AMERICAN JEW KICKED OUT OF BELGIAN CAFE FOR BEING JEWISH

Jewish tourist booted from Belgian cafe (JTA)

An American tourist was kicked out of a cafe in Belgium for being Jewish.

Marcel Kalmann, a 64-year-old professor, told the Antwerp Jewish magazine Joods Actueel that he was ejected from the renowned restaurant Le Panier d'Or in Bruges after a waiter saw his yarmulke under his cap.

"We are not serving Jews, out of here," the magazine reported.

Kalmann also told Joods Actueel that he was mistreated at the police station where he went to file a report and was told the incident would not be considered anti-Semitic. He said he will file reports against both the restaurant and the police.

Kalmann was born in the Auschwitz concentration camp three days before its liberation.

The mayor of Bruges has ordered a police inquiry into the incident and apologized to Kalmann, the European Jewish Press reported.

HOLOCAUST ARTIFACTS TO BE SHOWN

Tragic Bond 
For more than 60 years, Auschwitz survivor Meyer Hack hid a grim secret -- artifacts he found while processing clothes confiscated from new arrivals. They will appear in Watertown, Mass., in an unusual collaboration between the local Armenian and Jewish communities. (Boston Globe)

BUSH: U.S. SHOULD HAVE BOMBED AUSCHWITZ

70 YEARS TOO LATE.

Bush: U.S. should have bombed Nazi camps (JTA)
The United States erred in not bombing Auschwitz during the Holocaust, President Bush said.

Bush made the comment to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice while viewing an exhibit at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem of U.S. aerial photographs of the Nazi concentration camps, according to the memorial’s chairman, Avner Shalev.

Shalev took Bush on an hour-long tour of the museum on Friday; it was Bush’s second visit to Yad Vashem, a requisite stop for foreign dignitaries visiting Jerusalem. Avner reported that the president’s eyes welled up with tears twice during the tour.

"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it," Bush said.

Wearing a yarmulke and flanked by Israel’s president and prime minister, Bush also laid a red-white-and-blue wreath at the center’s main memorial -- a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six Nazi extermination camps.

CHECK OUT THESE BOOKS: The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? by Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum and The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 by David S. Wyman

UNREPENTANT NAZI DRAWS PENSIONS FROM 3 COUNTRIES

Unrepentant Nazi, 84, calls Auschwitz a 'ten star hotel' and tells Dachau victim 'you survived well' (UK Daily Mail)
An unrepentant old Nazi officer who served in some of the worst concentration camps gives the Hitler salute in Spain where he has hidden from justice for over 60 years. Now Paul Maria Hafner is the subject of a TV documentary called "Hafner's Paradise" which chronicles his life in exile – and how he manages to draw pensions from three countries.

Operation Last Chance, the campaign to round up the last Nazis in Europe organised by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel, has him on their wanted list. Yet although Hafner, 84, continues to make outrageous statements that would put him behind bars in Germany or Austria, no government has sought to prosecute him.

He calls the death camp of Auschwitz, where 1.1 million Jews were murdered, "a ten star hotel" where "Jews were sent for their own protection. All that stuff about murder is Allied propaganda crap." Of Hitler he says: "I regard him as the greatest man who ever lived, the most important person in the history of the world." He said he gets out of bed every day to give the raised arm salute to his Fuehrer.

He agreed to a documentary being made on him "because I want to set the record straight about our ideals and our cause during the Third Reich." He admits he dreams of seeing a "Fourth Reich" in Germany adding: "I am only sorry I will not be around to see it."

After WWII, Hafner found asylum in Franco's Spain, protected from allegations of war crimes and surrounded by old comrades. This is why Spain is "paradise on earth" for him - a place that allows him to continue to nurture his fanaticism, and yet protects him from the scrutiny of international justice.

"No Jew was ever killed under Hitler for being a Jew," he said, refusing to elaborate on what he did when posted to the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany.

Hafner is not being pursued actively by governments although Nazi war crime sleuths in Israel believe him guilty of atrocities in the two concentrations camps where he worked and on the Eastern Front where he served as a fighting SS man.

He draws three pensions because he qualifies for a war pension from Germany, an old age pension in Spain where he worked for many years as a pig farmer and one from Italy because it is the land of his birth.

Being a former concentration camp guard is not a barrier to receiving a German pension.

In the documentary, Hafner is brought face-to-face with a survivor from Dachau. You survived quite well," Hafner responds matter-of-factly after the Jewish victim recounts his painful memories.

According to Hafner there are hundreds like him in Spain.

Gunter Schwaiger, who filmed Hafner's Paradise, said: "He is in close contact with people who are indeed wanted or have been convicted in other countries because of their anti-Semitic actions and declarations, or because they have denied the existence of the Holocaust.

"Paul María Hafner is neither a Martian nor a diabolical being, but an apparently respectable gentleman living in a smart Madrid neighbourhood who, aged 84, might be taken for a congenial grandfather, filled with goodness and affection.

"The defeat of the Third Reich was an enormous trauma for Hafner, from which he has not yet recovered. His convictions have simply become firmer. He is not troubled by the accounts of the victims, or that National Socialism led the world to disaster. His fanaticism remains just as intact today as 60 years ago."

The film is due for release in the UK in the spring.

