AN AMERICAN JEWISH – GERMAN INFORMATION & OPINION NEWSLETTER dubowdigest@optonline.net

AMERICAN EDITION

October 11, 2011

Dear Friends:

First and foremost, best wishes for a wonderful New Year.

The UN General Assembly meeting is history and the EU is now, once again, trying to get Israel & the Palestinians back to the bargaining table. It may happen and if it does, I believe not much will come of it. I hope I’m wrong.

Most of my contacts in Germany tell me that the Middle East is far down the list of the things Germans are worrying about these days. With Germany and France more or less guarantying that Greece will not go under nor will European banks go broke, people are more relaxed about a possible Euro collapse – for the moment. However, with Italy, Portugal and Spain still on the bankruptcy horizon, the question of financial security still weighs heavily.

So….Germans, by and large, are not spending much time worrying about “Jewish issues” at present. However, we are. So, let’s get on with the news…

IN THIS EDITION

REUNIFICATION BIRTHDAY 21 – How really unified is Germany 21 years after reunification?

NAZI CRIMINALS YET TO BE HUNTED – Is it worth it to catch and prosecute men in their 80’s and 90’s?

A GERMAN FOUNDATION ‘FESSES UP – Shouldn’t the Future Fund be more careful about what sort of projects it supports?

NETANYAHU, MERKEL & GILO – What is Gilo and what made the Chancellor so angry about it?

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THE TURKISH PRIME MINISTER & THE GERMAN FOUNDATIONS – Erdogan finds another enemy.

YO! HO! HO! AND A BOTTLE OF - VOTES! – The non-Pittsburgh Pirates come out pretty well in the polls.

WRITINGS – A Hitler letter and a 10 volume diary tell historical truths.

REUNIFICATION BIRTHDAY 21

October 3rd marked the 21st birthday of the reunified Germany. If you drive or take a train through what used to be the German Democratic Republic (DDR or East Germany) it is hard these days to see much difference between it and what you see in the West. The country has undergone enormous changes. If nothing else, the center of Berlin has been rebuilt, the government has moved from Bonn to Berlin and the Chancellor is a former DDR citizen. It would take pages to try and outline all the changes. The roads, the telephone system, the airports, the school systems and the politics are all new. And yet not everything has changed. That may take two or three generations.

D-W World points out. More than two decades after Germany was reunified, great progress has been made in overcoming social divisions. But true unity has not yet been achieved in every field.

Economically, today's reunited Germany offers a mixed picture.

Huge strides have been made in the past twenty years. Just about every eastern German city and town has been thoroughly renovated.

While salary levels in the East are still only 78 percent of those in the West, even after 21 years of unity, the cost of living - especially for rents - is commensurately lower. One could argue, as a result, that most eastern Germans aren't that much worse off than their Western fellow citizens.

And there have been some industrial success stories in the former East Germany: "Silicon Saxony" with its computer chips, and the optical industry in and around the city of Jena in Thuringia, are two examples.

But in August this year, unemployment remained almost twice as high in the East as in the West. About half of the 80 billion euros ($103 billion) being paid in annual subsidies from west to east last year was eaten up by social benefits and welfare payments.

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Some 1.6 million people have relocated from east to west since 1990, most in search of better job opportunities, and that trend shows no sign of letting up. Moreover, sociologists speak of a "brain drain" from the East since it's the better educated who make up the majority of those who leave.

The Left Party, the successor to the old socialist party in Communist East Germany, combined with left-wing fringe parties from the West, has established itself as a mouthpiece for disgruntled easterners.

The SPD and the Greens are leery of cooperating with former communists, leading to the ironic result that the political left is bifurcated, helping Merkel's center-right government to hold on to power.

The establishment of the Left Party as a form of peaceful political protest can be seen as evidence of eastern Germans' adoption of western democracy. But it has also deepened many western Germans' sense of a cultural divide between them and their fellow citizens.

One oft-neglected aspect of reunification is the contributions made by residents who do not hold German passports and the effects it had on them.

Foreigners account for roughly eight percent of Germany's population, and with the removal of the East-West political divide in Europe as a whole, German society became much more multicultural, with large communities from Eastern Europe joining the substantial Turkish minority that had established itself in the post-war Federal Republic.

"The German immigrant nation is one of many nationalities, including Germans from the old Federal Republic, others from the former East, millions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe as well as an immigrant population of non-German descent," said Germany's leading immigration expert Klaus Bade. "Former 'guest workers' make up the majority, but there are also lots of smaller groups from an ever greater variety of backgrounds."

