McCain kicks Hagee to curb for Hitler remarks

It seems John McCain has tired of John Hagee, and rightfully so after it was reported that the leader of Christians United for Israel considered Hitler a divine agent, called by God to return the Jews to the biblical Land of Israel. Those six million butchered in the Holocaust? Collateral damage, I guess. Via CNN:

“Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them. I did not know of them before Reverend Hagee's endorsement, and I feel I must reject his endorsement as well,” McCain said in a statement to CNN Thursday.

He added that his relationship with Hagee did not compare with Obama’s lengthy association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright. “I have said I do not believe Senator Obama shares Reverend Wright's extreme views. But let me also be clear, Reverend Hagee was not and is not my pastor or spiritual advisor, and I did not attend his church for twenty years. I have denounced statements he made immediately upon learning of them, as I do again today,” said McCain.

Now, what to do with Rod Parsley?

Hagee: Hitler God's chosen to get Jews to Palestine

The Revealer unearthed a scary recording from the Rev. John Hagee.

in which Hagee elaborates on his view that Hitler and the Nazis were divine agents, sent by God to (with gruesome inefficiency it would seem) chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine. In his 2006 book "Jerusalem Countdown", Hagee proposed that anti-Semitism, and thus the Holocaust, was the fault of Jews themselves - the result of an age old divine curse incurred by the ancient Hebrews through worshiping idols and passed, down the ages, to all Jews now alive. In the sermon Hagee also clarifies a point, on his theological views, that has long concerned me...[Note: excerpt from John Hagee sermon, given probably in the late 1990's - with its themes plied into the John Hagee books "Battle For Jerusalem" (2001, reprinted 2003) and "Jerusalem Countdown" (2006), begins 1:00 minute into the video]

Last of failed Hitler assassins dead

The last living man who tried to kill Adolf Hitler, the 1944 briefcase bomber Philipp Freiherr von Boeselager, died Thursday. He was 90.

Von Boeselager was part of a group of officers who tried to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, supplying explosives for the operation led by Col. Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

The von Stauffenberg plot is the basis for the upcoming Tom Cruise film ''Valkyrie'' in which the American actor plays the aristocratic colonel.

Von Stauffenberg placed the bomb in a conference room where Hitler was meeting with his aides and military advisers but escaped the blast when someone moved the briefcase next to a table leg, deflecting much of the explosive force.

Almost immediately afterward, von Stauffenberg and many of his cohorts were arrested and executed in an orgy of revenge killings that saw some hanged by the neck with piano wire. Though many of those rounded up by Nazi officials were tortured in the hopes they would give up other conspirators, von Boeselager's name was never divulged and he was never found out.

Still, he carried a cyanide capsule with him until the end of the war in case his secret was revealed.

Von Boeselager, who lived in Altenahr, near Bonn, was first recruited by von Stauffenberg coconspirator Maj. Gen. Henning von Tresckow in 1942, he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview three weeks ago that was published Friday.

He said he knew that Jews were being systematically killed and that Germany was waging a war of annihilation along the Eastern Front with Russia and that he never considered declining taking part in the plot.

By 1942, he said that ''It was no longer about saving the country, but about stopping the crimes,'' the newspaper quoted him as saying.

A brave new Holocaust exhibit

With a mix of excitement and trepidation, New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage announced this week that it is planning to stage an exhibition devoted to the writer Irène Némirovsky in the fall.

The exhibition, the first museum show ever devoted to the recently rediscovered French author, is in many regards a coup for the 10-year-old institution. It is also, by the museum’s own admission, something of a risk.

In certain respects, Némirovsky, who perished at Auschwitz in 1942, is a natural subject for the museum that calls itself “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.” That one of the author’s final pieces of writing, the unfinished manuscript discovered more than 50 years after her death and published as “Suite Française” in 2004, has become an international sensation only enhances her appeal. And yet, choosing Némirovsky — a convert to Catholicism who published in right-wing journals and whose early work contains what can only be seen as deeply unsympathetic portrayals of Jews — is a departure. It is also, some observers of the museum world say, a daring and historic move.

“Holocaust museums are so often concerned with communicating a clear and unambiguous message,” said Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, professor of performance studies at New York University and an authority on contemporary Jewish museums. “By taking up the subject of Némirovsky, the Museum of Jewish Heritage is showing a willingness to lift things beyond the realm of black and white. The show may well be controversial, but it will open up a new kind of conversation.”

