News between January 27th and February 2nd, 1999, reversely ordered by date (i.e.: the newest can be found on top). For other News look into our News Archive.
JERUSALEM, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Orthodox Jews shouted ``Nazis'' and ``Jew-haters'' at American Reform rabbis who challenged Orthodox Jewish tradition at Jerusalem's Western Wall on Monday.
The liberal rabbis, part of a group of 33 Reform clergy visiting Israel to meet officials and candidates ahead of the May 17 general election, held a prayer service -- attended by men and women -- at Judaism's holiest shrine.
About 100 Orthodox Jews, reacting to the Reform violation of a ritual ban on a ``mixed'' congregation, hurled abuse in the stone plaza where men and women worshippers pray in separate enclosures.
``It's inconceivable that this small group, this cult, will come here and stir a riot in Israel,'' Orthodox lawmaker Avraham Lazerson said at the shrine, a perimeter wall of the ancient Jewish Temple compound.
Israel's Orthodoxy refuses to recognise the rabbis of the Reform and Conservative movements, even though 90 percent of affiliated Jews in the United States -- home to the world's largest Jewish community -- belong to the two movements.
The two liberal groups do not have a large following in Israel, where the Orthodox maintain a tight hold over official religious institutions.
``The Western Wall is...not an ultra-Orthodox synagogue and we won't allow the ultra-Orthodox to take away from the Jewish people national shrines,'' Ammiel Hirsch, a leading Reform rabbi who heads the delegation to Israel.
Many members of the delegation voiced anger at a law Orthodox parties pushed through parliament last week to limit the influence of Reform Jews on local religious councils that distribute funds to synagogues and other institutions.
Hirsch said he believed the legislation, which followed Israeli judicial rulings allowing non-Orthodox Jews to serve on religious councils, would affect campaign contributions by American Jews to Israeli political parties.
``We have told people in the community not to contribute to any entity...that cannot state to their satisfaction that they believe in religious pluralism and that they have respect for Reform and Conservative Jews,'' Hirsch told Reuters.
U.S. Jews give an estimated tens of millions of dollars to Israeli candidates and parties during election campaigns.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's ruling Likud party largely supported the religious councils legislation and former Defence Minister Yitzhak Mordechai of the new, and still unnamed, centrist party cast the deciding vote in favour.
Hirsch said after the vote last week that Mordechai's support of the bill would make it hard for him to raise funds among American Jews.
Mordechai's number two in the centrist party, former army chief Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, visited the United States last week to try to drum up financial support. The party gave no details about the trip but Israeli media reports said he got a cool reception.
The new law states that membership in a local religious council is conditional on a declaration of allegiance to the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate.
Some Reform and Conservative rabbis have agreed to take such a vow in order to have a say in allocation of council funds long denied to their movements.
LOS ANGELES, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Austria's biggest banking group has agreed to pay millions of dollars to Holocaust victims and release secret documents implicating Germany's Deutsche Bank in the seizure of Jewish assets in Austria, a negotiator in the deal said on Tuesday.
The negotiator, who asked not to be identified, was among about 30 people who hammered out the agreement to settle Holocaust-era claims against Creditanstalt, a subsidiary of Bank Austria, on Monday night in a meeting conducted by U.S.
mediator Alfonse D'Amato, a former Republican Senator, in a New York office suite.
Jewish groups led by the World Jewish Congress are in negotiations with Deutsche Bank to settle Holocaust-era claims against the giant German commercial bank. They have threatened to try to block Deutsche Bank's $10 billion merger with Bankers Trust until the claims are settled.
In Vienna on Tuesday, a Creditanstalt spokesman said negotiations were still going on and denied newspaper reports that it had agreed with Holocaust victims between $40 million and $92 million.
Victims of the Nazi regime and their relatives began legal action against the Austrian banking group last year, some of them represented by U.S. lawyer Edward Fagan, who charged Creditanstalt with profiting from gold stolen from Jews sent to concentration camps.
The negotiator said that following the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, Deutsche Bank took control of Creditanstalt.
The Austrian bank then engaged in an ``Aryanization'' process in which Jewish assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars were bought at firesale prices.
The documents will show that Deutsche Bank controlled the Austrian bank during this process and extended it into East Europe with the takeover of banks in Poland, Slovakia and the Balkans, the negotiator said.
Gerhard Randa, chief executive of the Austrian banking group, met WJC Secretary General Israel Singer and D'Amato last week in London where a timetable for wrapping up the talks was mapped out.
ZAGREB, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Jewish and Serb activists attacked the Croatian government on Tuesday for its ``political'' decision to release World War Two concentration camp guard Nada Sakic who was extradited last year to face war crimes charges.
The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC) said the decision made a mockery of Croatian government claims that it had ever had any real intention of providing justice for victims of World War Two ethnic cleansing campaigns in Croatia.
Sakic, 72, was released from Zagreb county jail on Monday after the state prosecutor said there was not enough evidence after a three-month investigation to formally charge her.
The release was ``exactly the travesty that activists feared would be played out in Croatia,'' the SWC's associate dean Rabbi Abraham Cooper said in a statement faxed from Los Angeles.
Milan Bulajic, director of Belgrade's Yugoslav Museum for Victims of Genocide, said he was surprised because Croatia had accompanied its extradition request with an explanation of the crimes Sakic was to be charged with.
``Yet the same prosecutor who submitted the request and explanation now claims there is no evidence,'' he said.
Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Centre's Jerusalem office told Reuters there was no question that evidence the centre had given the Croatian Justice Ministry last year was enough to prove Sakic's guilt.
