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Wednesday December 9 1:53 PM ET
HAMBURG, Germany (AP) - Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel has stepped into a bitter German debate over the Holocaust, reproaching an author for his comments regarding Nazi crimes.
In an open letter published Wednesday in the weekly Die Zeit newspaper, Wiesel called on noted German author Martin Walser to clarify his controversial remarks.
In a speech in November, Walser warned against the ``exploitation'' of German guilt about the Holocaust ``for present purposes,'' and said that the horror of Auschwitz should not become ``a routine threat.''
The leader of Germany's Jewish community, Ignatz Bubis, accused Walser of encouraging neo-Nazi groups with his speech.
Wiesel echoed Bubis' charge, telling Walser, ``You have opened a door that others can push through, others who follow completely different political views and are dangerous in a completely different way.''
Weisel said Walser, who wrote the foreword to the German edition of Wiesel's first book, ``Night,'' should tell his readers: ``Protection of the memory (of the Holocaust) is part of a dignified life. They deserve to hear it and you deserve to say it to them.''
FEATURE-Leaders of Holocaust reparations drive faulted
By Arthur Spiegelman
LOS ANGELES, Dec 11 (Reuters) - In the midst of an extraordinary battle to right wrongs of the Holocaust, the leaders of the fight are being accused of turning one of history's greatest tragedies into a tawdry tale of dollars and cents.
Thanks to a dogged coalition of Jewish groups, usually warring U.S. politicians, the keepers of long-secret wartime archives and a band of lawyers, more than $1.5 billion has been freed this year alone by governments and businesses to benefit people who had no friends when they most needed them -- the surviving victims of Hitler's Holocaust.
More than 15 million pages of top-secret archives have been opened, graphically tracing long-forgotten misdeeds of banks, insurance companies, greedy collaborators and countries like Switzerland, Sweden, Spain, France, Germany and Austria that profited from the systematic slaughter of European Jewry.
By next month, more than 100,000 Holocaust survivors will have received payments from the new reparations funds.
But the leaders of the fight are coming under intense criticism, accused of an unseemly quest for what one critic, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, called ``billions of dollars in Holocaust guilt money.''
Accusations are flying fast and furious that Jewish groups such as the World Jewish Congress and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, aided by legions of class-action lawyers, are reducing one of the century's most horrific acts to ``mere dollars and cents'' and, in the process, provoking a new anti-Semitism.
FIGHT FOR SPOILS?
``Jewish groups fight for spoils of Swiss case,'' declared a recent headline in the New York Times -- a line that has infuriated Jewish groups that deny any such fight among themselves for either spoils or profit.
``I fear that all the talk about Holocaust-era assets is skewing the Holocaust, making the century's last word on the Holocaust that the Jews died not because they were Jews but because they had bank accounts, gold, art and property,'' said Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League.
It is a point Foxman has made often in speeches, interviews and newspaper articles, leading WJC Executive Director Elan Steinberg to say sharply: ``Holocaust victims are not going to give up their claims because Mr. Foxman feels uncomfortable.''
Foxman argues the horror of the Holocaust, when Hitler rounded up and murdered 6 million of Europe's Jews, is being perverted by the recent push for reparations that has taken off more than 50 years after the war.
``The lessons (of the Holocaust) will be diminished and skewed by the efforts to put money over morality,'' he said in the Wall Street Journal last week.
And columnist Krauthammer, in a savage attack on lawyers handling class-action suits on behalf of Holocaust survivors, said, ``The only thing certain to come out this grotesque scramble for money is a revival of Shylockian stereotypes.''
'NOT A QUESTION OF MONEY,' WIESEL SAYS
But Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and survivor of two concentration camps, powerfully disagrees.
``It is not a question of money. The reason we were so late (in seeking reparations) is because we were embarrassed for so long to talk of money. Jews were robbed equally of their wealth and their poverty. They came with one shirt to the camps and that was taken away,'' he said in an interview with Reuters.
``It is wrong to think of this as about money. It is about justice, conscience and morality. All the money in the Swiss banks would not give a woman back a scarf that was taken from her in the camps, or her life.''
Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, agreed.
``You can't say, 'Don't go after the money because it would create anti-Semitism,''' he said. ``I have no doubt that it will be created, but this is a moral fight and it shows where they are at, not where we are at. You also can't just go after the Swiss, who were neutral in the war, and not go after those who actually flew the Swastika.''
Jewish groups freely concede some of the lawyers in the class actions suits flooding U.S. courts against banks and businesses that collaborated with the Nazis want a slice of the settlements that may be reached. But most of those who handled the landmark Brooklyn federal court case this summer in which major Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion in reparations for unreturned Holocaust-era assets worked for free.
One lawyer in the case is seeking compensation and a Federal judge has yet to rule on what lawyers would receive or on a compensation plan for survivors. A coalition of Jewish groups agreed to the plan in two meetings that participants said went smoothly, without argument or ``a fight for spoils.'' The groups are not asking for any money for themselves.
Besides the $1.25 billion from Swiss banks, Holocaust survivors and heirs will receive money from a $200 million Swiss humanitarian fund; $60 million from the Tripartite Gold Commission, which returned looted gold to nations after the war but not to victims until this year; a $90 million fund from insurance companies, and a $200 million Austrian fund.
WHY REPARATIONS MOVEMENT WAS DELAYED
Six reasons are usually given as to why the reparations movement started so late but took off with such success more than 50 years after the war ended:
-- A new generation has come to power in Europe not tainted by the war.
-- Documentation on what WJC President Edgar Bronfman calls the ``greatest theft in history'' became available thanks to an order from President Bill Clinton declassifying some 15 million pages of secret documents tracing Nazi business dealings.
-- People around the world became more sensitized to the issue because of the success of the film ``Schindler's List.''
-- The 50th anniversary of the end of the war in 1995 also brought about soul-searching by Europeans.
-- U.S. government backing for a reparations fight that united political enemies Clinton and powerful, outspoken New York Republican Sen. Alfonse D'Amato.
-- And what Bronfman calls ``the arrogant attitude'' of the Swiss bankers, which helped galvanise support against them.
``They (the bankers) started off rudely and badly and never understood what they should do. They spent an awful lot of money on an awful lot of people, consultants, public relations etc., and (helped turn) this into the big moral issue of the 20th century,'' he said in an interview with Reuters.
