This Could Be The World's Last Nazi Hunter (HBO)
World War II ended seven decades ago, but the hunt for Nazi war criminals is still going strong.
The effort is headquartered out of a former women's prison in the German city of Ludwigsburg that now houses at least 1.7 million documents dating back to the 1930s. Those pages are crucial to Jens Rommel and his small team as they attempt to bring the last remaining Nazi war criminals to justice.
Rommel is the chief senior prosecutor at the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist [Nazi] Crimes. The office has been in operation since 1958, and three years ago Rommel took the helm.
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GERMANY: GERMAN GOVERNMENT APPLIES TO EXTRADITE ERICH PRIEBKE
German/Eng/Nat
The German government has formally applied for the extradition of former S-S captain Erich Priebke from Italy.
Argentina, where Priebke lived for decades after the Second World War, would have to give its consent for Italy to extradite him to Germany.
Argentina's approval to extradite Priebke to Italy stipulated he could not be sent to a third country without permission.
The case of Priebke has focused attention on the failure of the world to bring war criminals to justice.
Jewish groups across the world say justice authorities have long been reluctant to pursue the authors of Second World War atrocities.
The Documentation Centre on Nazi Crimes, in the German town of Ludwigsburg.
The archives here contain details of some of the most chilling crimes of the 20th century.
It's an important historical record and may help prevent the world from forgetting the evil perpetrated by the Nazis in the name of National Socialism.
But as its yellowing files indicate, it's caught in a race with time.
Many of the suspects have already died peacefully in their beds and just three dozen cases remain open.
And experience has taught that the perpetrators are unlikely to be convicted.
SOUNDBITE: (German)
After the war, some 106-thousand, 178 judicial investigations were carried out. Of that number only six-thousand, 494 were sentenced. Twelve of those were sentenced to death before the death sentence was banned and 166 were sentenced to life-long imprisonment. Of the number of those sentenced, six-thousand 200 were sentenced for a certain number of years in imprisonment. In total, 98-thousand 52 cases were concluded without punishment.
SUPER CAPTION: Wille Dressen, assistant chief archivist Documentation Centre on Nazi Crimes
Michel Friedman, a lawyer and leading member of Germany's Central Council of Jews, says justice authorities have been slow to pursue war crimes suspects.
SOUNDBITE:
I believe that the world and Europe is not and was not very active in looking for and to say and work out all these principles in the legal structures after 1945. The exception was the trial, the exception was the judgement, the exception was that which happened
after the Nuremberg trials. Not only in Germany but in France, Italy and all these countries. This is a shaming, this is a problem, and Priebke is one of the chapters which demonstrates that we didn't show the face of justice there were it was necessary and with which energy I would have liked to see.
SUPER CAPTION: Michel Friedman, Central Council of Jews
Former S-S captain Erich Priebke was the latest alleged Nazi war criminal to go on trial.
But the difficulty of obtaining a conviction in cases of this sort was underlined at his trial in Italy.
A military tribunal convicted Priebke of involvement in the 1944 Nazi massacre of 335
civilians at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome.
But the court said aggravating circumstances of cruelty and premeditation, needed to get around a 30-year statute of limitations on murder, did not apply to Priebke's actions.
It freed him - but Priebke was soon returned to jail when protesters - mostly members of Rome's Jewish community - mobbed the courthouse.
And after Germany indicated it would seek his extradition, Priebke was formally re- arrested.
On Tuesday, Germany formally announced it would seek his extradition.
Prosecutors say they are confident that under German laws, they will be able to convict him.
SOUNDBITE: (German)
As you know the shootings in the Ardeatine Caves were gruesomely carried out. And we accuse Priebke of taking part in the killings of the victims. In our judicial system this stands as aiding and abetting in murder.
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Nazi hunter skeptical about SS officer P.1
Nazi hunter skeptical about SS officer
AP) -- 2 hours ago
BERLIN (AP) — The Simon Wiesenthal Center's top Nazi hunter said Tuesday he is not aware of any evidence of war crimes committed by a 97-year-old former SS officer, despite a newspaper report that he allegedly admitted his signature is on an order to kill thousands of Jews.
Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said there is evidence that Bernhard Frank was a devoted Nazi, but that he has seen nothing to indicate he was involved in ordering that Jews be killed.
He's attributed with far more responsibility and criminal guilt than he actually deserves, Zuroff said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. That's not to say he isn't a Nazi — even a zealous Nazi who still today identifies with the National Socialist movement — but there's a big difference between that and portraying him as one of the key operatives of the Nazi Holocaust.
Frank is best known as the SS officer who, in the final days of the war, arrested top Nazi Hermann Goering on Hitler's orders on accusations of treason. He has written two books in German on his experiences.
It was not clear where Frank could be reached; a call to one person of his name went unanswered and a call to another was an unrelated person with the same name.
According to an article in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, American investigator Mark Gould, posing as a neo-Nazi, met with Frank over the years and the two developed a trusting relationship.
