Holocaust: Netherlands PM Rutte apologizes for WWII persecution of Jews for first time

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on Sunday apologized for the first time on behalf of the government for the war-time persecution of Jews, saying little was done to protect them from the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany.

"Since the last survivors are still among us, I apologize today in the name of the government for what the authorities did at that time," Rutte said. "Our government did not act as the guardian of justice and security."

Of the 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands at the time, only 38,000 survived World War II. However, authorities never recognized their own role in facilitating the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany.

Note EU-Digest:  Was this apology by the Dutch PM a sincere gesture or more of a political P.R. statement? The Dutch Government at the time of the occupation, was one which was established by, and collaborating with the Nazi's, they obviously would or could do very little in stopping the atrocities committed by the Nazi's. This in contrast to the Dutch resistance forces, which fiercely attacked the Nazi occupiers in the Netherlands throughout the war.

Read more at: Netherlands apologizes for WWII persecution of Jews for first time | News | DW | 26.01.2020

The Vatican: Pope Francis Says Secret Archives On Holocaust-Era Pope Pius XII Will Be Opened Early - by Billy Perrigo

The Pope Francis announced Monday that the Vatican’s archives on controversial World War II-era pope Pius XII would be opened up eight years earlier than planned, in 2020, a move seen as an olive branch to Jews who have criticized the Vatican for not doing enough during the Holocaust.

The church is not afraid of history,” Pope Francis said, announcing the move in a speech to members of the Vatican’s Secret Archives. “On the contrary, it loves it, and would like to love it even more, like it loves God.”

Papal archives are usually opened to historians 70 years after the end of a pope’s rule, but the Church has come under pressure to reveal Pius XII’s records earlier than that, while aging Holocaust survivors are still alive.

Many Jewish groups have been calling on the Vatican to open the archives for decades. Rabbi David Rosen, of the American Jewish Committee, welcomed the news, telling Reuters it would help historians to “acknowledge both the failures as well as the valiant efforts made” during the Holocaust.

Read more: Pope Francis Says Secret Archives On Holocaust-Era Pope Pius XII Will Be Opened Early

Poland: PM withdraws from Israel visit afternegative remarks by Benjamin Netanyahu

Polish prime minister withdraws from Israel visit

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Poland: Warsaw lawmakers pass Holocaust bill to restrict term 'Polish death camps'

Polish Holocaust Death Camp

Polish lawmakers approved a bill on Thursday that would impose jail terms for suggesting Poland was complicit in the Holocaust, drawing concern from the United States and outrage from Israel, which denounced "any attempt to challenge historical truth."

Poland's ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) says the bill is needed to protect Poland's reputation and ensure historians recognize that Poles as well as Jews perished under the Nazis. Israeli officials said it criminalizes basic historical facts.

The Senate voted on the bill in the early hours on Thursday and it will now be sent to President Andrzej Duda, who has 21 days to decide whether to sign it into law.

The president has not said whether he will sign the bill, but has suggested he sympathizes with its aims. He told state television on Monday: "The matter needs to be explained calmly, but we absolutely cannot backtrack."

The bill would impose three years prison sentences for mentioning the term "Polish death camps," although it says scientific research into the Second World War would not be constrained.

Israel "adamantly opposes" the bill's approval, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

"Israel views with utmost gravity any attempt to challenge historical truth. 

No law will change the facts," ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Nahshon said on Twitter.

Israeli Housing Minister Yoav Galant, one of several cabinet ministers to denounce the bill, told Israel's Army Radio that he considered it "de facto Holocaust denial."

The bill has come at a time when right-wing, anti-immigrant parties like PiS have been in the ascendancy in Europe, especially in the former Communist countries of the east. EU officials have expressed alarm over the PiS administration in Poland, which they say has undermined the rule of law by exerting pressure over the courts and media.

The socially conservative, nationalist PiS has reignited debate on the Holocaust as part of a campaign to fuel patriotism since sweeping into power in 2015.

The U.S. State Department said the legislation "could undermine free speech and academic discourse" and Washington was concerned about the repercussions it could have "on Poland's strategic interests and relationships."

Read more: Warsaw lawmakers pass Holocaust bill to restrict term 'Polish death camps' - World - CBC News

Israeli Finance Ministry up in arms over Netherlands cutting off some Holocaust benefits - by Sam Sokol

If the Dutch had indeed taken such a step, "there is no justification," said Colette Avital, chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel.

Asked about the controversy, Colette Avital, chairwoman of the Center of Organizations of Holocaust Survivors in Israel, told The Jerusalem Post that if the Dutch had indeed taken such a step, “There is no justification, both because they cannot ask the Israeli government to replace them and because they cannot relinquish their responsibilities.”

In a related issue, the Hebrew press reported that one Holocaust survivor at the meeting testified that her benefits were cut off because as a resident of Modi’in, the Dutch mistakenly believed that she was living across the Green Line, although it was unclear why living in the West Bank would disqualify a survivor from receiving Holocaust related payments.

Gafni also took aim at the state created Company for Location and Restitution of Holocaust Victims’ Assets (Hashava) for missing quarterly payments to some 11,200 impoverished survivors across the country.

In 2006, the Knesset passed the Assets of Holocaust Victims Law, which established Hashava to take charge of the disposition of assets “that are in Israel and of which it may be assumed that their owners perished in the Holocaust.”

Hashava has stated that its coffers are currently empty and that it cannot liquidate funds for transfer without incurring a significant loss, while the Jewish Colonial Trust has not been paying it dividends.

The committee resolved that if payments are not resumed within two weeks, it will take action to push for an imposed resolution.