``If you have enough evidence to extradite a war criminal it's extremely strange, perhaps even unprecedented, that that person will be released without even an indictment,'' he said.
Zuroff believed there was a political dimension to the case, taking place so long after the crimes were alleged to have been committed.
In his annual state of the nation address in January President Franjo Tudjman spoke of the cases against Sakic and her husband as the West's ``renewed manipulation of NDH crimes,'' dismissing them as political pressure on Croatia.
``If the president of a country says a thing like that, it's obvious there is no political will to go forward,'' Zuroff said.
Sakic was among few women ever charged with war crimes from World War Two, but when she appeared outside Zagreb county jail there was more evidence of the Parkinson's disease with which she now suffers than the gruesome allegations against her.
She had been in jail since early November when she was extradited from Argentina to face charges including torture of civilians, while a member of the Nazi-backed Ustashe.
Her 76-year-old husband Dinko was already in Zagreb jail and is still there, awaiting the start of his own war crimes trial after his extradition last June.
``The way this was conducted is an indication to us of how the criminal proceedings against her husband will go ahead,'' said Bulajic.
The couple were members of the brutal Ustashe regime which ruled the Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945. It enforced racial laws and set up death camps in which tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats died.
The Sakic cases were hailed by many as a chance for Croatia finally to come to terms with its fascist past, but were also seen as controversial in a country only just recovering from a recent war with its Serb minority, when old hatreds resurfaced.
``The Croatian government has consistently asserted its commitment to the values of democracy and justice and has lobbied hard in the West to project the image that it deplores and completely disassociates itself from the horrors and excesses of the Ustasha-Nazi-puppet regime,'' Cooper said.
But the ``key litmus test for its commitment'' was how it dealt with Ustasha-era cases, he said.
ZAGREB, Feb 2 (Reuters) - A Jewish organisation asked Yugoslavia on Tuesday to renew its extradition request for World War Two concentration camp guard Nada Sakic, whom Croatia freed from custody on Monday after dropping all charges against her.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC), which amongst other activities tracks down former Nazis, had earlier denounced the Croatian government for its ``political'' decision to release Sakic, extradited from Argentina last year to face war crimes charges.
It said the decision made a mockery of Croatian claims that it had ever had any real intention of providing justice for victims of World War Two ethnic cleansing campaigns in Croatia.
The release was ``exactly the travesty that activists feared would be played out in Croatia,'' the SWC's associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said in a statement faxed from Los Angeles.
Milan Bulajic, director of Belgrade's Yugoslav Museum for Victims of Genocide, said he was surprised because Croatia had accompanied its extradition request with an explanation of the crimes Sakic, who lived in Argentina, was to be charged with.
Croatia's extradition request took precedence over one submitted to Argentine authorites by Yugoslavia, because the crimes were alleged to have been committed in Croatia.
On Tuesday Efraim Zuroff of the Wiesenthal Centre's Jerusalem office wrote to Yugoslav ambassador to Israel Mirko Stefanovic, urging the Yugoslav authorities to pursue the case, the centre said in a statement faxed to Reuters in Zagreb.
``We know that the Yugoslav judicial authorities possess testimony regarding the crimes committed by Nada Sakic in the Stara Gradiska concentration camp and therefore urge your immediate action in this regard,'' he said.
Zuroff told Reuters earlier it was perhaps unprecedented that someone who had been extradited was released without charge, as to extradite a person strong evidence was needed, and said he believed there was a political dimension to the case.
In January President Franjo Tudjman spoke of the West's ``renewed manipulation of NDH crimes'' and dismissed it as political pressure on Croatia.
Sakic was one of only a few women ever charged with war crimes from World War Two. She had been in jail since early November when she was extradited to face charges including torture of civilians, while a member of the Nazi-backed Ustashe.
Her 76-year-old husband Dinko remains in custody in Zagreb awaiting the start of his own war crimes trial, due in March.
The couple were members of the brutal Ustashe regime which ruled the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) from 1941 to 1945. It enforced racial laws and set up death camps in which tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats died.
BONN, Germany (AP) -- Germans marked their fourth annual Holocaust memorial day today with ceremonies at former concentration camps and warnings to keep alive the memory of Nazi atrocities.
For the first time, the events commemorated an estimated 10,000 gay victims of the Nazi regime with a ceremony at the Sachsenhausen camp at Oranienburg outside Berlin.
But the memorial day also illustrated the nation's growing uncertainty about how new generations of Germans should remember the Holocaust.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has backed a design unveiled this month by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman that calls for a memorial, library and Holocaust research center in central Berlin, near the Brandenburg Gate. Parliament hopes to approve the memorial this year.
As government flags flew at half-staff, Schroeder warned Germans to stay on guard against racism and intolerance and reminded them of their duty to preserve the memory of the Third Reich.
``Every attempt to withdraw from that historical responsibility is doomed to failure,'' he said in a statement.
His comment appeared partly aimed at German author Martin Walser, who set off controversy last fall by suggesting he was weary of repeated reminders of the genocidal crimes of his forefathers.
Walser's remarks sparked weeks of angry debate led by the head of Germany's Jewish community, Holocaust survivor Ignatz Bubis, who accused the author of playing into the hands of anti-Semites.
Herzog proclaimed the Day of Remembrance for Victims of Nazism in 1996, saying it was needed to keep memories of the Holocaust from fading after five decades. He chose Jan. 27 because it was the day Soviet soldiers liberated the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1945.
