THE THREE I’s: DISCERNING GENOCIDES FROM TRAGEDIES

We suggest that every tragedy that might be classified as genocide be tested by the three I’s – Intent, implementation and implication.

By Prof. Per Anders Rudling and Dr. Efraim Zuroff

(Courtesy of The Jerusalem Post where first published)

The accurate definition of genocide has come under scrutiny ever since the International Court of Justice accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza in its response to the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas terrorists, which claimed the lives of 1,200 Israeli civilians and foreign nationals in communities in southern Israel, and revelers at the Supernova music festival.

**Playing Politics**. Disinterested whether the accusation of genocide is true or not, a woman holds this sign outside the ICJ in 2024 in South Africa’s case against Israel. Having instituted the case of genocide against Israel, South Africa now stands itself accused of genocide by the Trump administration.(Photo: Johanna Geron/Reuters)

The term, coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his book ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in the wake of the Holocaust’, was defined as any attempt to destroy a group, in whole or in part, based on its national, ethnic, racial, or religious identity.

The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention not only criminalizes genocide, it also obligates state parties to pursue its enforcement. The convention was adopted in response to the Holocaust as the archetypal genocide. In recent decades there has been an expansion of the term to include a number of atrocities, well beyond the original genocide convention.

This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in some post-communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Lithuania, in particular has taken the lead in “widening” use of the term “genocide” to include Stalinist deportations and repressions.

**Defining Genocide**. Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the word “genocide” in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Tirelessly lobbying the UN for genocide to be added to international law, his efforts eventually paid off when on December 9, 1948, the UN approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

Often, these claims came with inflated numbers of victims. These cases are too many to mention. One such “victim inflation” was the plaques initially placed in Auschwitz, when Poland was under a Communist regime, which claimed that 4 million persons had been murdered in the camp. After Poland transitioned to a democracy, however, a team of expert historians revealed that the accurate number of victims was 1.3 million, among them 1.1 million Jews.

Former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko cited a tally of 10 million victims of the government-engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 – known as the “Holodomor” – calling it, in the superlative, “the greatest genocide.”

This is not just a matter of nomenclature, and not just about Lithuania. Over the past three decades, legislative assemblies across Europe have designated several atrocities as genocide. In 1994, Germany criminalized the “belittling, denying, relativizing… acts committed under National Socialist rule.” In subsequent years, other EU member states followed suit.

In 2008, the EU adopted a “Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia by means of Criminal Law, which meant that member states must make condoning, denying, and grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes a criminal offense.” This scope soon expanded to criminalize denial of “other internationally recognized crimes” as well.

DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE BECOMES LEGISLATED

As a result, numerous laws now define how we should interpret historical atrocities. France, for example, recognized the massacre of Armenians as genocide. The above-mentioned Lithuanian definition of genocide has been “widened” to include Stalinist deportations to Siberia and population transfers following World War II.

**Genuine Genocide**. Ottoman military forces march Armenian men from Kharput to an execution site outside the city. Sometimes called the first genocide of the twentieth century, the Armenian genocide refers to the physical annihilation of Armenian Christian people living in the Ottoman Empire from spring 1915 through autumn 1916. Of the approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, at least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation. (Courtesy of the Armenian National Institute)

In 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament recognized the 1932-1933 Soviet-engineered famine as a Ukrainian genocide, though the brutal Stalinist policies were aimed against economic and social groups (small farmers) and had devastating effects on many ethnic groups in several areas of the USSR.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland, and the European Parliament officially recognized that the Holodomor famine constituted a genocide.

Such memory regulations do not take into consideration that the historiography remains sharply divided as to the genocidal narration of the famine, and that many authoritative historians on the famine do not endorse the genocide thesis.

In some cases, inflated numbers have entered the official declarations of recognition, causing confusion rather than understanding. The current efforts also open up potential legal liabilities to those disputing the now-official narrative of the famine as a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians. These regulations risk hampering, rather than stimulating, critical inquiry into genocide.

**Man-Made Famine**. In 1932-1933, while the Soviet government sold massive quantities of Ukrainian grain to foreign markets, some 7 million Ukrainian men, women, and children starved to death. This deliberate attempt to crush the Ukrainian people by means of a man-made famine has become known as the ‘Holodomor’. That it was an unspeakable crime is not a question but did it amount to a genocide? (Photo: Alexander Wienerberger)

Nor do they provide a consistent approach to what constitutes genocide. For instance, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre is classified as a genocide by all EU-member states. The 33,000 Muslims there should have been protected by Dutch UN forces, but were abandoned to Serb forces. Approximately 6,500 males of combat age were murdered; women, children, and the elderly were released. What kind of ‘genocide’ was this? It was undoubtedly a war crime but not a genocide.

This crime against humanity is interchangeably referred to a genocide and an act of ethnic cleansing. The EU regulations, and national memory laws in member countries, affirm the genocidal narration.

However, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has not been universally recognized as such. Approximately 700,000 Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were slaughtered by radical Hutus intent on murdering the entire Tutsi population in Rwanda.

For some reason, which is difficult to identify, the United States refuses to recognize the mass murder of the Rwandan Tutsis as a case of genocide. One possible explanation is that the American refusal to send troops, or to encourage the United Nations to do so, remains highly problematic in light of the results of their failure to try and stop the mass murders.

**Mass Murder**. Seen here the Nyarubuye massacre site in Rwanda. While 700,000 Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were slaughtered by radical Hutus intent on murdering the entire Tutsi population in Rwanda in 1994, the ‘Rwandan genocide’ has not been universally recognized as such. (April, 1994. © Gilles Peress | Magnum Photos)

Ukraine does not recognize the 1915 massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide; its foreign ministry actively opposes campaigns to recognize the event as such.

THE THREE I’s

We suggest that every tragedy that might be classified as genocide be tested by the three I’s of intent, implementation, and implications:

The intent, in such cases, is to deliberately murder a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

Implementation reflects the goal of the perpetrators, the scope of the murders, the cruelty of the perpetrators, and the inability of those targeted to survive.

Implication refers to the degree of damage inflicted on the victims, and what possibility they have to survive/recover.

Justice and historical understanding can only succeed if the historical inquiry into past tragedies is open and free from ideologically imposed censorship.

About the writers:

Per Anders Rudling is an associate professor of history and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of History, Lund University, Sweden.

Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff has an MA and PhD in Holocaust Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For the last four decades, he has played an important role in bringing Nazi criminals to justice as the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves. LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

‘MARCH OF THE LIVING’ EXPOSES HARSH TRUTHS

It’s not “crying wolf” to name antisemitism when it appears, it’s crying warning.

By Allan Joffe

(*First appeared in the SAJR)

I recently participated in the March of the Living, a journey of remembrance and reflection that takes thousands of Jews and others on the walk from Auschwitz to Birkenau. Marching alongside survivors, rabbis, teenagers, and dignitaries, I expected grief and outrage. I found those emotions, but I also encountered deeper, more unsettling realisations – about Jewish identity, the nature of evil, and the troubling patterns of silence that persist today.

**Down on the Track**. Marchers prayed and wept as they proceeded through the camp complex as these who sat down on the train track that had brought millions of Jews from across Europe to their death. (Photo: Getty)

One of the first things that struck me was the sea of Israeli flags. Everywhere I turned, it was Israeli flags, not American, not Canadian, not British, or South African, only Israeli. It wasn’t just a matter of national pride. It reflected something deeper: the vast majority of Jews today, whether religious or secular, weave their Jewish identity with Israel.

Among the most powerful things I witnessed on the march was the overwhelming sense of Jewish pride, solidarity, and resilience. Thousands of Jews, from dozens of countries, marched carrying Israeli flags and family memories, not in bitterness or anger, but in remembrance and hope. Their Jewish identity was something rooted in history, faith, and the unbreakable link between past and future.

It also struck me that in stark contrast to the marchers, a small but vocal minority defines their Jewish identity almost entirely through opposition to Israel. Jenny Manson, the co-founder of Jewish Voice for Labour, admitted with breathtaking candour that she “began to identify as a Jew in order to argue against the state of Israel and its behaviour.” In other words, Jewish identity – for her and many like her – isn’t a source of pride, culture, or continuity. Unlike the marchers, their Jewishness isn’t an inheritance but a hollow construct, worn only when it serves their campaign against their own people. The irony and cognitive dissonance are staggering. If their opposition were ever successful, if Israel were dismantled, their connection to Judaism would collapse with it.

As we marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the sheer scale of horror became almost impossible to process. Auschwitz-Birkenau wasn’t just a site of death, it was an industrial complex designed for the systematic extermination of human beings. The Nazis refined murder into an assembly line. Every detail, from the layout of the barracks to the chemical engineering of Zyklon B, spoke of cold, calculated efficiency. The Holocaust is often compared to other atrocities, but in its bureaucratic dehumanisation, it remains a category of its own. It was genocide engineered with industrial precision, and that horror echoes uniquely across history.