At his first meeting with the Swiss, Bronfman was not even offered a chair. It was something he never forgot and some wags call the reparations the price for ``Bronfman's chair.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Ga. Historian To Seek Gingrich U.S. House Seat
By June Preston
ATLANTA (Reuters) - The historian hired, then abruptly fired, four years ago by House Speaker Newt Gingrich over controversial comments she made about the Holocaust announced her candidacy Thursday for his Georgia congressional seat.
``I am going to run,'' Christina Jeffrey told Reuters before a news conference in Marietta, Georgia, to announce her candidacy for the seat Gingrich has held for 20 years.
Jeffrey, a Republican who teaches at Kennesaw State College in Kennesaw, Georgia, about 20 miles (32 km) north of Atlanta, was hired by Gingrich to be House of Representatives historian after a Republican sweep in the November 1994 congressional elections.
He fired her one week later when he learned that a newspaper planned a story about comments she made concerning a 1987 course on the Holocaust. As a member of a U.S. Department of Education review panel, Jeffrey had criticized the program, saying it lacked balance because it did not include ``the Nazi point of view.''
She countered with a federal lawsuit and Gingrich settled the matter by publicly apologizing to Jeffrey, who teaches political science at Kennesaw State.
Gingrich also taught a class there, which resulted in a congressional reprimand and a $300,000 fine for using campaign funds to pay for the course and for providing the U.S. House Ethics panel with false information. Gingrich has paid the fine.
Jeffrey's announcement came outside the gates of Marietta National Cemetery. She noted that she and Gingrich share a common conservative political philosophy and added, ``That's why I'm going to win.''
She said she would give up her post as a college professor to seek the 6th District seat. The Georgia Board of Regents does not allow college professors to run for federal office, but Jeffrey said she does not plan to teach again next semester.
``Thanks to Newt fooling around and not immediately submitting his letter (of resignation), I can do this now,'' Jeffrey said.
Days after the November elections in which Republicans lost five seats in the U.S. Congress, Gingrich announced he was no longer a candidate for the U.S. speaker's job he has held since 1995. He also said he would resign from Congress, but did not indicate when he would depart. Because of the delay, no special election has yet been scheduled to fill his seat.
``He actually did me a favor, for once,'' the political science professor said. ``If he had resigned on Nov. 6, I would have been in the middle of a class, but by the time they hold the election, the semester will be over.''
In Georgia, special elections are generally open to anyone of any political persuasion and a few other candidates have indicated an interest in running, including Republican state school board member Johnny Isakson, who is considered a favorite to win.
Democrat Gary ``Bats'' Pelphrey, who lost to Gingrich in the November election, has also said he is a candidate. Great American Cookie Co. founder Michael Coles, a Democrat who lost to incumbent U.S. Sen. Paul Coverdell in the election, said he will not be a candidate.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Canada pays vets who suffered under Japan, Germany
By Randall Palmer
OTTAWA, Dec 11 (Reuters) - The Canadian government announced on Friday it would compensate veterans who suffered horrific conditions in Japanese and German concentration camps more than half a century ago.
Japanese captors subjected almost 1,700 Canadian soldiers in Hong Kong to more than three years of forced labour. Many ended up in skeletal condition -- or simply died.
Another couple of dozen airmen were ``exposed to unique brutality and horrors while incarcerated in Buchenwald Concentration Camp'' in Germany, a government statement said.
Japan paid the veterans C$1.50 a day after the war for each day they were in prison. Germany paid nothing.
Both countries have consistently rebuffed Canadian representations to increase -- or in Germany's case to start -- payments but, because of the veterans' advancing age, Ottawa decided to make payments on its own amounting to C$18 per day -- totalling C$18 million.
``Prisoner of war slave labourers worked until the flesh rotted from their toes, exposing bone,'' said Reform Party Member of Parliament Peter Goldring, who had pressed the Canadian government to take action.
``(They) were fed food so scarce and putrid with maggots that some even screened human feces for food sustenance. The sheer horror of the conditions of slave labourers under the Japanese compares badly -- if that is possible -- to the conditions of slave labourers in Nazi Germany.''
Veterans Affairs Minister Fred Mifflin, in making the announcement, said: ``This issue has gone on too long and now is the time to do the right thing. This is an extraordinary payment, to extraordinary individuals, who suffered extraordinary hardship while in captivity.''
On October 27, 1941, a total of 1,975 Canadians sailed from Vancouver to join a small force defending Hong Kong and on December 11 became the first in the Canadian Army to engage the enemy during the war.
``For two desperate and bloody weeks, the Grenadiers and Royal Rifles fought valiantly against overwhelming Japanese forces. But the situation was hopeless and Hong Kong surrendered on Christmas Day,'' a government statement said.
The Japanese captured 1,685 Canadians, and 260 of them died in captivity. Ottawa's payments will cover about 700 veterans or their surviving wives.
Goldring said the bill should be sent on to Japan, but Veterans Affairs spokeswoman Janice Summerby said: ``It's not a matter of writing up an invoice and passing it on.''
Goldring, who accused Britain and Canada of colluding in the 1950s to conceal possible benefits from their veterans, said this settlement will put pressure on London to compensate its veterans.
($1-$1.54 Canadian) ((Reuters Ottawa Bureau, 1-613-235-6745, fax 1-613-235-5890))
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Berlin bus stop houses new Holocaust memorial
BERLIN, Dec 11 (Reuters) - A Berlin bus stop became Germany's latest Holocaust memorial site on Friday with two posters commemorating the deportation of European Jews by the Nazis during World War Two.
The bus stop is a few steps away from what was the notorious Jewish Department run by top Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who masterminded the deportations of millions of European Jews to death camps in Germany and German-occupied Poland.
The poster memorial in the bus stop waiting room, unveiled in a brief ceremony, was initiated by artist Ronnie Golz and advertising agent Hans Wall in consultation with a Berlin-based historical foundation, Topography of Terror.
Reinhard Ruerup, head of the foundation, said the posters commemorated ``a dark chapter in Germany's history'' in a new way.
Their posters, one in German and the other in English, explain Eichmann's role in the Holocaust.