TRAIN OF COMMEMORATION TO AUSCHWITZ

Frankfurt, Germany (The Week)
Train to Auschwitz: A mobile exhibition dedicated to the children deported by the Nazis has begun a six-month journey through Germany and Poland. The Train of Commemoration carries photos, letters, and other documents related to the 1.5 million children who were transported by the Reichsbahn, the national railway, to concentration camps during the Holocaust. It will visit 30 cities before winding up at Auschwitz. The museum train is a way for Deutsche Bahn, the successor company to the Reichsbahn, to reflect on its complicity in the Holocaust. Deutsche Bahn director Hartmut Mehdorn rejected a proposal to install exhibits in train stations. "The subject is far too serious for people to engage with it while chewing on a sandwich and rushing to catch a train," he said.

NEW PIX DISCOVERED OF SS GUARDS FROLICKING AT AUSCHWITZ

In the Shadow of Horror, SS Guardians Frolic (NYT)

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — Last December, Rebecca Erbelding, a young archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, opened a letter from a former United States Army intelligence officer who said he wanted to donate photographs of Auschwitz he had found more than 60 years ago in Germany.

Ms. Erbelding was intrigued: Although Auschwitz may be the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, there are only a small number of known photos of the place before its liberation in 1945. Some time the next month, the museum received a package containing 16 cardboard pages, with photos pasted on both sides, and their significance quickly became apparent.

As Ms. Erbelding and other archivists reviewed the album, they realized they had a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break.

In all there are 116 pictures, beginning with a photo from June 21, 1944, of Höcker and the commandant of the camp, Richard Baer, both in full SS regalia. The album also contains eight photos of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor notorious for participating in the selections of arriving prisoners and bizarre and cruel medical experiments. These are the first authenticated pictures of Mengele at Auschwitz, officials at the Holocaust museum said.

The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album, a compilation of pictures taken by SS photographers in the spring of 1944 and discovered by a survivor in another camp. Those photos depict the arrival at the camp of a transport of Hungarian Jews, who at the time made up the last remaining sizable Jewish community in Europe. The Auschwitz Album, owned by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust museum, depicts the railside selection process at Birkenau, the area where trains arrived at the camp, as SS men herded new prisoners into lines.

The comparisons between the albums are both poignant and obvious, as they juxtapose the comfortable daily lives of the guards with the horrific reality within the camp, where thousands were starving and 1.1 million died.

For example, one of the Höcker pictures, shot on July 22, 1944, shows a group of cheerful young women who worked as SS communications specialists eating bowls of fresh blueberries. One turns her bowl upside down and makes a mock frown because she has finished her portion.

On that day, said Judith Cohen, a historian at the Holocaust museum in Washington, 150 new prisoners arrived at the Birkenau site. Of that group, 21 men and 12 women were selected for work, the rest transported immediately to the gas chambers.

Those killings were part of the final frenetic efforts of the Nazis to eliminate the Jews of Europe and others deemed undesirable as the war neared its end. That summer the crematoriums broke down from overuse and some bodies had to be burned in open pits. A separate but small group of known preliberation photos were taken clandestinely of those burnings.

Auschwitz was abandoned and evacuated on Jan. 18, 1945, and liberated by Soviet forces on Jan. 27. Many of the Höcker photos were taken at Solahütte, an Alpine-style recreation lodge the SS used on the far reaches of the camp complex alongside the Sola River.

Though they as yet have no plans to exhibit the Höcker album photos, curators at the Holocaust Memorial Museum have created an online display of them on the museum’s Web site (ushmm.org) that will be available this week. In many cases they have contrasted the Höcker images with those from the Auschwitz Album. In one, SS women alight from a bus at Solahütte for a day of recreation; meanwhile, in a picture from the Auschwitz Album taken at about the same time, haggard and travel-weary women and children get off a cattle car at the camp.

U.N. TO RENAME AUSCHWITZ DEATH CAMP

Poland says UN to rename Auschwitz death camp (YNet)
The United Nations has accepted Poland's request to rename the Auschwitz death camp on its list of World Heritage sites to make clear it was run by Germans not Poles, the Polish government announced on Wednesday.

Auschwitz and the linked Birkenau camp in Poland would be known as "Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi German Concentration and Death Camp", Culture Minister Kazimierz Ujazdowski told a news conference in Warsaw. (Reuters)

FIGHT AGAINST TIME TO PRESERVE AUSCHWITZ

Fight against time to preserve Auschwitz
OSWIECIM, Poland (Reuters) - Auschwitz is disintegrating. Over 60 years of winter snow, summer drought and millions of visitors have taken a heavy toll on the former Nazi death camp.

Just as survivors visiting the camp dwindle each year, so time is bearing down on the prison buildings, the rusting barbed-wire fencing and remnants of the gas chambers left behind when the Germans fled in January 1945.

Evidence of the victims -- hair, spectacles, children's toys and other belongings -- is also falling to pieces, eaten away by insects and mildew, its disappearance giving slow support to those who try to deny the Holocaust ever happened.

Unless conservation is stepped up there may soon be little left of the biggest graveyard in Europe, where up to 1.5 million men, women and children, mostly Jews, were slaughtered.

Now new management at the camp, covering 470 acres on two sites near Oswiecim in southern Poland, is accelerating work and hiring more staff to slow the deterioration and save the site as a lesson for future generations.

"If there is one place in the world that should be kept as a reminder of the consequences of racism and intolerance, it is this one," said Piotr Cywinski, who took over as director of Auschwitz in September. "But it gets more difficult every year."