**Remembrance on the Railway**. Leaving messages and photos of Holocaust victims on the camp’s infamous train track. (Photo: Getty)

Another realisation gnawed at me during the march: the Holocaust wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t tucked away in forests or isolated deserts. It was right there, often within earshot and eyesight of Polish towns. Ordinary people lived nearby. They saw the smoke, they heard the trains, they knew. And it wasn’t only in Poland. Trains packed with Jews crisscrossed Europe, rumbling through hundreds of towns and villages. Entire communities watched cattle cars filled with human beings pass by, and the knowledge of what was happening seeped across borders and societies. The idea that people “didn’t know” is a comforting myth. In truth, many knew, and chose to look away.

This is the bystander effect in its most extreme form – the phenomenon in which individuals don’t offer help to a victim when other people are present. Seeing it on such a massive, lethal scale forces uncomfortable questions about human nature. But it also forces questions about today.

**Defying Death**. With arm raised in defiance, walking out from the cunningly contrived ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ gate, where Jews entered 80 years earlier, never to leave. (Photo: Getty)

Over past months, we have seen this silence, and, at times, outright hostility, play out painfully across many parts of society. For example, universities, which once prided themselves on defending free thought and moral clarity, had students and faculty respond to the atrocities of 7 October not with empathy, but with strident hostility toward Israel and often toward Jewish students themselves. In some cases, it wasn’t merely individuals but the institutions themselves that adopted stances indistinguishable from antisemitism. Meanwhile, faculties and students in science, technology, engineering, and medicine largely remained passive bystanders. Even today, many within these fields haven’t meaningfully confronted the moral failure of their silence. Their grievance is narrowly framed:

“We weren’t involved; we don’t discriminate; yet we’re losing our funding.”

This isn’t merely an institutional failure; it’s a collapse of moral courage at the very hour it was most needed.

**Hostage Survivor**. Kidnapped on October 7, IDF surveillance soldier and released hostage Agam Berger and her mother participate at the March of the Living on April 24, 2025 (Yossi Zeleger/March of the Living)

Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, has described antisemitism as a virus that mutates. In the Middle Ages, we were demonised as Christ-killers, accused of blood libels and poisoning wells. In the 19th century, we were vilified as capitalist exploiters and simultaneously as revolutionary subversives. In the 20th century, we were depicted as a racial threat to Aryan purity. Today, we’re denounced as colonial oppressors for having a sovereign state. The language and justifications change; the hatred remains constant. It’s precisely because of this relentless mutation that the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted a working definition of antisemitism, a definition that recognises that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, such as by claiming that the existence of Israel is a racist endeavour, is itself a form of antisemitism.

We don’t need an impossibly high bar to recognise antisemitism. History teaches the opposite: we need a low bar. We need to be alert to the early signs, the coded language, the double standards. Waiting until antisemitism becomes undeniable has always meant waiting too long. It’s not “crying wolf” to name antisemitism when it appears, it’s crying warning.

After 7 October, the painful reality became impossible to ignore. The silence across much of the world was profound. The hesitation, the equivocation, the indifference, all made clear that even in the face of unspeakable brutality against Jews, outrage would be rationed, sympathy would be conditional, and solidarity would be rare. As Sam Harris, a neuroscientist, philosopher, and bestselling author known for his work on ethics, religion, and the human mind, bluntly observed:

“Who can be counted on to defend the Jews but the Jews.”

Many Jews who had lived comfortably in secular or universalist identities, people like Harris himself, found themselves transformed into “post-7 October Jews”. Not necessarily more religious, but far more aware: of vulnerability, of abandonment, and of the need for Jewish self-reliance.

**Singing Survivors**. Released hostage Agam Berger and Kibbutz Be’eri survivor Daniel Weiss (r) whose parents were murdered on October 7 perform at March of the Living on April 24, 2025. (Yossi Zeleger/March of the Living)

Of course, there are courageous non-Jewish voices of solidarity today, just as there were righteous gentiles during the Holocaust. Voices like John Spencer, Douglas Murray, and Richard Kemp have stood with Jews when many others wouldn’t. But they are too few and far between. Their courage only highlights the broader loneliness.

Marching from Auschwitz to Birkenau, I felt pride in our resilience. We’re still here. We carry the memory of the dead, and we stand defiant against those who would wish to erase us.

About the writer:

Allan Joffe is a businessman based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is married with three children and recently participated in the March of the Living, an international Holocaust education program.

*Feature picure: Participants with Israeli flag walk along the infamous rail track leading to the gate of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp in Poland, during the annual March of The Living to honor the victims of the Holocaust on April 24, 2025. (Photo: Wojtek Radwanski/AP).

IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN ON YOUR WATCH

You swore Never Again – but it is happening on your watch!

By Rolene Marks

Dear world leaders, “social justice” warriors, humanitarian organisations and non-governmental organisations, look at them. Say their names. Eli, Ohad and Or. Say their names. Look them in the eye and explain why you failed them.

Over the past weekend, three hostages who had been held in Hamas captivity for 491 days since 7 October were released. At the first site of the emaciated men, and after gasping in shock, my immediate thought that they looked like Holocaust survivors. I try stay away from Holocaust comparisons but this could not be avoided. The testimony that Or, Ohad and Eli have shared about the cruelty they suffered at the hands of Hamas is more than the soul can bear and like so many, I feel anger and sorrow.

At the end of January, world leaders gathered at the United Nations, Auschwitz or at respective memorials around the world, dressed suitably in funereal black with mournful expressions on their faces. Some even lit candles! It was a study in performative grief – but oh, the photo opportunities!!! The reality is that many world leaders have been silent or have done nothing as antisemitism spikes at astronomical levels and many Jews question if they still have a future in the countries they live in and contribute to. If you are Australian Prime Minister, Anthony “Tennis Albo” Albanese, you play tennis while a synagogue with worshippers inside burns – but make sure you get de rigueur photo op by visiting a Holocaust centre while your Israel-hating policies ignore the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Albanese sent his Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, to participate in the commemoration ceremony marking 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, despite a petition from the Jewish community asking for her not to be the representative on this most solemn day. Wong, who has taken a decidedly hostile posture towards Israel, insulted many in Israel and Australia when she refused to visit the decimated kibbutzim when she visited Israel shortly after 7 October.

If you are soon to be former Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, you make insipid statements while Montreal erupts with riots. Antisemitism has exploded across Canada as well, where synagogues have been attacked, Jewish schools have been shot at and Jews have been threatened, intimidated, had businesses vandalized and more. Trudeau was the only G7 leader not to visit Israel in the wake of the atrocities of 7 October. The message was received loud and clear by both the Jewish community – and the Pro-Hamas camp.

If you are British Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, you pose for a picture with former hostage, Emily Damari’s mother – then betray all the families by voting for a sham UN resolution that does not link the immediate and unconditional release of the hostages to a ceasefire. Despite overwhelming evidence that proves UNRWA (United Nations Relief Works Agency) involvement in the 7 October atrocities – you shore them up with support by allocating even MORE money to their coffers. If these attitudes could be turned into a fragrance, it would be eau de hypocrisy!!

These same leaders have been the ones withholding licenses for weapons that Israel needs to defend itself from multiple genocidal terror organisations. While magnanimously bestowing upon us their sanction of our right to defend ourselves, they have lectured Israel about our response to Hamas and made humanitarian aid to Gazans their priority. They have said the bare minimum about the horrific condition of our hostages – or their testimonies.

All these great western bastions of human rights have fallen silent. They barely acknowledge the appalling treatment of our hostages – or ignore the horrific attacks on Jews in their respective countries.

On January 27, in front of the ghosts of Auschwitz, they solemnly swore NEVER AGAIN. They are failing to make good of that vow.

January 27^th is International Holocaust Memorial Day, designated by the United Nations to remember and memorialize all those murdered in the Holocaust and in particular, six million Jews. While many others were murdered by the Nazis because they were LGBTQ, Roma or Sinti or political dissidents, Jews were specifically marked for extermination, without exception.

The Holocaust did not start with gas chambers. The Holocaust started with words – and the steady erosion of Jews from society, including from the arts, literature, sports and other professions. In 2024, there was a significant resurgence in this horrific trend following the atrocities of 7 October 2023.

International Holocaust Memorial Day should serve as a stark reminder to the world what happens when Jew hatred goes unchecked. It would appear not all world leader respects this. Michael Higgins, President of Ireland, who already has a record of appalling hostility to Israel, used the solemnity of a Holocaust memorial ceremony to castigate the State of Israel. Several members of the Jewish community stood up and turned their backs on him in silent protest. Security officials physically removed them, including a pregnant Israeli woman – a descendant from Holocaust survivors. The optics were appalling. If the representative of the highest office in the country abuses his platform, what message does this send to fellow citizens?

Contrast Higgins with King Charles who made history as the first British Monarch to visit Auschwitz and met with survivors and members of the Krakow Jewish community. The late Queen Elizabeth II visited the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen where she paid a moving tribute to Anne Frank.

In the last nearly sixteen months, Jews in the literary world have been excluded from panels, put on lists to alert possible readers that the author may be “Zionist” and have been refused participation on panels. What is next? Burning books by Jewish writers?

