INCREDIBLE!-120 million euros to preserve Auschwitz-Birkenau!

• Published 18:18 03.07.10
• Latest update 18:18 03.07.10

Clinton: U.S. to contribute $150 million to Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation

The American contribution is subject to Congressional authorization, but if approved it will begin in 2012.

By Natasha Mozgovaya and Haaretz Service Tags: Israel news Jewish world Hillary Clinton

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Saturday announced the U.S. intends to contribute $15 million to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation.
Clinton made the announcement at the Schindler Factory Museum in Krakow, Poland, where Oskar Schindler, the German entrepreneur, saved hundreds of Jewish factory workers during the Holocaust.
The State Department on Saturday said Clinton's announcement of the anticipated contribution helps commemorate the 1.1 million victims who perished at the Nazi death camp, and demonstrates the U.S. administration's commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education.
The contribution is subject to Congressional authorization, but if approved it will begin in 2012.
The U.S. contribution is intended to help fund a 120 million euro endowment to preserve and safeguard the remains of the camp, whose buildings and other artifacts are in serious danger of irreversible deterioration.
In 2009 alone, more than 1.3 million people from around the world visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial. 

Clinton says US to give $15m to preserve Auschwitz

Page last updated at 04:49 GMT, Sunday, 4 July 2010 05:49 UK BBC

Hillary Clinton visited the Schindler Museum in Krakow

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said the US will donate $15m (£10m) to preserve the site of the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Mrs Clinton was on a visit to Poland, where she oversaw the signing of a key missile base agreement.
She warned of a "steel vice" of repression crushing democracy and civil liberties activists in countries such as Iran, Egypt and Zimbabwe.
She held up Poland, which elects a new leader on Sunday, as a model democracy.
More than a million people, most of them Jews, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz during World War II.
The money to preserve Auschwitz-Birkenau depends on Congressional approval.
Mrs Clinton defended US funding for advocacy groups in other countries, which some governments condemn as meddling.
Mrs Clinton said social activists in many countries were being harassed, censored, arrested or killed.
The Iron Curtain no longer existed, she said, "but we must be wary of the steel vice in which governments around the world are slowly crushing civil society and the human spirit".
Mrs Clinton later travelled on to Azerbaijan, and is also due to visit Armenia and Georgia.
'Evolving threats' The secretary of state witnessed the signing of the amendment to the ballistic missile agreement with her Polish counterpart, Radoslaw Sikorski, in the southern city of Krakow.
The deal sets up a permanent US missile base as part of a revamped version of the controversial missile defence shield.
Russia opposes a Polish base hosting US missiles. Mrs Clinton said the new deal did not threaten Russia.
Mrs Clinton said the agreement would "protect Poland and our allies from evolving threats, such as those from Iran".
In Azerbaijan and Armenia, Mrs Clinton will push for a resolution of the region's conflicts and will seek to bolster US access to an overland route used for supplying troops to Afghanistan, says the BBC's David Stern in Kiev.
In Georgia, Mrs Clinton will have to reassure officials that the government of embattled President Mikhail Saakashvili still has US support despite Washington's attempt to improve relations with Russia, our correspondent adds.

Russia posts Katyn massacre documents on Internet

Russia posts Katyn massacre documents on Internet

Published April 28, 2010

 | Associated Press

• http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/28/russia-posts-katyn-documents-internet/ 

AP

In this May 1943 file photo, two German officers, left, and a group of Allied officers who were prisoners of war look over a partly-emptied mass grave in the Katyn Forest in Russia. Russia's state archives posted documents Wednesday April 28, 2010 for the first time on the Internet about the Soviet Union's World War II massacre of more than 20,000 Polish officers and other prominent citizens.

MOSCOW

MOSCOW (AP) — Russia's state archives posted documents on the Internet for the first time Wednesday about the Soviet Union's World War II massacre of more than 20,000 Polish officers and other prominent citizens.

The step was a gesture to Poland in a case that looms large in Polish history and has soured relations between the two countries for decades.

President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the documents posted on the archives' Russian-language website, reflecting a new willingness in Russia to accept responsibility for the killings at Katyn and elsewhere in 1940.

Relations between Russia and Poland have warmed following the tragic April 10 plane crash that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski, his wife and 94 others on a flight to visit the Katyn forest in western Russia for a memorial ceremony on the 70th anniversary of the massacre.