The bus stop is on Berlin's number 100 bus route which is used by many tourists to pass one of Berlin's most famous landmarks, the Brandenburg Gate.
``I hope that passengers from Germany and abroad will notice it,'' Wall told journalists. ``This is to show that anti-Semitism and xenophobia will not stand a chance again in Germany.''
The foundation runs a historical documentation centre on the site of Berlin's former Gestapo headquarters with a permanent exhibition on the role of the secret police in the Third Reich.
Part of it is set in cellars of the building and, as part of the exhibition, visitors can see the cells where prisoners were often tortured and murdered.
Eichmann was nicknamed the ``technician of death'' for drawing up deportation plans that made Nazi plans for the ``Final Solution'' -- the genocide of six million Jews -- possible.
After the end of World War Two, he fled to Argentina and lived there under an assumed name until 1960 when he was abducted to Israel, tried and executed two years later.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Friday December 11 8:52 PM ET
By MATTHIAS BRUELLMANN Associated Press Writer
BERN, Switzerland (AP) - Swiss dealers and collectors played a major part in World War II trafficking in Nazi-looted art, but no one ever was punished, according to a government-commissioned report released Friday.
Some prominent collectors and dealers even were compensated by the Swiss government when, in a fraction of the cases, they were forced to return the art, the report said.
``What happened during and after the war in the art-trading world is a scandal,'' said historian Thomas Buomberger, who for two years coordinated the report on Switzerland's role in the dealings.
The report was commissioned long before plans were laid for the U.S.-sponsored conference in Washington earlier this month to gain an overview of what happened to the art, much of which was stolen from Holocaust victims.
Buomberger said his view of the Swiss involvement was limited mainly because many vital archives - including that of the highest Swiss court - remained closed to him.
But he said what he was able to examine made it clear that hundreds if not thousands of art objects passed through Switzerland. A 1946 U.S. government report listed more than 2,000 people in a number of countries who trafficked in Nazi-looted art.
Buomberger said he found Switzerland handled victims' claims for the stolen art after the war similar to the treatment of the heirs of Holocaust victims who tried to recover bank deposits: Great obstacles were placed in their way.
The Swiss government announced that in mid-January it will open a claims office in Bern to help the heirs of Holocaust victims looking for art looted from their families.
FOCUS-Possibility raised of new Holocaust commission
By Joan Gralla
NEW YORK, Dec 11 (Reuters) - A key Jewish group, deciding whether to fight a multibillion-dollar German-U.S. bank merger, said Friday that its concerns about outstanding Holocaust issues might be addressed through a new international commission.
Bilateral negotiations are another possible option, according to the World Jewish Congress, which might try to block the $10.1 billion merger between Deutsche Bank (DBKG.F) and Bankers Trust (BT.N) unless it is satisfied that the big German bank will adequately respond to claims that it looted bank accounts and personal assets from Holocaust victims.
Elan Steinberg, WJC executive director, said in a telephone interview: ``I don't want to prejudge it, but what we certainly want is a process, a transparent mechanism, which would allow us to arrive at the truth, which would allow us to determine what the moral and material responsibilities are.''
New York State banking regulators, who along with the U.S.
Federal Reserve must approve the Deutsche Bank-BT merger, last year heeded similar objections the Congress raised against a merger between Credit Suisse Group and the Union Bank of Switzerland before the deal went ahead.
The WJC now is in the midst of talks with the U.S. and German governments, as well as with Deutsche Bank, and Steinberg said it could decide as soon as next week whether it will call for a delay of the Deutsche Bank merger.
The battle with the German banks was not simply about economic justice, but also a fight to correct the historical record, Steinberg said. ``In terms of both moral and material restitution, moral restitution is confronting the past honestly so that we have an honourable future for all of us,'' he said.
Claims against insurers prompted the creation in October of an international commission to handle disputes over prewar life insurance policies that were bought by European Jews. The WJC valued those claims at up to $2.5 billion in today's dollars.
That commission, which also will answer questions about the historical record, might be a template for a new international body to handle billions of dollars of claims from Holocaust victims and survivors against German banks, Steinberg said.
Deutsche Bank and a few other German banks face class-action lawsuits filed by Holocaust victims in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suits charged the conversion of stolen assets ``played an integral role in the Nazi Holocaust and war effort.''
A Deutsche Bank spokeswoman referred calls for comment to the bank's Frankfurt headquarters, which on Dec. 4 said it had nothing new to add to the remarks made by its chief executive, Rolf Breuer, when the merger with Bankers Trust was announced.
Breuer on Nov. 30 said German banks already were looking at ways to resolve Holocaust issues.
New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, whose sanction threat last year helped persuade Swiss banks to reach a $1.25 billion settlement, has urged delaying the big German bank's merger until the Holocaust issues are resolved.
Hevesi three years ago began to question Swiss banks about how they had treated Holocaust victims, and on Friday, he said the talks with the German banks might wind up much more swiftly. ``I believe that the conversations will pursue the latter end of the track of the talks between the World Jewish Congress and the Swiss,'' Hevesi said.
In a statement, the German bank said: ``Deutsche Bank underlines that its situation is fundamentally different from that of the Swiss banks.'' It also appeared to indirectly address one of the charges in the U.S. lawsuits -- that it financed industries that used slave labour -- by saying: ``Deutsche Bank did not employ the use of slave labour.''
((--U.S. Municipal Desk, 212-859-1654, joan.gralla+reuters.com))
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
EU wants crackdown on racism in candidate countries
By Rolf Soderlind
VIENNA, Dec 12 (Reuters) - The European Union urged eastern European states waiting to join the 15-nation bloc to crack down on racism and pledged similar action of its own.
Sweden, which made the proposal at a summit here, said it was especially important to educate people in former Soviet bloc countries, such as Poland, about the Holocaust when some six million Jews were killed by the Nazis in World War Two.
``We won acceptance for our fight against racism and xenophobia and for our efforts to spread knowledge about the Holocaust,'' Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson told a news conference on Saturday at the end of the two-day EU meeting.
``It is incredibly important to inform about the Holocaust in countries like Poland, Lithuania and so on,'' he said.
Poland is one of six states, five of them former Soviet bloc countries, which have already opened formal talks with the EU about joining. Lithuania is one of a number of other states waiting in the wings.
