by Rhonda Spivak
Anyone walking down Campbell street between Mather's and Grant in River Heights will be able to see a very large bronze coloured swastika spray painted on the south side of the house at 792 Campbell Street. Underneath the swastika the word MOVE is spray painted. Next to this large is another swastika spray painted on the window of the sun porch of the same house.
The Winnipeg Jewish Review received a "tip" from a source who wishes to remain anonymous, asking us to go to the scene to investigate this matter.
Both swastikas on 792 Campbell face the side door (which is the main entrance) of the house at 796 Campbell.
The house at 796 Campbell is owned by Marsha and Laurence Singer. Marsha Singer, who has lived there since the 1950’s told the Winnipeg Jewish Review that “I can see these large swastikas every time I open the door or look out my kitchen window. They are staring me in the face.”
Singer said that the swastikas were put there “sometime in the winter last December” [2009] and she doesn’t know who did this. I assume it was “some kids.” She added that she assumed that her neighbors who live at 792 didn’t paint over the swastikas “because it was too cold in the winter to paint.”
When asked if she thought these swastikas were directed at her because she is Jewish, Singer responded, “I don’t know who did this but if it’s directed at me, I’m NOT MOVING. I was here before you [vandals].”
For the past few months, Singer said “Every one who has come to my door has asked me if I know about the swastikas.” She said “I got used to them already.”
Kay Robertson, an elderly non-Jewish woman, who lives at 796 Campbell St. told the Winnipeg Jewish Review that she reported this matter to the police, “but nothing has happened.” She assumed “It must be some kids who came around here.”
When asked by the Winnipeg Jewish Review, if she was going to paint over the large swastika on the side of her house, Robertson first answered, “I don’t see it because I doesn’t pass by it to enter my house. I don’t care if it’s there. It doesn’t bother me.”
But afterward Robertson said “I don’t like it [the swastika].”
Earl Varlow, an elderly man who lives at Robertson’s house “part-time” says he intends to paint over the swastika. He told the Winnipeg Jewish Review “I guess we’ll have to replace the porch window.”
Robertson said “Maybe we’ll be able to take a knife and scrape it off the window.”
Varlow added, “Eventually we’ll have to replace the screen,” since the spray painted swastika is on the screen also.
Varlow also said he was the one who spoke to the police, but he no longer remembered the incident number.
Robertson added, “About two weeks ago, someone came back and shot at the window of our sun porch with a b.b. gun. I don’t know if it was the same guy or not.”
Roberston and Varlow showed the Winnipeg Jewish Review the hole in the glass window made by the b.b. gun shot. It is next to the window of the sun porch with the spray painted swastika.
When asked if they had reported this second incident to the police, Robertson said, “No I haven’t. They won’t know who did it”, and said she didn’t know why her house is being targeted.
Neither Robertson or Varlow indicated that they had decided one way or another whether they were going to notify the police.
On Robertson’s garage facing the back lane there is the word “gov?” also spray painted n what appears to be the same colour spray paint as the swastikas.
When asked by the Winnipeg Jewish Review if they have any enemies that would do this kind of thing, Varlow answered, “No, not that we know. We assume its just some kids doing this, but we don’t know why they chose ours house.”
Robertson said she didn’t know whether the vandals knew that her neighbor who would be facing the swastikas on her house was Jewish.
When the Winnipeg Jewish Review pointed out that anyone walking down the street would be able to see the large swastika on the side of her house, Robertson said, “Really, I didn’t realize that.”
Singer told the Winnipeg Jewish Review that there is a “smaller spray painted swastika” on the garage a couple houses up the way closer to Grant.”
On inspection, the Winnipeg Jewish Review found a spray painted insignia there, but it didn’t fully resemble a swastika, although it appeared to be the same colour of spray paint as the other swastikas at 792 Campbell.
CAN OWNERS OF PRIVATE PROPERTY LEAVE SWASTIKAS UP?
On May 10, the Winnipeg Jewish Review spoke by telephone with Constable Natalie Aiken of the Winnipeg Police Department who confirmed that “A report about the incident had been made,” but that there were ‘‘no known suspects.”
Aiken advised that the Winnipeg Police had explained to the residents of 792 Campbell St. that the City of Winnipeg would provide free graffiti wipes or paint vouchers so that remedial measures could be taken to remove the swastikas. Aiken noted that a resident whose home is vandalized with graffiti can call the number 311 and get assistance removing the graffiti.
“She [Robertson] was advised of these measures,” Aiken said, and indicated that the file had been seen by the hate crimes unit of the Winnipeg Police Department.