But while Medvedev's order was clearly intended as a positive gesture, the documents posted Wednesday were made public long ago and already have been published in Poland and Russia. Many more documents remain classified, despite dogged Polish appeals for the archives to be opened.

"There is some material that has not yet been handed over to our Polish partners. I have given the order to make that happen," he told journalists in Copenhagen.Medvedev later promised that more documents would be released.

The Katyn documents would help people learn from history, he said.

"Let everyone know what was done, who made the decisions, who ordered the elimination of the Polish officers," he said. "Everything is written there. With all the signatures."

In Warsaw, Poland Prime Minister Donald Tusk was cautiously optimistic, saying he welcomed the sentiment but would await Russia's next step.

Kaczynski's death could be a catalyst for renewed co-operation between Warsaw and Moscow, and Tusk urged Russia not to let the opportunity slip.

"I am curious to see if Russia will use the chance that this tragedy has given," Tusk told a news conference. "Let's wait for facts."

The documents now on the Internet were made public in 1992 by Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first post-Soviet leader. They include a March 1940 letter by Lavrenty Beria, head of the secret police, recommending the execution of the Polish prisoners of war. The letter bears the signatures of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and three other members of the Politburo.

The documents also include the minutes of the Politburo meeting on March 5, 1940, at which Beria's proposal was approved, and a note from the head of the Soviet secret police in 1959 to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev advising that the Katyn files be destroyed.

For 50 years, the Soviet Union blamed the massacres on the Nazi German forces who invaded in 1941. This remained the official line until Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged Soviet responsibility in 1990, but Poles had always known the truth and the cover-up fed animosity toward Russia.

Documents that remain classified include materials from an investigation in the 1990s that are believed to include the names of those who carried out the executions. It was not clear whether Medvedev planned to release these materials.

Russia also has refused Polish requests to recognize the executed Poles as victims of political repression.

Polish historian Andrzej Kunert said although the documents posted Wednesday were known to historians, the decision to post them on the Internet was significant.

"We can surely call the decision a breakthrough, because it seems that for the first time a website that is generally accessible to everyone in the Russian Federation publishes three very important documents concerning the Katyn massacre," Kunert said on Polish TVN24. "It is certainly a very important step forward."

Many Russians still do not know the truth about Katyn, and the release of the documents may play a positive role in helping Russians come to terms with their own painful history under Stalin.

Within hours of the posting of the documents, nearly 700,000 Internet users tried to access the website, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, citing a spokesman for the state archives. The website responded slowly throughout the day due to the continued heavy traffic.

Kunert stressed that Poles were still waiting to see the results of the investigation by Russian prosecutors, and especially the classified reasons behind the discontinuation of the investigation in 2004.

Russia's Supreme Court took a small step in that direction last week by ordering the Moscow City Court to consider an appeal calling for the prosecutor's decision to drop the investigation to be declassified.

The Memorial rights organization, which brought the appeal, welcomed the posting of the documents on the government website, but said it was only a small step.

"The files of this criminal case must be disclosed and procedures observed, giving the Polish POWs executed in Katyn the status of victims of political repression," Alexander Guryanov of Memorial said, according to the Interfax news agency.

___

On the Net: http://rusarchives.ru/publication/katyn/spisok.shtml

Dunkirk: Are we finally ready to face the truth?

29 May 2010 9:49 PM

This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/05/this-is-the-law-not-teddyhugging-time-at-the-local-nursery.html

Dunkirk: Are we finally ready to face the truth?

I think enough time has passed since Dunkirk for us to admit the truth about it. It was not a triumph, but a terrible national defeat – surpassed in the 20th Century only by the other Churchillian catastrophe of Singapore in 1942.

Having entered a war for which we were wholly unready, for a cause which was already lost, at a time we did not choose and with allies on whom we could not rely, we were flung off the continent of Europe in weeks. Only thanks to a double devil’s pact did we survive as a nation.

We sold our economy and our empire to Franklin Roosevelt’s USA, and we handed half of Europe to Joseph Stalin’s homicidal tyranny. They won the war in the end, though we had to contribute many lives to their victory. Then we looked on as they rearranged the world.

Sooner or later, the fuzzy, cosy myth of World War Two and our ‘Finest Hour’ will fade. We once needed to pretend Dunkirk was a triumph. If we are to carve our way in a hostile world, we now need to understand – as those who were actually on the beaches well knew – that it wasn’t any such thing.

