Personal effects of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat credited with saving tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. The Russians gave the wooden box to his sister Nina Lagergren in 1989 containing Wallenberg's diplomatic passport, telephone diaries, money and other documents. Lagergren has been campaigning to learn the fate of Wallenberg, who was arrested by the Soviets in Jan. 1945, six months after he arrived in Budapest to begin his rescue mission.
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany opened the world's largest collection of documents on Nazi crimes and their victims to the public on Wednesday. The International Tracing Service (ITS) in the western town of Bad Arolsen contains about 50 million records on some 17 million victims of Hitler's Nazi regime.
The paperwork, which includes imprisonment orders, death registers and Gestapo notes, reveals details about people who were murdered in the Holocaust, concentration camp survivors and millions of forced laborers and displaced people. It contains the names of people on "Schindler's List" -- hundreds of Jews saved by businessman Oskar Schindler. Until Wednesday, the centre allowed only Nazi victims and their relations access. ITS director Reto Meister said the opening marked the start of a new chapter for the archives more than 60 years after the end of World War Two. "The opening will contribute to keep alive the memory of the monstrous crimes of the Nazi era," said Meister at the opening ceremony. The centre is part of the International Committee of the Red Cross and 11 nations are represented on the ITS board -- Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Britain and the United States.
JERUSALEM - "Any who deny the Holocaust wish to deny Israel's right to exist," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Wednesday evening during the opening ceremony for Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
"It has been 6o years since the satanic factories of death worked by the Nazis and their collaborators were silenced; over two generations have passed since the oiled wheels of the death machine ceased ending the lives of more and more Jews," Olmert continued. "However, even with the passage of time the magnitude of the Holocaust remains unfathomable to any rational person, incomprehensibly shocking and unacceptably horrifying." "Even 60 years later, who would believe that the ugly head of Jew hatred and Israel hatred is rearing all over the world; still inciting, poisoning and enticing. The voice of the deniers is not absent from among these; those who are driven insane with hatred; those who deny the greatest horror that humanity has ever known."
"To those who hate and deny and hatch evil and to any who allow them to operate in their vicinity we say on this day: Never again!" Olmert asserted. "You who deny truths documented in millions of documents; you who deny the railroad tracks leading to the crematoriums and the extermination camps that remain a mute monument; you who deny the eyewitness accounts of millions of people are not interested in historical accuracy - you wish to deny Israel's right to exist and mistakenly think that the Jewish State was established because of the Holocaust. If you will - cancel the Holocaust and the Israel's raison d'etre will also be canceled."
The prime minister praised the contribution of the survivors to the establishment of the state. "On this day of all days we extend a deep bow of indebtedness," he said. "We raise our heads with immeasurable pride over the contribution of the Holocaust survivors to the building of this country." "There is no power in the world that can contend with the spirit of this nation, which emerged from the depths of extermination to heights of the creativity, success… and strength of Israel," Olmert concluded.
President Shimon Peres, who spoke before Olmert, spoke of the challenge the Holocaust posed to his faith and said that the allied defeat of the Nazis "saved the values of the human race."
"Six million Jews were exterminated by the machine of the devil only because they were Jews," Peres said. "The victory over Nazi Germany saved the values of the human race and saved the European continent from sinking into an era of darkness and destruction,"
The president criticized nations that did nothing to save Jews during the Holocaust. The central theme of this year's ceremony is Holocaust Survivors in Israel. On Thursday, a two-minute siren will sound at 10 a.m., at the start of a day of ceremonies throughout the nation. An official state wreath-laying ceremony will take place just after the siren is sounded, at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial at Yad Vashem, in the presence of the prime minister and other VIPs. The "Unto Every Person There is a Name" ceremony will follow - in which Holocaust victims' names are read out - at both the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and at the Knesset. Approximately 250,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel.
JERUSALEM - "My heart shudders when I recall that there was a possibility that Hitler could acquire nuclear weapons," Peres said. "A leader who plans mass destruction, together with weapons of mass destruction. What would have been left of our world?" Peres spokeswoman Ayelet Frisch said he meant his comments to be taken as a comparison of the damage done by Hitler and Nazi Germany to the threat posed by Ahmadinejad and the Islamic regime in Iran.
"We will act on our responsibilities. The world must act on its responsibilities without delay," Peres said, in what aides said was another reference to Iran. His warning came during a ceremony at Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial and research center in Jerusalem, on the annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.