When asked what the police would do if Robertson did not paint over the swastikas or remedy the situation, Aiken responded, “There is nothing we can do. It is private property and we can’t make her take the graffiti down.”
The Winnipeg Jewish Review then asked Aiken whether in the event a person deliberately chose not to paint over or cover up swastikas visible to his or her neighbors and the public, that person could potentially be the subject of a criminal prosecution for willfully promoting hatred against Jews?
Aiken was unable to answer this question and said that she would have to consider it and get back to the WinnipegJewish Review.
See this report at Israel Behind the News
Showing posts with label Nazi Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nazi Germany. Show all posts
Friday, May 14, 2010
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Nazi Filmmaker’s Family Denies He Was Anti-Semitic. Are they Correct? Critique of Harlan In The Shadow of Jud Süss
by Rhonda Spivak
The German documentary film by German Felix Moeller, Harlan In the Shadow of Jud Süs, which examines the life of Veit Harlan, one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious filmmakers, was premiered in Canada during Winnipeg’s Jewish Film Festival here on Sunday March 21.
“Film was arguably the most important medium of propaganda in Nazi Germany, so much so that German cinemas were protected by anti-aircraft units in the latter part of the war and, as a result, functioned until the end of the regime when very little else was standing,” said, Catherine Chatterly, a Post Doctral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba, and one of a number of panelists who critiqued the film after its viewing.
Millions across occupied Europe saw Viet Harlan’s most pernicious propaganda film Jud Süss which was so anti-Semitic, that Joseph Goebbels, who was appointed by Hitler to be the Nazi minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1933, made the film required viewing for all SS members.
Chatterly noted that directors employed by Goebbels received “large salaries, perks, subsidies, and huge production budgets.”
The controversial Harlan, who was Goebbel’s top director, was the only artist from the Nazi era to be tried for crimes against humanity, but in fact was aquitted twice.
The commercial exhibition or sale as a DVD of Harlan’s film Jud Süss is still prohibited in Germany and several other European countries. Set in the 18th century, Harlan’s anti-Semitic film claimed to be a dramatization of the true story of how a sinister, cunning Jewish financier, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, took control of the duchy of Wurttemberg while preying sexually on a pure Aryan maiden, played by Harlan’s wife, Kristina Söderbaum.
Felix Moeller’s film about Harlan’s life includes some snippets from “Jew Süss,” but most Moeller’s film examines the Harlan family from the Third Reich to the present. It includes extensive interviews of Viet Harlan’s children and grandchildren, each of whom have differing responses to dealing with their father or grandfather’s artistic immorality.
WHY DID HARLAN MAKE JUD SUSS?
One of the most significant issues arising from Moeller’s film is the question of why Veit Harlan wrote and directed the anti-Semitic movie Jud Süss in the first place. Was he a Nazi true believer, an opportunistic careerist or was he coerced by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief?
In his memoirs, Harlan claimed he was coerced to make the film, and in Moeller’s film most of Harlan’s children and grandchildren interviewed deny that the family patriarch was anti-Semitic, and claim that he had no choice but to agree to what was expected of him in the Nazi era.
One of Harlan’s sons Casper says in the film that his father Viet was “an artist who got carried away.” Another child says “Even if it cost him his life, he couldn’t make a bad film. There must have been coercion [for him to make the film].” Another family member says her grandfather Harlan couldn’t have been a Nazi, since “he had Jewish friends.”
Christiane Kubrick-who is not only Harlan’s niece but also the widow of famous film-maker Stanley Kubrick-suggests that Harlan saw himself as a ‘great artist,” and “ thought only of the moment, of the good scenes,” rather than of the political, social, and real-world effects of his film.
Yet, as Chatterly, who received her PhD in Modern Jewish History and Modern German and Central European History from the University of Chicago pointed out, these comments must be examined critically. As she noted, one of Harlan’s daughter’s, “ Maria Korber has apparently even convinced herself that her father directed Jud Süss because he presumed he could do so in a more humane and less venomous way than any other director,” a statement Chatterly found to be very suspect.
In Moeller’s film, one questioning son, Thomas Harlan asks whether his father, if he really had been coerced to make Jud Süss would have had his wife, Kristina Söderbaum star in the film. Why would he involve her if he didn’t believe in what he was doing?
Thomas, who is willing to accept responsibility for the behaviour of his father becomes obsessed with writing books, movies and hunting Nazis in Poland, finding evidence to assist in the prosecution of war crimes
Thomas turned against his father Viet, even setting fire to theaters that showed Harlan’s postwar movies. In Moeller’s film Thomas says he now feels “extreme prejudice” against Viet, doubting Viet’s profession of ignorance. “Once you’ve see the fruit of your work turn into a murder weapon,” Thomas says, “It is difficult to say, I am a filmmaker and will carry on making films.”