Czechs massacre German civilians

A still from the footage 

Newly Discovered Film Shows Post-War Executions

Jan Puhl – Spiegel Online June 2, 2010

It has long been known that German civilians fell victim to Czech excesses immediately following the Nazi surrender at the end of World War II. But a newly discovered video shows one such massacre in brutal detail. And it has come as a shock to the Czech Republic.

For decades, the images lay forgotten in an aluminum canister -- almost seven minutes of original black and white film, shot with an 8 mm camera on May 10, 1945, in the Prague district of Borislavka during the confusing days of the German surrender.

The man who shot the film was Jirí Chmelnicek, a civil engineer and amateur filmmaker who lived in the Borislavka district and wanted to document the city's liberation from the brutal Nazi occupation. Chmelnicek filmed tanks rolling through the streets, soldiers and refugees. Then, at some point, his camera also caught groups of Germans, who had been driven out of their houses and into Kladenska Street by Red Army soldiers and Czech militiamen.

Chmelnicek's film shows how the Germans were rounded up in a nearby movie theater, also called the Borislavka. The camera then pans to the side of the street, where 40 men and at least one woman stand with their backs to the lens. A meadow can be seen in the background. Shots ring out and, one after another, each person in the line slumps and falls forward over a low embankment. The injured lying on the ground beg for mercy. Then a Red Army truck rolls up, its tires crushing dead and wounded alike. Later other Germans can be seen, forced to dig a mass grave in the meadow.

A Shock to Czechs

The shaky images show an event that has been described again and again by eyewitnesses and historians: the systematic killing of German civilians. Yet the film comes as a shock to Czechs. "Until now, there was no footage whatsoever of such executions," says Czech documentary filmmaker David Vondracek, who showed the historical images on television. "When I watched this for the first time, it was like seeing a live broadcast from the past."

The only such images known before were taken by a US Air Force camera team. That footage showed injured Germans lying on the ground in Plzen, in what was then Czechoslovakia, in early May 1945. The images included some dead bodies, but they didn't show a liquidation, from beginning to end, like this one.

Vondracek's documentary about Czech atrocities, called "Killings, Czech Style," aired during primetime on Czech state television just two days before May 8, the anniversary of Nazi Germany's surrender. The broadcast marks yet another milestone on the Czech road toward confronting a not-always-comfortable World War II past -- a path the country has been working its way down for years.

Even organizations representing "Sudeten Germans" -- ethnic Germans expelled from Czechoslovak territory after the war -- took notice. Horst Seehofer, governor of Bavaria, plans to pay an official visit to Prague soon, making him the first holder of his office to do so since World War II. "A great deal has come into the open where the Sudeten Germans are concerned," Seehofer commented recently.

Victim to Acts of Revenge

Following Nazi Germany's defeat, the Czechs and the Red Army expelled around 3 million ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland and the rest of Czechoslovakia. In the process, up to 30,000 civilians fell victim to acts of revenge. Only a small minority of them had been Nazi perpetrators. Germans and Czechs had lived side by side for decades before Hitler's 1938 annexation of Bohemia and Moravia, the two regions that make up the majority of the Czech Republic today.

No one knows who singled out the Germans in Borislavka, nor what crimes they were accused of committing. They were most likely killed by Red Army soldiers, perhaps also by "Revolutionary Guards" -- members of Czech militias. Those firing the shots may also have included former Czech collaborators, who had previously worked with the Germans and who wanted to clear their names with a show of anti-German brutality.

Helena Dvoracková, amateur filmmaker Jirí Chmelnicek's daughter, was one of the first to see the images of these executions. She doesn't remember how old she was when her father set up his projection screen and ran the film. "I don't remember either whether he said anything about it -- and really, there wasn't much to be said," she says.

'Under the Meadow'

Her father kept the film hidden at home for decades. Communist police even came calling -- someone had figured out that the footage existed. The police asked about the film and threatened Chmelnicek. But the filmmaker didn't turn over his reel. He wanted the world eventually to learn what had been done to defenseless people that day in May in Borislavka.

Ten years ago, long after her father's death, Helena Dvoracková offered the historical footage to a well-known Czech television historian, but the historian kept the film under wraps. "People will stone me to death if I show this," he supposedly said, and placed the reel in the state television station's archives. Documentary maker Vondracek found it there, after a cameraman who knew the amateur filmmaker's family told him about it.