Some 1.6 million Jews and tens of thousands of Poles and Gypsies died in 1942-45 at Auschwitz and at nearby factories where they were forced to work under Nazi SS guard.
Schools across German held special classes today about the Holocaust, and some planned field trips to former concentration camps.
Ceremonies at the Sachsenhausen camp included a wreath-laying and lectures about Nazi persecution of gays, honoring a group organizers say has long been overlooked because of prejudice against homosexuals.
Sachsenhausen had about 1,000 homosexual inmates, more than other concentration camps because it was near Berlin, which had a thriving gay culture in the 1920s.
BONN, Germany (AP) -- Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's top aide will be flying to Washington to press efforts to recover former East German spy files believed taken by the CIA.
During his Feb. 8-9 trip to Washington, Bodo Hombach, Schroeder's chief of staff, will also hold talks with U.S. officials on compensation for U.S. survivors of Nazi death camps, government spokesman Walter Jakobs said Wednesday.
Hombach will meet CIA chief George Tenet and probably also with President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, Jakobs said.
Germany is eager to recover the secret spy records, allegedly spirited away to the United States shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
German officials believe the files could expose people who worked for the Stasi, the communist East German state security service.
The United States has not officially admitted taking the files, whose disappearance from East Germany was considered a triumph of Cold War espionage.
Hombach also will discuss an agreement reached in December on compensating Americans imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, Jakobs said.
More than 200 Americans who survived World War II concentration camps will be paid a total of up to $25 million, depending on how much the German parliament provides for the deal, according to lawyers involved in the case. Some of the survivors became American citizens after the war.
In Berlin, meanwhile, the leader of Germany's Jews says new plans for a Holocaust memorial and research center should include a list of the names of Jews killed by the Nazis, according to a newspaper report Wednesday.
The list ``would make the memorial less abstract,'' Ignatz Bubis was quoted as saying in the weekly newspaper Die Woche.
His suggestion comes as parliament prepares to vote on the design by U.S. architect Peter Eisenman, the first memorial plan in 10 years of rancorous discussion that politicians and Jewish leaders alike seem to find acceptable.
Bubis says he can ``live with'' the latest memorial plan, a version of Eisenman's original idea for a field of about 2,700 closely set concrete pillars resembling a cemetery. After discussion with government leaders, who felt a memorial was not educational enough, Eisenman incorporated a research center and tunnels that can be used for exhibitions.
Elke Leonhard, the head of parliament's cultural committee, said lawmakers could approve the new design before their summer break. If that happens, the memorial could be built by 2004, she told ZDF television Wednesday.
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (AP) -- Thousands of people laid flowers at a War World II memorial in St. Petersburg on Wednesday to observe the 55th anniversary of the day the Nazi blockade of the city was lifted.
During the 900-day siege of the city -- then called Leningrad -- roughly half of its 3 million people died, mainly of hunger and cold, Russian historians say.
``Of course that feeling of hunger was terrible,'' said Yevgenia Bryanskaya, who spent the blockade with her mother in a small communal apartment in St. Petersburg.
``It was terrible when I saw my mother swell up (from malnutrition). She could hardly move,'' Bryanskaya told Associated Press Television News.
Thousands of people walked through Peskaryovskoye cemetery, where many blockade victims are buried, and laid flowers at a towering World War II memorial. Many mourners carried pictures of relatives who died during the blockade.
German troops first encircled Leningrad in August 1941. After failing to take it with bombing raids and heavy shelling, the Nazis decided to starve the city into submission.
They thought it would take a couple of weeks; it lasted nearly three years.
Before long, all the city's cats and dogs were eaten, then rats and crows, and then people started to scrape off wallpaper to eat the paste. They boiled leather coats and ate them.
Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov recently promised $1.6 million for the 400,000 blockade survivors, many of whom are now struggling to get by on small pensions.
The money Primakov promised was to come from the Cabinet's reserve fund and will be distributed by April 1, Russian news agencies reported.
- (PINELLAS COUNTY) -- Prosecutors in Pinellas presenting the case against the Reverend Henry Lyons will continue today to concentrate on Lyons' supposed misuse of monies that were donated to help burned-out black churches throughout the South. Lyons, who is the president of the National Baptist Convention, allegedly accepted nearly a half-Million-dollar donation from the Anti-Defamation League and doled out a pittance to some churches... before spending the rest or socking it into bank accounts he controlled. But the defense contends that Lyons was just being judicious with the funds... and had NO time limit in which to distribute them. His lawyers also point out the A-D-L got its money back when it asked for it.
Copyright © 1999 Reuters Limited.
- (SARASOTA) -- Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel (vee-ZEHL) is slated to speak in Sarasota tonight. However, to hear the Boston University professor's speech at the Sarasota-Manatee Jewish Federation Keynote Event will be expensive. Tickets for the event cost 75- dollars each... but only those who give a minimum one- thousand-dollar donation to the federation are allowed to buy a ticket.
BERLIN (AP) -- Germany's Dresdner bank has millions of dollars worth of gold taken by the Nazis from Holocaust victims during the war, a newspaper said Thursday.
The Berlin-based Die Welt daily, in an early release of a report that is to appear in its Friday editions, said the gold involved 30 bars with a current value of $2.37 million.
The report said the Hannah-Arendt Institute, which was commissioned in 1997 by Dresdner Bank to research its Nazi past, would make public the report in Dresden on Friday.
Last year, Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest commercial bank, reported that it still had Nazi victims' gold worth $2.51 million, which it was turning over to two Jewish organizations in the United States.