It said the investigator got him to divulge that in 1941 he worked for the office of SS leader Heinrich Himmler and signed a document ordering the killing of Jews in newly-captured Soviet territories — a precursor to the wholesale killing to come.
The newspaper called him the most senior Nazi criminal still alive today and said a group of American families whose relatives were killed by the Nazis were planning to file a lawsuit against him.
In a press release Tuesday, Gould said he has filed a civil suit with a U.S. federal court in Washington, accusing Frank of genocide, torture, kidnapping and crimes against humanity.
It's been over six decades since Bernhard Frank took a pivotal role in the Nazis' extermination program, but given the cover-up of his identity and the lack of criminal remedies, this led to the decision to file a civil suit and to publish his crimes, Gould said.
The group involved in what it called a six-year investigation was planning a news conference in New York later in the day.
Zuroff said his research indicates that many people signed the same 1941 document, and that Frank's job was just to verify that the language conformed with Nazi ideology — rather than actually give any order for killing.
There seems to be a very deliberate inflation of the criminal aspect of his activities, Zuroff said.
Though Frank ended the war with the relatively high rank of Obersturmbannfuehrer — the SS equivalent of a lieutenant colonel — Zuroff said he worked in an office whose role was more ideological rather than operative.
When we rank them, it's not a question of their rank, it's a question of what they did, Zuroff said, referring to the Wiesenthal Center's annual most wanted Nazis list.
Thomas Will, the deputy head of the special German prosecutors office that investigates Nazi-era crimes, said that he has seen Frank's name surface in wartime documents, but that there has never been any evidence of a crime for which he could be prosecuted.
There is no known concrete accusation against Mr. Frank, he said in a telephone interview from Ludwigsburg.
He added, however, that his office would be very interested if there was new evidence.
Holocaust and Genocide Lecture Series - February 5, 2019 - Professor Christopher Browning, Ph.D.
ORDINARY MEN AS PERPETRATORS: A REAPPRAISAL AFTER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
- Professor Christopher Browning, Ph.D., Frank Porter Graham Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Robert L. Harris Memorial Lecture
Ahnenerbe | Wikipedia audio article
This is an audio version of the Wikipedia Article:
Ahnenerbe
00:03:01 1 Background
00:06:54 1.1 The Nazi Party takes power
00:10:44 2 History
00:10:53 2.1 Formation
00:21:09 2.2 The Holocaust
00:22:10 2.3 The Second World War
00:22:49 2.4 Institutes
00:23:51 3 Expeditions
00:24:00 3.1 Karelia
00:25:22 3.2 Bohuslän
00:26:54 3.3 Italy
00:27:30 3.4 Western Eurasia
00:29:18 3.5 New Swabia
00:29:38 3.6 Germany
00:29:47 3.6.1 Hedeby
00:30:04 3.6.2 Baden-Württemberg
00:30:55 3.6.3 Mauern
00:31:59 3.7 France
00:32:36 3.7.1 Bayeux Tapestry
00:33:20 3.8 Tibet
00:34:04 3.9 Poland
00:36:05 3.10 Crimea
00:37:29 3.11 Ukraine
00:38:11 4 Cancelled expeditions
00:38:21 4.1 Bolivia
00:39:32 4.2 Iran
00:40:18 4.3 Canary Islands
00:41:03 4.4 Iceland
00:42:39 5 Other Ahnenerbe activities
00:42:49 5.1 Master Plan East
00:45:07 5.2 Failed seizure of Tacitus manuscript
00:45:39 5.3 Headquarters relocation
00:46:18 6 Financing
00:47:48 7 Medical experiments
00:48:25 7.1 Dachau
00:50:12 7.2 Skulls
00:51:10 8 Post–World War II
00:51:20 8.1 Trials
00:54:09 9 Legacy
00:54:17 9.1 Academic study
00:55:31 9.2 Influence in pseudo-archaeology
00:56:04 10 In popular culture
00:57:41 11 See also
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The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
- Socrates
SUMMARY
=======
The Ahnenerbe (German: [ˈʔaːnənˌʔɛʁbə], ancestral heritage) was a think tank that operated in Nazi Germany between 1935 and 1945. It was an appendage of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and had been established by Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS. It was devoted to the task of promoting the racial doctrines espoused by Adolf Hitler and his governing Nazi Party, specifically by supporting the idea that the modern Germans descended from an ancient Aryan race which was biologically superior to other racial groups. The group comprised scholars and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines.
Hitler came to power in 1933 and over the following years he converted Germany into a one-party state under the control of his Nazi Party and governed by his personal dictatorship. He espoused the idea that modern Germans descended from the ancient Aryans, who he claimed—in contrast to established academic understandings of prehistory—had been responsible for most major developments in human history such as agriculture, art, and writing. His racial theories and claims about prehistory were not accepted by the majority of the world's scholarly community, and a decision was taken to give them greater scholarly backing. The Ahnenerbe was established with the purpose of providing evidence for Nazi racial doctrine and to promote these ideas to the German public through books, articles, exhibits, and conferences. Ahnenerbe scholars interpreted evidence to fit Hitler's beliefs, and some consciously fabricated evidence to do so; many of their ideas are regarded as pseudoscience. The organisation sent out various expeditions to other parts of the world, intent on finding evidence of ancient Aryan expansion.