As Chatterly noted, Casper Harlan explained his mother Kristina Söderbaum ’s participation in Jud Süss by saying that his mother’s “strengths don’t include her intellect or her analytic abilities,” and, “She had no idea what she had done there.”
According to Chatterly, “We see sons [of Viet Harlan] who would rather have their mother known in public as stupid rather than guilty of knowingly participating in Hitler’s criminal regime. It is interesting to note that the granddaughters state unequivocally that she [their mother] is not stupid.”
In Chatterly’s view, ‘it may have been productive for the filmmaker to ask what exactly determines whether an individual is an anti-Semite or not, but the question was not asked.”
Two of Viet Harlan’s daughter’s married Jewish men, in what Chatterly referred to as “an attempt to escape their association with the perpetrators and attach themselves instead to Germany’s victims.”
Meoller’s film also shows viewers Harlan’s son Kristian who claims, “Film has always been subverted into propaganda. These days, [consider] all the war games and films... sponsored by the American military.”
In Chatterly’s opinion, Kristian is very bitter and “intent on minimizing the crimes of Nazism by comparing Germany to contemporary America.”
In analysing the responses of Harlan’s descendents, Chatterly said:
“[In the film] we see the first generation defined by deceit and denial and therefore completely unrepentant about their individual roles and responsibilities in the criminal state that was Nazi Germany, [We see] the complex spectrum of opinion amongst the second generation, and the disconnection, dissipation, and apathy of the third generation who are tired of the burden of the past and feel no personal responsibility for it.”
There is a clip in Moeller’s film which shows Kristine Söderbaum in a 1973 television interview, remembering that she was horrified when her husband Viet agreed to make Jud Süss, even though, Söderbaum insisted they couldn’t have known in 1939 that “it would be used in such a way.” The film, she said, “ruined our lives.”
Chatterly, however, told the viewing audience that she completely disagreed with Söderbaum’s statement.
‘I disagree; what ruined their lives was losing the war. Unfortunately, very few of these people, including the children and grandchildren, would have had any difficulty with Jud Süss-or its depiction of Jews-if Germany had succeeded in its war of European conquest and Jewish annihilation,” she said
SELF-SERVING STATEMENTS
Alexander Freund, a history professor at the University of Winnipeg of German ancestry, said that Moeller’s film is portrayed as a documentary, using the technique of “contemporary witness.” But it falls short because it “asks us to accept the words “of those family members interviewed in the film as being “objective ‘truth. But, as Freund added, the words of the children and grand-children are “self-serving,” but the film maker almost never interrupts his interviews with penetrating questions.
Freund said, in analysing the “self-serving” words of Harlan’s family members “Catherine Chatterly has done what Moeller should have done in his film.”
Freund also said that many members of Harlan’s family “portray themselves as victims,” something he said was more common amongst “Germany’s middle and upper classes.”
In a similar vein, Stephan Jaeger, from U of M’s Department of German and Slavic Studies, noted that the film doesn’t examine the effect of memory.
“The film never answers whether Harlan was right or wrong when he says [in his memoirs] that he was forced to make Jud Süss,” he said.
LACK OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Another issue raised by a member of the audience was the fact that the film offers no images of concentration camps, or historical flashbacks.Were the horrors of the Holocaust adequately addressed?
In Chatterly’s view, “The film assumes a certain amount of knowledge from audiences who do not necessarily have that knowledge, and will not have that knowledge in the future. We have people being interviewed without context, and that will be a big problem [in the future]...The viewer can’t address whether the Harlan family members are victims, or the degree to which their statements are self-serving.”
Chatterly indicated that in her view, the remarks of a couple of Harlan’s granddaughters show they have failed to fully comprehend the horror of the their grandfather’s film. Granddaughter Nele Harlan refers to Harlan’s work as “cheesy” or “banal.” Alice Harlan, says “It’s full of caricatures, I find it grotesque.” These descriptors minimize the potent anti-Semitism of Jud Süss, and show “they don’t get it,” said Chatterly.
Jaeger added, that this lack of historical context shows again that “the film is not investigative.”
As Chatterly added some of Harlan’s descendents ask viewers “to believed that Harlan and Soderbaum had no idea what kind of regime they were working for and no idea about the nature of the film they were making, or how it would be used to support Nazi ideology.”