One of the greatest changes during the last 21 years (but not reported in the D-W World article) happened in the German Jewish community. When the Berlin Wall came down there were 28,000 Jews in the combined Germanys. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the possibility of Jewish emigration, Jews started pouring into the new Germany as well as to the U.S. and Israel. The Jewish community in Germany today has grown to over 100,000 registered and, perhaps, another 50,000 to 100,000 not registered. Jewish communities in cities all over Germany grew to the point where there was just not enough infrastructure (rabbis, cantors, teachers, etc.) to handle it all. The problem persists but great strides are being made so that Jewish life in Germany is well on its way to being stabilized.

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The progress and growth of the Jewish community in the Federal Republic of Germany is one of the great Jewish stories of our time.

NAZI CRIMINALS YET TO BE HUNTED

For about 30 years courts in Israel, the U.S. and finally Germany tried to get John Demjanjuk, a former concentration camp guard, convicted of helping to murder Jews during the Holocaust. Finally, as reported in The Local, “Ukraine-born Demjanjuk, 91, was sentenced to five years in prison by the Munich District Court for helping to murder at least 28,000 people while working as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. After his conviction, he was freed pending appeal.

More importantly, “Kurt Schrimm, head of the Zentrale Stelle, the authority tasked with finding and investigating Nazi crimes, told The Local that the conviction of Demjanjuk in May changed the rules for his investigators in two important ways.

“For decades the framework was different, but the Demjanjuk case showed that German courts could have jurisdiction in a case which had taken place outside of Germany – and that there was no need for the prosecution of individual actions,” he said.

So now, German prosecutors are free to seek out Holocaust criminals in others countries in an effort to bring them to justice. Schrimm’s colleagues currently scattered around the world are now hoping to unearth other former workers at Nazi death camps, even though the chances of success may be slim.

He said he currently had active investigations in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, as well as Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, and is also in contact with the authorities in Bolivia.

The work is not Nazi-hunting as portrayed in Hollywood films, he said. “We are not trying to find Mr. X. It is a question of looking at the records in local archives, working with people on the ground to filter out people who arrived from Germany during the late 1940s and 1950s.”

He admitted the chances of securing another conviction were small, but said it was his office’s responsibility to do the research to establish what happened when and who was involved – then the state prosecutor would decide whether the information was sufficient to launch a prosecution.

Although the legal precedents set by the Demjanjuk case could be overturned by a higher court, Schrimm said he was not prepared to wait for the appeals that lawyers said they would launch – his potential targets are too old.

“We cannot wait for the outcome of any appeal, it would take too long and we would

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lose valuable time. It could take around a year for any appeal to be decided,” he said.

You might ask whether it is worth it to try to run down former Nazi concentration guards who are mostly in the late 80’s and 90’s. Why not get on with life as it is today and worry about Germany’s relationship to Israel, etc. etc. etc.

I believe that it is a hard and fast rule (at least in my thinking) that the statute of limitations never runs out on murder. In addition, the commitment to the rule of law by Germany is an important step forward in the growth of their democracy. The fact that a German agency is keeping faith with the law is enormously important.

So, my hat’s off to Mr. Schrimm. Keep doing what you’re doing!

A GERMAN FOUNDATION ‘FESSES UP

In the last Germany Edition of DuBow Digest I wrote, “Ben Weinthal writing in The Jerusalem Post recently reported, “A German foundation that seeks to combat Jew-hatred and carry forward the memories of the victims of the Nazi period has enabled teenage students to draw crude pictures of Israeli Jewish pupils as part of a German and Israeli Arab high-school exchange program.

The revelation that a Holocaust foundation funneled public money to hardcore anti-Israel educational activities unleashed criticism last week from the Jerusalem-based NGO Monitor group and German experts on academic anti- Semitism.

The foundation – Remembrance, Responsibility, Future (EVZ)(Ed. Note: Also known as The Future Fund) — provided funds to partner agencies to produce a 31-page brochure depicting Orthodox Jewish students wearing yarmulkes and bearing sidelocks while seated in a well-kept classroom with a sign over a world map stating “Jewish School.”

The adjacent drawing shows a dilapidated, overcrowded schoolroom with Palestinian pupils seated below a giant cobweb and a beat-up map lacking countries. A collapsing sign above the students reads “Palestine School.”

A second cartoon apparently shows a light-skinned Israeli asking a dark-skinned Palestinian if he wants to be friends. An imposing tank is positioned behind both students, suggesting that the Israeli student is compelling the Palestinian student to shake his hand.

Anne Herzberg, legal adviser for NGO Monitor, told The Jerusalem Post on Friday, “The reported use of German government funding for a student project that produced anti-Semitic images is deplorable, and shows a complete lack of judgment and oversight.”