Read the rest of that story from The Forward here.

Friedlander's Pulitzer for Holocaust studies

Saul Friedlånder seems to sit down for a lot of Q&As, but, then again, he deserves the audience. A Holocaust historian at UCLA, Friedlander won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction Monday -- I ordered the two-volume, 1,500-word series "Nazi Germany and the Jews" yesterday -- and The Forward has this interview:

GS: Unlike a number of your colleagues in the field, you put great stock in survivor diaries. What do such sources offer, and what are their potential pitfalls?

SF: You don’t go to diaries for historical exactness. You go to them for the attitudes, the reactions, the fears, the hopes — the life of those that were targeted. If you leave that aside, you come to rely uniquely on German documents. You completely shunt aside the humanity of the Jewish communities that are the face of the story. I wouldn’t turn to the diaries to learn about German policies, but I need to read them to be informed of daily life in the ghettoes. Now, you may tell me that these sources are unreliable, but not more unreliable than Eichmann’s depositions in Jerusalem or the memoirs of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, which are used everywhere. One must, of course, consider Jewish diaries with extreme care and with a totally open critical mind, as one would any other source.

GS: In a review of “The Years of Extermination” that recently appeared in The Washington Post, historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of the 1996 book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” wrote that your book “may prove to be the last major general history of the Holocaust produced by a leading scholar who lived under the Nazis.” This is, of course, interesting at the level of biography, but when it comes to the scholarship itself, is there a tangible difference between Holocaust historians who lived through the experience and those who did not?

SF: There shouldn’t be, but there is. The person who has lived through the events is familiar with nuances that cannot be gotten from administrative documents. The things that are between the lines are more vivid among those who remember. Now, it has been argued that the survivor-historian is more subjective and less scientific, but we are all subjective with regard to this period. So you say where it is you are coming from and do your best, if you are an honest person, to try to restrain your subjectivity.

(skip)

GS: You take your book’s epigraph from the diary of one Stefan Ernest, a Jew hiding in “Aryan” Warsaw in 1943. “[People] will ask,” you quote him as saying, “is this the only truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth…. Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth.” It seems here that you are trying to sound a note of humility. But am I wrong in sensing a hint of bravado here, too? Do you see yourself as wielding “the mightiest pen”?

SF: I don’t want to underestimate my work. It would, in a way, be grotesque to write and then say, “This is worthless.” But I meant the epigraph very simply and directly: Don’t let us have any illusions. We try, and we have to try, but this is not even a fragment of a fragment of the truth.

'Hitler's Pope' a Zionist sympathizer?

He's been called "Hitler's Pope" and his name has been intrinsically tied to a worldly ambivalence to the Holocaust as it happened. For the past six decades, plenty of people have debated whether Pope Pius XII was actually an anti-Semite or simply blind, and the record has not been cleared.

Ruth Gledhill, who writes the Articles of Faith blog, reports that newly unearthed evidence further complicates the quest for understanding the pontiff formerly known as Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli.

In 1917, it seems, Pacelli arranged for a meeting between Nahum Sokolow, the leading Zionist publisher, and Pope Benedict XV. It's difficult to infer from this meeting what the future pope thought. He is merely a facilitator. But the exchange does offer some interesting, and ironic, insight into the efforts to create a Jewish state.

Sokolov arrived in Rome about three weeks later, and on the 10th May, after conferring with Monsignor Pacelli, he was received by Benedict XV. It was as though Herzl's audience was being annulled. 'Have I correctly understood Zionism?' asked the Pope when the opening formalities were over. 'What a reversal of history! Nineteen centuries ago Rome destroyed Jerusalem, and now, desiring to rebuild it, you take the path to Rome!'

In his reply Sokolov recalled the fate of the Empire and compared it to that of the Jewish nation: one had vanished, the other was reclaiming its land.

'Yes, yes,' agreed Benedict with enthusiasm, 'this was providential. God willed it.'

The Pope then asked Sokolov to explain the Zionist project in detail. Sokolov answered as follows: 'Our programme is twofold. It aims first to create in Palestine a spiritual and cultural centre for Jewry, and secondly to establish a national home for oppressed Jews. Our desire is to build up in that country a great centre where Jews will be able to develop their culture freely, to educate their children in the spirit of their ideals, and to devote all their energies to making their National Home a model of Jewish civilisation and morality.'