“It was just the prelude… Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too.” Prophetic words, penned by German Jewish Writer Heinrich Heine in 1821. During the dark years of the Nazi regime between 1933-1945, Heine’s words became a devastating reality as the seminal works of some of the greatest Jewish writers were burned. We know what followed.

It is not just writers who are steadily being excluded. This has filtered into the world of sports, arts and culture, business, medicine and wherever there is a Jewish presence. The horrific sense of déjà vu that we are experiencing cannot be understated, except that it is 2025 and not 1933. It does feel like we have entered some kind of horrible time warp and are experiencing that which we vowed Never Again.

Antisemitism manifests itself in many evil ways. It manifests in every iteration from the exclusion and threats to Jews in society, to the brutal massacres and kidnapping of Israelis citizens – and the silence or inaction of those in power.

This brings me back to the scenes on Saturday. Hamas have never hidden their cruelty. On the contrary, they have happily boasted about it knowing that they have accurately judged the reaction of the world.

On January 27, world leaders stood for photo opportunities – a public display of performative grief. They said the “right” things about fighting antisemitism, remembrance and education. They said “Never Again” and they failed. Again.

So where are they, as Jews are being targeted, erased from public spaces, beaten and harassed?

Where are their voices demanding the immediate release of the hostages or an end to the silence about the mass rape of victims on 7 October?

Where are they when our hostages, emaciated and terrified are released from captivity while others languish in the terror dungeons?

Antisemitism is not a Jewish issue – it is a societal problem. It is happening on their watch. We are terrified where this will end.

NAZIS AS NEIGHBORS

Uncovering uncomfortable truths of how and why Nazis found allies in the suburbia of the USA after their gruesome pasts were uncovered.

Book Review by Dr. Efraim Zuroff

First published in the Jerusalem Report

It took more than three decades for any of the five Allied Anglo-Saxon democracies which fought against Nazi Germany in World War II (United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain and New Zealand), and against all logic, admitted at least hundreds, if not thousands of Nazi criminals as immigrants, to take any legal measures against those persons who had lied to obtain entry. It was only in 1979, that the United States, which admitted the largest number of former Nazis, estimated at 10,000, established the “Office of Special Investigations” to exclusively prosecute former Nazi collaborators who lied on their immigration applications in order to obtain permission to enter the United States and subsequently become American citizens. Three additional countries – Canada in 1986, Australia in 1989, and Great Britain in 1991 – followed suit and passed laws enabling to pursue legal measures against former Nazi collaborators. The only country which refused to prosecute those who lied about their service with the Axis forces, was New Zealand.

**Nazi Quarry to Chicago School**. The book details how after being promoted to oversee 12 men at the Gross-Rosen facility, Kulle marched prisoners to a quarry (pictured) where the 12-hour shifts were so brutal few lived for more than a month.

This year, now that almost all of the perpetrators are no longer alive, and it appears that there will not be any more Nazi trials, historians, journalists and writers can summarize the results achieved by each of the countries which tried to take legal action against the Holocaust criminals who sought refuge in Anglo-Saxon democracies, and the same is true for Germany. So far, four excellent books have been published this year, about four different countries which summarize their efforts to bring Holocaust perpetrators to justice. Tobias Buck‘s The Final Verdict; The Holocaust on Trial in the 21^st Century focuses on the belated trials in Germany, but also gives excellent insights to explain why West Germany made it so difficult to prosecute Nazi criminals, and why so many murderers were spared trials and punishment. Jon Silverman and Robert Sherwood‘s Safe Haven; The United Kingdom’s Investigation Into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice explains the failures of the British War Crimes Unit, which account for the paltry results achieved (only one perpetrator convicted and punished). Historian Jayne Persian‘s Fascists In Exile; Post-War Displaced Persons in Australia explains the reasons for the even worse results in Australia (no convictions).

In view of such dismal results all over the globe, Michael Soffer‘s Our Nazi; An American Suburb Encounter With Evil is a genuine breath of fresh air for several reasons. First of all, the major focus of the book is a case of a German Nazi who immigrated to the United States, which has the most successful record of all the Anglo-Saxon democracies who faced this problem. For the record: 109 Nazis who immigrated to the U.S. illegally have been punished either by denaturalization and/or deportation for immigration and naturalization violations.

The first book to lay bare the life of a Nazi camp guard who settled in a Chicago suburb and to explore how his community and others responded to discoveries of Nazis in their midst. “Our Nazi; An American Suburb’s Encounter With Evil,” The University of Chicago Press, 2024, 306 pages, $25.00

And what makes this book even more interesting is the particular problems which arose in the case of German Reinhold Kulle, who served as an S.S. guard in the notorious Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and whose diligence and dedication to his job posed some difficult dilemmas for his employers and his neighbors.

**Behind the Smiling Façade**. Nazi prison camp guard Reinhold Kulle who hid in plain sight in America for nearly three decades, is seen here in the Oak Park and River Forest High School’s 1966 yearbook.

Kulle was considered an outstanding school custodian, beloved and respected by the staff and students of Oak Park and River Forest High School. His work performance was uniquely appreciated, as was his personal conduct and exceptional relations with the students, many of whom found it difficult to believe that Kulle had been an S.S. guard in a Nazi concentration camp.

**Hiding in Plain Sight**. Reinold Kulle, during his time as a Nazi before he fled to the US and a quiet, Midwestern life. Kulle was one of around 10,000 Nazis who entered the US after the war and, like others, blended into his community, his neighbors oblivious to his past. Throughout World War II, Kulle had not only been a member of the Nazi’s Waffen-SS, but had worked at Gross-Rosen concentration camp where 40,000 Jews died.

To make the story more understandable, Soffer provides an excellent summary of the history of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), its establishment, and the obstacles that they faced to pursue the cases in the United States. Of particular interest, are his descriptions of the OSI lawyers, such as Bruce Einhorn and Eli Rosenbaum, for whom the Kulle case was his first at OSI, and later for many years became its director.

**School for Scandal**. The school hired Kulle even though the marriage certificate it had on file for him had his SS rank, the concentration camp where he worked, and a Reichsadler eagle stamp. Top left: Kulle at his Brookfield home in 1983, at the time of his deportation hearing. (Photography: (Kulle) Chicago Tribune; (school) Pioneer Press)

He also described in great detail the local personalities on both sides of the debate about Kulle and how to decide his fate. What was of particular interest was the tireless efforts of some of the Jewish women residents of Oak Park, who never gave up despite the pressure they faced from their colleagues and neighbors. Leah Marcus, Rima Lunin Schultz, and Rae Lynne Toporoff, helped make history and achieve justice, and deserve the mention that Michael Soffer gave them.

About the writer:

Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the former director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center dedicated to Holocaust research, the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, and confronting antisemitism. As the world’s last Nazi hunter, Dr. Zuroff co-created the project, “Operation Last Chance” that operated across 14 countries in Europe and South America, offering financial rewards for information which could facilitate the prosecution of Nazi Holocaust perpetrators. Dr. Zuroff is also the author of over five hundred scholarly articles, publications, and books about the Holocaust and related subjects.

LETTER TO MY GRANDFATHER

A lifelong personal journey of a grandson to expose Lithuanian complicity in the mass murder of its Jewish citizens in the Holocaust.

By Grant Gochin

Growing up in South Africa, you implored me to “remember” -“Zachor”. I was to remember who we Jews are, and where we came from. You showed me the photos and told me stories. You taught me only love. You asked me to visit our family cemetery in the “old country” and to recite Kaddish for our family.

Zayde, I have.

So then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I traveled to the “old country”, specifically, Lithuania. Once there, my first destination was your shtetl. There was nothing Jewish remaining. They destroyed everything. Deliberately. I erected a new gravestone where I could say Kaddish.

The cemeteries were in utter disarray and in shambles. It was glaringly apparent to me that the overgrowth was intentional. No one wanted to remember that Jews had lived in Lithuania.

Together with others, I began to document and restore dozens of Jewish cemeteries in Lithuania.

Zachor Zayde, we preserved memory.

I searched for survivors. I found Sarah, our only cousin who survived the Shoah. Sarah’s descendants and I have formed strong family bonds. We remember. We are a family again. Everybody else was murdered. Lithuanians did it. Not Nazis.

Research led me to other survivors who could have easily been our Jewish relatives. I helped them Zayde, to the best of my ability. We worked tirelessly to support and love them. That is what you would have expected from me; I delivered.

I began to research your life. You did not tell me of the brutality and cruelty Lithuanians perpetrated against you, your mother, your father and your siblings. You sheltered me because you worried that I was too young to comprehend. Indeed, even as an adult, it is almost impossible to comprehend the cruelty and viciousness Lithuanians perpetrated against our family. They did so viciously, opportunistically and joyously.

Zayde, you embodied the dignity of Litvaks. I wanted the Lithuanians to know your name. Simply for them to know you had existed, and to record your name in a modern document. I applied for Lithuanian citizenship. I did not need their citizenship, because I am American now. I just wanted to preserve your memory. Lithuania denied you existed. They lied. They slandered you. When I applied , they used every tool they could create to deny citizenship to any Jew.