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Herzberg added, “Instead of utilizing the funding to compensate victims of the Nazis and educate about the horrors of the regime, as it was intended, money was redirected to a project for Arab and German students that both presented and fostered a distorted view of the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Students from Nazareth and the Gerhart Hauptmann School in Wernigerode, a small town in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, participated in the exchange program, whose purpose was to examine the “Right to Education.”

The brochure features articles in English, Arabic and German. Dr. Martin Salm, the chairman of the Holocaust foundation, said that “500 copies were produced at a cost of 2,130 euros.”

A week later, JTA reported, “The head of a German fund established to compensate victims of forced labor under the Nazis says he regrets an "ambiguous project publication" supported by the fund containing illustrations that "could be seen as containing anti-Semitic stereotypes."

Martin Salm, director of the 11-year-old Memory, Responsibility and Future Fund, which also sponsors educational programs, said he was sure that the controversial illustrations in the HEAR student exchange publication were "not motivated by anti-Semitism." But Salm added in a statement that the foundation "cannot permit criticism of societal conditions to be used to delegitimize the State of Israel. We take the misunderstanding surrounding this project as an opportunity to examine our funding practice with regard to this program."

The student publication raised alarm bells after the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot broke the story last week.

The Future Fund was established after international pressure led German industry to join the government in compensating Nazi-era forced laborers of all backgrounds. The fund also is mandated to support international and domestic educational projects, most of them having to do with commemorating Nazi victims, promoting Jewish life in Europe and promoting human rights and understanding between nations.

It was under this mandate that the fund reportedly had provided more than $28,000 to the HEAR exchange program between students in Nazareth and former East Germany under the auspices of the Europeans for Peace program.

JTA reported, “The Berlin-based office of the American Jewish Committee (AJC) urged the EVZ last week to “review its human-rights program guidelines and create targeted programming to combat anti-Semitism and contribute to a balanced understanding of modern Israel.”

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“A foundation that was initiated by the German government and industry to honor the lives of millions of Nazi slave and forced laborers should give priority to initiatives that promote good relations with Israel and fight modern forms of anti- Semitism,” said Deidre Berger, director of AJC Berlin Ramer Institute for German- Jewish Relations.

Berger added that “Unfortunately, programs combating anti-Semitism constitute an extremely small part of the foundation’s annual program. And some programs, reflecting a skewed human rights agenda, may do more harm than good.”

Rabbi Andrew Baker, AJC’s director of International Jewish Affairs, is a member of the EVZ Board of Trustees.

“I fully expect that there will be a thorough discussion about this when the board meets in December. The reputation of the EVZ Stiftung hangs in the balance.” said Baker.

One might think that the amount of publicity this matter received in the media would bring it to a close and that EVZ (aka The Future Fund) would get its act together. Maybe it will. However, some Jewish groups are urging that the money spent on the HEAR program be paid back. I’m not sure where those funds would come from. However, it is clear that EVZ did not monitor its programs very well and moved away from its stated purpose. We’ll have to see how quickly and effectively they clean up their errors. Hopefully soon. Stay tuned!

NETANYAHU, MERKEL & GILO

I’m sure you know who Netanyahu and Merkel are but what is Gilo and what’s newsworthy about it? Well, as it turns out after the 1948 War and ceasefire Gilo wound up on the Arab side of what became known as the Green (truce) Line.

According to Wikipedia, “In 1970, the Israeli government expropriated 12,300 dunams of land to build a ring of new neighborhoods around Jerusalem on land conquered in the Six-Day War. Gilo was established in 1973. According to an Israeli municipal planner, most Gilo land had been legally purchased by Jews before World War II, much of it during the 1930s, and that Jewish landowners had not relinquished their ownership of their land when the area was captured by the Jordanians in the 1948 War. According to other sources, the land belonged to the Palestinian villages...”

Why is Gilo important? Well, recently the Israeli government announced that permission had been granted for the building of 1100 housing units in Gilo. These 1,100 are not the first units to be built in Gilo. There are already 40,000 Israelis living there and Gilo is not some obscure settlement in the West Bank somewhere. It’s very close to the middle of Jerusalem.

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The Jerusalem post reported, “German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday that plans for new housing units in east Jerusalem raised doubts that his government is interested in starting serious negotiations with the Palestinian leadership.

Her spokesman said it was up to Netanyahu to dispel German doubts as to Israel's willingness to engage the Palestinians.

She reiterated to Netanyahu in the language of a Quartet of Middle East mediators statement which called on both sides to refrain from making "provocative actions."   