The Nazi government used the Ahnenerbe's research to justify many of their policies. For instance, the think tank's claim that archaeological evidence indicated that the ancient Aryans lived across eastern Europe was cited in justification of German military expansion into that region. Ahnenerbe research was also cited in justification of the Holocaust, the mass killing of Jews and other groups—including Roma and homosexuals—through extermination camps and other methods. In 1937 the project was renamed the Research and Teaching Community of the Ancestral Heritage (Forschungs- und Lehrgemeinschaft des Ahnenerbe). Some of the group's investigations were placed on hold at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Towards the end of the war, Ahnenerbe members destroyed much of the organisation's paperwork to avoid it incriminating them in forthcoming war crimes tribunals.
Many Ahnenerbe members escaped the de-Nazification policies in West Germany and remained active in the country's archaeological establishment throughout the post-war decades. This stifle ...
Germany paying pensions to Nazi collaborators in UK and Belgium
Germany paying pensions to Nazi collaborators in UK and Belgium Nearly 75 years after the second world war, is still paying monthly pensions to collaborators of the wartime Nazi regime in several European countries including Belgium and Britain, according to Belgian MPs and media reports. The foreign affairs committee of the Belgian parliament this week voted in favour of urging the German federal government to put an immediate stop to the payments and publish a full list of those receiving them. “The receipt of pensions for collaborating with one of the most murderous regimes in history is in clear contradiction to the work of remembrance and for peace constituted in the European project,” states the resolution, which was passed unanimously. The document said nearly 30 people in Belgium are still receiving the payments under a decree by granting the same nationality and pension rights as German citizens to foreigners, including Waffen-SS volunteers, from Nazi-occupied territories who pledged “allegiance, fidelity, loyalty and obedience” to the Führer. German authorities have “consistently refused to communicate the list of pension recipients to their Belgian counterparts, citing legal concerns around the protection of privacy”, .The resolution’s authors, five MPs from French-speaking parties, said the monthly payments were made by individual German states and the names of the recipients were known to the German embassy in Brussels. Responding to the claims, the Germany labour ministry said 18 people in were receiving war pensions but “there are no former members of the Waffen-SS” among them. It did not name the pensioners or say on what grounds they were entitled to the payments. Authorities in Belgium were not aware of the pensioners’ identities, the Belgian MPs Olivier Maingain, Stephane Crusnière, Véronique Caprasse and Daniel Senesael said, adding that the situation was “the same in the UK, where former SS people also receive payments directly from the German länder [states] without the amounts being taxed or communicated to the British authorities”. The German embassy in London said it did not have any information about the Belgian allegations. The Belgian state broadcaster, RTBF, were also being made in Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. In the Netherlands, historian Cees Kleijn has said war criminals may be among 34 former Nazi collaborators receiving German government pensions, according to the state broadcaster NOS. Citing the work of a Belgian researcher specialising in the second world war, Alvin de Coninck, RTBF said the payments range from €435 to €1,275 a month, depending on the length of time the recipients – among a total of 80,000 Belgians convicted of various forms of wartime collaboration – had spent in prison after the war. By contrast, Belgian survivors among the 12 million foreigners from 20 countries who were enrolled in Nazi Germany’s forced labour schemes receive €50.“This pension shows that Belgian collaborators with the Nazi regime are considered to be like any other kind of worker,” the MPs said, “even if they were convicted of actively participating in the war”, creating a “morally problematic” situation. The pension payments have continued because Hitler’s 1941 decree was not repealed by the postwar Potsdam Conference of July 1945, at which Britain, the US and the Soviet Union established Germany’s postwar order, deciding on its demilitarisation, dismantling, democratisation and denazification. German payments to wartime collaborators have been a source of concern in Belgium since their existence was first uncovered by a Socialist deputy in 1997. In 2012, it emerged through parliamentary questions that about 2,500 Belgians were still receiving some form of German state pension, the majority of whom are now thought to have died. “Among the beneficiaries were some residents of eastern Belgium and Alsace who acquired German nationality after the Nazi invasion, but also Belgians who joined the Waffen-SS during the war,” said De Coninck, the son of a resistance fighter and member of Remembrance, a group of Belgian concentration camp survivors. In 2017, at the request of Remembrance, Germany’s then ambassador, Rüdiger Lüdekring, told a hearing of the Belgian parliament that as a representative of the federal government he was was unable to give any precise information because the relevant details were held by Germany’s 16 länder.A Belgian parliamentary commission visited Berlin last year to discuss the issue with their German counterparts. The MPs established that a majority of 27 Belgian wartime collaborators still receiving German pensions were being paid by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Belgian media reported. The present German ambassador to Belgium, Martin Kotthaus, told a Flemish-language news site last year that an investigation was under way to establish what exact role the remaining recipients of the pens