Zayde, you were pure love and dignity, I would not allow such monstrous people to obliterate and sully your name. I declared moral war on the Lithuanian Government and fought them in their own courts. I exposed their modern virulent antisemitism. I won. I am now a citizen of Lithuania; many of your grandchildren are also. We have used Lithuania’s slanders against you to crack open their stealth wall of hate. Now, through and because of you, many thousands of Jews have reclaimed their Lithuanian citizenship. Because of the principles you instilled in me to fight for truth; stand for respect and defend the vulnerable. Zachor.

Reciting Kaddish as you asked me to, I discovered the identity of the murderer of our own family. His name was Jonas Noreika. Lithuania considers him their national hero! Initially, I could not believe that such an evil ideology was still possible. I did what you asked of me Zayde, I stood up for truth. I approached the Lithuanian Government to explain to them that they had made a “mistake”. In my own mind, it was not possible that a monster who murdered thousands of his own co-citizens simply because they were Jews, could be elevated to their modern-day national hero. But I made a horrific discovery. The Lithuanian Government has fraudulently rewritten their national history and has zero interest in the truth. I tried everything; I was able to show them the facts. They treated me just as they had treated you, and all of our relatives; with contempt and brutality.

Zayde, you had no ability to stand up to Lithuanians during your lifetime, so, I did it for you. I did it for all their victims, for all Jews. I demanded the Lithuanian Government tell the truth. I fought them with every fiber of my being. Lithuania almost won. They declared their murderers as their heroes and contemptuously told us few surviving Jews that Lithuania was a rescuer nation. Zayde, they spat in your face. They had only contempt for the 220,000 Jews their national heroes had murdered.

No Holocaust organization would help me. They were bystanders. No Jewish institution helped me. Almost nobody would help me fight for truth. I realized that if I did not stand up for you, and for all 220,000 murder victims, Lithuania would successfully declare themselves the victim of their own murders, and the memory of every Lithuanian Jewish murder victim would be murdered again. It was the murder of truth and the murder of memory. How could I accept this and still face you? I could not.

Your life lessons left me no choice but to fight. I sued them in every court in their country, I sued them in the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations. I faced down their death threats; their threats of criminal and constitutional charges, their slanders and their attacks. It was them or you. I had no choice. You were love, they are hate. I could not have lived with myself had I allowed them to repeat their vile conduct.

I fought them for fifteen years. I spent hundreds of thousands of hours fighting them. You gave me no option. Allowing them to win would have been a betrayal of you and every Jewish victim.

I led a decade long international media campaign against the Lithuanian Government to expose the truth. I spent years researching, bringing truths to light, and preserving memory. I sat on Boards where we preserved documents and authentic history. I dedicated my life to remembering, documenting and preserving. Respect for you dominated my world and motivated all of my actions.

Good Lithuanians helped. Noreika’s own Granddaughter, Silvia Foti, stepped forward to tell the truth about her grandfather. Michael Kretzmer made an extraordinary documentary to expose the truth. And under the withering glare of international media, Lithuania finally crumbled.

Lithuania has admitted only some of Noreika’s crimes. They remain the most intense Holocaust revisionists in the world. They continue to lie about their many murderer heroes whose crimes I have exposed. Lithuania’s national history is a fraud, but we have finally penetrated the wall of their deceptions. And the world now knows. I have restored the truth.

Zayde, I have honored your legacy. You may now rest in peace. I love you.

*Feature picture: The writer’s grandfather, Samuel Gochin, in Lithuanian uniform of 5^th Grand Duke Kestutis Doughboys Infantry. (Source: Gochin Family Archive).

About the writer:

Grant Arthur Gochin currently serves as the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo. He is the Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs for the African Union, which represents the fifty-five African nations, and Emeritus Vice Dean of the Los Angeles Consular Corps, the second largest Consular Corps in the world. Gochin is actively involved in Jewish affairs, focusing on historical justice. He has spent the past twenty five years documenting and restoring signs of Jewish life in Lithuania. He has served as the Chair of the Maceva Project in Lithuania, which mapped / inventoried / documented / restored over fifty abandoned and neglected Jewish cemeteries. Gochin is the author of “Malice, Murder and Manipulation”, published in 2013. His book documents his family history of oppression in Lithuania. He is presently working on a project to expose the current Holocaust revisionism within the Lithuanian government. Professionally, Gochin is a Certified Financial Planner and practices as a Wealth Advisor in California, where he lives with his family. Personal site: https://www.grantgochin.com/

FINAL VERDICT

With time running out, the trial of Nazi death camp guard provides last opportunity for Holocaust survivors to relate their stories in a court of law.

By Dr Efraim Zuroff

The title of Tobias Buck’s Final Verdict is somewhatmisleading. While it does focus on one of the very last trials of a Nazi war criminal in a German court, the trial of Stutthof watchtower guard Bruno Dey was not the last such proceeding conducted recently in Germany. Nor was it one of the most interesting of the “belated trials” in Germany of Holocaust perpetrators. During the eight months Dey served in the Nazi concentration camp, he apparently did not murder any of the inmates, nor did he ever shoot his rifle.

It was precisely Dey’s relative insignificance, however, and the enormous difference between him and the major Nazi criminals, who served in notorious death camps, such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, or the important desk mass murderers like Eichmann, that piqued Buck’s curiosity, and attracted him to the case. He was quite certain that Dey would not have been a mass murderer, or a commander of a death camp, but he was not sure that Dey would be able to admit his guilt, and whether he would fully grasp his responsibility.

The gripping narrative of one of the last Nazi criminal trials in Germany – that of Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard charged with aiding the murder of more than 5,000 people – and a larger exploration of Germany’s reckoning with the Holocaust, from silence to memory to today’s rising tide of fascism and antisemitism. (Hachette Books, 2024, 327 pages, $32.00)

Another aspect which attracted Buck’s interest was that he viewed the trial as one of the last opportunities for:

– Holocaust survivors to relate their stories in a court of law

– an old man to confront his guilt in front of a judge and

– a German court to show that justice could still be done, even many years after the crimes had been committed.

Buck explained that it was also a last opportunity for him to re-visit Holocaust issues, which as he put it “had held a grip on me since my early teenage years in Germany, when I developed a sudden and deep curiosity about the Nazi period, and specifically the murder of Europe’s Jews.” This interest prompted him to visit Auschwitz and to interview Holocaust survivors, something extremely rare among German youth his age. (Oddly enough, it was only once he began covering the Dey trial, that he began to research his own family, and discover that his grandfather Rupert was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933-1945, and a member of the S.S. from 1933-1935.)

It was Buck’s interest in Holocaust issues, and especially in the failure of the German judiciary to bring so many major Nazi Holocaust perpetrators to justice, that motivated him to write a book not only about the Dey trial, but also to explain the terrible failure of German justice, and explain how and why Germany dramatically changed its prosecution policy vis-à-vis Holocaust perpetrators, the step which led to eight trials of individuals who served in death and concentration camps, who would never have been brought to justice without the change in policy.

According to Buch:

“There was no single cause that can explain the historical failure of the West German judiciary to prosecute Nazi crimes. There were practical, as well as legal reasons, political reluctance, as well as popular resistance. Justice was thwarted by German amnesia, and American realpolitik (U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy pardoned some prisoners, and reduced the sentences of others), and by an unspoken agreement between key German leaders to draw a line under the past and move on.”

The statistics speak for themselves. From 1949, when West Germany assumed responsibility for its judiciary, until 1985, 200,000 Germans were investigated for Nazi crimes, the majority of whom (120,000) were indicted, but less than 7,000 were punished, many with extremely light sentences, some of which were subsequently commuted.

The situation hardly improved after German unification, until an extraordinary change in German prosecution policy vis-à-vis Nazi Holocaust perpetrators was implemented by Thomas Walther and his colleague Kirsten Goetze, a pair of dedicated prosecutors working at the German Central Office for the Clarification of Nazi War Crimes. They, and Anne Meier-Goering, the judge in the Dey trial, are the heroes of Final Verdict.

Despite the restrictions of the Covid pandemic, Judge Anne Meier-Goering pressed on with the trial against 93-year-old German Bruno Dey accused of being an SS guard involved in the mass murder of thousands of prisoners, many of them Jewish in the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland.(Fabian Bimmer/Pool via AP)

Until 2008, the main obstacle to the prosecution in Germany of Holocaust perpetrators, was the requirement that there was available evidence that the suspect had committed a specific crime against a specific victim, which was almost impossible to prove decades after the crime had been committed. Walther and Goetze suggested that instead of trying to convict suspects of murder, which was nearly impossible to prove, why not charge the suspects with “accessory for murder.” In that case, what the prosecution would have to prove in a case of a death camp guard, was “only” that:

1) the defendant was present in the camp when the Jews were being murdered

2) that during his or her service in the camp, at least a certain number of Jews were killed

3) that the suspect had assisted in the murders due to his or her function in the camp hierarchy

The case chosen to test this strategy was quite famous, that of Ivan Demjanjuk, who had initially been convicted in the United States (of immigration and naturalization violations), and in Israel (of mass murder in the Treblinka death camp), but was ultimately released on the grounds of mistaken identity, and sent back to the United States. There, he was tried again, only this time for service in Sobibor, not Treblinka, and ordered deported. Based on the new policy, Germany was able to obtain his extradition and convict him for the deaths of some 28,000 Jews in Sobibor, a decision which paved the way for the trials of seven men and women who served in Nazi concentration camps, among them Bruno Dey.