Hundreds of Holocaust survivors and other Israelis filled the main plaza on a cool evening to listen to speeches, prayers and music, including a children's harmonica band founded by Shmuel Gogol, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. After a memorial air raid siren early Thursday, further ceremonies were to include the public reading of names of Holocaust victims at sites around the country, including the parliament. Speakers at Wednesday's ceremony repeatedly referred to Israel's military strength, asserting that it could prevent another mass catastrophe from befalling the Jewish people.
Peres, 84, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and serves now as Israel's ceremonial head of state, observed that the Jewish people were too late in setting up their state to rescue the Jews of Europe from the Holocaust. Saying the world woke up too late to eliminate the threat of Hitler before he started a war that killed 60 million people, Peres said the world must not let that happen again. "In history, it is forbidden to be late," he said. He criticized the German people of the 1930s for electing and venerating a "crazy person," Hitler. "How is it possible that a people does not rise up in the face of murder in the streets, an army rolling on tank treads to destroy neighbors of yesterday and friends of the day before?" About 270,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, of whom about 80,000 survived Nazi death camps, said Zeev Factor, chairman of a commission working on benefits for them. Many survivors live in poverty, and Factor said that despite Israeli government promises to increase their support payments, "nothing has been implemented yet."
In his speech at Yad Vashem, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert conceded that the country has "not always paid our debt to the survivors." The body that deals with German reparations and restitution, known as the Claims Conference, said it distributed or allocated $737 million to survivors in 2007. Some survivors charge that the body spends too much on education and research projects and not enough to help destitute survivors.
Sources: AP MARK LAVIE, AP Photo/Arthur Max, J-Post Etgar Lefkovits, Reuters: Madeline Chambers; Editing by Robert Woodward,
The paperwork, which includes imprisonment orders, death registers and Gestapo notes, reveals details about people who were murdered in the Holocaust, concentration camp survivors and millions of forced laborers and displaced people. It contains the names of people on "Schindler's List" -- hundreds of Jews saved by businessman Oskar Schindler. Until Wednesday, the centre allowed only Nazi victims and their relations access. ITS director Reto Meister said the opening marked the start of a new chapter for the archives more than 60 years after the end of World War Two. "The opening will contribute to keep alive the memory of the monstrous crimes of the Nazi era," said Meister at the opening ceremony. The centre is part of the International Committee of the Red Cross and 11 nations are represented on the ITS board -- Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Britain and the United States.
JERUSALEM - "Any who deny the Holocaust wish to deny Israel's right to exist," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Wednesday evening during the opening ceremony for Holocaust Remembrance Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
"It has been 6o years since the satanic factories of death worked by the Nazis and their collaborators were silenced; over two generations have passed since the oiled wheels of the death machine ceased ending the lives of more and more Jews," Olmert continued. "However, even with the passage of time the magnitude of the Holocaust remains unfathomable to any rational person, incomprehensibly shocking and unacceptably horrifying." "Even 60 years later, who would believe that the ugly head of Jew hatred and Israel hatred is rearing all over the world; still inciting, poisoning and enticing. The voice of the deniers is not absent from among these; those who are driven insane with hatred; those who deny the greatest horror that humanity has ever known."
"To those who hate and deny and hatch evil and to any who allow them to operate in their vicinity we say on this day: Never again!" Olmert asserted. "You who deny truths documented in millions of documents; you who deny the railroad tracks leading to the crematoriums and the extermination camps that remain a mute monument; you who deny the eyewitness accounts of millions of people are not interested in historical accuracy - you wish to deny Israel's right to exist and mistakenly think that the Jewish State was established because of the Holocaust. If you will - cancel the Holocaust and the Israel's raison d'etre will also be canceled."
The prime minister praised the contribution of the survivors to the establishment of the state. "On this day of all days we extend a deep bow of indebtedness," he said. "We raise our heads with immeasurable pride over the contribution of the Holocaust survivors to the building of this country." "There is no power in the world that can contend with the spirit of this nation, which emerged from the depths of extermination to heights of the creativity, success… and strength of Israel," Olmert concluded.
President Shimon Peres, who spoke before Olmert, spoke of the challenge the Holocaust posed to his faith and said that the allied defeat of the Nazis "saved the values of the human race."
"Six million Jews were exterminated by the machine of the devil only because they were Jews," Peres said. "The victory over Nazi Germany saved the values of the human race and saved the European continent from sinking into an era of darkness and destruction,"
The president criticized nations that did nothing to save Jews during the Holocaust. The central theme of this year's ceremony is Holocaust Survivors in Israel. On Thursday, a two-minute siren will sound at 10 a.m., at the start of a day of ceremonies throughout the nation. An official state wreath-laying ceremony will take place just after the siren is sounded, at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Memorial at Yad Vashem, in the presence of the prime minister and other VIPs. The "Unto Every Person There is a Name" ceremony will follow - in which Holocaust victims' names are read out - at both the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and at the Knesset. Approximately 250,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel.
