Martha and Waitstill Sharp became the second and third Americans to be named to Yad Vashem’s Righteous. The Boston couple left the United States in 1939 to travel to Europe where they aided nearly 2,000 Jewish refugees as they fled Nazi persecution.
Hitler monument
Ted Junker, an 87-year-old German living in Wisconsin, is building a memorial to Adolf Hitler on his land. Junkers lived in Romania during the rise of the Third Reich and eventually joined the Waffen SS, where he served on the Russian front.
After the war, he moved to the United States. While he asserts that Hitler has simply been misunderstood, others believe that he’s simply a Holocaust denier.
“I like the US,” Junker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel according to the Associated Press. “I can’t understand why people don’t know the truth. This is for understanding, not hate.”
Kathy Heilbronner, of the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, told AP that “in making these assertions, he’s deliberately choosing to ignore the overwhelming volume of everything that supports every aspect of the Holocaust.”
Rwanda tribunal lags
With costs soaring into the millions, the Arusha-based International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda is claiming that they will not be finished with their cases by the 2008 date. The most disturbing aspect of this story was ICTR spokesman Timothy Gallimore’s statement — “it is unlikely that all the people responsible, even the big fish, will be brought to justice.”
Ex-Nazis of little use to the CIA
As the CIA works to turn over nearly 8 million pages of documents, a clearer picture of our complicity in the aftermath of World War II is emerging. The latest round of documents to be declassified shows that the CIA knew where Adolf Eichmann was living as well as the alias he was using.
Even after they learned this from West German intelligence sources, they refused to share the information with Israel who were actively pursuing him. This decision was apparently fueled by the belief that revealing (and prosecuting) Eichmann would put other former Nazis, like Hans Globke, at risk.
The United States government, preoccupied with the cold war, had no policy at the time of pursuing Nazi war criminals. The West German government was wary of exposing Eichmann because officials feared what he might reveal about such figures as Hans Globke, a former Nazi then serving as a key national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Mr. Naftali said.
In 1960, also at the request of West Germany, the C.I.A. persuaded Life magazine, which had purchased Eichmann’s memoir from his family, to delete a reference to Globke before publication, the documents show.
While it’s no secret that the CIA helped to harbor certain Nazis in order to use them for information, this latest round of documents shows that they were not only ineffective in most cases, but often caused more harm than good. With stark examples, such as the cases of Heinz Felfe and Tscherim Soobzokov, we’re reminded of the mistakes we made in dealing with war criminals in the midst of the Cold War.
Canada’s Nazi prosecution record
Efraim Zuroff, the director of Jerusalem’s Simon Wiesenthal Center, was in Toronto and Ottawa this week to present the center’s annual report and launch a new program entitled Operation: Last Chance. The latest report gives Canada a poor rating at successfully prosecuting war criminals (“minimal success that could have been greater”).
“The problem is that the system is not streamlined,” said the centre’s chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff.
“For the past few years, eight cases against war criminals have been won by the government, they have been stripped of their citizenship, but with delay after delay, the government has not succeeded in kicking them out of the country.”
Even though other countries, like the United States and Italy, got high marks for its success in prosecuting and deporting war criminals, there are are still an estimated 10,000 Nazi perpetrators at large. This comes after a more productive year of prosecutions worldwide.