VANDALS STRIKE AUSTRIAN HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

Vandals strike memorial to Austrian Jews (JTA)
An artwork remembering the suffering of Austrian Jews under the Nazis was destroyed days after it was installed.

Artist Peter Wagner had planted the 70 wooden stakes last week alongside a road in the town of Oberschutzen, near a controversial memorial that serves as a reminder of Germany's annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938.

According to the Kurier newspaper, Wagner's project was called "zone38 -- 70 years after the annexation," and was dedicated to the memory of the Jews of the Oberwart district.

Wagner reported the incident to the police.

Oberschutzen Mayor Gunter Toth said he had noticed that many stakes had been removed but thought it had something to do with traffic regulations.

Wagner said the vandalism was probably a deliberate act by those who disliked being reminded of the past. Austria has been slow to recogize its complicity in the Nazi crimes.

"Someone deliberately did this, removing the stakes so we can't set them back up again," he said.

Wagner's has another art remembrance project scheduled to open nearby in mid-March.

CHILLING HOLOCAUST MASSACRE REVEALED

Report: 180 Jews murdered at party in Austrian castle in 1945 (Haaretz)
BERLIN - A few weeks before the end of the Second World War, as the Soviet Red Army was swiftly approaching the borders of Germany, SS men held a party inn an ancient castle by the Austrian town of Rechnitz. The party, held to mark the eve of Easter, March 24, 1945, was hosted by a baroness who owned the castle and was a member of one of the wealthiest families in Europe.

According to a report published in the German Newspaper "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung," at the height of the party, some 200 Jews were taken from the dungeons of the castle to a nearby silo. The Jews, who were kept in the dungeons, worked on the fortifications of the nearby town of Lasem.

At some point, party organizers handed out pistols and clubs to the drunken revelers and invited them to kill the Jews herded into the silo. Over the course of the evening, 180 Hungarian Jews were murdered and buried in a mass grave.

British Historian David Lichtfield discovered the story of the party while researching a book he was writing entitled "They Thyssen Art Massacre." Lichtfield revealed the story last Thursday in "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung."

POLL: EUROPEANS INCREASINGLY HATE JEWS

Poll: Jews losing favor with Europeans (JTA)
A survey of six European countries found an increase in negative attitudes toward Jews.

The survey, conducted a month ago by the Anti-Defamation League in Austria, Belgium, Hungary, Holland, Switzerland and Britain, found favorable views of Israel on the rise and predominantly negative attitudes toward Iran and Hamas. But respondents said they had more sympathy for the Palestinians than for Israel, and negative attitudes toward Jews in general increased from a 2005 survey.

Approximately half the Europeans surveyed said Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country, and more than a third said Jews have too much power in business and finance. A majority of respondents in Austria, Hungary and Switzerland said they believe American Jews control U.S. policy on the Middle East.

“More than a decade after the fall of communism, we hoped that such anti-Jewish attitudes would have begun to diminish rather than increase,” ADL National Director Abraham Foxman said.

Asked about boycotts against Israel by British-based groups, 43 percent of British respondents said they opposed the boycotts while 37 percent expressed support for them.

Among the six countries polled, anti-Semitic attitudes were found to be lowest among respondents from the Netherlands.

NEW VIENNA MUSEUM EXHIBIT OF JEWISH ARTIFACTS

Vienna museum opens archival exhibit (JTA)
Vienna's Jewish Museum opened an exhibit featuring newly discovered artifacts on the city's Jews, including many from the Holocaust period. Photos, letters about emigration and Nazi documents are included in the collection, which opened Wednesday and is on display through Oct. 21. Archival material also includes Jewish items and correspondence dating back to the 19th century. Some of the World War II material only surfaced in 2000 when the Jewish Community was cleaning out one of its properties and discovered 800 boxes of material.

