Germany Recognizes Gypsy Holocaust

Berlin, Dec 20 (Prensa Latina) The Upper House of the German Parliament (Bundesrat) Thursday agreed to demand the government build a monument to recall the extermination of the central European gypsies by the Nazi Germany.

The belated apology to the half million gypsies deported and killed in Nazi extermination camps was agreed on the occasion of the 65 anniversary of the signing of Auschwitz decree by the chief of the SS Heinrich Himmler, on December 16, 1942.

When he was leader of the Schutzstaffel, which was a major Nazi military organization exclusively under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Himmler ordered the killing of millions of people for the simple reason of being different.

It was then that 11 million people, half of them Jewish, as well as Polish, homosexuals, Jehovah witnesses and Gypsies in Germany and other occupied countries, were systematically and methodically killed.

Germany pledges racism crackdown

Sports Illustrated
SI.com
Posted: Monday December 11, 2006 11:42AM; Updated: Monday December 11, 2006 11:42AM

HEIDELBERG, Germany (AP) -- German soccer president Theo Zwanziger promised Holocaust survivors a crackdown on the surge of racism in the country's stadiums.

Zwanziger said Monday that a new task force will use the Internet to track incidents, with offending clubs facing the threat of fines, point penalties and playing in empty stadiums if they can't control their fans.

"With a new tracking system we want to know every weekend where there were problems with fans at the 80,000 matches, and which clubs have to be held responsible for the unbearable and sometimes open racism," Zwanziger said.

Zwanziger met with the Central Council of Sinti and Roma in Heidelberg -- which included Holocaust survivors -- after racist chanting was heard recently at nearby stadiums in Ulm, Kaiserslautern and Karlsruhe.

Since hosting the World Cup in June, Germany has been alarmed series of violent incidents, from the professional level down to youth and amateur matches played each weekend.

(MORE)

Largest archive of Holocaust records to open

USA TODAY
By Arthur Max, The Associated Press

BAD AROLSEN, Germany — The 21-year-old Russian sat before a clerk of the U.S. Army Judge Advocate's office, describing the furnaces at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp where he had been a prisoner until a few weeks previously.

"I saw with my own eyes how thousands of Jews were gassed daily and thrown by the hundreds into pits where Jews were burning," he said.

"I saw how little children were killed with sticks and thrown into the fire," he continued. Blood flowed in gutters, and "Jews were thrown in and died there"; more were taken off trucks and cast alive into the flames.

Today the Holocaust is known in dense and painful detail. Yet the young Russian's words leap off the faded, onionskin page with a rawness that transports the reader back to April 1945, when World War II was still raging and the world still knew little about gas chambers, genocide and the Final Solution.

The two pages of testimony, in a file randomly plucked off a shelf, are among millions of documents held by the International Tracing Service, or ITS, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

This vast archive — 16 miles of files in six nondescript buildings in a German spa town — contains the fullest records of Nazi persecutions in existence. But because of concerns about the victims' privacy, the ITS has kept the files closed to the public for half a century, doling out information in minimal amounts to survivors or their descendants on a strict need-to-know basis.

This policy, which has generated much ill-feeling among Holocaust survivors and researchers, is about to change.

(MORE)