``There are worrying signs of growing anti-Semitic tendencies in some countries seeking membership,'' Par Nuder, state secretary at Persson's office, told Reuters.
He noted that Poland had asked to join an anti-racism task force made up of the United States, Britain, Germany, Israel and Sweden.
EU leaders asked the European Commission, the bloc's executive body, to prepare a campaign to fight racism and xenophobia both within the European Union and in aspiring member states.
The programme should be ready by the next EU summit set for Cologne, Germany, in June.
``The European Council invites the Commission to draft proposals for its Cologne meeting for measures to counter racism in the candidate countries and invites the member states to consider taking similar measures inside the union,'' it said.
The EU said it welcomed a Swedish offer to host an international conference in Stockholm next year on educating people on the Holocaust as a way of preventing such an atrocity happening again.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
FEATURE - Ghost of Auschwitz still haunts modern Germany
By Robert Mahoney
BONN, Dec 14 (Reuters) - The picture of the rail tracks leading to the gates of Auschwitz has not faded from Germany's television screens or newsstands.
More than 50 years after the Nazi death camp was closed, the image still haunts a reunited and democratic Germany.
This troubled Martin Walser, one the country's leading writers. He said so in a speech marking his acceptance of the German book trade's peace prize in October.
A taboo was broken. Instead of picking his way carefully through the moral minefield of the Holocaust, the 70-year-old intellectual forged ahead, giving voice to many Germans' unspoken questions about how they should come to terms with the past.
Walser's thoughts were not new. But his timing proved explosive.
The generation that lived through the Holocaust is dying out, adding urgency to the debate about how the new Germany should remember the old.
Claims for restitution of gold and property plundered by the Nazis are flying around the world's courts.
The giant corporations that helped forge the modern economic miracle are being forced to face up to their involvement with the Nazis as former slave labourers file for compensation.
Against this backdrop Walser mounted the prize-giving podium in Frankfurt's St Paul's church, an historic bastion of German liberalism, to assert that over-exposure to the past was counter-productive.
``When the worst footage from the concentration camps is shown, I have looked away 20 times,'' Walser said.
NATIONAL DEBATE
The speech immediately ignited a national debate and outraged the country's tiny Jewish community.
Ignatz Bubis, chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, complained of anti-Semitism and labelled Walser an ``intellectual arsonist.''
Politicians, writers, World War Two survivors and the Israeli ambassador have all joined the fray.
Walser, who seems surprised by the ferocity of the reaction to his speech, has refused to respond to his critics and rejected the offer of a televised debate with Bubis.
The Jewish leader, whose family perished in the Holocaust, has kept up his counter-offensive, although he withdrew a charge of anti-Semitism levelled at Walser's defender, Klaus von Dohnanyi, a former Hamburg mayor whose father was executed for opposing Hitler.
``No serious person denies Auschwitz,'' Walser said in the speech. ``But when the media holds up the past to me every day, I realise that something in me turns against this constant showing of our shame.''
Walser wondered whether the media was less interested in preventing people from forgetting than in ``exploiting our shame for present purposes.''
Bubis leapt on the phrase ``present purposes,'' asking whether Walser meant survivors' compensation claims.
``Absurd,'' replied Walser last week in his only television interview since the speech.
He denied that he was appealing for Germans ``to draw a line under their history,'' and rejected Bubis's accusation that his speech could be exploited by present-day right-wing extremists.
``Bubis accuses me of not speaking about 'crimes' but about our 'shame,''' Walser said. ``That is the essential point. There is a language that must be used when you speak about our past and Ignatz Bubis is the moral arbiter who judges whether you are speaking correctly or incorrectly, and that means whether you are good or evil.''
FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE
Walser said that as a writer he demanded the freedom to speak as his conscience dictated. ``I must be allowed this, otherwise we are heading for another Inquisition,'' he added.
He complained of people using the Nazi past as a ``moral cudgel'' and said his speech was not a call to forget Auschwitz but to see it in the perspective of modern Germany.
That Germany is changing fast. Gerhard Schroeder is the first chancellor not to have lived through the war. He represents the generation that feels no guilt for the sins of their fathers, even though they acknowledge a responsibility to prevent history repeating itself.
Schroeder, 54, wants to create a new ``Berlin Republic,'' a self-confident, economic powerhouse anchored in the European Union and ruled from a reunified Berlin. His Germany is forward-looking and less constrained by its past.
In a reflection of this new spirit, he has rejected former chancellor Helmut Kohl's plan to build a grandiose Holocaust memorial in the heart of the capital, preferring something more modest.
Walser called Kohl's plan a ``football field sized nightmare.''
That the new Germany might need a memorial is demonstrated by polls showing that up to one third of German youngsters do not know what Auschwitz was.
A Forsa poll in July found 31 percent of 14-18 year-olds could not answer the question ``What was Auschwitz-Birkenau?''
A study by Cologne's Institute for Mass Communications put the figure at 20 percent.
``It is a surprise,'' the Institute's Alphons Silbermann told the Tageszeitung. He believed parents and teachers were not informing youngsters adequately about the past.
``Their main source of information is television. And that is obviously not suitable.''
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Bonn developing new Holocaust memorial plan
BONN, Dec 13 (Reuters) - Germany's centre-left government is developing a new plan for a memorial in Berlin to the victims of the Nazi Holocaust to replace a scheme backed by former Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a government spokesman said on Sunday.
The spokesman confirmed that Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's culture supremo Michael Naumann was developing a proposal which would be submitted for discussion to parliament.
He declined to give details, but the Spiegel news weekly reported earlier that Naumann hoped to win parliamentary approval by mid-1999 for a memorial which would make it possible to hold exhibitions on the Holocaust.
Spiegel said Naumann had Schroeder's ``full backing'' for his proposal being drawn up in cooperation with the Holocaust museums in Washington and Jerusalem.
It said Naumann had been convinced by Miles Lerman, head of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum, and U.S. Under Secretary of State Stuart Eizenstat of the need for the memorial to have an educational function.
Naumann has in the past criticised as too monumental the plan backed by Kohl to erect some 2,700 concrete pillars spread over two hectares (4.9 acres) near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate.
Spiegel said that U.S. architect Peter Eisenmann, who designed the original proposal to commemorate the six million mainly-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, was in talks on drawing up a blueprint for Naumann's version.