Leaders across Europe have been highly critical of Israel's decision to continue development in east Jerusalem.

EU Foreign Affairs chief Catherine Ashton condemned the Gilo plan, calling the program "provocative" and urging Israel to "reverse" its decision to build 1,100 new homes over the Green Line.

Netanyahu rejected European and American complaints over the construction in Gilo, saying "Gilo is not a settlement nor an outpost."

"It is a neighborhood in the very heart of Jerusalem, about five minutes from the center of town."

In every peace plan on the table in the past 18 years, Gilo "stays part of Jerusalem and therefore this planning decision in no way contradicts" the current Israel government's desire for peace based on two states for the two peoples, he added.

A day or two later P.M. Netanyahu noted publicly that there was no diplomatic rift between Israel and Germany. He blamed the flap on the Israeli media. You can read about that by clicking here. http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/netanyahu-s-office-there-is-no-israel-germany-diplomatic-crisis-1.387635

I don’t think for a moment that there was no diplomatic disagreement. The Chancellor doesn’t have her press people release a statement after a phone call for no reason. There is little doubt that the Gilo announcement was somewhat embarrassing for Merkel. Most of the EU is not at all sympathetic to Israel and the Chancellor; I am sure feels as if her pro-Israel position is being undercut by P.M. Netanyahu. This is not the first time that a telephone call between the two has wound up in the headlines.

Netanyahu obviously has his own internal politics to worry about and toughness on the building situation is a position he feels he has to maintain.

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Perhaps the timing of the announcement could have been handled better and the Israelis should think about that. However, on the subject of Gilo itself, no one, not even the Palestinians can realistically believe that an essential Jerusalem neighborhood where there are large apartment blocs and 40,000 residents will come back to them in any sort of a settlement. It is my opinion that the Green Line of pre-1967 (actually 1948) should not be seen as a dividing line. It was never a border, only a truce line.

Like Berlin, it divided a legitimate city. It should never be any sort of a genuine demarcation line. I would hope that my German friends would take that into consideration.

THE TURKISH PRIME MINISTER & THE GERMAN FOUNDATIONS

I think we are all pretty much aware of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s attacks on Israel. Well, he seems to have now focused on another victim – the German political foundations.

Juergen Gottschlich writing in Spiegel On-Line reports, “Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is leveling targeted attacks against German political foundations, accusing them of supporting the Kurdish PKK. But the foundations view the attacks as merely part of a calculated plan to criminalize legal Kurdish organizations.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is well-known for the tough and occasionally undiplomatic tone he uses with foreign politicians. The most recent to experience his wrath was Israel's government. But now Erdogan is attacking German political foundations with a presence and projects in Turkey -- and in no uncertain terms.

Erdogan is accusing several foundations of supporting the "Kurdish terrorist organization PKK," the Kurdistan Worker's Party. Several days ago, he spoke of a single foundation, accusing it of collaborating with local officials of the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) -- a legal political party that managed to win 36 seats in the Turkish parliament in June -- and of issuing loans to companies with PKK ties.

At a press conference on Wednesday, Erdogan went even further. He alleged that German foundations are using loans to Kurdish BDP officials to get aid to the PKK. "The German foundations have unfortunately been doing similar things for a long time, but German officials have yet to respond to Turkish complaints," he said. In other words, Erdogan was no longer concerned about a single foundation, it was now "the German foundations" in general.

In Turkey, it is no minor matter to be charged with supporting the PKK -- especially when the man leveling the charge is the prime minister himself. In such cases, state

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prosecutors are quick to draw up an indictment like the ones that have put thousands in jail on similar charges.

Appalled representatives of German political foundations are rejecting the accusations. For example, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, a think tank associated with Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has labeled the claims as "absurd." Officials in both Turkey and Germany with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which is aligned with the Green Party, said the accusations "are lacking any basis in fact," adding that "foundations don't issue loans nor do they finance any infrastructure projects.”

German Ambassador Eberhard Pohl noted that, “…it is simply impossible that money was channeled from the projects to the PKK. Representatives of foundations also pointed out that they cannot legally provide any loans in Turkey.

Ulrike Dufner, the head of the (Heinrich Boell Foundation) office in Istanbul, views Erdogan's current accusations as an attempt to "stir up nationalist emotions." In fact, she believes the attack is targeting the civilian Kurdish opposition much more than German foundations themselves.

It certainly appears that the German foundations are just another scapegoat. If Erdogan is to restore the Ottoman Empire’s greatness he needs enemies. So, move over Israel, you’ve got company.