However, as Chatterly noted, there are many historical facts that undermine that claim. As she stated, by the time Jud Süss was released into German theatres in September 1940, Germany’s Jews had been deprived of their status as citizens for a full five years and were t excluded from all aspects of German society.
“Kristallnacht was already almost two years old, in which 267 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 businesses vandalized, 91 Jews killed and 6000 Jewish men rounded up and sent to concentration camps-all in full public view...Germany had carved up Poland, and was in the process of establishing Jewish ghettos in its major cities. It sealed the Lodz ghetto already in May, and Warsaw would be created in October....It would be only another nine months before Hitler committed to the decision to annihilate European Jewry.”
Freund noted that the film chooses not to tell the viewers what happened to Dora Gerson, a Jewish woman who was Viet Harlan’s first wife.
“Their marriage only lasted for 2 years and Gerson and her second husband escaped to Holland in 1942, but she was sent to Auschwitz and died in 1943,” he said.
GERMANS OF MIXED ANCESTRY
One of the more “tragic and sympathetic” characters in the film, in Chatterly’s view, is Jessica Jacoby, Harlan’s grand daughter, who grapples with knowing that one of her grandfathers (Harlan) was complicit in the death of her Jewish grandfather. Jacoby’s mother Susan committed suicide in 1989 after converting to Judaism after marrying a Jew whose parents died in the Holocaust
Ben Baader, a Professor of Jewish History at the University of Manitoba noted that many German’s today of mixed ancestry are struggling with this type of realization. There is often a ‘great divide” between a “textbook knowledge” of the Holocaust, and personal family memoirs. People may have a textbook knowledge but they “don’t make the link between the textbook and their family.”
Baader said that Moeller’s film has received “mixed “reviews in the United States.
Freund added that it is interesting to note that Moeller, 44, comes from a family that also has a Nazi past.As Moeller told the New York Times, “The mother of my father was such a fanatical Nazi that, like Magda Goebbels, she committed suicide at the end of the war and used poison to take five of her six children with her.
Rhonda Spivak is Member of the Canadian and Israel Bar Associations, now editing the Winnipeg Jewish Review at http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
The German documentary film by German Felix Moeller, Harlan In the Shadow of Jud Süs, which examines the life of Veit Harlan, one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious filmmakers, was premiered in Canada during Winnipeg’s Jewish Film Festival here on Sunday March 21.
“Film was arguably the most important medium of propaganda in Nazi Germany, so much so that German cinemas were protected by anti-aircraft units in the latter part of the war and, as a result, functioned until the end of the regime when very little else was standing,” said, Catherine Chatterly, a Post Doctral Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba, and one of a number of panelists who critiqued the film after its viewing.
Millions across occupied Europe saw Viet Harlan’s most pernicious propaganda film Jud Süss which was so anti-Semitic, that Joseph Goebbels, who was appointed by Hitler to be the Nazi minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in 1933, made the film required viewing for all SS members.
Chatterly noted that directors employed by Goebbels received “large salaries, perks, subsidies, and huge production budgets.”
The controversial Harlan, who was Goebbel’s top director, was the only artist from the Nazi era to be tried for crimes against humanity, but in fact was aquitted twice.
The commercial exhibition or sale as a DVD of Harlan’s film Jud Süss is still prohibited in Germany and several other European countries. Set in the 18th century, Harlan’s anti-Semitic film claimed to be a dramatization of the true story of how a sinister, cunning Jewish financier, Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, took control of the duchy of Wurttemberg while preying sexually on a pure Aryan maiden, played by Harlan’s wife, Kristina Söderbaum.
Felix Moeller’s film about Harlan’s life includes some snippets from “Jew Süss,” but most Moeller’s film examines the Harlan family from the Third Reich to the present. It includes extensive interviews of Viet Harlan’s children and grandchildren, each of whom have differing responses to dealing with their father or grandfather’s artistic immorality.
WHY DID HARLAN MAKE JUD SUSS?
One of the most significant issues arising from Moeller’s film is the question of why Veit Harlan wrote and directed the anti-Semitic movie Jud Süss in the first place. Was he a Nazi true believer, an opportunistic careerist or was he coerced by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief?
In his memoirs, Harlan claimed he was coerced to make the film, and in Moeller’s film most of Harlan’s children and grandchildren interviewed deny that the family patriarch was anti-Semitic, and claim that he had no choice but to agree to what was expected of him in the Nazi era.
One of Harlan’s sons Casper says in the film that his father Viet was “an artist who got carried away.” Another child says “Even if it cost him his life, he couldn’t make a bad film. There must have been coercion [for him to make the film].” Another family member says her grandfather Harlan couldn’t have been a Nazi, since “he had Jewish friends.”