Eisenmann told the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper, however, that he had not yet discussed the matter with Naumann.
Writer Lea Rosh, instigator of the Holocaust memorial idea, also criticised Naumann's plans. ``You can't make a memorial out of changing exhibitions,'' she told the newspaper.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
France's Le Pen slams door on party rebels
PARIS, Dec 14 (Reuters) - France's Jean-Marie Le Pen slammed the door of his far-right National Front (FN) in the face of party rebels on Monday, barring them from a leadership meeting intended to try to stop their bid to unseat him.
The two sides traded graft charges and fought in court over the party's post box as the struggle intensified for control of the FN, one of Europe's largest ultra-rightist groups.
Backers of Le Pen's rival, Bruno Megret, were stopped in the lobby of the front's headquarters as they turned up to attend a meeting of the front's political bureau.
Jean-Yves Le Gallou, the party chief for the greater Paris area who has joined Megret in his revolt, said hardly half of the 44 members of the political bureau were allowed in and Le Pen no longer had a majority in the leadership.
Le Pen said 31 members attended or were represented.
Megret backer Daniel Simonpieiri said that an emergency party congress called by Megret to try to unseat Le Pen would go ahead on January 17 or 24.
Le Pen, the front's 70-year-old founder, has rejected calls for a congress and vowed to serve out the remaining two years of his three-year term as party president.
Charges flew at separate news conferences. Rebel Serge Martinez accused Le Pen of paying a personal servant and enriching his family from party funds.
Le Pen said the servant was working for the party and charged Martinez used FN funds to pay a personal secretary.
``After having been the FN's locomotive, Le Pen has become its ball and chain,'' Le Gallou said. Le Pen retorted that he was ``a cannon ball.''
``The old man is not dead yet,'' he said defiantly.
Le Gallou said Le Pen had accumulated mistakes over the past 18 months, including publicly repeating in Germany a notorious quip that Nazi gas chambers were ``a detail of history,'' taking part in an election brawl last year and saying he preferred a Socialist to a conservative win in general elections.
``(The mistakes) do not detract from what he did in the 20 years before, but we must now save the baby (the FN) even if it means acting against its father,'' he said.
Le Pen has sacked several rebel leaders from the party. They responded by rescinding the sanctions.
Le Pen has reacted with fury to Megret's challenge, and, comparing himself to Julius Caesar, said he would not allow himself to be killed by Brutus.
``What makes me different from Caesar...is that I take out my sword, and I kill Brutus before he kills me,'' he has said.
Le Pen has called a fabrication Megret's assertion that he has received letters in favour of an emergency congress from more than 20 percent of Front members, the threshold required by party statutes.
Under Le Pen's leadership, the anti-immigrant National Front has grown to become one of Europe's largest ultra-rightist parties and a major player in French politics.
Branded racist and xenophobic by conservative French President Jacques Chirac, the front is constantly in the news and typically wins 15 percent of the vote in national elections, often tipping polls to the left by dividing the right-wing vote.
The true impact of the leadership battle may not be known until next June's elections for the European Parliament, in which both sides expect to put up their own slate of candidates.
While the mainstream parties mostly keep their distance from Le Pen, Megret has long advocated reaching out more aggressively to the right in order to team up and take power from the left.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Monday December 14 11:56 AM ET
By TONY CZUCZKA Associated Press Writer
BONN, Germany (AP) - A decade-long debate about a Holocaust memorial in Berlin was re-opened today when the government proposed scrapping plans for a giant sculpture and building a Holocaust museum, research center and park instead.
Culture Minister Michael Naumann said the new concept he is working on would be aimed chiefly at educating young people about the Holocaust rather than erecting a ``landscape of stone.''
In contrast, a memorial lacking in educational value would signal ``a symbolic ending'' to German efforts to keep alive the memory of a ``historically unique crime,'' Naumann told reporters.
He said Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder backs the initiative, which would require a new design competition.
Naumann said he wants to cooperate with Holocaust museums in Washington and Jerusalem and with the Leo Baeck Institute in New York in setting up a Holocaust library and genocide research center in Berlin as well as an educational museum.
He said the project could be financed by selling one-third of the five-acre site that was donated for the memorial by the federal government under former Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Naumann called the empty plot, near the Brandenburg Gate in the heart of Berlin, ``oversized anyway.'' The Tagesspiegel newspaper estimated its value in excess of $90 million.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem already have offered to help with the museum, Naumann said.
He indicated that Steven Spielberg's archive of filmed interviews of Holocaust survivors is not part of the project, despite an offer by the film director to contribute it.
Spielberg directed the Oscar-winning film ``Schindler's List,'' which tells the story of a non-Jewish industrialist who saved thousands of Jews during World War II.
Germany has been debating plans for a national Holocaust memorial for 10 years, with politicians and intellectuals arguing over whether a single, giant sculpture could adequately represent an atrocity so sweeping and horrific. Eleven million people were killed in the Holocaust, 6 million of them Jews.
The leading design had been a cemetery-like field of 2,700 concrete pillars designed by New York architect Peter Eisenman.
Kohl was the project's biggest backer. But Schroeder, a Social Democrat who defeated Kohl in September elections, has expressed doubts about the monument and plans to have parliament decide how to proceed next year.
Naumann said hopes to enlist Eisenman for the museum project when the two meet Saturday in Berlin.
In reaction, Eisenman said he had too little information to comment today on the new development.
Germany pushes Holocaust museum not stone monument
By Robert Mahoney
BONN, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Gerhard Schroeder's new government waded into the row over a Holocaust memorial in Berlin on Monday with a plan for a museum rather than the sprawling monument backed by Germany's former chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Chancellor Schroeder's culture supremo Michael Naumann said he hoped parliament would vote for the revised plan which he said was supported by Holocaust museums in Washington and Jerusalem.
``What we are suggesting is a museum placed in a memorial park landscape exactly where (the other) monument was supposed to be,'' Naumann, a former New York publisher, told Reuters.
He hoped parliament would vote on the competing designs by the middle of next year.
The debate about how Germany should commemorate the Nazi extermination of European Jewry has been raging since the idea for a memorial in Berlin was floated 10 years ago.
Kohl backed a toned-down plan by New York architect Peter Eisenman for a maze of 2,700 concrete pillars near the city's landmark Brandenburg Gate.