According to Die Welt, Dresdner Bank is to make known Friday what action it will take.
No one could be immediately contacted at Dresdner Bank to comment on the report late Thursday.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Eleven Polish nationals have filed a class action lawsuit against over 20 German, Austrian and American banks and industrial corporations on behalf of all Polish citizens who were compelled to perform forced labor during World War II. The lawsuit, filed today in federal court for the District of New Jersey, is the broadest lawsuit yet filed against German, Austrian and American companies for their use of forced labor. This lawsuit targets a broader spectrum of German, Austrian, and American financial and industrial interests than previous lawsuits, which have been filed primarily on behalf of Jews and other minorities persecuted by elements of the Third Reich. This new suit was filed on behalf of all Polish nationals who toiled and died as forced laborers under the Nazi Regime, whether they were Jewish, Catholic, or from any other ethnic or religious group.
The potential members of the class number at least in the hundreds of thousands, given that millions of Poles were compelled to perform forced labor for the Germans and Austrians during the War.
The lawsuit does not seek any specific dollar amount as compensation to the class members. Given the enormous number of potential members of the class, the potential liability of the German, Austrian and American companies is in the tens of billions of dollars.
Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, P.L.L.C has played a lead role in persecuting cases on behalf of victims of the Holocaust. The firm has offices in Washington, D.C. and Seattle and is active in major litigation pending in federal and state courts throughout the nation. For additional information or comments contact Michael D. Hausfeld or Paul T. Gallagher at 202-408-4600.
SOURCE: Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, P.L.L.C.
VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) -- A court-appointed medical panel said Friday that Aleksandras Lileikis is too ill to face trial on charges of genocide for allegedly turning over scores of Jews to a Nazi execution squad during World War II.
The court is not obliged to accept the panel's conclusions, but is seen as unlikely to go against the doctors' determination. No date has been set for the court to make a decision on whether the trial would go ahead.
Lileikis, 91, was the head of the security police in Vilnius, the capital, during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation. The charges against him say he ordered the arrest of scores of Jews and that they were turned over to the squad that performed executions in a forest outside the city.
The trial was to begin last fall, but Lileikis did not show up for the opening session and his lawyer claimed he was too ill to appear. The medical panel examined him and found him fit to stand trial.
When the trial reopened, Lileikis showed up in a wheelchair and proclaimed his innocence, but then began gasping and was taken from court in an ambulance. The trial was to have resumed in January, but Lileikis again did not appear.
The panel's head doctor, Antanas Garmus, told reporters that Lileikis' cardiovascular disease had become worse in recent months.
Lileikis' trial was the first attempt in post-Soviet Lithuania at prosecuting someone for alleged Nazi war crimes.
Last week a medical panel concluded that the defendant in Lithuania's second Nazi trial, 91-year-old Kazys Gimzauskas, was also too ill to stand trial.
After regaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Lithuania promised to diligently pursue, indict and convict Lithuanians who participated in the massacre of Lithuanian Jews during Nazi rule.
But the process has been slow, with trial dates for both Lileikis and Gimzauskas being set years after prosecutors launched their investigations.
Some Jewish leaders have bitterly criticized Lithuania for dragging out the legal process.
More than 90 percent of Lithuania's 240,000 pre-war Jewish community perished during the Nazi occupation. Historians say hundreds or possibly thousands of Lithuanians collaborated in murdering Jews.
Lileikis emigrated to the United States in 1955, and lived in the Boston area for 40 years. He returned to Lithuania in 1996 as a U.S. court was moving to revoke his citizenship and deport him.
Gimzauskas also lived in the United States before returning to Lithuania.
HAMBURG, Germany (AP) -- German government advisors have recommended that companies that employed millions of slave laborers during the Nazi era should set up a ``German Memory Fund'' to compensate survivors, a magazine said Saturday.
The private fund should begin payments on Sept. 1, the 60th anniversary of Germany's invasion of Poland, Der Spiegel reported. The fund will compensate former slave laborers from eastern Europe, Jews and Roma gypsies.
The recommendation was reportedly made in a confidential paper commissioned by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's chief of staff Bodo Hombach, whom Schroeder has assigned to help German companies resolve outstanding claims by people forced to work during World War II.
It wasn't immediately clear if the proposed fund was identical with one Schroeder is expected to unveil next month.
The Chairman of Germany's Central Council of Jews, Ignatz Bubis, was quoted as saying the fund should be chaired by German President Roman Herzog, who retires in June, and the former Hungarian Prime Minister Gyula Horn, the report said.
The fund would be called the ``Endowment Initiative of German Companies: Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future,'' and should also sponsor international projects to aid reconciliation, the group of advisors have recommended.
While Germany has paid more than $60 billion in reparations to Nazi victims, it traditionally has refused to honor wage claims from slave laborers, who were technically working for private companies. But German companies face huge lawsuits in U.S. courts.
The new, left-leaning German government began working with industrial firms, banks and insurance companies to establish a compensation fund to settle those suits. A key issue in establishing the fund is ensuring that German companies will face no additional claims.
The advisors said the U.S. government should take steps to prevent class action lawsuits by survivors, as well as boycotts of German companies, as part of the compensation scheme, Spiegel reported.
More than 7 million people, most from Poland and the Soviet Union, were forced to work in Nazi Germany. Experts believe at least 500,000 are still alive.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. government's chief Nazi hunter says the Lithuanian government lacks the political will to bring World War II persecutors to trial and accuses one elderly defendant of feigning illness to avoid trial.