The Pope was deeply impressed. 'That is a wonderful idea,' he said. Then he wanted to know whether this plan had been contrived with a view to preventing persecutions. Sokolov answered in the rhetorical terms which came naturally to him. He referred to the right of the Jews 'to a place in the sun—in our land.'

'We look forward,' he said, 'to the rebirth of historical Judaism, to the spiritual and material revival of the homeland that personifies our national genius and our Biblical tradition in its purest sense. We claim the right of Freedom which cannot be denied to any people.'

Lily Isaacs, from Jewish folk to Christian Gospel

The Baptist Press has a worthwhile profile of Lily Isaacs, the German-born Jew selling well as a Christian Gospel singer.

In retrospect, Isaacs said it was her parents' Holocaust experience that was such an obstacle for her in coming to know Jesus as Christ. The horror of her parents' ordeals as well as the Nazi murders of other family members created a powerful bond with her Jewish heritage that transcended any religious attachments.

"I grew up in a Jewish home," Isaacs told Baptist Press. "But, I was more tied to Judaism through the Holocaust than I was the actual religion itself.

"We were not Orthodox. We weren't very religious when we were growing up, but I was very tied to the Jewish cause simply because so many of my family were killed during World War II."

(Hat tip: DMN)

French dislike president's Holocaust curriculum

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust.

“Nothing is more moving, for a child, than the story of a child his own age, who has the same games, the same joys and the same hopes as he, but who, in the dawn of the 1940s, had the bad fortune to be defined as a Jew,” Mr. Sarkozy said at the end of a dinner speech to France’s Jewish community on Wednesday night. He added that every French child should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child-victim of the Holocaust.”

Adding to the national fracas over the announcement, Mr. Sarkozy wrapped his plan in the cloak of religion, placing blame for the wars and violence of the last century on an “absence of God” and calling the Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”

Education Minister Xavier Darcos explained later that the aim of the plan was to “create an identification between a child of today and one of the same age who was deported and gassed.”

The Holocaust is already taught in French schools, but some psychiatrists and educators predicted that requiring students to identify with a specific victim would traumatize them.

Secularists accused Mr. Sarkozy, who is already under fire for his frequent praise of God and religion, of subverting both the country’s iron-clad separation of church and state and the national ideal of a single, nonreligious identity for all.

Political opponents dismissed the plan as his latest misguided idea, unveiled without reflection or consultation. Some historians argued that ...

The list of detractors in this New York Times story goes on and on. Frankly, I think Sarko's plan is a good one. I wonder what the French would say if he suggested Holocaust comic books.

Lantos, Congress' only Holocaust survivor, dies

Bay Area Rep. Tom Lantos, who was the only Holocaust survivor to ever serve in Congress, died early this morning at age 80. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee was battling cancer and announced last month that he would not run for reelection.

Lantos, who referred to himself as "an American by choice," was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Lantos' mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust.

That background gave Lantos a moral authority unique in Congress and he used it repeatedly to speak out on foreign policy issues, sometimes courting controversy. He was a strong supporter of Israel and a lead advocate for the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq war, though he would come to be a strong critic of the Bush administration's strategy there. In 2006 Lantos was one of five members of Congress arrested in a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy over the genocide in Darfur. ...

Tall and dignified, Lantos never lost the accent of his native Hungary, but his courtly demeanor belied the cutting comments he would make in committee if the testimony he heard was not to his liking.

"Morally, you are pygmies," he berated top executives of Yahoo Inc. at a hearing he called in November 2007 as they defended their company's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist.

Lantos showed his moral authority when in 2005 he identified the giant elephant that is the American refusal to recognize as genocide the 1915 atrocities committed against Armenians by the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

German students handed Holocaust comic

German students will soon be given a Holocaust textbook published in a most unusual format -- that of a comic book.

The comic books trace the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany's descent into barbarism through the eyes of a Jewish family.

In full-colour panels, the family members use the internet to trace their lost relatives, victims of the Holocaust. Pictorial flashbacks graphically show Hitler and his henchmen as well as the horrors of his war and the gas chambers.

The Search, as the comic book is entitled, is the first attempt to use a graphic novel as an aid in teaching history in Germany. The comics are being tested in public schools in Berlin and in North Rhine-Westphalia for the spring 2008 semester.

Pupils in years Seven through Ten will be given the graphic novel as teaching aids, and it was unveiled on the 75th anniversary of Hitler becoming chancellor on January 31, 1933.

Recent surveys show that Germans under age 20 have an appalling lack of knowledge about 20th Century history.

While all of them know and recognise Hitler, only one in three was aware of what the word "Holocaust" means.

And fewer than one in ten could identify Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels or other Nazi henchmen.

Terms such as the Sudeten Crisis or the Siege of Stalingrad were unknown to all but a handful of pupils.

Almost none could give the date of the start of World War II, and fewer than 20 per cent could name the four Allied Powers which occupied post-war Germany.

So most educators have welcomed the move.

"We are very excited about this," one school administrator told RTL Television. "There is an appalling ignorance among teenagers about anything prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989."

I hope the Escapist makes an appearance.

'Hitler Suite' a popular pick in Belgrade

That's not the Westin LAX. It's the Mr. President in Belgrade. And it's sickening.

As a member of the Design Hotel chain, Mr. President boasts many luxurious suites. The most luxurious, on the seventh floor, comes complete with a portrait of former communist leader Josip Broz Tito, who ruled Yugoslavia for more than 35 years. You can enjoy his picture while soaking in your Jacuzzi.

In addition to the Bushes, Margaret Thatcher, Fidel Castro and Joseph Stalin, there is also a junior suite named after the infamous Adolf Hitler.

The Hitler or room 501, occupied mainly by German, Croat and Slovenian guests, sees the highest demand, according to Zabunovic. ...

Like all Serbs — who were persecuted alongside Jews and gypsies during the Nazi occupation — Zabunovic does not have any kind of admiration for Hitler. But sitting in the lobby of his new hotel surrounded by statues of former U.S. Presidents Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Madison, he says he refuses to exclude him.

"It is wrong not to have Hitler in Madame Tussaud and other museums," he told ABC News. "All his victims would turn in their graves if nowhere it is reminded what a monstrous criminal he was."

Indeed that would be true if all Hitler's victims were given the dignity of graves. But by capitalizing on Nazi nostalgia, Mr. President is not offering a form of remembrance. It is exhibiting old-fashioned avarice.

Coincidentally, this weekend marks the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

(Hat tip: DMN)

Congress' only Holocaust survivor won't run again

Rep. Tom Lantos announced today that he has cancer of the esophagus and won't seek re-election. Lantos, 79, is Congress' only Holocaust survivor and has been a staunch advocate for Israel. The Chronicle offers this appreciation:

Right or wrong, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos, D-San Mateo, has never failed to raise his voice for human rights in parts of the world Washington has often forgotten. Even if you disagreed with him, as this newspaper did when Lantos supported President Bush's push to send U.S. troops to Iraq, you knew he did what he thought was right.

Lantos took his status as the only Holocaust survivor elected to the House seriously. In 2006, he was arrested at a Darfur protest. In 2007, Lantos accompanied Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Syria. He has long sought a visa to visit Iran - where he wants to hector Tehran's tyrannical clerics. "I believe in talking with everyone," he explained.

In November, Lantos scolded Yahoo executives for their role in helping China identify and jail two journalists. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," Lantos railed.

Lantos will leave the House a giant.

The Fresh Prince of the Third Reich?

Will Smith has been getting a lot of grief for an off-hand invocation of Hitler in a recent interview.

"Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'let me do the most evil thing I can do today'," said Will. "I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good'. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming."

This is the kind of statement that can be seriously misconstrued and misappropriated. (And it was.) I don't hear this as a defense of Hitler, but it seems an odd anecdote nonetheless. Esther K has a sober assessment of what she thinks Smith meant and the impact it will have on his popularity.

Do I believe that Will Smith is an anti-Semite? No. Will I never look at his movies the same way again, like what happened in the wake of Mel Gibson's trip to Crazytown? No. Will I insist, as the local JDL is, that Hollywood "shun any future projects involving Smith." Clearly not. But do I find it surprising that Smith would invoke Hitler, the most hated, and most acknowledgedly-evil human to have walked the planet (at least in recent memory) through a haze of attempted comprehension? Uh-huh.

The report continues that "Smith himself is angry at the way critics have interpreted his words" [I bet he is] "saying there's no way they should be read to imply that he believes Hitler was anything but "a vile, heinous vicious killer."

Good. We all agree. Let's move on. And please, celebrities...whether you yell at Matt Lauer for the evils of meds-prescribing psychologists or try to understand Hitlerian logic, even as an intellectual exercise that challenges the concepts of good and evil, I implore you: think before you speak.

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MacArthur: Wouldn't lie to hide Jews from Nazis

On his blog, my former college pastor, Rhett Smith, recalls why he stopped reading and listening to John MacArthur, the megachurch pastor of Grace Community Church in the San Fernando Valley:

I used to read and listen to MacArthur on the radio all through college, but I stopped one night in about 1996 or 1997 after he said something to the effect of not lying to officials if he was hiding Jews in his house. The underlying idea being, that God is sovereign and doesn’t need us to lie to accomplish His will, etc. Which brings about all sorts of thoughts, but here is just two: 1) I’m glad I’m not a Jew hiding in his house; 2) God is Sovereign but seems to use us and all sorts of methods to bring about his way (i.e. lying being one of them, Rahab for example). Here is that question being asked by a person and answered by John.

Rhett recommends that anyone looking for good Christian theology on fighting against Hitler and protecting persecuted Jews read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a refusenik Lutheran minister who died in a concentration camp.

Gangster Jews and the bid to defy weakness

A few weeks ago, I finished reading "Blood Relation," Eric Konigsberg's fascinating account of the mobster life of Uncle Heshy. The author's family was Jewish, so the murdering and racketeering of his uncle, Harold "Kayo" Konigsberg, was sort of frowned upon.

But, then again, Jewish mobsters have always had a taboo appeal -- think Murder Inc., Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.

Barney Frank, a Massachusetts congressman who grew up with Kayo, voices this sentiment.

"We loved the fact that he was one of us. I mean, here's a guy who had -- you know, he wasn't just an accountant like Meyer Lansky. I remember teasing one of your father's cousins about him. She'd get upset, but most of the Jewish kids I knew were sort of worshipful of Kayo."

Anyway, the LA Daily News ran a story today from the Chronicles of Jewish mobsters. Only, this one, written by Tony Castro (Luke Ford's source on the Mayor Villaraigosa marriage split), is about a gangster who survived the Holocaust before getting caught up in organized crime.

"Spielberg! You've got to get me Spielberg!" Paul Gelb slurred as he bit off the words with the insistence of a Hollywood studio head.

"Spielberg has to come here. If he's a good Jew, he'll come here to see me. Do you know if he speaks Yiddish?

"And I need to talk to a rabbi. I'd like that. But a rabbi who speaks Yiddish.

"I need to see both of them before I die, ... and I'm dying."

But then, Gelb, 83, has been dying since he was 15 and was sent to a series of Nazi concentration camps with his family.

He survived the Holocaust, which is why he is so insistent this day on seeing director Steven Spielberg, who has created an archive of living testimony of survivors in the wake of his Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List."

"I'll bet you," Gelb says, "that Spielberg doesn't have a story like mine."

That's because to survive in America, Gelb became involved with the Mafia, running New York strip joints and a money-skimming operation that ultimately landed him in a California federal prison in the 1990s.

(skip)

For Gelb, the ultimate irony was having survived a Nazi concentration camp to wind up half a century later in a minimum-security federal prison camp in California, where he was inmate 10945-054, according to a federal report.

"There were no bars, no fences there, no gas chambers, no ovens," he says. "Some people tried to compare my experience in a concentration camp and prison, and I told them, `Don't even try to compare it. One was hell on Earth.' Prison wasn't heaven, but I'm not ready to go there yet, anyway!"

Friedlander's Holocaust memories

Saul Friedlånder, whom some have called a genius, has written an acclaimed two-volume tome on the Holocaust. It's a personal story for Friedlander, and one I'm eager to read, whenever I can carve out the time for some 1,360 pages.

Recently honored with Germany's highest literary award, the Holocaust orphan and UCLA professor was interviewed in Frankfurt by the LA Weekly. Not that revealing, but nonetheless:

You went from fighting with the Irgun [a quasi-terrorist Zionist paramilitary group] to joining the Israeli movement Peace Now. Many Germans feel inhibited when discussing Israel’s behavior vis-à-vis the Palestinians, while others believe that embracing Palestinian rights masks a latent anti-Semitism. What’s your take?

What you’re talking about is more pronounced in Great Britain or France than in Germany. Criticism is legitimate. But what bothers me at times is a shrillness that gives you a feeling that it is not only based on an analysis of policy but on some deeper emotions — I don’t want to say hatred — which comes through acceptable political pretext.

What did the fall of the Berlin Wall add to Holocaust research?

A lot. The opening of Soviet archives gave us an enormous amount of new material because they were keeping for themselves a lot of German documents. Of course, it also exposed the tendency to say, “Look, we spoke enough about Nazis, now let’s see about the second barbarian system in the world, communism and communist dictatorship.” They are so concentrated on their own dictatorship experience that the past before that is already ancient history. It is often a kind of unintentional layering of the other past. So the answer is that you have to study this and you have to study that. You can’t replace one with the other.

I hear people say that if fascism ever came back to Germany, it would target the Muslims and not the Jews. Do you agree?

Well, it will not come again to Germany. Of that, I am almost sure. But it’s true there’s a kind of xenophobia and hatred, possibly more in the former East Germany than in the West, of minorities coming in, mainly from Turkey.

Do you think the U.S. is embracing fascism?

No. That’s Philip Roth’s book The Plot Against America, where Lindbergh was a metaphor, I think, for President Bush. I like Roth a lot and I am critical of the U.S. as well, but that’s much too overstated.

For more from the LA Weekly's Holocaust files, there is a story in the paper this week about accusations that famed Los Angeles author Charles Bukowski was a Nazi. Sunday, LA Times book editor David L. Ulin says he was just a bad writer.

'Only positive thing about Hitler's time on earth'

Whether we print journalists like it or not, we bloggers are here to stay. Here, Bill Conlin, a sportwriters for the Philadelphia Daily News, makes the mistake of trading ugly e-mails with a blogger.

The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth -- I’m sure he would have eliminated all bloggers.

Bad call Bill on any Nazi nostalgia. He continues:

In Colonial times, bloggers were called “Pamphleteers.” They hung on street corners handing them out to passersby. Now, they hang out on electronic street corners, hoping somebody mouses on to their pretentious sites. Different medium, same MO. Shakespeare accidentally summed up the genre best with these words from a MacBeth soliloquy: “. . .a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. . .”

Quote of the day

"I seen the devil a million times. And I beat him up and sent him back to Hell again."

That is what Albert Rosa, a rather colorful Holocaust survivor who lives in Los Angeles, told me yesterday.

The self-proclaimed Nazi hunter

To Nazi hunters, Aribert Heim is the most coveted target still at large. The German and Austrian governments, as well as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, all believe that the so-called Butcher of Mauthausen is alive, and they are offering $430,000 for information on him. They periodically send investigators around the world to find him, most recently to Chile.

There is just one small problem: Heim is now said to be dead, executed in 1982 in California by a secretive cell of Jewish avengers.

So, at least, says Danny Baz, a retired Israeli air force colonel who claims he was a member of The Owl, a covert Jewish death squad made up of former American and Israeli military and intelligence officials. Baz claims that the group spent years tracking down and killing Nazis who fled to the Western Hemisphere after World War II.

Baz’s sensational allegations appear in “Not Forgotten or Forgiven: On the Trail of the Last Nazi,” a memoir released last month by mainstream publisher Grasset in France, where it received broad media coverage.

Baz has been fiercely condemned by the Wiesenthal Center and other Nazi hunters since the book appeared in mid-October. The American government backs the critics.

“This is a bunch of baloney,” said Eli Rosenbaum, director of the Nazi-hunting Office of Special Investigations at the U.S. Justice Department. “What is true is that there is a real person who calls himself Danny Baz and is trying to make some money with this book at the expense of the truth.”

Read the rest at The Forward.

French priest uncovers the horrors of the Holocaust in Ukraine

His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.

They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.

He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.

The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.

Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.

“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”

That is the beginning of a powerful profile in yesterday's New York Times about how one man is helping write the history of the Holocaust in a country where Jews were murdered with machine guns and their bodies buried in fields.

The story was the Times' most e-mailed yesterday. Thanks to Bloggish for sending it to me.

Seraphic Secret has a link to photos of the "Holocaust by Bullets," and has this to say about the man on a mission:

Father Desbois is a great and righteous man. The Jewish people—dead and alive—owe him a huge debt of gratitude.