The design was the front runner of four but the whole competition was put on hold because of September's general election.
Naumann, minister of state for culture, said the plan would have had the unintended effect of drawing a line under German history.
He wanted a museum and research centre that would be a spur to remembering not just a monument.
The museum would have a permanent exhibition, a networked library and a ``Genocide Watch'' centre that would seek to prevent the kind of mass killings seen since the end of World War Two, he said.
``A monument as we have it right now does not serve the hard labour of remembrance, it is a ritual...a monument's real purpose is to be overlooked,'' Naumann said.
Jewish leaders and many Berlin politicians rejected Naumann's plans, insisting on a highly-visible monument.
``It is not as if there is nowhere to check out a book on the Holocaust in Berlin,'' said Leah Rosh, leader of a prominent monument pressure group.
``This suggestion has got nothing to do with a memorial,'' added Ignatz Bubis, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Naumann said he was not trying to skirt the issue of German guilt by rejecting a massive monument.
He said he had received support from Washington's Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem in Israel and the Leo Beck institute.
Meanwhile Bubis, who had ignited another national debate over Germany's Nazi past by accusing writer Martin Walser of ``intellectual arson,'' withdrew the remark.
Walser said over-exposure to images of death camps and Nazi horrors were counter-productive.
The two men settled their row after being brought together by the Frankurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper over the weekend.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Austria finds possible slave labour files
VIENNA, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Historians searching for evidence about companies' use of slave labour during the Nazi era said on Tuesday they had uncovered thousands of documents on wartime employees who worked for former Austrian industrial giant Voest.
``We found 38,000 wage documents from the period between 1939 and 1944/45,'' historian Oliver Rathkolb told Reuters, adding that a further 300 files containing other personal documents were also found.
Rathkolb chairs a team of historians who are investigating the wartime activities of Voest, whose present-day successor companies are steelmaker VA Stahl AG (VAST.VI) and engineering group VA Technologie AG (VATE.VI).
He could not say immediately how many of the files related to forced labourers. A preliminary report would be published in six months' time.
VA Stahl and VA Technologie earlier this year jointly employed the historians to clarify how many forced or foreign labourers as well as prisoners from concentration camps had been employed in Voest plants in World War Two.
Rathkolb said the documents, which were found in a former anti-aircraft tower, would help establish under what conditions wartime employees worked at Voest.
U.S. lawyer Edward Fagan, who represents Holocaust victims, has called on several Austrian firms to pay compensation to his clients or be included in a lawsuit against German companies.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
By Joan Gralla
NEW YORK, Dec 15 (Reuters) - The World Jewish Congress is unlikely to block the proposed Deutsche Bank-Bankers Trust merger, at least for now, because the German bank is trying to resolve claims that it looted bank accounts and personal assets from Holocaust victims, a WJC source said on Tuesday.
The source, who declined to be named, cited talks among the World Jewish Congress, Deutsche Bank and the U.S. and German governments, part of a sweeping effort to arrange what the WJC calls moral and economic restitution for Holocaust victims during the Nazi era. Founded in 1936, the World Jewish Congress is an advocacy group that claims to represent Jewish communities in 80 countries.
``The internal report within the World Jewish Congress characterizes Deutsche Bank as being serious and genuine in their talks,'' the source said.
That report is expected be released next week. It could carry considerable weight with the New York City comptroller and New York State banking officials, whose support for the $10.1 billion bank merger is crucial.
On Monday, the comptroller, Alan Hevesi, the comptroller, said the union of Deutsche Bank and New York-based Bankers Trust should be delayed until the German bank dealt with claims that it -- along with other German and Austrian banks -- looted assets from Holocaust victims.
Those allegations were made in billion-dollar class-action suits filed in federal court in New York, which also charged the banks ``played an integral role in the Nazi Holocaust and war effort.''
The city comptroller was expected to take the same approach as the WJC, or one very close to it, and the administration of Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York in the past has deferred to Hevesi in this area.
The World Jewish Congress ``is going to recommend to Mr. Hevesi that there be a moratorium placed, for punitive actions in general, and specifically, in blocking the merger,'' the WJC source said. Hevesi's spokesman was not immediately available.
Last year, Hevesi organized a network of state and local finance officials, whose threat to impose sanctions on Swiss banks helped persuade them to reach a $1.25 billion settlement with Holocaust victims. In March, the state and local group, at the recommendation of the World Jewish Congress, put a moratorium on punitive steps against the Swiss banks.
New York State banking regulators, who along with the U.S. Federal Reserve, must sign off on the Deutsche Bank-Bankers Trust union, could again follow the WJC's advice.
The state officials listened closely earlier this year, when the WJC objected to the merger of Credit Suisse Group and Union Bank of Switzerland, because those banks also faced thorny claims from Holocaust victims and their survivors.
While a Deutsche Bank spokeswoman in New York City was not immediately available to comment, in Frankfurt the bank shot back at a U.S. lawyer representing Holocaust victims, saying his claim to new proof of the bank's Nazi past stemmed from old papers that had been public for 50 years.
New York attorney Edward Fagan said on Monday he sent ``new evidence'' of Deutsche's involvement with the Nazi-era regime in the form of World War Two-era U.S. intelligence documents to U.S. banking and German government officials.
The big German bank's plans to transfer 40 billion of marks ($24.13 billion) of its industrial stakes into separate holding companies were seen as a way to protect itself from coming changes in German tax codes.
Cassandra Kelly at HSBC Securities in London said the move probably was not designed primarily to placate U.S. banking authorities now studying its proposed merger with Bankers Trust.
Tuesday December 15 1:00 PM ET
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - A history museum in Munich is to display previously secret details of Adolf Hitler's failed war-time effort to produce the world's first atom bomb.
The German Museum said Tuesday historians would for the first time have full access to writings by leading Nazi scientists working on the program.
The documents, seized by the United States immediately after World War Two and only returned to Germany in the 1970s, are currently held at the Karlsruhe Research Center and cannot be viewed in full.
Hitler's effort to become the world's first nuclear power had fizzled out by 1944 as a number of his scientists fled Germany to work on the Allied atom program.
The German Museum in the Bavarian state capital did not say exactly when it expected to have the archive, which includes notes written on fragile scraps of paper, ready for viewing.