``This is an outrage,'' said Eli Rosenbaum, head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, after learning that a medical panel told a court in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius on Friday that 91-year-old Aleksandras Lileikis was too ill to appear.
Lileikis, who emigrated to the United States in 1955 and lived for 40 years in Norwood, Mass., outside Boston, is accused of executing Jews for the Nazis while serving as head of security police in Vilnius during the German occupation. Rosenbaum's office got a U.S. District Court to revoke Lileikis' naturalized U.S. citizenship in 1996 and was moving to deport him when he returned to Lithuania.
``The U.S. government has specific, verified information that Lileikis has been feigning illness. He is fit to stand trial,'' Rosenbaum said in an interview.
A second Nazi war crimes trial in Vilnius, of Lileikis' wartime deputy, also was held up in Vilnius in recent days because of reports the defendant was too ill.
The Lithuanian court is not obliged to accept the court-appointed panel's conclusions on Lileikis, but is seen as unlikely to go against the doctors' determination. No date has been set for the court to decide whether the trial will go ahead.
Lileikis was chief of the Lithuanian Security Police, known as the Saugumas, in Vilnius during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation. Charges against him allege that he ordered the arrest of scores of Jews, who were turned over to a squad that performed executions in a forest outside the city.
He lost his naturalized U.S. citizenship after Justice prosecutors presented captured Nazi documents and other evidence showing Lileikis signed orders consigning Jewish men, women and children to death by gunfire at execution pits in the wooded hamlet of Paneriai, several miles from Vilnius.
The trial was to begin last fall, but Lileikis did not show up for the opening session and his lawyer reported he was too ill to appear. The medical panel examined him and found him fit to stand trial.
When the trial reopened, Lileikis showed up in a wheelchair and proclaimed his innocence, then began gasping and was taken from court in an ambulance. The trial was to have resumed this month, but Lileikis again did not appear.
Lileikis' trial was the first attempt in post-Soviet Lithuania to prosecute someone for alleged Nazi war crimes.
Last week a medical panel concluded that the defendant in Lithuania's second Nazi trial, 91-year-old Kazys Gimzauskas, who was Lileikis' wartime deputy, also was too ill to stand trial.
Gimzauskas fled to Lithuania from his home in St. Petersburg, Fla., in 1993. He too was stripped of his naturalized U.S. citizenship in a proceeding begun by Rosenbaum's office.
After regaining its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Lithuania promised diligently to pursue, indict and convict Lithuanians who participated in the Nazi-era massacre of Lithuanian Jews.
The process has been slow, however, with trial dates for both Lileikis and Gimzauskas being set years after prosecutors launched investigations.
Jewish leaders have criticized Lithuania bitterly for dragging out the legal process.
More than 90 percent of Lithuania's 240,000 prewar Jews perished during the Nazi occupation. Historians say hundreds or possibly thousands of Lithuanians collaborated in murdering Jews.
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- Vice President Al Gore praised Switzerland on Saturday for trying to redress any World War II-era wrongs over the assets of Holocaust victims taken by the Nazis.
Gore, meeting with Swiss President Ruth Dreifuss, announced the creation of a new bilateral commission, saying the two countries were opening a ``new era'' of cooperation.
The two leaders pointed to improving relations between Switzerland and Jewish groups campaigning for compensation for assets taken by the Nazis and deposited in Swiss Banks. Dreifuss said she and Gore had noted in particular the August 1998 $1.25 billion settlement between Swiss banks and heirs of Holocaust victims.
``This brings to an end the question of material claims,'' Dreifuss told a joint news conference.
Gore said he had been assured by the World Jewish Congress and World Jewish Restitution Organization, two leading groups in the campaign, that they also want to help foster friendlier relations.
``I am very pleased that the Swiss are working, through their historians and in other ways, to face their past,'' said Gore, who was winding up a two-day visit to attend the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Gore also congratulated Dreifuss, Switzerland's first female and first Jewish president, on her election in December.
Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat said the bilateral commission announced by Gore aims to, among other things, harmonize regulatory measures and facilitate entry into each other's markets.
The commission is similar to about a dozen others set up with countries including Russia, Jordan and Egypt.
Switzerland and the United States also will increase cultural, scientific and educational exchanges and work together to combat organized crime, drug trafficking and environmental woes, Eizenstat said.
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- An Austrian bank accused of having profited from the sale of gold taken from Jewish Holocaust victims will pay $92 million in restitution, a U.S. lawyer representing survivors said in comments published Sunday.
In exchange for the relatively low sum, the Bank Austria group promised to cooperate in similar investigations against German banks, said lawyer Ed Fagan, quoted in the weekly Format and by the Austria Press Agency.
Bank Austria ``will provide us with documents that will open the way to the main vein of gold,'' Fagan said, pointing to Germany's Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank.
The two banks are thought to have profited from Holocaust victims in a number of ways, including keeping gold taken from victims and put into Nazis' accounts.
Dresdner Bank is reported to have such gold with a current value of $2.37 million. Deutsche Bank, Germany's largest commercial bank, has acknowledged still having Nazi victims' gold worth $2.51 million, which it plans to turn over to two Jewish organizations in the United States.
Five plaintiffs representing at least 50,000 Holocaust survivors filed a lawsuit last year in federal court in New York against the two German banks, along with Bank Austria and other Austrian banks.
The lawsuit was similar to another against Swiss banks accused of hiding assets belonging to Holocaust victims that was settled for $1.25 billion last year.
With offices closed Sunday, Bank Austria officials were unavailable for comment.