KURT WALDHEIM IS DEAD

Ex-UN Chief Waldheim Dies (SF Chron)
Former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who was elected Austrian president despite an international scandal about his secretive World War II military service, died Thursday, Austrian media reported. He was 88.

Waldheim, who was hospitalized in Vienna late last month with a fever-causing infection, died of heart failure, state broadcaster ORF reported, citing his family. Waldheim's tenure as U.N. chief from 1972-82 and his election as president in 1986 were overshadowed by revelations that he belonged to a German army unit that committed atrocities in the Balkans during World War II.

I WONDER IF HE'LL BE ROOMING WITH ARAFAT IN HELL.

AUSTRIAN HOLOCAUST RECORDS DISCOVERED

A Nation’s Lost Holocaust History, Now on Display (NYT)
When Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, or Jewish Community Vienna, decided to sell a vacant building in the summer of 2000, two employees were sent to look for any archival material that might have been left behind.

What they found exceeded any historian’s dream: Stacked floor to ceiling in two rooms of one apartment sat some 800 dusty boxes containing, among other things, about half a million pages of detailed records of the community during the Holocaust — archives not known to have survived.

“Opening each box was extremely exciting,” said Lothar Hölbling, the chief archivist and one of the discoverers. “Eight hundred excitements.”

Now, after seven years of quiet work reordering, preserving and microfilming the archives — a joint project of Jewish Community Vienna and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington — the documents are about to be officially unveiled with a presentation at the museum on Thursday, followed by an exhibition, opening on July 3, at the Jewish Museum Vienna.

When combined with community records stretching back to the 17th century that had been shipped to Israel in the 1950s, the Vienna cache makes up one of the largest Holocaust archives of any Jewish community, some two million pages. With it historians will be better able to understand how the Holocaust unfolded and provide a window into the daily life of Vienna’s Jews. The archives of Jewish Community Vienna, the representative body of the city’s Jews, will also be of great help to families in uncovering exactly what happened to their relatives.

AUSTRIAN DESIGNER TAKES NUDE PHOTOS AT DEATH CAMP

"Extraordinary bad taste" - Nazi camp site in nude photos (Juralo)
Accusations of "extraordinary bad taste" were levelled Sunday after details emerged of an Austrian designer snapping nude photos at a former Nazi concentration camp. Gudrun Geiblinger, an up-and-coming poster designer, used the memorial site at the former Mauthausen death camp as backdrop for nude photos of herself, the news magazine Profil wrote in its latest edition.

The photos, shot in the late 1990s, show Geiblinger naked, wearing only white stockings and high heels, in sensual poses in front of a camp watchtower and hugging a sculpture depicting a dying soldier.

Profil quoted Geiblinger, among whose clients are the Austrian army, Siemens and the Austrian Federal Railways, as saying the photos were an "artistic thought experiment. "

She justified the photoshoot by saying she worked on a project at an art school, doing a poster series for Amnesty International and the photos were used for "brainstorming. " Prison walls, barbed wire and a naked woman - those images were intended to "provoke", she said

"By coincidence" she discovered Mauthausen had what she needed. "I did not want Mauthausen as such, what I needed was a prison," Geiblinger said. However, the provocative project was never realized.

Shooting the photos had been easy, she added. Naked beneath her coat, she simply shed it when necessary and had her photographer snap the pictures.

VIENNA JEWISH SCHOOL EXPELS CHILDREN OF IRANIAN HOLOCAUST DENIAL CONFERENCE ATTENDEE

Friedman’s kids expelled from Jewish school (JTA)
A Jewish school in Vienna expelled the children of a fervently Orthodox Jew who attended a Holocaust denial conference in Iran. The Associated Press quoted Moshe Arye Friedman as saying that his four children had been expelled from school Monday and told that no other Jewish school in Vienna would accept them. Friedman told the AP that he planned to sue the school.

Friedman and a handful of other anti-Zionist Jews have been scorned by the worldwide Jewish community since attending the December conference in Tehran as guests of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.