Berlin Rethinks Memorial Plan
The "interactive" project, which borrows heavily from the instructional experience of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, would replace a monumental sculpture park favored by Schroeder's predecessor, Helmut Kohl, that was set for groundbreaking next month. It called for a graveyard-like labyrinth of 2,700 concrete pillars scattered over a five-acre site near the Brandenburg Gate.
Critics lambasted the model by architect Peter Eisenman and sculptor Richard Serra as gigantic and too abstract to convey the powerful symbolism behind the murder of 6 million European Jews. Michael Naumann, Schroeder's designated culture minister, has scorned the concept as a "wreath dumping ground" whose grandiose scale recalls the projects of Hitler's favorite architect, Albert Speer.
In its place, Naumann said he now envisions a memorial museum that would feature a garden for contemplation, a research library, an exhibition hall and a "genocide-watch" institute that would alert the world to potential mass slaughters in regional flash points. He said the project will be debated in the German Parliament and that a final decision should be reached by next summer.
"We want this to be a living memorial, not a ritualistic monument, that provides a clear and visible link between the past, the present and the future," Naumann said in an interview. "There will be global collaboration in this experience, with places like Yad Vashem in Israel and the Washington Holocaust museum sharing data, exhibits and scholarly expertise."
Schroeder has expressed his full backing for Naumann's project and shares the belief that a Holocaust memorial for "the Berlin Republic" should teach generations of young Germans about the scale of Nazi atrocities and the risk of future genocides. That concern was underscored by a recent survey of German teenagers by the Forsa polling institute that found 31 percent of them could not answer the question, "What was Auschwitz-Birkenau?" -- the adjoining concentration camps that the Nazis established in Poland where an estimated one-third of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust perished.
Ever since the idea was conceived nearly a decade ago, the proposed construction of a Holocaust memorial to honor Jewish victims of Nazi persecution on a vast site at the epicenter of Hitler's Third Reich has provoked heated arguments among politicians, intellectuals and the 100,000 Jews who live in Germany.
A succession of architectural designs have been dismissed as too abstract or frivolous. One envisioned a large Ferris wheel equipped with 16 revolving freight cars similar to those that transported Jews to the death camps, a concept described by the artist as the "tension between hope and hopelessness, between a carnival and genocide."
Other entries in the design competition included building an oven 60 feet high that would burn day and night and erecting a mammoth vessel with enough capacity to contain the blood of 6 million people. The winning entry called for a block-long slab of tilted concrete inscribed with the names of several million Holocaust victims, but Kohl exercised his veto and chose the labyrinth of pillars after Eisenman and Serra consented to reduce its proportions.
Earlier this year, however, a group of prominent German historians and writers urged the government to abandon the project, saying it failed to meet the original standard of creating a place for "quiet mourning and remembrance, of warning or enlightenment." They also questioned why some of the other victims of Nazi crimes, including Gypsies, homosexuals and disabled persons, were not honored by the memorial.
Schroeder's ascendancy as the first German leader without any personal memory of World War II has raised concerns at home and abroad that a new generation of political leadership would try to draw a line under history and strive to be treated as other "normal" Europeans without any special debt incurred by the Nazi legacy.
Since Schroeder's victory in the September election, Naumann has traveled extensively soliciting cooperation from other countries and seeking to convince them that Germany's new government of Social Democrats and Greens has no intention of disavowing its obligations to remember the past.
Naumann said he had won pledges of full cooperation from directors at the Washington museum, the Leo Baeck Institute in New York and Yad Vashem in Israel. "We realize we can all benefit from exchanging materials and exhibits," Naumann said. "This will become a global network to ensure that future generations can learn about the unique tragedy of the Holocaust and to make sure that it does not happen again."
Tuesday December 15 2:23 AM ET
COLOGNE, Germany (AP) - International recording label EMI says it has stopped production of a cassette by German folk singer Heino that contains traditional marching songs the Nazis used during World War II.
The cassette, titled ``As We March Side By Side,'' was produced several years ago but never marketed commercially because of EMI's concerns about its content, EMI spokesman Erich Grote said Monday in Cologne.
The 60-year-old Heino, popular mostly with older Germans, has been singing folk music since the 1960s. ``As We March Side By Side'' contains songs popular before the Third Reich but exploited by the Nazis as propaganda about the glories of Germany.
Heino also sings the German national anthem on the cassette, including the original first verse that was banned after the war. It begins: ``Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles,'' or ``Germany above all.''
The decision to stop production of the cassette followed a German TV report that ``As We March ...'' was being offered for sale by mail order in the extreme right-wing German National Newspaper.
``This was an unpleasant surprise,'' the EMI spokesman told The Associated Press. ``We immediately informed our customers that we would not fill any more orders (for the cassette), because we in no way want to support this kind of product.''
Heino was not immediately available for comment about EMI's decision.
The newspaper, published in Munich by politician Gerhard Frey, had been running the mail-order advertisements for about a year, the station ARD reported.
German bank says ``new'' Nazi proof is 50 yrs old
FRANKFURT, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank, Germany's biggest bank, on Tuesday fired back at a U.S. lawyer representing Holocaust victims, saying his claim to new proof of the bank's Nazi past stemmed from old papers that had been public for about 50 years.
New York attorney Edward Fagan said on Monday he sent ``new evidence'' of Deutsche's involvement with the Nazi-era regime in the form of World War Two-era U.S. intelligence documents to U.S. banking and German government officials.
A Deutsche Bank spokesman said, however, the evidence was hardly new but apparently came from papers that had been available since shortly after the war ended.
``Mr. Fagan has not yet made his documents available to us,'' a bank spokesman said. ``The details that have been made known to us so far indicate that they have been available for decades.''
The German bank's $10.1 billion purchase of Bankers Trust of the United States is pending approval from U.S. authorities.
Fagan said the documents supported a suit he filed in June in federal court demanding $18 billion in reparations from Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank for accounts looted from Holocaust victims by the Nazis.
``With this new evidence I will work even harder to see to it that the survivors will finally get the justice they deserve,'' Fagan said. ``Regulators will now have ammunition as they decide on the proposed merger.''
One post-war document obtained by Reuters called for the bank's liquidation and for its officials to be indicted and tried as war criminals over its participation in Nazi war crimes.