Fagan also represents survivors and families of those forced to labor for the Nazis in a class-action suit against Austria's Steyr Daimler Puch and VOEST-Alpine conglomerates.
Millions of Poles, Russians and others considered inferior by the Nazis were forced to work there and in plants throughout Hitler's Reich.
Germany has paid more than $60 billion in reparations to Nazi victims, but has refused to honor wage claims by slave laborers, who were technically working for private companies.
BERLIN (AP) -- Police arrested 10 extreme rightists in Berlin on Sunday after breaking up a party commemorating the 66th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's accession to power.
Three police were injured during the raid on what police said was a ``conspiratorial music event'' attended by 300 extreme rightists in the northern district of Pankow.
Police said several of those arrested were in possession of neo-Nazi paraphernalia, which is illegal in Germany.
Hitler was appointed German Chancellor in Berlin on Jan. 30, 1933.
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Russia's secret service has given the German Red Cross files on 30,000 Germans who disappeared at the end of World War II, a newspaper said Sunday.
Up to 300,000 German civilians disappeared in central and eastern Europe as Soviet troops advanced on Berlin in the spring of 1945, Welt am Sonntag said, quoting the German Red Cross.
The men and women were arrested, many ``the victim of sheer caprice,'' and sent without trial to Soviet camps or tortured and died during interrogation, the newspaper said.
Stalin's Red Army believed many belonged to the Nazi party, while others were minor government officials, town mayors and even German communists, the report said.
After talks between Germany's former Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the mid-1990s, Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, agreed to release the data, which had been kept for 54 years on card files in the KGB's archives.
The information arrived at German Red Cross headquarters in Munich last week.
To back its report, the newspaper published details of four people, omitting their last names for privacy reasons. Two pictures from one of the files was also published.
Each listed the person's name, date of birth, reason for arrest and burial place. On the back of each was stamped SMERT -- dead -- in Russian.
The German Red Cross is working to match the names with 1.2 million missing persons in its records, the report said.
In a separate discovery, the Red Cross said it found in Russia 50,000 thick folders containing letters written home by German soldiers during World War II, the newspaper reported.
The letters, found in an Interior Ministry archive at Podolsk, outside Moscow, were taken from captured Germans or from downed transport planes, it said.
ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) -- Croatia halted an investigation Monday of a Croat woman suspected of torturing inmates in the country's most notorious World War II detention camp.
The state attorney's office said it decided to stop further criminal proceedings against Esperanza Nada Sakic, saying there wasn't enough evidence to prove she had committed the crimes.
Mrs. Sakic, 76, whose husband, Dinko Sakic, 76, is awaiting trial on war crimes charges, was extradited from Argentina in November. She was suspected of committing crimes against humanity and of breaching one section of international law -- war crimes against civilians.
A warrant issued in July accused her of ``carrying out torture, inhuman treatment of civilians, as well as terror, intimidation and collective punishment of civilians,'' during her tenure as guard in the women's block of the Jasenovac prison camp from 1942 to 1945.
Tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats were killed at Jasenovac, the most notorious of more than 20 concentration camps run by Croatia's World War II Nazi puppet state. Women were held at the Stara Gradiska camp, a part of the Jasenovac complex.
Her husband, who was indicted in mid-December, is accused of ordering, witnessing and participating in the war crimes committed in the Jasenovac camp, which he commanded between 1942 and 1944. His trial is expected in the coming weeks.
After three months and 26 witnesses, the state attorney's office reportedly could not find a single inmate who could confirm the allegations against Mrs. Sakic.
The office added that the inquiry also could not prove that Mrs. Sakic, although a member of the Ustashe -- the equivalent of German SS troopers -- held any position of authority after arriving at the camp as a 16-year-old.
According to Mrs. Sakic's lawyer, Branko Seric, the decision had been expected.
``Not a single witness, neither directly or indirectly, could (link) Nada Sakic with the crimes she was accused of,'' Seric said.
Mrs. Sakic and her husband fled Croatia in 1945, when Nazi rule was crushed. Both had lived in the Argentine resort of Santa Teresita since arriving in 1947.
In April, Dinko Sakic outraged Holocaust survivors by telling Argentine television that Jasenovac victims died of disease and natural causes.
Many critics of Croatia feared that the legal system, which is under the thumb of authoritarian President Franjo Tudjman, would be lenient toward the Sakics.
PARIS (AP) -- Only a handful of French Jews whose property was seized during World War II did not receive postwar reparations from the French government, officials said Monday.
``One can conclude that there is a relatively limited number of Jews who didn't receive compensation,'' said Jean Matteoli, head of a government-appointed panel of experts studying the confiscation of Jewish assets during the war.
His remarks on Europe-1 radio came a day before the panel was scheduled to give the second part of its study to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.
Apart from the remaining compensation for stolen properties, the panel will also recommend paying reparations for the first time to Jewish children orphaned by the Holocaust, said Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, a panel member.
``The panel will announce important, generous measures on behalf of the real victims -- the 10,000 Jewish children orphaned during the war,'' he said in a telephone interview.
Confiscation of Jewish assets -- real estate, stock, bank accounts and insurance policies -- came under the anti-Jewish laws passed by the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.
About 75,000 Jews, including 12,000 children, were deported from France to Nazi death camps. Only about 2,500 survived.
The panel was established two years ago to demonstrate France's eagerness to face up to its wartime persecution of Jews.
``The deportation of Jews was the handiwork of the Nazis, but the plundering, unfortunately, was the handiwork of the French,'' Matteoli said.
Matteoli, a former Resistance activist and concentration camp survivor, said the commission has received about 300 requests for damages.