Christiane Kubrick-who is not only Harlan’s niece but also the widow of famous film-maker Stanley Kubrick-suggests that Harlan saw himself as a ‘great artist,” and “ thought only of the moment, of the good scenes,” rather than of the political, social, and real-world effects of his film.
Yet, as Chatterly, who received her PhD in Modern Jewish History and Modern German and Central European History from the University of Chicago pointed out, these comments must be examined critically. As she noted, one of Harlan’s daughter’s, “ Maria Korber has apparently even convinced herself that her father directed Jud Süss because he presumed he could do so in a more humane and less venomous way than any other director,” a statement Chatterly found to be very suspect.
In Moeller’s film, one questioning son, Thomas Harlan asks whether his father, if he really had been coerced to make Jud Süss would have had his wife, Kristina Söderbaum star in the film. Why would he involve her if he didn’t believe in what he was doing?
Thomas, who is willing to accept responsibility for the behaviour of his father becomes obsessed with writing books, movies and hunting Nazis in Poland, finding evidence to assist in the prosecution of war crimes
Thomas turned against his father Viet, even setting fire to theaters that showed Harlan’s postwar movies. In Moeller’s film Thomas says he now feels “extreme prejudice” against Viet, doubting Viet’s profession of ignorance. “Once you’ve see the fruit of your work turn into a murder weapon,” Thomas says, “It is difficult to say, I am a filmmaker and will carry on making films.”
As Chatterly noted, Casper Harlan explained his mother Kristina Söderbaum ’s participation in Jud Süss by saying that his mother’s “strengths don’t include her intellect or her analytic abilities,” and, “She had no idea what she had done there.”
According to Chatterly, “We see sons [of Viet Harlan] who would rather have their mother known in public as stupid rather than guilty of knowingly participating in Hitler’s criminal regime. It is interesting to note that the granddaughters state unequivocally that she [their mother] is not stupid.”
In Chatterly’s view, ‘it may have been productive for the filmmaker to ask what exactly determines whether an individual is an anti-Semite or not, but the question was not asked.”
Two of Viet Harlan’s daughter’s married Jewish men, in what Chatterly referred to as “an attempt to escape their association with the perpetrators and attach themselves instead to Germany’s victims.”
Meoller’s film also shows viewers Harlan’s son Kristian who claims, “Film has always been subverted into propaganda. These days, [consider] all the war games and films... sponsored by the American military.”
In Chatterly’s opinion, Kristian is very bitter and “intent on minimizing the crimes of Nazism by comparing Germany to contemporary America.”
In analysing the responses of Harlan’s descendents, Chatterly said:
“[In the film] we see the first generation defined by deceit and denial and therefore completely unrepentant about their individual roles and responsibilities in the criminal state that was Nazi Germany, [We see] the complex spectrum of opinion amongst the second generation, and the disconnection, dissipation, and apathy of the third generation who are tired of the burden of the past and feel no personal responsibility for it.”
There is a clip in Moeller’s film which shows Kristine Söderbaum in a 1973 television interview, remembering that she was horrified when her husband Viet agreed to make Jud Süss, even though, Söderbaum insisted they couldn’t have known in 1939 that “it would be used in such a way.” The film, she said, “ruined our lives.”
Chatterly, however, told the viewing audience that she completely disagreed with Söderbaum’s statement.
‘I disagree; what ruined their lives was losing the war. Unfortunately, very few of these people, including the children and grandchildren, would have had any difficulty with Jud Süss-or its depiction of Jews-if Germany had succeeded in its war of European conquest and Jewish annihilation,” she said
SELF-SERVING STATEMENTS
Alexander Freund, a history professor at the University of Winnipeg of German ancestry, said that Moeller’s film is portrayed as a documentary, using the technique of “contemporary witness.” But it falls short because it “asks us to accept the words “of those family members interviewed in the film as being “objective ‘truth. But, as Freund added, the words of the children and grand-children are “self-serving,” but the film maker almost never interrupts his interviews with penetrating questions.
Freund said, in analysing the “self-serving” words of Harlan’s family members “Catherine Chatterly has done what Moeller should have done in his film.”
Freund also said that many members of Harlan’s family “portray themselves as victims,” something he said was more common amongst “Germany’s middle and upper classes.”
In a similar vein, Stephan Jaeger, from U of M’s Department of German and Slavic Studies, noted that the film doesn’t examine the effect of memory.
“The film never answers whether Harlan was right or wrong when he says [in his memoirs] that he was forced to make Jud Süss,” he said.
