroit, Michigan, and might have been living there, the US Justice Department said.
The government filed a request with the US Immigration Court to have Leprich deported on the grounds that he served as a Nazi guard.
“We intend to remove Leprich from the US with all deliberate speed,” said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigation (OSI).
United States deports Nazi guard
The United States has deported a former Nazi concentration camp guard to Romania.
Nikolaus Schiffer, who is 83, had been stripped of his US citizenship after the authorities found he had withheld information about his past.
He was ordered to be deported eight years ago when an immigration judge ruled he had been involved in persecuting prisoners at Nazi camps during the Second World War.
However Mr Schiffer, a retired baker living in Pennsylvania, appealed against the decision.
He also said he had worked as a tower guard and had not taken part in any atrocities.
But the legal battles came to an end on Monday when he was flown back to Romania, a US immigration spokeswoman said.
Elite unit
Nikolaus Schiffer was born to Romanian parents in Philadelphia in 1919.
But soon afterwards, he was taken back to Romania and joined the national army in 1941.
He later served in the German Waffen SS – an elite branch of Adolf Hitler’s army.
US court records showed that as part of his duties, he worked in four concentration camps including Sachsenhausen in Germany and Majdanek in Poland.
In the original deportation order in 1997, a US immigration judge said Mr Schiffer had “personally testified to his participation in a death march from Hersbruck to Auschwitz on which weakened prisoners were shot or left to die when they could not continue”.
During Mr Schiffer’s time at the four camps, atrocities were committed against thousands of civilians including inhumane treatment, subjection to slave labour, abuse, torture and mass murder, US legal papers said.
He returned to the US in 1953, gaining citizenship in 1958.
However the authorities said he would not have been naturalised had they known about his past.
Former SS officer tried for murder
A 93-year-old former Nazi SS officer has gone on trial in the German city of Hamburg, charged with ordering the murder of 59 Italian prisoners-of-war in 1944.
Branded the “Butcher of Genoa” by the Italian media, Friedrich Engel is accused of taking a bloody revenge for an attack on a cinema for German soldiers.
Last year he expressed regret for having had a role in the killings, but said he was only carrying out orders.
Mr Engel, who denies the charge of murder, is expected to give evidence during the trial.
The killings, in the Turino Pass, took place on 19 May 1944.
Rough grave
The victims were forced to stand in groups of six on a plank over a rough grave dug by Jewish prisoners.
They were shot, and were buried where they fell.
The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center welcomed the opening of the German trial, describing it as an “important act of moral significance”.
Four massacres
“As long as individuals are healthy, they must be held accountable for their crimes,” Efraim Zuroff, director of the centre’s Israeli branch.
Mr Engel was in 1944 the leader of the elite SS force in the port city of Genoa.
An Italian court has already sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment for killing at least 246 Italian prisoners.
It said he bore responsibility for four separate massacres committed in the final two years of the war.
Eyewitnesses have accused him of shooting some of the victims himself.
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