A November 1946 report by the U.S. Military Government for Germany details how Deutsche Bank carried out an ``aryanization'' program during the Nazi years by broking or buying properties or businesses taken from Jews held in Nazi custody.
``The Deutsche Bank indicated a very early interest in aryanization,'' the report said. It ``gained politically by its demonstrations of loyalty to the Nazi program'' and ``reaped immediate and tangible extra profits'' by keeping accounts.
A Deutsche spokesman said he had not seen the documents yet, but added ``Deutsche Bank's involvement in aryanization is known and we have never denied it.''
A flood of lawsuits have been filed by Holocaust victims against German banks and manufacturers including DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen and Siemens.
New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi has said he would block the merger unless Deutsche Bank first settles survivors' claims, the Times reported Monday.
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
Tuesday December 15 2:09 PM ET
By TONY CZUCZKA Associated Press Writer
BONN, Germany (AP) - A German government drive to get industry, banks and insurance firms to compensate slave laborers and other Nazi victims has stalled because the companies can't agree on a common approach.
Huge compensation lawsuits in the United States and fears of more to come have led some of Germany's most powerful companies to seek a way out. After September elections, the new left-leaning government took up the cause by offering to help set up a restitution fund.
But a mid-December target once envisaged for unveiling the fund passed Tuesday with no agreement in sight. Negotiations now seem likely to drag into next year.
``The talks are more complicated than expected,'' government spokesman Uwe-Karsten Heye said.
A central dispute is whether the fund can link compensation for two largely separate groups: slave laborers the Nazis rounded up to work mainly for German industry during World War II, and Holocaust survivors who are claiming pilfered assets from German insurers and banks.
DaimlerChrysler, Germany's biggest industrial group, has demanded that banks be kept out of the fund because claims against them are likely to be higher than for German industry, according to a recent German newspaper report.
Sources familiar with the talks, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that participants in the fund were still under debate. DaimlerChrysler declined comment.
Pressure on German businesses to reach a broad deal on compensation has grown sharply since earlier this year, when two Swiss banks paid $1.25 billion to settle Holocaust claims.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's chief of staff, Bodo Hombach, has met with industry leaders three times to discuss details of the fund, including how much will be paid and how compensation would be distributed. No date has been announced for the next round of talks.
Participants in the talks include the bosses of the cream of corporate Germany: the Allianz insurance company, Dresdner and Deutsche banks, Volkswagen, BMW, Siemens, Krupp, Degussa and BASF.
The German government has paid more than $60 billion in compensation to victims of the Nazis, mainly to Jews.
But it has rejected paying back wages for slave laborers, arguing the companies involved were responsible. And many victims in eastern Europe, who were unable to make compensation claims during the Cold War, have received little or no restitution for health damage and imprisonment.
More than 7 million people were forced to work in Nazi Germany, and experts believe at least 500,000 are still alive.
Most German firms have argued the slave workers were forced on them by the Nazis and so the current government, as legal successor to the Nazi regime, should be responsible.
But Schroeder appears to have ruled out a major government role in the proposed fund.
Russian Communist blames Jews for ``genocide''
MOSCOW, Dec 15 (Reuters) - A leading Russian Communist told a parliamentary hearing on Tuesday that Jews were responsible for what he called the ``genocide'' of the Russian people.
Viktor Ilyukhin, head of the defence committee in the State Duma lower house of parliament, became the latest in a series of deputies from the party to make openly anti-Semitic remarks. The Communists control the largest bloc of seats in the chamber.
``The large-scale genocide would not have been possible if (President Boris) Yeltsin's entourage and the country's previous governments had consisted mainly of members of the indigenous peoples rather than members of the Jewish nation alone, though that nation is without a doubt able, pragmatic and has done much to benefit the Soviet Union,'' Ilyukhin said.
He made the comments to a hearing of a Duma committee debating Yeltsin's impeachment. ``Genocide'' against Russians is one of the five charges the committee is considering.
Russia's population has shrunk dramatically amid economic decline and the collapse of health care during Yeltsin's seven-year rule. Ilyukhin said this demonstrated a premeditated genocide plot.
The remarks immediately drew strong fire from the government, including First Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Maslyukov, who is the most highly-placed Communist in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Maslyukov was quoted by RIA news agency as saying remarks which criticised officials on the basis of their ethnicity were ``intolerable.''
Ilyukhin's remarks followed those of Albert Makashov, another Communist deputy, who told a rally in October that Jews should be rounded up and jailed. He has since repeated those and other anti-Jewish statements in print and on television.
The Communists helped block a Duma motion to censure Makashov and many members spoke openly in his support, leading to accusations that the party's leadership is unable to distance itself from the anti-Semitism of many of its supporters.
The Kremlin has said Yeltsin intends to lead a crackdown on ``extremism'' in response to Makashov's and other statements, although no concrete actions have been taken.
The Communist party has called for the media to be censored by panels vetted according to their ethnicity. Presently two of Russia's three main television networks are controlled by businessmen who are of Jewish descent.
Some liberals have called for the Communist Party to be banned, although Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov has said he opposes such a move.
REUTERS PGG GDJ
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.
War Crimes Prosecutor William Denson Dies
He successfully prosecuted 177 war criminals from 1945 to 1947 in Dachau, Germany. Among those he eventually prosecuted were Ilse Koch, dubbed the Beast of Buchenwald, who was married to the commandant of Buchenwald, and August Eigruber, a ruthless high-ranking Nazi official who governed Upper Austria.
Mr. Denson, who was born in Birmingham, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Harvard University law school. In 1945, he joined Gen. George Patton's 3rd Army headquarters staff in Europe.
In 1948, Mr. Denson joined the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Washington as its litigation chief. He represented the commission in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union and later were executed.
Mr. Denson went into private practice in 1952, eventually joining the New York law firm of Morgan, Finnegan, Durham & Pine, where he litigated patents, trademarks and copyrights. He later joined the Long Island firm of Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein, Wolf and Schlissel. He also served as mayor of Lawrence from 1966 to 1976.
He spoke about his experiences with the Nazi trials before religious groups, schools and other organizations. His videotaped recollections are in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Survivors include his wife, Constance, of Lawrence, and three children.