LACK OF HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Another issue raised by a member of the audience was the fact that the film offers no images of concentration camps, or historical flashbacks.Were the horrors of the Holocaust adequately addressed?
In Chatterly’s view, “The film assumes a certain amount of knowledge from audiences who do not necessarily have that knowledge, and will not have that knowledge in the future. We have people being interviewed without context, and that will be a big problem [in the future]...The viewer can’t address whether the Harlan family members are victims, or the degree to which their statements are self-serving.”
Chatterly indicated that in her view, the remarks of a couple of Harlan’s granddaughters show they have failed to fully comprehend the horror of the their grandfather’s film. Granddaughter Nele Harlan refers to Harlan’s work as “cheesy” or “banal.” Alice Harlan, says “It’s full of caricatures, I find it grotesque.” These descriptors minimize the potent anti-Semitism of Jud Süss, and show “they don’t get it,” said Chatterly.
Jaeger added, that this lack of historical context shows again that “the film is not investigative.”
As Chatterly added some of Harlan’s descendents ask viewers “to believed that Harlan and Soderbaum had no idea what kind of regime they were working for and no idea about the nature of the film they were making, or how it would be used to support Nazi ideology.”
However, as Chatterly noted, there are many historical facts that undermine that claim. As she stated, by the time Jud Süss was released into German theatres in September 1940, Germany’s Jews had been deprived of their status as citizens for a full five years and were t excluded from all aspects of German society.
“Kristallnacht was already almost two years old, in which 267 synagogues were destroyed, 7,500 businesses vandalized, 91 Jews killed and 6000 Jewish men rounded up and sent to concentration camps-all in full public view...Germany had carved up Poland, and was in the process of establishing Jewish ghettos in its major cities. It sealed the Lodz ghetto already in May, and Warsaw would be created in October....It would be only another nine months before Hitler committed to the decision to annihilate European Jewry.”
Freund noted that the film chooses not to tell the viewers what happened to Dora Gerson, a Jewish woman who was Viet Harlan’s first wife.
“Their marriage only lasted for 2 years and Gerson and her second husband escaped to Holland in 1942, but she was sent to Auschwitz and died in 1943,” he said.
GERMANS OF MIXED ANCESTRY
One of the more “tragic and sympathetic” characters in the film, in Chatterly’s view, is Jessica Jacoby, Harlan’s grand daughter, who grapples with knowing that one of her grandfathers (Harlan) was complicit in the death of her Jewish grandfather. Jacoby’s mother Susan committed suicide in 1989 after converting to Judaism after marrying a Jew whose parents died in the Holocaust
Ben Baader, a Professor of Jewish History at the University of Manitoba noted that many German’s today of mixed ancestry are struggling with this type of realization. There is often a ‘great divide” between a “textbook knowledge” of the Holocaust, and personal family memoirs. People may have a textbook knowledge but they “don’t make the link between the textbook and their family.”
Baader said that Moeller’s film has received “mixed “reviews in the United States.
Freund added that it is interesting to note that Moeller, 44, comes from a family that also has a Nazi past.As Moeller told the New York Times, “The mother of my father was such a fanatical Nazi that, like Magda Goebbels, she committed suicide at the end of the war and used poison to take five of her six children with her.
Rhonda Spivak is Member of the Canadian and Israel Bar Associations, now editing the Winnipeg Jewish Review at http://www.winnipegjewishreview.com/
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
Obama's Legacy and the Iranian Bomb: Neville Chamberlain was remembered for appeasing Germany, not for his progressive social programs
by Professor Alan M. Dershowitz
from the Wall Street Journal
The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy.
There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small "sacrifice" of the billion Muslims in the world.
The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime.
Finally, Iran could use its nuclear weapons without ever detonating a bomb. By constantly threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation, it could engender so much fear among Israelis as to incite mass immigration, a brain drain, or a significant decline in people moving to Israel.
These are the specific ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons, primarily against the Jewish state. But there are other ways in which a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger the world. First, it would cause an arms race in which every nation in the Middle East would seek to obtain nuclear weapons.
Second, it would almost certainly provoke Israel into engaging in either a pre-emptive or retaliatory attack, thus inflaming the entire region or inciting further attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas.
Third, it would provide Iran with a nuclear umbrella under which it could accelerate its efforts at regional hegemony. Had Iraq operated under a nuclear umbrella when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein's forces would still be in Kuwait.
Fourth, it would embolden the most radical elements in the Middle East to continue their war of words and deeds against the United States and its allies.
And finally, it would inevitably unleash the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, nobody knows the extent of the harm a nuclear-armed Iran could produce.
In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.