“Every day there are fewer and fewer survivors” to receive the money, said Gafni, urging speed. 

 Read more: Finance Ministry up in arms over Netherlands cutting off some Holocaust benefits - Diaspora - Jerusalem Post

Historians, politicians slam Benjamin Netanyahu 'distortion of history' - by Ahiya Raved

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday at the 37th Zionist Congress that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler did not initially plan to exterminate the Jews and was convinced by the grand mufti of Jerusalem – but renowned historians said definitively on Wednesday Oct.21 that this was not the case.

Professor Dan Michman, a world-renowned expert who is the head of the Institute of Holocaust Research at Bar-Ilan University and Head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem said Hitler did indeed meet the mufti – but this only occurred after the Final Solution began.

The German government said regarding Netanyahu's remarks that responsibility for the Holocaust lay with the Germans.

"All Germans know the history of the murderous race mania of the Nazis that led to the break with civilization that was the Holocaust," Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert said when asked about Benjamin Netanyahu's remarks.

"This is taught in German schools for good reason, it must never be forgotten. And I see no reason to change our view of history in any way. We know that responsibility for this crime against humanity is German and very much our own."


Read more: Historians, politicians slam PM's 'distortion of history' - Israel News, Ynetnews

Israel: Germany tells Netanyahu: We are responsible for the Holocaust

Germany has insisted it was responsible for the Holocaust, after Israel's prime minister claimed a Palestinian leader told the Nazis to kill Europe's Jews.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germans were "very clear in our minds" that the Nazis were responsible.
Benjamin Netanyahu had said Hitler had only wanted to expel Jews from Europe, but that Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini told him: "Burn them."

His remarks have been condemned by Israeli historians and politicians.
Speaking alongside Mrs Merkel in Berlin, Mr Netanyahu said "no-one should deny that Hitler was responsible for the Holocaust".

Read more: Germany tells Netanyahu: We are responsible for the Holocaust - BBC News

Second world war: Netherlands fined for Holocaust survivors treatment

The City of Amsterdam fined hundreds of Jewish Holocaust survivors for failing to pay taxes while they were in hiding or in concentration camps.

The affair was exposed in an article in Het Parool, a local daily, on March 30. Many of the houses in question were confiscated and used by members of the NSB Dutch Nazi party while the Jewish owners were in hiding or in camps.

The city went after survivors as late as 1947, the report said. Other Dutch municipalities waived such debts, Het Parool reported. The following year the city agreed to reimburse half of what it charged to some Jews who were taxed in absentia. The city’s archives contain 342 requests for reimbursement, Het Parool reported.

The documents about this taxation were discovered by Charlotte van den Berg, a 23-year-old university student. She said she found them bundled with an elastic band in the archive section of one of the city’s departments while conducting research on Jewish home owners.

About 75 percent of Holland’s pre-World War II Jewish population of 140,000 was murdered in the Holocaust, according to the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, a Hague-based watchdog on anti-Semitism which is known locally by its acronym CIDI.

Read more: Amsterdam fined, taxed Holocaust survivors in hiding | The Times of Israel

Yahoonews: Sweden/Germany/Hungary: Scholars run down more clues to a Holocaust mystery - by Arthur Max and Randy Herschaft

For the complete report from YahooNews click on this link

Sweden/Germany/Hungary: Scholars run down more clues to a Holocaust mystery - by Arthur Max and Randy Herschaft

Sweden - Budapest, November 1944: Another German train has loaded its cargo of Jews bound for Auschwitz. A young Swedish diplomat pushes past the SS guard and scrambles onto the roof of a cattle car.Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus "passports" that extended Sweden's protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on, dumbfounded. Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and gentle manner. Recruited and financed by the U.S., he was sent into Hungary to save Jews. He bullied, bluffed and bribed powerful Nazis to prevent the deportation of 20,000 Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, and averted the massacre of 70,000 more people in Budapest's ghetto by threatening to have the Nazi commander hanged as a war criminal.

Wallenberg's rescue mission inevitably placed him in a vortex of intrigue and espionage involving the Hungarian resistance, the Jewish underground, communists working for the Soviets, and British, U.S. and Swedish intelligence operations. He also had regular contact with Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis running the deportation of Jews.After the Red Army arrived in January, Wallenberg went to see the Russian military commander to discuss postwar reconstruction and restitution of Jewish property. Two days later he returned under Russian escort to collect some personal effects, then was never seen in public again. And what did his country — or his influential cousins — do about it? In the mid-1950s, the Swedes pursued the case more aggressively, prompting a memorandum from Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in 1957 that Wallenberg had died of heart failure in detention 10 years earlier — at age 34. As more testimony came in that Wallenberg was still alive, Stockholm periodically raised the issue with Moscow — but without results, said Magnusson, interviewed in the Netherlands where he is now ambassador.

AlterNet: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq: Holocaust Denial, American Style - by Mark Weisbrot

For the complete report from AlterNet click on this link

Civilian Death Toll in Iraq: Holocaust Denial, American Style - by Mark Weisbrot

The average American believes that 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed since the US invasion in March 2003. The most commonly cited figure in the media is 70,000. But the actual number of people who have been killed is most likely more than one million. This is five times more than the estimates of killings in Darfur and even more than the genocide in Rwanda 13 years ago.

The estimate of more than one million violent deaths in Iraq was confirmed again two months ago in a poll by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business, which estimated 1,220,580 violent deaths since the US invasion. This is consistent with the study conducted by doctors and scientists from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health more than a year ago. Their study was published in the Lancet, Britain's leading medical journal.