Most of the confiscated assets went into the coffers of the French national deposit bank and remain there today, Matteoli said.
He said the bank has cooperated fully with the investigation.
About 2,000 art works thought to have been confiscated from Jews also remain in the hands of national museum authorities.
LOS ANGELES--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--Feb. 1, 1999--Sunday night, Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation commemorated the recording of its 50,000th testimony with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust.
At a ceremony attended by more than 400 people involved with the project, both at its Los Angeles headquarters and abroad, Shoah Foundation founder and chairman Steven Spielberg thanked everyone and announced the future direction of the organization.
Spielberg told the group, ``No one could have imagined the breadth of the undertaking we embarked on four years ago. Your commitment and hard work have made possible a remarkable achievement.
Now, while interviews still will be conducted on a limited basis, the Foundation's focus will turn to the task of making the testimonies available for educational purposes. These testimonies, folded into a comprehensive computer archive, will be a resource for teaching racial, ethnic, religious and cultural tolerance.
Interviews will be catalogued using keywords, names and other criteria, enabling individuals and institutions to access the archive. The complex process includes the pioneering work of an indexing technology for oral history testimonies, developed by the Shoah Foundation.
Eventually the archive will be linked via secure computer lines to museums and other educational institutions throughout the world. Currently the archive is accessible to the staff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and plans are underway to make the material available to the general public at the Center by the end of 1999.
``Our hope is to create a resource so enduring that, ten, or fifty, or even one hundred years from now, people all around the world will learn directly from survivors about the atrocities of the Holocaust, what it means to survive, and how our very humanity depends upon the practice of tolerance and mutual respect,'' said Spielberg.
The Foundation's first educational CD-ROM, ``Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust,'' is being released to U.S. schools this semester, and their third documentary, ``The Last Days,'' is set for domestic theatrical release in February.
After filming ``Schindler's List,'' Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to develop archives and teaching materials based upon the videotaped testimonies by survivors of and witnesses to the Holocaust in order to preserve the memory and establish the basis for tolerance education around the world for generations to come.
To date, the Shoah Foundation has collected testimonies in 57 countries, with interviews conducted in 31 languages.
Individuals interested in supporting the efforts of the Shoah Foundation are encouraged to call 800/661-2092 or write to P.O. Box 3168, Los Angeles, Calif., 90078-3168. The Foundation's home page is www.vhf.org.
PARIS (AP) -- Five U.S. banks operating in France during World War II handed over Jewish accounts to the Nazi occupiers, according to a report released Tuesday on the looting of Jewish assets.
In the report presented to France's Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, a government-appointed panel of experts fingered the French branches of Chase -- now Chase Manhattan Bank -- J.P. Morgan, Guaranty Trust Co. of New York, Bank of the City of New York and American Express for turning over about 100 accounts belonging to Jews.
``The U.S. banks enjoyed a certain amount of freedom and protection until Pearl Harbor,'' said historian Claire Andrieu, a panel member. She said they could have behaved differently from French banks obeying the pro-Nazi French Vichy regime, but didn't.
Other foreign banks cited in the report include two British banks, Barclay's and Westminster Foreign Bank Ltd, and the Royal Bank of Canada.
There were no details on how much money was in the accounts.
The French national deposit bank, which amassed millions of dollars in seized property during the war, said at Tuesday's news conference that since the war, it already had returned about two-thirds of those assets to rightful owners or their heirs.
Its representative, Pierre Saragoussi, said about 9.5 million francs -- worth about $3.5 million today -- that were stripped from Jews at the Drancy transit camp remain in state coffers.
Upon arrival at Drancy -- the last stop before Auschwitz -- Jews had to give up all their possessions: jewelry, pens, cash, stock certificates and insurance policies.
What happened to furniture and other household items has yet to be determined, but the panel documented about 40,000 trainloads of goods confiscated from Jews and shipped to Germany to rebuild bombed German cities.
Some items were returned to France, including 2,000 pianos that officials displayed following the Liberation.
The panel of experts, called the Matteoli commission, was established by the government two years ago and is headed by former French Resistance activist Jean Matteoli.
In Tuesday's report -- an interim report before a final version expected at the end of 1999 -- the panel recommended awarding a lifelong pension to the 10,000 Jewish children orphaned during the war.
If approved, the compensation would mark the first monetary awards to French-born children of foreign Jews who suffered persecution and deportation. Under postwar French law, they received no compensation because their parents weren't French.
No details were available on the amount of the stipend or when it might be awarded.
A survivors' group, the Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France, praised the recommendation. ``Our childhood was ruined; let our old age be made peaceful,'' the group said.
The report also said the panel had drawn up an exhaustive list of Jews who passed through Drancy and what was taken from them. The list will not be published, but will be made accessible to anyone proving family ties to a victim.
The commission also recommended that Nazi-looted art works and antiques recovered in Germany after the war and currently decorating French official residences around the world be brought back to Paris and put on display.
HAMBURG, Germany (AP) -- Prince Ernst August of Hanover, recently married to Princess Caroline of Monaco, will take ``all appropriate legal action'' against Germany's Bild newspaper over allegations his family had links to the Nazi regime, his office said.
In a report Monday, Bild alleged that the prince's grandfather, Duke Ernst August of Braunschweig and Lueneburg, may have profited from the forced sale of a Jewish-owned bank in Munich to non-Jews and the expropriation of a Viennese building company in 1938.
In addition, the prince's father and three younger brothers were expelled from the Wehrmacht, Hitler's army, during World War II, the statement said. His father was imprisoned by the Gestapo in Berlin in November 1944.