Today Borislavka is one of Prague's nicer districts, and tall grass has grown over the meadow where the executions took place. Vondracek now wants to start a search for the Germans' mass grave. "It must be somewhere under the meadow," he says.

Likely not all that far away from a memorial plaque for two Czechs who fell in the battle against the Nazis on May 6, 1945.

Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,698060,00.html

Last updated 13/06/2010

P. Buchanan: Remembering Wars and Warriors

Patrick J. Buchanan Archive

May 28, 2010

Remembering Wars and Warriors

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Since America became a nation, four of her greatest generals have served two terms as president: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant and Dwight David Eisenhower.

Not one of these generals led America into a new war.

Washington was heroic in keeping the young republic out of the wars that erupted in Europe after the French Revolution, as were his successors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Jackson, arguably America's greatest soldier—who won the Battle of New Orleans, which preserved the Union, and virtually annexed Florida—resisted until his final days in office recognizing the Republic of Texas, liberated by his great friend and subaltern Sam Houston.

Jackson wanted no war with Mexico.

Eisenhower came to office determined to end the war in Korea. In six months, he succeeded—and kept America out of the raging war in Indochina.

Of the men who led us into our 19th century wars—the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War—only one, William McKinley, was a soldier who had seen combat.

McKinley had enlisted at 17. In 1862, he was with the Union army at Antietam, the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil.

Though derided as having "the backbone of a chocolate eclair" by the bellicose Theodore Roosevelt, McKinleyconfided to a friend before going to war with Spain: "I have been through one war. ... I have seen the dead piled up. I do not want to see another."

James Madison, who took us into the War of 1812, which came close to tearing apart the Union; James Polk, who took us to war with Mexico and gave us Texas to the Rio Grande, the Southwest and California; and Abraham Lincoln, who led the nation in its bloodiest war, were politicians. Lincoln had served three months in the Illinois Militia in the Black Hawk War, but he never saw action.

America was led into the world wars by Woodrow Wilson, a professor, and Franklin Roosevelt, a politician. Harry Truman, who took us into Korea, had captained an artillery battery in France in 1918. John F. Kennedy, who led us into Vietnam, had served on a PT boat in the Solomons. George H.W. Bush, who launched Desert Storm, was one of the youngest Navy pilots to fight in the Pacific war.

While Americans this Memorial Day put flags out for all of their war dead, the arguments do not cease over the wisdom of the wars in which they fought and died.

In the grammar and high schools we attended in the 1940s and early 1950s, they were all good wars, all just wars, all necessary wars. Perhaps that is how it should be taught to America's children.

Yet, if the Revolution was a great and good cause, men fighting for freedom and nationhood, the War of 1812, where we were a de facto ally of Napoleon, seems a less noble endeavor. For among our motives was seizing Canada while the Mother Country was diverted.

Though deplored today, the Mexican War was not an unjust war.

Far from stealing Mexican territory after our victory, we paid for it, and the Mexicans, five years later, agreed to the Gadsden Purchase and offered to sell us Baja California. The greed was in Mexico City.

As for America's Civil War, this quarrel will never end. Did not the South have the same right to secede from the Union as the 13 colonies did to secede from England? Did Lincoln have the right to use blockade and invasion to drive Old Dixie down? His predecessor James Buchanan did not think so.

Was the Civil War essential to ending slavery, when many states had already abolished it by legislation and every nation in the hemisphere ended it without a civil war, save for Haiti?

The Spanish-American War, begun over a falsehood—that Spain blew up the USS Maine in Havana harbor—ended with American soldiers and Marines fighting for years to deny Filipinos the freedom for which our fathers fought in the Revolution. Cuba was liberated, but the Philippines, 10,000 miles from Washington, was annexed. That was an imperial war.

In 1917, we declared war on Germany "to make the world safe for democracy." And our major allies were four of the largest empires on earth: the British, French, Russian and Japanese. We deposed the Kaiser, and got Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and World War II.

As a result of these world wars, all the Western empires fell, and Western Civilization began its inexorable advance to the grave. 

Impending bankruptcy aside, not one Western nation has a birth rate that will enable its native-born to survive many more generations. We did it to ourselves.

About Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan—and the presidents who fought those wars, LBJ, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush—the divisions are still deep and emotions raw. Today is not the time to re-fight them, but to honor and pray for the patriots who, throughout our history, did their duty, fought and died in them. Requiescant in pace.