YO! HO! HO! AND A BOTTLE OF - VOTES!

In the last edition I wrote briefly about the new Pirate Party and how well they had done in the Berlin state election.

It seems that the Skull & Crossbones is catching on nationally. The Local reports, “In a survey for the Bild am Sonntag newspaper, polling company Emnid found the party, which emphasizes civil liberties and governmental transparency, two percentage points more popular than a week before.

They are now at 9%.

A similar result in the 2013 general election would make the Pirates the fourth-strongest political party in Germany – well ahead of the hard-line socialist Left (Die Linke) party and the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).

Whereas support for The Left stayed at seven percent, the FDP hit a historic low of three percent – below the five-percent hurdle needed to get seats in parliament.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) on 32 percent remained the strongest party in the poll. The centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) on

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28 percent and the environmentalist Green on 17 percent also both held steady from the previous week.

The Pirate Party shocked Germany's political establishment by wining nearly nine percent of the vote in Berlin's state poll last month. The motley group of novice politicians has since declared its intention to take the movement nationwide.

It’s probably a little early in the game for the Pirate Party gang to start measuring drapes for their offices in the Bundestag building. Maybe they are just a flash in the treasure chest. Certainly, their catchy name alone has drawn some support. If they had selected something like New Liberal or Democratic Union who would be paying them much attention? There are quite a few other minor parties in Germany and they get zero publicity.

Having said all that, they did draw 9% in the Emnid poll and that is certainly popular “gold”.

So, we’ll keep one eye on the P.P. (The other eye now has a black patch over it) and let you know how things progress.

How do you say “Jolly Roger” in German?

WRITINGS

According to JTA, “Ten months after World War I ended, a 30-year-old German army veteran wrote a two-page letter in which he explained the "Jewish question" on a “rational” and “scientific” basis.

“An anti-Semitism based on reason must lead to a systematic combatting and elimination of the privileges of the Jews,” he wrote. “The ultimate objective must be the irrevocable removal of Jews in general.”

Signed “Respectfully, Adolf Hitler,” the letter received high marks for the author from his superiors in a military propaganda unit bitterly opposed to the newly established Weimar Republic as the perceived handiwork of Bolsheviks, Socialists and Jews.

UCLA historian Saul Friedlander, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a two-volume analysis of the Nazi regime, observed that “In his very first written statement about the Jews, Hitler shows that [hatred of Jews] was the very core of his political passion.”

At the behest of his superiors, Hitler wrote the letter to a fellow soldier propagandist named Adolf Gemlich, and the document is known as the Gemlich letter. In contrast to his later public rants, Hitler assumes an almost professorial tone in the letter.

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For instance, he expounds that “Anti-Semitism is too easily characterized as a mere emotional phenomenon. And yet, this is incorrect. Anti-Semitism as a political movement may not and cannot be defined by emotional impulses, but by recognition of the facts.”

What are the facts? According to the letter, one is that “Jewry is absolutely a race and not a religious association.”

Hitler features the stereotype of the Jew as a money grubber bent on world domination.

“Everything man strives after as a higher goal, be it religion, socialism, democracy, is to the Jew only means to an end, the way to satisfy his lust for gold and domination,” he wrote.

The Wiesenthal Center now has the letter it its possession. There is more to the story. Click here to read about it.

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/10/02/3089655/hitler-letter-offers-first-glimpse-of-anti-semitic-passions

Perhaps of equal historical importance is a 10 volume diary kept by an anti-Nazi German, Friedrich Kellner which spells out clearly what all German knew about the crimes of the Nazis during their time in power.

According to Spiegel On-Line, “Ten closely written volumes document the things Kellner experienced, observed and, most of all, what he read and heard. He cut out speeches and calls to action from newspapers and analyzed them, and he made notes about ordinances and decrees.

Using military news, obituaries of those who died ("for Germany's greatness and freedom"), caricatures, newspaper articles and conversations with ordinary people, Kellner fashioned an image of Nazi Germany that has never existed before in such a vivid, concise and challenging form. Until now, the discussion over German guilt has fluctuated within the broad space between two positions. The one side emphasizes the deliberate disinformation of Nazi propaganda and the notion that ordinary citizens lived in fear and terror, concluding that they couldn't have known better. The other side takes the opposite position, namely that most were aware of what was happening.

Kellner's writings offer a glimpse into what everyone could have known about the war of extermination in the East, the crimes against the Jews and the acts of terror committed by the Nazi Party.”

There is more to this story as well. Click here to read it.

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,789900,00.html#ref=nlint

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DuBow Digest is written and published by Eugene DuBow who can be contacted by clicking here

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