Expected to be one of the last Nazi-era trials, as both survivors and perpetrators are now very old, and in some cases their memories are failing, former Nazi guard Bruno Dey hides his face behind a folder during his trial which he was found guilty of mass murder at Stutthof Camp.

The Dey trial posed several technical and judicial problems for Judge Meier-Goering. The corona pandemic erupted during the trial, but Judge Meier-Goering managed to continue despite all the restrictions.

In order to convict Dey, she believed that the prosecution had to prove that the watchtower guard knew what was happening in Stutthof. Time and again, she asked Dey whether he conversed with the inmates to learn about their conditions. But Dey refused to “cooperate” with her, and claimed that he never witnessed an execution, a public whipping, or any other form of punishment. He even claimed that he didn’t know where the gallows were, but the detailed testimonies of the survivors about the gas chambers, the horrible lack of food, and the refusal to provide medical treatment for ill inmates, made Dey’s supposed ignorance about the purpose of the camp much less believable. And indeed, Judge Meier-Goering clearly and extensively mentioned the crimes that Dey witnessed day after day and the fact that he made no effort to be reassigned to a different task. In that respect, Judge Meier-Goering’s verdict established a ruling that could have enabled the prosecution of thousands of Holocaust perpetrators who were never prosecuted in Germany, that there is nothing as a “small cog” in a concentration camp.

The crematoria at Stutthof concentration camp after liberation, 9 May 1945.

Final Verdict is an extremely valuable book, which deserves wide circulation, not only in Germany, but throughout the Western world. I can only hope that it will be translated to as many languages as possible.

About the writer:

His works include the following books: (1) Occupation Nazi-Hunter; The Continuing Search for the Perpetrators of the Holocaust; (2) The Response of Orthodox Jewry in the United States to the Holocaust; (3) The Activities of the Vaad Ha- Hatzala Rescue Committee of the Orthodox Rabbis, 1939-1945; (4) Operation Last Chance – One Man’s Quest to Bring Nazi Criminals to Justice and (5) Our People; Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust, co-written with Ruta Vanagaite.

A MASS EMIGRATION OF CRIMINALS

Illuminating review of new book that reveals the mostly untold story of Nazi war criminals and collaborators who found safe refuge in Australia in the early post-WWII years.

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Nazi hunter who has played a key role in bringing Nazi criminals to trial.

(*First published in the Australia/Israel Review (AIR), a publication of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council)

One of the strangest outcomes of World War II was the mass postwar emigration of Nazi war criminals to the Anglo-Saxon democracies which fought against the Nazis and played a major role in the defeat of the Third Reich. Thus, for example, some 200,000 American soldiers lost their lives fighting against the Germans, yet an estimated 10,000 Nazi perpetrators were admitted as immigrants to the United States during the decade after the war. And a similar situation developed in Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The only exception in this regard was South Africa, which was hermetically closed to immigration in the aftermath of World War II.

**Safe Harbor.** With serious flaws in the screening process during the post war period, how many Nazis and their collaborators sneaked into Australia? Seen here are migrant arrivals from Europe arriving in Sydney harbor in 1947.

For more than three decades in the United States, and more than 40 years in the other Anglo-Saxon democracies, no effort was undertaken to identify, investigate, and if possible, prosecute any of these perpetrators. But as knowledge and interest in the Holocaust grew throughout the world, efforts to bring these criminals to justice were launched.

The first government to take steps to enable the prosecution of the Holocaust perpetrators, who had immigrated by lying about their service with the Nazis, was the United States, which established its Office of Special Investigations in 1979. Nazi collaborators were stripped of their American citizenship, and could then be deported. Eight years later, Canada passed a law enabling criminal prosecution of Nazi criminals, and in 1989, Australia passed a similar law. In the UK, it took almost another five years to pass similar legislation in 1991. The only country which refused to take legal action against immigrants who lied about their service with the Nazis was New Zealand.

Now that at least three and a half decades have passed since the efforts to prosecute these perpetrators commenced, and there is no political will in any of these countries to bring ninety-year-olds to justice, the time has come for historians to assess the results. So far, two books on the “belated” trials of Holocaust perpetrators in Anglo-Saxon countries have been published this year – Safe Haven by Jon Silverman and Robert Sherwood on Great Britain, and Jayne Persian’s Fascists in Exile on Australia.

**Easy Entry**. A new life for immigrants from Europe disembarking in Sydney could so easily include Nazis and their collaborators as the screening was poor on departure and even worse on arrival in Australia.

The latter is the subject of this review, and well deserving of public attention. Anyone interested in post-Holocaust justice, the history of Australian Jewry, the critical role of Eastern European Nazi collaborators in the Final Solution, and related topics will find this book of great interest. Unlike Safe Haven, which covers the history of the issue starting with the passage of the British War Crimes Act in 1991 (after a heated struggle that took four and a half years with fierce opposition by the House of Lords, which twice rejected the bill), Fascists in Exile covers the entire issue, from the post-World War II emigration of the Eastern European refugees to Australia to the present.

Fascists in Exile: Post-War Displaced Persons in Australia
*Jayne Persian*
*Routledge, 182 pages, A$49.99*

Persian does an excellent job of exposing the serious flaws in the screening, or the lack thereof, both in Europe prior to immigration and in Australia after arrival. During the years 1947 to 1952, 170,000 non-Jewish Displaced Persons settled in Australia, the overwhelming majority of whom were Eastern Europeans from countries in which the local population actively participated in the mass murder of the local Jewish population. Although there was extensive information available on the World War II service of such individuals, hardly any effort was made by the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) to prevent their immigration, or even inform the Australian authorities about their past.

Persian explains in great detail what went wrong in Europe, as well as in Australia. First of all, in Europe, most of the investigations were carried out by inexperienced officers and enlisted men, who were not aware of the role played by Eastern European Nazi collaborators in the Holocaust. To make things worse, the British Foreign Ministry instructed its military officers to protect the 20,000 members of the Latvian SS Legion, who fought for the victory of the Third Reich. Quite a few of the Latvia SS Legion’s members joined after serving in the Arajs Kommando mass murder squad, or the Latvian SD, both of which played major roles in the annihilation of Latvian Jews, as well as German and Austrian Jews deported to Latvia.

Another example of the totally irresponsible screening of large numbers of prospective immigrants occurred with respect to the Ukrainians of the Galicia Division of the SS, which also participated in the mass murder of Jews. Only 180 out of 8,000 men were interviewed individually. Thus, is it not at all surprising that the IRO acceptance rate for immigration was 82.6%.

To make matters worse, all the flaws in the screening process in Europe were exacerbated by the policies of the Australian government, which believed that once the IRO vetted the refugees, they were no longer responsible for any additional security checks. In addition, the major concern of the Australian government was that the refugees would fit into “White Australia”, and help solve the country’s population and labour force deficits. In effect, their only concern was that the new arrivals might join and strengthen local fascist organisations.

To add insult to injury, the only Europeans whose immigration to Australia was considered undesirable by the government were Jews. In the words of an Australian immigration official quoted by Persian:

“We have never wanted these people and still don’t want them.”

**Australia’s Attitude**. In spite of the alarming rise in the Nazi persecution of German Jews, Australia’s attitude towards Jewish refugees remained inhospitable as was expressed at the Evian Conference in 1938, by Australia’s chief delegate, Colonel T. W. White, (above) who declared: *“as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration”.*

And in instructions sent in 1949 to the Australian mission in Europe, the staff were instructed that “The term [Jewish] referred to race and not religion and the fact that some DP’s who are Jewish by race have become Christian by religion is not relevant.”

Given this attitude, it is not surprising that all the protests and warnings, especially by Jewish activists, about the immigration to Australia of Nazi collaborators were ignored or summarily dismissed. All this changed in 1983, in the wake of the ouster from power of the Liberal Party, which was the political home of the overwhelming majority of the right-wing Eastern European refugees. Labor was open to investigating the Nazi war criminals who had immigrated to Australia, and the combination of the deportation of Latvian suspect Konrad Kalejs from the US to Australia, and a five-part exposé on radio and TV by journalist Mark Aarons, led to the 1986 decision to establish an official government inquiry, headed by Andrew Menzies, a former deputy secretary in the Attorney-General’s Department.

**Heading ‘Home’**. Deported by the US and Canada and unwanted in Britton, accused WWII Latvian death squad commander Konrad Kalejs flees to Melbourne where this photo caption heading reads, “Flying home”.