Britain's secret biological weapons in WWII

Files reveal Britain's secret biological weapons trials in second world war

Owen Bowcott and Rob Evans, Guardian

Porton Down scientists studied foot-and-mouth, typhoid and cholera for disease attacks May 17, 2010 British scientists experimented with ways of spreading foot-and-mouth disease, and lethal infections such as dysentery, cholera and typhoid in secret biological warfare trials during the second world war. An extensive list of the contagious agents and plagues that could be turned into weapons of mass destruction is revealed in files from a War Cabinet committee released to the National Archives. The government was known to have produced 5m anthrax-filled cakes to infect cattle in Germany during the war, but the latest documents show research was carried out into a far larger variety of diseases, mostly in Porton Down, near Salisbury, and Pirbright in Surrey. Experts reported to the War Cabinet's Porton experiments sub-committee, which acknowledged that "bacteriological warfare" was outlawed by the 1925 Geneva protocol. The minutes, only now released, are labelled "secret" and "to be kept under lock and key". One session on "Toxin X" – thought to be botulinum – was so sensitive the minute records: "Not circulated." An interim report in January 1941 said: "The diseases considered most likely to be effective in bacteriological warfare are: • Human diseases: enteric group (typhoid and para-typhoid), dysentery and cholera. • Animal diseases: anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease, rinderpest, glanders, and swine fever. (Anthrax and glanders also affect human beings under conditions favourable for infection)." Biological warfare was not thought "likely to achieve a decisive effect, but might cause grave embarrassment at a critical stage in the conflict," the report said. Preparation was required both to defend against such attacks by "the enemy" and as a "means of retaliation". The study queried whether retaliation should be limited only to diseases or infections "first used" by the Nazis. "... It is assumed that retaliation would be made simultaneously and on a maximum scale with all the means at our disposal". Human diseases, it was said, could be introduced into "enemy territory only by saboteurs" – for example at "restaurant food counters". That would make it "very difficult to achieve on a scale sufficient to produce serious effects". Attempts to infect reservoirs from the air would "necessitate large quantities of material and would probably be defeated by the chlorination of water supplies", it said. Some animal diseases – "anthrax, foot-and-mouth and rinderpest", the report added, "could be distributed [by spraying] on pasture land from aircraft." By February 1941 work had been carried out to fit "streamlined steel containers" to the bomb bays of Wellington and Blenheim bombers. Estimates of the time needed to prepare "retaliatory measures" in each disease were set out. Only small quantities of typhoid, dysentery and cholera would be required, it advised, and experiments were being made into "methods for use". Infective anthrax spores could be produced in large numbers at a few days' notice, three strains of foot-and-mouth virus were available but a three-week "reactivation" period was needed. Supplies of rinderpest – or cattle plague – had to be obtained from Africa and a new isolation station built. Large batches of glanders – a bacterial infection – could be made up in two weeks. Experiments were being conducted on swine fever. The sub-committee recommended that research into human and animal diseases continue. Scientists at Pirbright found their cows were unco-operative with attempts to poison them with cattle feed cakes containing infections or ground glass dropped from the air. "Observations have shown that cattle are rather suspicious of any new type of food." The virulence of stored foot-and-mouth disease also tended to decline rapidly, it was discovered. Experiments on "keeping the properties of the virus when filled into cakes" were ordered. Pirbright was the government research station whose leaking drains in 2007 triggered a foot-and-mouth outbreak across Surrey. By November 1941 anthrax-filled cakes were emerging as the favoured, practical means for "taking offensive action". The committee justified the research on the basis of defensive necessity. "This sub-committee was set up in 1936 because of reports that Germany was exploring the field," one minute recorded. "Work started in Porton Down in 1940, directed almost entirely to the exploration of offensive possibilities in order to supply evidence on which defensive action can be taken and on which means of retaliation could be based if authorised." Dr Brian Balmer, of University College London, who is the author of Britain and Biological Warfare: Expert Advice and Science Policy 1930-65, said the newly released material provided fresh insights into the UK's wartime biological programme. "We have not seen such a detailed list before." He added: "The process [at Porton Down] most likely involved starting with a list of likely sources for infections and then finding that some are difficult to aerosolise or are unstable or are otherwise unsuitable for weaponisation." Neither side used biological weapons in the war.