A call to his office Tuesday seeking more details was not immediately returned.
Bild Editor in Chief Udo Roebel noted the prince's statement did not directly address the charges in the article, and said the newspaper was not worried about a possible lawsuit.
It was one of several controversies surrounding the prince. Earlier, Bild reported he had requested the return of property from the former East German state of Saxony-Anhalt, including a castle, hundreds of paintings and antiques once owned by his family.
Social Democrat Gunter Weissgerber, a member of Germany's lower house of parliament from the state, was quoted as saying the prince should consider if his request would help the process of inter-German reconciliation.
In December, a court ordered the prince to pay $9,000 to a photographer he hit with an umbrella for trying to snap pictures of him with Princess Caroline.
VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) -- The head of a Lithuanian medical panel on Tuesday rejected a U.S. government Nazi-hunter's contention that a 91-year-old defendant was faking illness to avoid trial on Nazi war crimes charges.
The court-appointed panel last week said that Aleksandras Lileikis, 91, suffers such severe cardiovascular disease that he could not withstand the rigors of a trial.
The medical panel was appointed in January after Lileikis' trial was delayed for a third time for medical reasons. The panel's head, Antanas Garmus, said all eight of its doctors agreed Lileikis was suffering serious diseases.
``It is not exactly realistic that we would fabricate something,'' Garmus told the Baltic News Service on Tuesday.
Lithuanian officials have said they are determined to prosecute Nazi-era war criminals, but there is wide suspicion that the country wants to find excuses to avoid reopening a painful chapter of history. About 90 percent of Lithuania's pre-war Jewish population of 240,000 died during the 1941-44 Nazi occupation.
Another court medical panel has said Kazys Gimzauskas, who also is charged with genocide, is too sick to be tried.
Lileikis was head of security police in Vilnius during the Nazi occupation and Gimzauskas was his deputy. Both are charged with turning over scores of Jews to a Nazi execution squad.
Both emigrated to the United States after the war, but returned to Lithuania as U.S. officials moved to revoke their citizenship for lying about their past. U.S. officials said there was a shockingly complete paper trail linking Lileikis to executions.
The medical panels' assessments are not binding on whether to proceed with the trials.


The Black Crows Daemon Birdie is an all-mountain model with full reverse camber. It's designed for pivoting and carving, however, testers felt that the ski was too light and lacking in edge grip to accurately carve turns. The Daemon Birdie rewards a neutral to less aggressive stance and favors soft snow. All in all, the 99-mm-waisted reversed cambered ski disappointed aggressive skiers, but its lightweight semi-cap construction, enlarged edges and dampening Titanal plate underfoot lends itself to women looking for an easy-to-turn freeski for soft snow.
The Black Crows Daemon Birdie is an all-mountain model with full reverse camber. It's designed for pivoting and carving, yet testers felt that the ski was too light and lacking in edge grip to accurately carve turns and scored it moderate to low for Carving. Testers felt that the Daemon Birdie performs best in soft snow, attributed to a 99 mm waist width and full reverse camber (where the middle of the ski touches the snow while both ends arc up). Full reverse camber works well in soft snow as there is no effective edge to seek a hard surface, however, that also means a lack of edge on a hard surface, hence low scores for Carving Pleasure.
All in all, the Daemon Birdie disappointed aggressive skiers who tend to pressure the front of the ski in order to bend it and arc on hardpack. "I wanted more sidecut," said one tester. "It didn't perform GS turns at all and was too light to trust." Carving may not be its forte, but smearing is. The lightweight semi-cap construction, poplar woodcore, enlarged edges extending to the tip and the dampening Titanal plate underfoot lend it toward women looking for an easy-to-turn freeski for soft snow conditions.
The Daemon Birdie received low scores for Responsiveness. Some complained that the ski felt planky underfoot while other testers mentioned low reliability in the carved turn. Soft snow, however, is where the 99-mm-waisted ski performed best "was enthusiastically energized," according to one tester.
"Got camber?" asked one tester. "The contact point is miniscule and the rest of the ski is off the snow." Soft snow aside, the Daemon Birdie received moderately low scores for Stability. Some testers reacted negatively to the profile of the ski, with reverse camber, front rocker and early rise in the tail. Though Black Crows says the full reverse camber profile and Titanal adds easy handling, pivoting and carving, nearly all testers missed the edge grip that comes from camber and felt that the ski's bandwidth extended only to soft snow.
The Daemon's Resort Float scores were its highest. The nearly 100 mm waisted ski can smear and float in soft snow as well as pivot thanks to the reverse camber, front rocker and early rise tail. The light semi-cap construction aids in flotation.
The Black Crows Daemon Birdie rated low for Versatility with the testers who felt it performed best in soft snow, but not much else. These testers commented on lack of turn shape and snow condition variability. Several testers "who don't rail like others" liked the lightness of the ski and the easy "smearability" from the reverse camber.
Testers agree that the Daemon Birdie is easy to turn but not easy to carve. Edge grip was missing on this full reverse cambered ski. "The contact point is miniscule and the rest of the ski is off the snow," says one tester. Even though Black Crows says that the enlarged edges extend to the tip, testers couldn't feel the edges engage into firm snow. The ski more aptly pivots and smears, performing best in soft snow. Though testers felt a solid flex directly underfoot, they felt it was too precise to make the ski ideal for a variety of skiers. All in all, the Daemon Birdie favors turns in soft snow and not on hard snow or groomers.