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Friday March 16, 2007

Shorts: World

Hitler may lose German citizenship

Germany is considering revoking Adolf Hitler’s citizenship.

Der Spiegel reported this week that Isolde Saalmann, a Social Democratic member of the Lower Saxony regional Parliament, is seeking to rescind the Austria-born dictator’s naturalization granted by Germany in 1932. Saalmann told Der Spiegel that it would be an important “symbolic step,” especially for Lower Saxony, which continues to feel the stigma of its former identity as Braunschweig, the Nazi stronghold that helped the stateless Hitler acquire citizenship, paving the way for his presidential candidacy.

Attorneys for the Lower Saxony Parliament are researching whether the revocation would be legally viable. — jta

Churchill reportedly mixed on Jews

An unpublished article by Winston Churchill surfaced in which he partly blamed Britain’s Jews for anti-Semitism.

Cambridge University lecturer Richard Toye recently discovered the 1937 article, titled “How The Jews Can Combat Persecution,” in a campus archive dedicated to the 20th-century statesman. Churchill denounced the “wickedness” of anti-Semites but added his own criticism of what he called Jewish “aloofness.”

“Yet there are times when one feels instinctively that all this is only another manifestation of the difference, the separateness of the Jew,” Churchill wrote in the article, which did not arouse publishers’ interest until Britain’s Sunday Dispatch newspaper offered to run it in 1940. By then, Britain was at war with Germany and Churchill was on the verge of becoming prime minister. His office declined to allow the article’s publication. Toye suggested that Churchill felt the timing was wrong given the flare-up of Jewish persecution in Europe. — jta

Anne Frank’s tree to be cut down

Amsterdam’s city council gave the owner of the chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank while she was in hiding a license to cut it down. Opponents have six weeks to file an objection but that is seen as unlikely.

The large, 150-year-old tree has been attacked by a fungus and is in danger of falling down.

The tree is familiar to some 25 million readers of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” It stands in the courtyard of the “secret annex,” the canal-side warehouse where her family hid during the Nazi occupation. The Jewish teenager made several references to it in the diary she kept during the 25 months she remained indoors until the family was arrested in August 1944.

“Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs,” she wrote on Feb. 23, 1944. “From my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy.”

The Anne Frank Museum, where the tiny apartment is preserved, said grafts have been taken and a sapling from the original chestnut will eventually replace it. — ap

5 get fines for burning Frank’s diary

A court in eastern Germany last week sentenced five men to fines and nine months’ probation for burning a copy of the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank during a solstice ceremony that glorified Nazi rule.

Two defendants were acquitted, while those convicted were given fines ranging from $1,700 to $2,900 for inciting hatred.

Prosecutors said the defendants, age 24 to 29, took part in the solstice ceremony June 24 in front of some 60 people in the town of Pretzien in the Saxony-Anhalt region.

The verdict comes amid concerns among mainstream politicians and Jewish leaders that not enough is being done to combat far-right groups, including violent neo-Nazis, in eastern Germany. Far-right parties sit in three eastern state parliaments. — jps

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