JERUSALEM - "My heart shudders when I recall that there was a possibility that Hitler could acquire nuclear weapons," Peres said. "A leader who plans mass destruction, together with weapons of mass destruction. What would have been left of our world?" Peres spokeswoman Ayelet Frisch said he meant his comments to be taken as a comparison of the damage done by Hitler and Nazi Germany to the threat posed by Ahmadinejad and the Islamic regime in Iran.
"We will act on our responsibilities. The world must act on its responsibilities without delay," Peres said, in what aides said was another reference to Iran. His warning came during a ceremony at Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial and research center in Jerusalem, on the annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.
Hundreds of Holocaust survivors and other Israelis filled the main plaza on a cool evening to listen to speeches, prayers and music, including a children's harmonica band founded by Shmuel Gogol, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. After a memorial air raid siren early Thursday, further ceremonies were to include the public reading of names of Holocaust victims at sites around the country, including the parliament. Speakers at Wednesday's ceremony repeatedly referred to Israel's military strength, asserting that it could prevent another mass catastrophe from befalling the Jewish people.
Peres, 84, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and serves now as Israel's ceremonial head of state, observed that the Jewish people were too late in setting up their state to rescue the Jews of Europe from the Holocaust. Saying the world woke up too late to eliminate the threat of Hitler before he started a war that killed 60 million people, Peres said the world must not let that happen again. "In history, it is forbidden to be late," he said. He criticized the German people of the 1930s for electing and venerating a "crazy person," Hitler. "How is it possible that a people does not rise up in the face of murder in the streets, an army rolling on tank treads to destroy neighbors of yesterday and friends of the day before?" About 270,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, of whom about 80,000 survived Nazi death camps, said Zeev Factor, chairman of a commission working on benefits for them. Many survivors live in poverty, and Factor said that despite Israeli government promises to increase their support payments, "nothing has been implemented yet."
In his speech at Yad Vashem, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert conceded that the country has "not always paid our debt to the survivors." The body that deals with German reparations and restitution, known as the Claims Conference, said it distributed or allocated $737 million to survivors in 2007. Some survivors charge that the body spends too much on education and research projects and not enough to help destitute survivors.
Sources: AP MARK LAVIE, AP Photo/Arthur Max, J-Post Etgar Lefkovits, Reuters: Madeline Chambers; Editing by Robert Woodward,
Well..Mr President Peres without going into any "deep analyzes"..we do believe that because this was a time in the 30´s depression when Hitler and his allies came to power and made conditions better for the Germans with creating work with constructions, railroads and industry and the people saw a lot happening that made life better for them. Ordinary people was not familiar with his political plans or plans to go to war until everything happened very fast and they stood in middle of it..And by that time there was a enormous propaganda machinery and a military machinery established. We do think it would have been very difficult or a direct threat to their lives to oppose anything..
This whole machinery was as much a dictatorship management with the same indoctrination as we see in the "Global-Suicide-killing-everyone-but-themselves, which the Iranian regime doing both with their own people with threats like criminals and to people around the region with different methods. Yeah..It´s a threat with psychopaths sacrificing other people to stand against stability and peace to be able to sacrifice more people for nothing else than their own political agendas! And breaking international laws, human rights laws makes it not even a war-fare, but simple murder and mass murder! When we look at the Iranian regime how they have ruled their country..We find it very hard to believe they would actually know how to rule without criminal methods..They took all from Cyrus the Great and did just the opposite way..And we suspect Hamas have a problem with it also..What the heck..they have firing rockets for 20-? years..We mean..We are convinced of that some of their women would do a far much better work on the international political arena. They should introduce some women and save their "butts"..
This whole machinery was as much a dictatorship management with the same indoctrination as we see in the "Global-Suicide-killing-everyone-but-themselves, which the Iranian regime doing both with their own people with threats like criminals and to people around the region with different methods. Yeah..It´s a threat with psychopaths sacrificing other people to stand against stability and peace to be able to sacrifice more people for nothing else than their own political agendas! And breaking international laws, human rights laws makes it not even a war-fare, but simple murder and mass murder! When we look at the Iranian regime how they have ruled their country..We find it very hard to believe they would actually know how to rule without criminal methods..They took all from Cyrus the Great and did just the opposite way..And we suspect Hamas have a problem with it also..What the heck..they have firing rockets for 20-? years..We mean..We are convinced of that some of their women would do a far much better work on the international political arena. They should introduce some women and save their "butts"..