The final chapters of the book are devoted to the efforts of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), which was established in 1987 by the government as a result of the findings of the Menzies investigation. It opened with a total of 841 files, but according to Persian, that figure is misleading since some suspects had two or three files. The country of origin with the highest number of suspect files was Lithuania with 238, followed by Latvia with 111, Ukraine with 84, Hungary with 45, and Croatia with 44. (The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s office in Jerusalem sent the Australian authorities a total of 487 suspects, mostly from the Baltics, between 1986 and 2005). Two hundred and forty-eight of the suspects were not located in Australia, and 262 persons were assumed to be deceased due to their advanced age.

**Unearthing the Truth**. Between 1987 and 1993 the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) carried out investigations into allegations that Nazi collaborators and mass killers had migrated to Australia following the end of WWII. During those investigations the SIU undertook the exhumation of the human remains of Jewish victims who were executed as seen here during the course of the Serniki exhumation, where the SIU forensic team counted 553 bodies.

According to Persian, SIU interviews of suspects were a fairly informal process, which relied on a cooperative interviewee. Suspects could simply refuse to be interviewed, others simply answered “No comment, no comment.” In case after case, it was clear that the suspects had served in killing squads, but no one admitted that they had committed murder, nor were there any eyewitnesses who could testify that a certain suspect had committed murder. Thus, it was not surprising that the first three prosecutions failed, which gave the government of Paul Keating an excuse to close down the SIU long before it finished its task.

There are a few factual mistakes in Jayne Persian’s book that should be mentioned. The American OSI won cases against slightly more than 100 Holocaust perpetrators, not against “several hundred people”. Canada only prosecuted one case on criminal charges, not three. And Persian failed to mention the successful prosecution in Germany of Ernst Hering, who was discovered due to the (failed) trial in Australia of Heinrich Wagner, who served in the same unit that murdered 104 Jews in Israelovka, Ukraine. She also failed to mention the jailing of Karoly Zentai, who sat in prison in Perth for several months awaiting extradition to Hungary to face charges for the murder of Peter Balasz, an 18-year-old Jewish boy whom he caught in Budapest on a tram without the obligatory yellow star.

Despite this, Persian’s book is extremely informative, and well-researched and written, and should be required reading in every Australian high school and university.

**Jewish Reaction**. Australian Jewish students shout slogans at Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne before the arrival of alleged Nazi mass murderer Latvian-born Konrad Kalejs. *(Photo:* Reuters/Will Burgess / Bridgeman Images)

About the writer:

Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs.

GERMANY SHOULD EXPRESS REMORSE OVER THE CRIMES COMMITTED AGAINST SERBS

The UN’s Srebrenica resolution has sparked debate over selective historical justice, particularly Germany’s role in WWII-era atrocities against Serbs.

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff and Aleksandar Nikolic

(First published in The Jerusalem Post)

Slightly more than two months ago, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution, which was not supported by a majority of its member states (84 voted in favor; but 68 countries abstained; 19 voted against, and 22 countries, including Israel, were not present for the vote). It adopted a resolution designating July 11 as the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica,” condemning the denial of genocide, as well as the glorification of war criminals.

Why was this heinous war crime chosen out of so many massacres committed during the modern era to be designated as a case of genocide? The UN General Assembly did so, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the Bosniaks who had escaped to Srebrenica, which had been officially proclaimed as a haven for Bosnian Muslims, were not harmed by the troops of the Republic of Srpska. In fact, all the women, children, and elderly men, who constituted a huge majority of the 25,000 refugees, were released unharmed.

Such an absurd decision is hardly unusual in the United Nations, where politics is the name of the game, and certain political allies have an automatic majority. Under these circumstances, Serbia did not stand a chance of preventing the passage of this resolution. Israelis can commiserate with Serbia since Israel, too, was the victim of patently politically motivated resolutions and unfair criticism passed in the General Assembly. The most famous and outrageous of which was the “Zionism is racism” resolution.

**Outrageous Resolution**. On November 10, 1975, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Chaim Herzog – later the sixth President of Israel – delivered one of the most influential speeches in history denouncing the UN General Assembly resolution that equated Zionism with racism.

While Serbia can take some consolation in the fact that a majority of General Assembly members declined to support the resolution, one of the most infuriating aspects was that the resolution was proposed and cosponsored by Germany. While German responsibility for the horrific “Final Solution” implemented by the Nazis to completely annihilate European Jewry is common knowledge, few people outside of former Yugoslavia are aware of the extent and cruelty of Nazi crimes against the Serbs during World War II.

**Crveni Krst Concentration camp**. Located in Crveni Krst, Niš, more than 10,000 inmates are thought to have been killed here by the German Gestapo who operated this notorious camp.

Nazi brutality was already on display from the first day of the invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, when they launched a murderous fire-bombing attack on Belgrade, during which the National Library and its precious collection of books, some of which were even from the 12th century, were all destroyed. This was followed in the areas under German military occupation by the erection of infamous Nazi concentration camps, such as Banjica in Belgrade, and the notorious Crveni Krst (Red Cross) in Nis, where about fourteen thousand innocents, mostly Serbs, were murdered.

**Banjica Concentration Camp.** Located in the Banjica neighborhood of Dedinje – a suburb of Belgrade, a German soldier points his rifle at a prisoner in Jajinci, which served as an execution site for Banjica inmates.

BLACK OCTOBERS EVERYWHERE

The killing of a German soldier was accompanied by massive reprisals against the Serbian civilian population, which were far more drastic than the measures taken in other occupied countries. One hundred civilians (in some cases including children), executed for the death of a single German soldier, and 50 for a wounded one. The most notorious slaughter of innocents took place in Kragujevac in aptly-named “Black October” of 1941.

**Mass murder of Serbs**. On October 21,1941, Nazi soldiers killed over 4,000 civilians, including children, as part of an “atonement exercise” in occupied Serbia, which today hardly features in Germany’s historical recollection of WWII.

A substantial number of Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans), residents of Yugoslavia, acted as a fifth column during the years leading up to the war and then joined the Nazi invaders, many volunteering to join the S.S. 7th Volunteer Mountain Division Prinz Eugen.

In the annexed areas of Yugoslavia, the Germans’ allies committed horrific crimes against the Serbian civilians with the full permission and support of the Nazis. The worst perpetrators in this regard were the Croatian Ustasha, who launched a genocidal campaign against the Serbs, during which they were massively slaughtered in rural areas and in the concentration camps they built throughout the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which the Germans created following the occupation of Yugoslavia. Serbs, Jews, Roma, and anti-fascist Croatians were tortured in the most horrific ways, and ultimately murdered in Jasenovac, the camp which became a symbol of Ustasha cruelty and depravity.

‘NAZI GERMANY HAD COMPLETE RESPONSIBILITY’

Even Edmund Glaise von Horstenau, the German military envoy in Zagreb, harshly criticized the terrible Ustasha atrocities, warning that they would cause an uprising of the local Serbian population. Nazi Germany had complete responsibility for them as well. It not only created the preconditions but also conceived the NDH. Nazi Germany never made any attempt to restrain the Ustasha genocide campaigns launched by the NDH’s dictator Ante Pavelic. On the contrary, Hitler told him that if the NDH wants to be stable, intolerant nationalist policy must be conducted for 50 years, since too much tolerance can only create problems.

The head of the foreign policy committee of the German Bundestag, Michael Roth, referring to the negative reactions from Belgrade to the passage of the resolution on Srebrenica, called them “shameful and disappointing.” He added that suggesting in response to pass a similar resolution on Jasenovac seems an attempt to divert attention. “The point is not for some to point fingers at others.”

**Selective Characterization**. A Bosnian Muslim survivor of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre walks among headstones as she visits the graves of her relatives at the memorial cemetery in Potocari, near the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica, July 11, 2024. Serb officials deny that the 1995 massacre was a “genocide,” instead referring to it as a “terrible crime”. (Photo: Elvis Barukcic, AFP)

Despite understanding what Roth wanted to say, the lack of an elementary expression of regret and remorse is unacceptable. It is certainly not about the absence of honoring the victims as such, but the absence of special consideration for their fate, which should be forthcoming from Germany, which had full responsibility for Jasenovac as well. Until today, however, there is no feeling in the Balkans that Germany has ever expressed any remorse or regret for the crimes committed against Serbs.

Instead, for political reasons, it has too often sided with those who acted to Serbia’s detriment. Germany is among the most important investors and foreign trade partners of Serbia. It is certainly one of the central countries of the European Union, so important to Serbia as well. Precisely because of this, it would only be natural to expect an expression of historical responsibility towards the Serbian people and reverence for its victims.

About the writers:

Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and director of its Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs.

Aleksandar Nikolic is an honorary consul of the Republic of Serbia to Israel.

BARTALI RAISED THE BAR

In a post October 7 world when Jews again are tagged and targeted, the name of cycling legend Bartali personifies true heroism– reflections and recollections during the 2024 Tour de France.