In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"
But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"
Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain's financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain's enduring legacy.
So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation-a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.
If Iran were to become a nuclear power, there would be plenty of blame to go around. A National Intelligence Report, issued on President George W. Bush's watch, distorted the truth by suggestion that Iran had ended its quest for nuclear weapons. It also withheld the fact that U.S. intelligence had discovered a nuclear facility near Qum, Iran, that could be used only for the production of nuclear weapons. Chamberlain, too, was not entirely to blame for Hitler's initial triumphs. He became prime minister after his predecessors allowed Germany to rearm. Nevertheless, it is Chamberlain who has come to symbolize the failure to prevent Hitler's ascendancy. So too will Mr. Obama come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.
Prof. Dershowitz is a leading law professor at Harvard.
See the original article in the Wall Street Journal
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
from the Wall Street Journal
The gravest threat faced by the world today is a nuclear-armed Iran. Of all the nations capable of producing nuclear weapons, Iran is the only one that might use them to attack an enemy.
There are several ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons. The first is by dropping an atomic bomb on Israel, as its leaders have repeatedly threatened to do. Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, boasted in 2004 that an Iranian attack would kill as many as five million Jews. Mr. Rafsanjani estimated that even if Israel retaliated with its own nuclear bombs, Iran would probably lose about 15 million people, which he said would be a small "sacrifice" of the billion Muslims in the world.
The second way in which Iran could use nuclear weapons would be to hand them off to its surrogates, Hezbollah or Hamas. A third way would be for a terrorist group, such as al Qaeda, to get its hands on Iranian nuclear material. It could do so with the consent of Iran or by working with rogue elements within the Iranian regime.
Finally, Iran could use its nuclear weapons without ever detonating a bomb. By constantly threatening Israel with nuclear annihilation, it could engender so much fear among Israelis as to incite mass immigration, a brain drain, or a significant decline in people moving to Israel.
These are the specific ways in which Iran could use nuclear weapons, primarily against the Jewish state. But there are other ways in which a nuclear-armed Iran would endanger the world. First, it would cause an arms race in which every nation in the Middle East would seek to obtain nuclear weapons.
Second, it would almost certainly provoke Israel into engaging in either a pre-emptive or retaliatory attack, thus inflaming the entire region or inciting further attacks against Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas.
Third, it would provide Iran with a nuclear umbrella under which it could accelerate its efforts at regional hegemony. Had Iraq operated under a nuclear umbrella when it invaded Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein's forces would still be in Kuwait.
Fourth, it would embolden the most radical elements in the Middle East to continue their war of words and deeds against the United States and its allies.
And finally, it would inevitably unleash the law of unintended consequences: Simply put, nobody knows the extent of the harm a nuclear-armed Iran could produce.
In these respects, allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons is somewhat analogous to the decision by the victors of World War I to allow Nazi Germany to rearm during the 1930s. Even the Nazis were surprised at this complacency. Joseph Goebbels expected the French and British to prevent the Nazis from rebuilding Germany's war machine.
In 1940, Goebbels told a group of German journalists that if he had been the French premier when Hitler came to power he would have said, "The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!"
But, Goebbels continued, "they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war!"
Most people today are not aware that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain helped restore Great Britain's financial stability during the Great Depression and also passed legislation to extend unemployment benefits, pay pensions to retired workers and otherwise help those hit hard by the slumping economy. But history does remember his failure to confront Hitler. That is Chamberlain's enduring legacy.
So too will Iran's construction of nuclear weapons, if it manages to do so in the next few years, become President Barack Obama's enduring legacy. Regardless of his passage of health-care reform and regardless of whether he restores jobs and helps the economy recover, Mr. Obama will be remembered for allowing Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. History will not treat kindly any leader who allows so much power to be accumulated by the world's first suicide nation-a nation whose leaders have not only expressed but, during the Iran-Iraq war, demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice millions of their own people to an apocalyptic mission of destruction.
If Iran were to become a nuclear power, there would be plenty of blame to go around. A National Intelligence Report, issued on President George W. Bush's watch, distorted the truth by suggestion that Iran had ended its quest for nuclear weapons. It also withheld the fact that U.S. intelligence had discovered a nuclear facility near Qum, Iran, that could be used only for the production of nuclear weapons. Chamberlain, too, was not entirely to blame for Hitler's initial triumphs. He became prime minister after his predecessors allowed Germany to rearm. Nevertheless, it is Chamberlain who has come to symbolize the failure to prevent Hitler's ascendancy. So too will Mr. Obama come to symbolize the failure of the West if Iran acquires nuclear weapons on his watch.