By David E. Kaplan

This year’s 2024 Tour de France – won in spectacular fashion by Slovenian Tadej Pogačar – had plenty of high moments and the breaking of long-held records. For the most part, I watched on TV all 21 stages. What particularly caught my attention was on the Saturday and penultimate stage of the grueling 21-stage race that ended the next day in Nice in a nail-biting ‘time trial’, was the commentator’s line which he repeated again and again:

“If Pogačar wins today’s mountain stage, he will equal the record of 5 mountain stage wins in a Tour with Gino Bartali.”

Bartali? Where had I heard that name before?

**Records and Revelations**. Tour de France 2024 race leader Tadej Pogačar climbs to victory on penultimate stage 20 atop Col de la Couillole, equaling the record of the great Gino Bartali who saved Jews during WWII in Italy. (Photo: Tim de Waele/Getty Images)

It rang a clangor and for more than only cycling. I let the thought linger until the end of the stage when Pogačar won in spectacular fashion and the animated commentator was battling to catch his breath as if he had himself just raced the132.8 km and said:

“The only other man to have won five mountain stages in one Tour was Gino Bartali in 1948.”

Again, the name Bartali and coupled with a “76-year-old record had been equaled.”

76 years…Bartali……!

And then I remembered.

Pogačar had equaled a record of not only the leading cyclist of his era, a three-time winner of the Giro d’Italia (1936,1937 and 1946), who won the Tour de France in 1938 and again after the war, a decade later in 1948 but had, in the intervening years, saved the lives of Jews in wartime Italy.

It all came back to me when I recalled back to a Yom HaShoah ceremony many years earlier in my hometown of Kfar Saba in central Israel. That year, the annual memorial ceremony for the six million victims of the Holocaust focused on the connection between sport and the Holocaust and related the story of an Italian, not Jewish and a great cyclist named Gino Bartali, who at great risk to himself and his family, had saved Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis. There was good reason why on July 7, 2013, Yad Vashem recognized Gino Bartali as Righteous Among the Nations.

**Writing on the Wall**. Years later, Gino Bartali sticks his head out his car window to view graffiti honouring him and other Tour de France winners – Ottavio Bottecchia (1924), himself (1938), Fausto Coppi (1949) and *Gastone Nencini (1960).*

During his lifetime, Bartali didn’t talk about his wartime activities and was only after his death in 2000 that details began to emerge.

A villager from a poor Tuscan family, Bartali in the second half of the 1930s was reaching the peak of his career having won his first Giro d’Italia in 1936 and then retaining the title in 1937 when war clouds began to ominously loom over Europe. When he then in 1938, won his first Tour de France, it was in the aftermath of this triumph that revealed as much about Bartali’s moral character as his cycling prowess.

**Cycling Courier**. Gino Bartali and his bicycle that helped saved the lives of Jews.

As related by Bartali’s son Andrea, there was one particular fan of his father who was following the cyclist’s progress with more Machiavellian than sporting interest – Benito Mussolini, the country’s fascist leader. Under the evil spell of Hitler, “He believed,” said Andrea, “that if an Italian rider triumphed in the Tour de France it would show that Italians too belonged to the master race.”

**Man of Modesty**. Bartali wanted to be remembered for his sporting career on his bike and when asked about his wartime excursions, used to say: “I did the only thing I was good at, I cycled.” In truth, he did so much more risking his life to save Jews from the clutches of the Nazis in wartime Italy.

Bartali would go on to win won the 1938 Tour de France but for him, unlike for Mussolini it was a ‘race’ only in a cycling not in an ethnicity sense. While the Italian leader felt Bartali had contributed to fascist prestige and wanted to exploit the cyclist’s win, Bartali would have none of that.

“When my father was invited to dedicate his win to Mussolini and the fascist cause, he refused,”revealed Andrea. A risk-taker on the saddle, he was even more so when off. By refusing to dedicate his win to the fascist cause “my dad was insulting il Duce. He was taking a great personal risk.”

However, he would take far more serious risks in the near future.

**Streets of Salvation**. Bartali’s bike on display in the cycling museum in Madonna del Ghisallo Church, Lombardy. Withing the frame and handlebars, were hidden the photographs and counterfeit ID documents for Jews fleeing for their lives from the Nazis.

In the middle of that year’s 1938 Tour de France, on the 14 July, Mussolini published the Manifesto della razza (Manifesto on Race), which led to Italian Jews being stripped of their Italian citizenship and any position in government or the professions. These antisemitic laws demonstrated the increasing influence of Adolf Hitler over Mussolini. Nevertheless, Italy still managed to remain a country in which Jews could at least take refuge, but that all terrifyingly transitioned when Italy surrendered to the allies in 1943 and the German army responded by occupying northern and central parts of the country. They immediately started rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps.

**Smiling Monsters**. Bartali defied them both – Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler riding in an open car, circa 1940s.(Fotosearch/Getty Images)

It was at this point that Bartali, a devout Catholic, was asked by the Cardinal of Florence, Archbishop Elia Dalla Costa, to join a secret network offering protection and safe passage to Jews.

His role in the network spearheaded by the Cardinal together with Rabbi Nathan Cassuto (later arrested by the Nazis, deported and sent to his death) was uniquely suited to his temperament and talents. As an internationally renowned cyclist; a national hero with a face recognised by all, he became an unsuspecting courier – on two wheels – relaying forged documents, most of it relating to Jews trying to escape.

ON THE ROAD

So, on the ‘surface’ (literally as well as figuratively), Bartali was undertaking long training rides for which he was renowned, but in reality, he was carrying photographs and counterfeit identity documents to and from a secret printing press produced by the Assisi network, another rescue operation initiated by Church people in that town. All these secret documents were hidden in the frame and handlebars of his bicycle.

Riding through many roadblocks manned by Italian fascists as well as Nazis, when Bartali was stopped and searched, he specifically asked that his bicycle not be touched “since the different parts were very carefully calibrated to achieve maximum speed.”

A perfectly credible explanation.

At remarkable risk, Bartali cycled thousands of kilometres across Italy, peddling between cities as far apart as Florence, Lucca, Genoa, Assisi and the Vatican in Rome.

At one point he was arrested and questioned by the head of the Fascist secret police in Florence where he lived and for a period, went into hiding, living incognito in the town of Citta Di Castello in Umbria.

In addition to these defiant exploits, Bartali hid his Jewish friend Giacomo Goldenberg and his family.

“He hid us in spite of knowing that the Germans were killing everybody who was hiding Jews,” Goldenberg’s son, Giorgio would later reveal.

“He was risking not only his life but also his family. Gino Bartali saved my life and the life of my family. That’s clear because if he hadn’t hidden us, we had nowhere to go.”

The Goldenberg family would emigrate to the emerging Jewish state after the war. Young Giorgio Goldenberg, son of Bartali’s friend, would take with him a signed 1940 photo Bartali had given him of his cycling victories. Giorgio now goes by the name of Shlomo Paz and has three children and five grandchildren and lives outside of Tel Aviv.

BRAVE BARTALI

**Portrait of a Cyclist**. The 1941 photo Gino Bartali gave to young Giorgio Goldenberg who would change his name to Shlomo Paz and live outside Tel Aviv.

Andrea Bartali says that eventually “little by little my father told me about his actions during the war.” However, “he made me promise at that time not to tell anyone.”

An unusual type of hero was Bartali.

When asked why he could not speak about his father’s heroic wartime exploits, he replied that his father had said:

“You must do good, but you must not talk about it. If you talk about it, you’re taking advantage of others misfortunes for your own gain.”

**Father and son**. Gino Bartali with his son Andrea who would years later be in Jerusalem to see his late father honoured at Yad Vashem.

Because Bartali didn’t want to be acknowledged for what he had done, very few of those he helped ever knew his name or what role he had played in their rescue.

Andrea Bartali says his father refused to view his actions as heroic.

“When people were telling him, ‘Gino, you’re a hero’, he would reply: ‘No, no – I want to be remembered for my sporting achievements. Real heroes are others….”

Really? If Bartali been caught by the Nazis – despite being a sporting hero – he most likely would have been shot.

**Living Legacy**. Bartali’s son Andrea Bartali visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem in 2013, where his father was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations for risking his life to save Jews during WWII.

None of this was related by the sports commentator at this year’s 2024 Tour de France while he constantly made the comparisons between Pogačar and Bartali. Probably, like the Jews Bartali saved, the commentator did not even know the story.

However, for those who do know and remember, in a post October 7 world when Jews again are tagged and targeted, the name Bartali personifies true heroism – others before self.

**The Road Ahead**. Members of the ISRAEL-PREMIER-TECH team at the 2024 Tour de France emblazoning to a global audience on their cycling attire the name ISRAEL and the Star of David.

*Feature picture:
Hero on and off the bike. Gino Bartali rides uphill in the 1938 Tour de France.(Photo STF/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

THE PEOPLE AND THE BOOK

An in-depth illuminating account of WWII Nazi fugitives in the UK and their escape from British justice.