Prof. Dershowitz is a leading law professor at Harvard.
See the original article in the Wall Street Journal
See this article and more at Israel Behind the News
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Museum Receives Horrifying Offer from Nazi Relative
by David Bedein
JERUSALEM - The offices of Yad Vashem, the Israeli agency that memorializes the six million Jews murdered by their Nazis and their allies, received an extraordinary and even infuriating proposal recently. The grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the notorious commander of the Auschwitz death camp, offered to sell some of his grandfather’s personal effects to the museum.
The letter to the museum, which was sent several months ago and entitled “Rare objects, Auschwitz, Commander Hoess,” was short and succinct, saying: “These are several objects from the estate of Rudolf Hoess, the commander of Auschwitz: A massive, fireproof box with official insignia - a gift from Henrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, weighing 50 kilograms, a letter opener and folders, slides from Auschwitz that have never been seen publicly, letters from his period of imprisonment in Krakow. I would be very grateful for a brief answer. Sincerely, Reiner Hoess.”
The management of Yad Vashem responded with shock to the proposal and rejected it out of hand. The management of the museum expressed disgust over the desire of the criminal’s relative to profit from Holocaust memorabilia.
A high-ranking official of Yad Vashem said, “Here we must ask: did you murder and profit as well?” (The reference is to 1 Kings 21:19-INT)
However, museum officials told Rudolf Hoess’s grandson, Reiner, that he may donate the original items to the museum in order to commemorate the Nazi horror.
In an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth last night, Mr. Hoess, 44, said the idea of selling the items to Yad Vashem came up following a conversation that he had with a friend, the grandson of Baldur von Schirach, who was the leader of the Nazi youth movement, the Hitler Youth.
“These items were in the family’s possession,” Hoess said in a telephone conversation.
“We knew about them, people outside the family knew about them for a long time as well. Quite a few organizations wanted to buy them from us, including well-known media such as Der Spiegel and the Axel Springer publishing company. In the wake of Mr. von Schirach’s recommendation, I thought that it would be appropriate to sell the items to Yad Vashem. I do not want these items to get into the wrong hands.”
We asked Mr. Hoess: “Would you be willing to donate the items to Yad Vashem?”
He answered, “That is a good question. I can’t make a decision like that on my own. My tendency is to agree to donate the items, but I will need to consult the rest of the family. We want the items to go to a museum that deals with history.”
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
JERUSALEM - The offices of Yad Vashem, the Israeli agency that memorializes the six million Jews murdered by their Nazis and their allies, received an extraordinary and even infuriating proposal recently. The grandson of Rudolf Hoess, the notorious commander of the Auschwitz death camp, offered to sell some of his grandfather’s personal effects to the museum.
The letter to the museum, which was sent several months ago and entitled “Rare objects, Auschwitz, Commander Hoess,” was short and succinct, saying: “These are several objects from the estate of Rudolf Hoess, the commander of Auschwitz: A massive, fireproof box with official insignia - a gift from Henrich Himmler, the commander of the SS, weighing 50 kilograms, a letter opener and folders, slides from Auschwitz that have never been seen publicly, letters from his period of imprisonment in Krakow. I would be very grateful for a brief answer. Sincerely, Reiner Hoess.”
The management of Yad Vashem responded with shock to the proposal and rejected it out of hand. The management of the museum expressed disgust over the desire of the criminal’s relative to profit from Holocaust memorabilia.
A high-ranking official of Yad Vashem said, “Here we must ask: did you murder and profit as well?” (The reference is to 1 Kings 21:19-INT)
However, museum officials told Rudolf Hoess’s grandson, Reiner, that he may donate the original items to the museum in order to commemorate the Nazi horror.
In an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth last night, Mr. Hoess, 44, said the idea of selling the items to Yad Vashem came up following a conversation that he had with a friend, the grandson of Baldur von Schirach, who was the leader of the Nazi youth movement, the Hitler Youth.
“These items were in the family’s possession,” Hoess said in a telephone conversation.
“We knew about them, people outside the family knew about them for a long time as well. Quite a few organizations wanted to buy them from us, including well-known media such as Der Spiegel and the Axel Springer publishing company. In the wake of Mr. von Schirach’s recommendation, I thought that it would be appropriate to sell the items to Yad Vashem. I do not want these items to get into the wrong hands.”
We asked Mr. Hoess: “Would you be willing to donate the items to Yad Vashem?”
He answered, “That is a good question. I can’t make a decision like that on my own. My tendency is to agree to donate the items, but I will need to consult the rest of the family. We want the items to go to a museum that deals with history.”
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
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