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (Israel)

(*First published in The Jerusalem Report)

The book ‘Safe Haven’ is one that should attract several diverse audiences of readers. Former BBC reporter Jon Silverman, who covered the British Nazi War Crimes Act issue from beginning to end, and his co-author Robert Sherwood, an expert on the post-World War II prosecution of Nazi war criminals, have written an excellent history of the fate of the legislation passed in the British Parliament in Spring 1991 to enable the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators living in the United Kingdom. Theirs is a cautionary tale regarding an important and highly justified judicial initiative, launched to prosecute Nazi war criminals who had illegally immigrated to Great Britain, which in practical terms, only ONE individual was convicted and punished out of many clearly guilty perpetrators. This was a miserable failure but ultimately had a positive impact on Holocaust consciousness in the United Kingdom.

**Escaping Justice**. ‘*SAFE HAVEN’* by Jon Silverman and Robert Sherwood is the first book to examine the police and legal inquiries in the UK after the passage of the War Crimes Act in 1991. It provides revelatory information about Nazi collaborators in Eastern Europe given refuge in Britain after 1945 and explains why there was only one conviction out of hundreds of cases.

The authors explain the practical “failure” of the bill in great detail, and point out how quite a few more mass murderers could have been convicted, had the British legal bureaucracy been more flexible, and had there been greater political will to convict and punish these Eastern European Nazi collaborators. Thus, this story is not only about the Holocaust, or post-World War II justice, but also about how governments function and how justice is or isn’t achieved in a leading Western democracy. On a personal level, the book also deals with an important chapter of the efforts of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to help facilitate the prosecution of Nazi criminals. In 1986, I was hired by the center to open an office in Jerusalem, which would focus on Eastern European Nazi collaborators who had immigrated to Western democracies. By this point, it was common knowledge that all the major Anglo-Saxon democracies which had fought against the Nazis had admitted at least dozens, if not hundreds, of the worst of Hitler’s henchmen as refugees. (The only exception was South Africa, which was closed hermetically to immigration in those years.) Canada and Australia had already been alerted to the problem and were discussing possible steps to take, but Great Britain and New Zealand ostensibly had no indication that they also had the same problem. On October 22, 1986, however, the Wiesenthal Center submitted a list I compiled of 17 Latvian and Lithuanian Nazi collaborators living in Great Britain to Donald Ballentine, the British consul in Los Angeles, which marked the beginning of the process that led to the War Crimes Act. We subsequently sent 50 more names to the British authorities and did our best, together with the local supporters of the initiative, to convince the government to pass the bill and maximize its impact. The “heart” of the book and its most interesting chapters are about the sole conviction, how it was achieved, and the cases of suspects who were obviously guilty but for technical reasons or simple bad luck (their premature demise or the refusal of eyewitnesses to their crimes to testify against them) could not be convicted. Thus, for example, Anthony Sawoniuk, a cruel Byelorussian policeman who participated in many executions of Jews in his hometown of Domachevo, was successfully convicted because of the testimony of eyewitnesses to the murder of local Jewish women and the fact that he was the only person in town named Andrusha. In three other cases, the British police and prosecutors were not so lucky, and as a result, mass murderers from Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus escaped punishment.

**Murderer of Thousands**. War crimes suspect Anton Gecas who died in 2001 and never brought to trial, was the head of a special police battalion responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews, partisans and Communist Party members in Lithuania and Belarus in 1941.

The most famous case was that of Antanas Gecevicius, who changed his name in Scotland to Anton Gecas. He was the “star” of my original list, having served as an officer in the notorious Lithuanian 12th Auxiliary Police Battalion, which was sent in October 1941 to Belarus, where they murdered at least 20,000 Jews. According to members of his unit, who were prosecuted in Soviet Lithuania, Gecas not only issued orders to murder Jews but finished off those not killed by the initial round of bullets. Gecas denied the accusations and filed a defamation suit against Scottish TV, and he sued me for libel because I accused him of those crimes in my book Occupation: Nazi-Hunter. Gecas lost his suit against Scottish TV and was called a criminal; but luckily for him, the standard of proof was based on the civil standard, which fell short of the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which would have paved the way for his prosecution. In addition, at least a dozen veterans of Gecas’s unit were found living in the UK, to whom the Scottish war crimes team were ready to grant immunity if they testified against Gecas. But the British refused to exempt them from prosecution, and without that promise none of them were willing to testify against him. Some of them were willing to answer a few questions about the unit but not to deliver strong enough evidence against Gecas.

**Jew-Killer Convicted**. In Britain’s war crimes trial at the Old Bailey in 1999, Anthony Sawoniuk was given two life sentences in 1999 for the murder of 18 Jews in his hometown of Domachevo, which was then in Nazi-occupied Byelorussia (now Belarus) in 1942. (Photo: Reuters)

A second case of a murder squad officer who immigrated to Britain and escaped prosecution, was that of Latvian Harijs Skiveris, who had been a senior officer in the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, commonly referred to as the Arajs Kommando (named for its commander Viktor Arajs, who was convicted in Germany of the murder of 13,000 Jews and was sentenced to life imprisonment). Thirty additional members of the unit were executed for war crimes in the Soviet Union. Skiveris, who signed documents as “Head of Security, Kommando”, and “Battalion Commander”, was obviously one of the most important officers in the unit, which played a key role in the majority of the murders of approximately 30,000 Jews in and around Riga (initially in Bikerenieki Forest, and later at Rumbula), as well as in the provincial Latvian towns. In 1942, moreover, the unit was sent to combat pro-Soviet partisans in Belarus, where they killed partisans and burned down entire villages. Skiveris, of course, denied that he committed any crimes or even was present when Germans shot Jews. The problem was, however, that he could not be prosecuted because there was no direct evidence that Skiveris served as Arajs’s adjutant or as a battalion commander, and the prosecution did not have any live, legally admissible eyewitness evidence of his participation in the murder of innocents.

**Killers in the UK**. Latvian Harijs Skiveris, who immigrated to Britain and escaped prosecution had been a senior officer in the infamous Latvian Auxiliary Security Police commonly referred to as the Arãjs Kommando, seen here in this 1942 group photo. (Photo: State Archive of Latvia.)

The third case of a guilty criminal who escaped punishment despite his crimes was that of Szymon Serafinowicz, who was the first person prosecuted under the 1991 War Crimes Act. Various testimonies accused Serafinowicz of active participation in the mass murder of the Jews of Mir, especially the testimony of Dov Resnik, who saw Serafinowicz murder his 16-year-old son and a friend Aron Rudicki, along with his wife and two children. On July 12, 1995, Serafinowicz was arrested and charged with four counts of murder. At that point, he was 84 years old but was considered physically and mentally capable to stand trial. According to the authors, if Serafinowicz would have been put on trial in 1995 or early 1996, a historic conviction could have been obtained. Unfortunately, the trial was delayed by a committal procedure, which was a test run of the prosecution’s case before a magistrate without a jury, a step which the lawyers who supported the War Crimes Act recommended to omit. And indeed, the delay caused by the committal process spared Serafinowicz from a conviction and a punishment, since he had begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and could not be prosecuted. Sawoniuk was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in jail in 2005. The Serafinowicz investigation was the last of its kind, which meant that only one Holocaust perpetrator who had entered Britain illegally was convicted and punished, clearly a terribly dismal result, which the authors very cogently explain could have been far better. They do, however, leave us with a silver lining, as they assert that the tremendous efforts invested in passing the War Crimes Act and trying to implement it helped:

**Saved by Alzheimer’s**. Due to a delay in court proceedings and the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, Szymon Serafinowicz (center) – who is seen here escorted by policemen from the Epsom magistrates court after he was charged with the murder of four Jews in the years 1941 and 1942 in Nazi occupied Byelorussia – escaped conviction and punishment. (Photo: JOHNNY EGGITT/AFP via Getty Image)

“change the status of the Holocaust in British culture and society…and helped to mark the dawn of the institutionalization of the Holocaust; a process aligned to the formation of cultural memory, and one which climax a decade later by Holocaust Memorial Day and other events.”

SAFE HAVEN: The United Kingdom’s Investigations into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice
Jon Silverman and Robert Sherwood
Oxford University Press, 2023
336 pages; £43.8

About the writer:

Dr. Efraim Zuroff. Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center – Israel office and Eastern European Affairs. Coordinator, SWC Nazi war crimes research worldwide
1 Mendele Street
Jerusalem, Israel 92147
Tel: 972.2.563.1273/4/5
Fax: 972.2.563.1276
www.swcjerusalem.org <http://www.swcjerusalem.org>

Category: Holocaust Education

THE THREE I’s: DISCERNING GENOCIDES FROM TRAGEDIES

Like this:

‘MARCH OF THE LIVING’ EXPOSES HARSH TRUTHS

Like this:

IT IS HAPPENING AGAIN ON YOUR WATCH

Like this:

NAZIS AS NEIGHBORS

Like this:

LETTER TO MY GRANDFATHER

Like this:

FINAL VERDICT

Like this:

A MASS EMIGRATION OF CRIMINALS

Like this:

GERMANY SHOULD EXPRESS REMORSE OVER THE CRIMES COMMITTED AGAINST SERBS

Like this:

BARTALI RAISED THE BAR

Like this:

THE PEOPLE AND THE BOOK

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: