Free Republic

James Hoyt delivered mail in rural Iowa for more than 30 years. Yet Hoyt had long kept a secret from most of those who knew him best: He was one of the four U.S. soldiers to first see Germany's Buchenwald concentration camp. Hoyt died Monday at his home in Oxford, Iowa, a town of about 700 people where he had lived his entire life. He was 83. His funeral was Thursday at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Oxford, with about 100 people in attendance. The Rev. Edmond Dunn officiated and recalled time he spent with Hoyt and his wife. "I...

Pinchads Zlotosvsky*, 32, didn't always live as an Orthodox Jew. In fact, quite the opposite. Zlotosvsky, who continues to live in Warsaw, Poland, with his wife and two children, was a skinhead before discovering his Jewish identity. Zlotosvsky joined up with local Polish skinheads when he was 16 years old as a political statement and adopted the racist and anti-Semitic contempt of his peers. So when he found out he came from a family of "hidden Jews"—his mother was sent to a monastery to survive the Holocaust and all of her relatives were reportedly murdered—he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz...

A judicial inquiry into the wartime activities of Jewish anti-Nazi resistance fighters in Lithuania has led to accusations that the small Baltic state is trying to distort the history of World War II. The row follows investigations by the country's prosecutor into whether the former partisans - Holocaust survivors now in their 80s - themselves committed war crimes. Israel has denounced the inquiry as scandalous and refused to allow one of the main potential witnesses to be questioned. Britain's foremost World War II historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, told the BBC he was "deeply shocked" by the investigation, which he called...

Sen. Joe Lieberman praises pastor who said Holocaust was God's work One of John McCain's most prominent supporters on Tuesday praised an evangelical leader whom the Republican presidential candidate repudiated after a string of controversial remarks were made public. Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent who frequently campaigns with McCain, said pastor John Hagee's support for Israel outweighed the remarks that led McCain to reject his endorsement. Lieberman said he had been urged not to speak to Hagee's group, Christians United for Israel. Advertisement "The bond that I feel with Pastor Hagee and each and every one of you is...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Monday that the United States could never allow Iran to inflict a "second Holocaust" on the Jewish people, in comments aired on Israeli TV on the eve of a visit to Israel by his Democratic rival Barack Obama. --snip-- Asked whether he would back Israel if it chose to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, McCain told Channel 2 TV: "But I have to look you in the eye and tell you that the United States of America can never allow a second Holocaust."

Poles who risked their lives a half century ago by taking in fugitive Jews during the Nazi Holocaust were honored in Warsaw on Sunday, in what may be one of their final gatherings. They recalled how they tucked Jews into odd hiding places when German soldiers were on the prowl, risking the death penalty for themselves and their family. "At various times we had up to nine people living in our flat. They had free run of the house, but when they heard a knock at the door, they would all run down to a special hiding place next to...

Zagreb - Dinko Sakic, a former commander of Croatia's most notorious Nazi-era concentration camp during World War II, has died at age 86, news reports said Monday. Sakic was in charge during May-October 1944 at the Jasenovac camp, where tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews and others died under the Ustasha regime, Croatia's 1941-45 Nazi puppet government. He died late Sunday at a prison hospital in Zagreb, the capital, local media reported. Sakic was extradited to Croatia from Argentina in 1998 and sentenced to 20 years in prison for war crimes, the maximum sentence under Croatian law. He was convicted...

The US Congress has passed resolutions urging Eastern European nations including Poland to make progress on legislation regarding the restitution of private property. Though the US resolutions are nonbinding, observers argue that this is a clear signal that such legislation in Poland is long overdue.

There recently was a death of a 98 year old lady named Irena. During WWII, Iliana, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive... She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews, (being German). Iliana smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack,(for larger kids). She also had a dog in the back, that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in, and out of the ghetto. The soldiers of...

Nicholson Baker and Pat Buchanan are high on the list of Osama Bin Laden's "Favorite Infidels". They have done the impossible. They have written well-selling books proclaiming that World War II should NOT have been fought. Sir Winston Churchill was the real villian of the Forties they claim. They claim that World War II marked the destruction of the West. Because Britain, France and The Netherlands were bled white by the war, they could no longer hold on to their colonies. Aw pshaw. To digress a moment, young presidential candidate Adolf Hitler perceived a problem selling Nazism to the German...

On July 3rd I went to the local Walgreen's. While standing in the shade out front I was passed by an elderly gentleman on his way inside. I thought I saw the words "Bomb Group" accross the pocket of his polo shirt. So when he came out I stopped him. The shirt said "440th Bomb Group". "World War II?" I asked. "Yes!" He smiled. I shook his hand, adding sadly "the last one we won". "The last one we tried to win." "Amen, Brother." As I watched him go out of sight my mind was on the 56,000 who never...

WASHINGTON — During World War II, more than 25,000 European Jews became citizens of El Salvador, a country most had never visited and few ever would. The country, roughly the size of Israel, would come to justify its Spanish name as "the savior" thanks to bogus certificates that made thousands of Jews citizens of El Salvador and kept them from being deported to concentration camps. The signature on nearly all the certificates was that of George Mandel-Mantello, a Romanian Jewish refugee who in the early 1940s sought help from a Salvadoran acquaintance in Switzerland. The El Salvador consul general in...

Hey, way to go, Townhall.com. Why not publish Pat Buchanan’s Holocaust revisionism? After all, he’s a real conservative, isn’t he? Retch. Townhall.com::Was the Holocaust Inevitable?::By Patrick J. Buchanan. I’ve removed Townhall.com from our list of news sources. This is appalling. UPDATE at 6/20/08 9:39:59 am: The article has been deleted, but the print version is still online.

So asks Newsweek's cover, which features a full-length photo of the prime minister his people voted the greatest Briton of them all. Quite a tribute, when one realizes Churchill's career coincides with the collapse of the British empire and the fall of his nation from world pre-eminence to third-rate power. That the Newsweek cover was sparked by my book "Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War" seems apparent, as one of the three essays, by Christopher Hitchens, was a scathing review. Though in places complimentary, Hitchens charmingly concludes: This book "stinks." Understandable. No Brit can easily concede my central thesis: The...

Petition urges Yad Vashem to add Bergson Group By ETGAR LEFKOVITS More than 100 Israeli political and cultural leaders from across the political spectrum have signed a petition to Yad Vashem urging the Holocaust museum to add material about the Holocaust rescue activists known as the Bergson Group to its exhibits. The Bergson Group was a maverick activist group in the US in the 1940s, led by Peter Bergson, also known as Hillel Kook, that raised public awareness of the Holocaust and campaigned for US rescue action to save European Jewry during World War II. At the time, mainstream American...

Today, Pope Benedict XVI is welcoming a group of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Arranged by the Pave the Way Foundation, the group will personally thank the pope for the Catholic Church’s intervention in saving their lives in Italy during World War II. Catholic League president Bill Donohue addressed this event today: “Despite attempts by embittered ex-priests and seminarians, and others, to discredit Pope Pius XII’s heroic efforts in rescuing Jews during the Holocaust (as many as 860,000 were saved), the evidence is mounting that Pius was a ‘Righteous Gentile.’ What is happening in the Vatican today is another reminder of just...

Henryk Mandelbaum, a member of the Sonderkommando -- Jewish prisoners who were forced to empty the gas chambers at Auschwitz after fellow Jews were gassed and burned -- died Tuesday. He was 85. Mandelbaum died at a hospital in the southern Polish city of Bytom several days after undergoing heart surgery, said Igor Bartosik, a historian at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum who has co-written an upcoming book on Mandelbaum. Bartosik said he did not know the exact cause of death, and hospital officials refused to comment. Mandelbaum was Poland's last surviving member of the Sonderkommando, in which he was forced by...

Some 10 years ago, a prominent Christian clergyman gave a sermon that was recorded for posterity. In it, Rev. John Hagee, the leader of a group called Christians United for Israel, speculated about the cause of the Holocaust. His answer was to see it as divine punishment of the Jews. The unforeseen consequences of his comments were considerable. The man who will be the Republican nominee for president this year, Sen. John McCain, formally rejected Hagee's endorsement following the re-emergence of Hagee's statement. Some Jewish leaders, notably the Reform movement's Rabbi Eric Yoffie, joined in the condemnation. Yoffie wrote that...

Glenn Beck explains. Click HERE for the video.

IN THERESIENSTADT, a Nazi ghetto and labor camp near Prague from which tens of thousands of Jews were deported to their deaths during World War II, a tiny storeroom, unbeknownst to the Gestapo, was transformed into a synagogue. There Jewish inmates would gather in secret, a few at a time, to pour out their hearts in prayer - an act as stirring for its courage as for its demonstration of faith. more stories like this What was in their thoughts as they prayed we can only speculate. But they left some clues. On the walls of the clandestine chapel, elegantly...

Germany's foreign minister pledged on Thursday to stand up for the security of Israel and urged a tough line against Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling his denial of the Holocaust "unbearable." Frank-Walter Steinmeier, speaking at a parliamentary debate marking the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel, said Germany's responsibility toward Israel due to its role in the Nazi Holocaust meant it had to "take a stand against the Iranian president's talk time and again."

Comments about God and the Holocaust made in a sermon 10 years ago by a leading evangelical pastor, John Hagee, have received a great deal of attention. They have led to Sen. John McCain severing ties with the pastor, whose support the presumptive Republican presidential nominee had originally solicited.

This is sickening. Barack Obama, on the campaign trail, said his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz. He then said “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain,” Obama said. “That’s why this idea of making sure that every single veteran, when they are discharged, are screened for post-traumatic stress disorder and given the mental health services that they need – that’s why it’s so important.” Look, we all know Obama has a problem with Jewish voters and veterans, but trying to...

Barack Obama’s campaign scrambled Tuesday to set the record straight about remarks the Democratic presidential candidate made on Memorial Day where he said his uncle helped liberate the Auschwitz death camp at the end of World War II. There were two obvious problems with the tale: Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Army, and Obama’s American mother was an only child. As the Republican National Committee seized on the discrepancies, Obama’s campaign clarified that the Illinois senator was actually referring to his “great uncle,” and that he had confused Auschwitz with another concentration camp. The campaign said he meant to...

Hans-Joachim Sewering: Accused of mass-murder A former SS doctor accused of sending 900 sick children to their deaths under the Nazi euthanasia programme has been awarded a German medical association's highest honour.The decision comes as Jewish organisations continue to press Germany to put 92-year-old Hans-Joachim Sewering on trial for mass murder. He was given the Guenther-Budelmann medal by the German Federation of Internal Medicine for "unequalled services in the cause of freedom of the practice and the independence of the medical profession and to the nation's health system". Sewering was a doctor at a tuberculosis clinic near Munich before...

John Hagee, the controversial pastor who has endorsed John McCain, argued in a late 1990s sermon that God sent Hitler to help the Jews get to the promised land (Israel, not Auschwitz). Why did God allow the Holocaust to happen? According to a report in the Huffington Post by Sam Stein, Hagee's answer was: "Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel." The report raises several questions. Did God have to be so rough in his methods? Instead of putting the Jews on trains to Auschwitz,...

Lessons of the Holocaust   By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, May 19, 2008 Frontpage interview's guest today is Hilmar von Campe, a world renowned intellectual, speaker, and author. He grew up under the Nazis and was at one time a member of the Hitler Youth. A WWII veteran, he made a sensational escape from a POW camp in Communist Yugoslavia, after which he gave his life to God and dedicated himself to never again be a bystander to injustice and to make restitution for the Nazi atrocities – which would include his investigation of what made them possible. He...

The Ohio branch of the leading player in the nation's abortion industry, Planned Parenthood, is blaming the callers for a fiasco in which a local official was caught on tape agreeing to take a donation designated to eliminate blacks.WND has reported previously on the work of Lila Rose, editor of the Los Angeles-based Advocate, who has conducted several undercover investigations of Planned Parenthood.In one taped interview, an Idaho official for Planned Parenthood said it was "understandable" that a donor would want to contribute to abortions targeting blacks so that his own, presumably white, child would have less competition in...

Poland paused this week to pay tribute to Irena Sendler -- a Catholic social worker who risked her life during World War II to smuggle 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto, saving them from the ravages of the Holocaust. Sendler died Monday at 98, and after a large crowd flocked to her funeral at a Warsaw church yesterday, Poland's Orthodox chief rabbi offered prayers at her graveside. Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said: "Irena Sendler's courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate...

WARSAW, Poland - Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who helped save some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto and giving them false identities, has died. She was 98.

It was more an embarrassment than a ship. Nearly 20 years old, its single tall funnel poked out above dilapidated decks and scarred paintwork. It was heading for the breaker’s yard until the Haganah, the Jewish underground, bought it. Now, loaded with more than 4,500 Jewish refugees, many of them Holocaust survivors, it was approaching the Palestinian port of Haifa and its moment of destiny. Its commander that July day in 1947 was Yossi Harel, who has died at 90. The ship was the USS President Warfield but Harel had renamed it Exodus 1947. Nearing Haifa it was pursued by...

A Dutch-Canadian Holocaust survivor explains what Israel means to him This week marks Israel's 60th birthday. It also happens to mark the 63rd anniversary of the liberation of Holland -- and my personal liberation after nearly three years in hiding with my Dutch saviours, Albert and Violette Munnik and their daughter, Nora. As I reflect on my life as a Jew, these historical events are linked in a powerful way. The 1945 liberation was not so liberating for many Jewish children: The majority of Holland's successfully hidden boys and girls were orphaned. But in my case, my parents miraculously returned...

May 2. Holocaust Remembrance Day. A perfect time to remember something that didn't happen. No, not the Holocaust. Despite what Holocaust-deniers say, the Holocaust certainly took place, ultimately taking 6 million innocent lives. Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem-based Holocaust History Museum, includes memorials to many of the victims, and its online Web site now includes specific information on 3 million individuals who died in the camps. Still no record there of my uncle Morris and his family: We still don't know what happened to them. My father and grandmother could easily have been victims - but they left Austria just in...

New York, NY, April 29, 2008 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement regarding the controversial film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness. Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors...

Some Palestinians in West Bank town say Jews fabricated Holocaust, while others say 'we are also murdered and burned; we have our own independent Shoah'

EMMETT - When Dachau liberator Max Fullmer is honored at today's Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony in Boise, Lorissa Wilfong Holt - one of the people he helped liberate - will be in the audience. The odds of that happening are almost nil. Rabbi Dan Fink of Boise's Congregation Ahavath Beth Israel estimates the number of Holocaust survivors in Idaho to be fewer than 10. "Between the relatively small Jewish population of the state and the reality that many or most of the survivors have died of natural causes, it's a small group," Fink said. Fullmer, now of Caldwell, was among...

France led a walkout at the United Nations last week after Libya’s Deputy Ambassador compared the Israeli military’s treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza to the way the Nazis sent Jews to concentration camps. French Ambassador Jean Maurice Ripert was followed by Americian, British, Belgian and Costa Rican diplomats after Ibrahim Dabbashi made the comments during a private meeting on the situation in the Middle East. The meeting was postponed following the walkout. Britain's deputy ambassador, Karen Pierce, said: “A number of council members were dismayed by the approach taken by Libya and do not believe that such language helps...

Jewish leaders planned the Holocaust to kill "disabled and handicapped" Jews to avoid having to care for them, according to a Hamas TV educational program. As much of the world prepared to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Hamas TV presented its latest sinister twist on Holocaust denial. The Hamas TV educational program, broadcast last week, taught that the murder of Jews in the Holocaust was a Zionist plot with two goals: 1- To eliminate "disabled and handicapped" Jews by sending them to death camps, so they would not be a burden on the future state of Israel. 2- At...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - Budapest, November 1944: Another German train has loaded its cargo of Jews bound for Auschwitz. A young Swedish diplomat pushes past the SS guard and scrambles onto the roof of the cattle car. Ignoring shots fired over his head, he reaches through the open door to outstretched hands, passing out dozens of bogus "passports" that extended Sweden's protection to the bearers. He orders everyone with a document off the train and into his caravan of vehicles. The guards look on dumfounded. Raoul Wallenberg was a minor official of a neutral country, with an unimposing appearance and a...

Le Pen: Auschwitz didn't have gas chambers Extreme right-wing leader repeats claim that no Jews were gassed or burned at Nazi death camps, says Auschwitz inmates worked as laborers for factory Far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen sparked a chorus of outrage in France on Friday by repeating an incendiary claim that the Nazi gas chambers were a "detail of history." Anti-racism and Jewish groups threatened immediate legal action against the National Front chief - who already holds several similar convictions - after he made the comments in a magazine interview. "I said the gas chambers were a detail of...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- An author writing a new biography on Pope Benedict XVI says genocide during the Nazi regime in World War II played a key role in shaping the pro-life views of the Catholic leader. Author Brennan Pursell relates the story in his upcoming book Benedict of Bavaria. Pursell learned of the tragic story while compiling material for the book. He found out that, as a 14-year-old boy, Joseph Ratzinger had a cousin born with Down Syndrome who was just a couple years younger. In 1941, German "therapists" arrived at the boy's home and took him away --...

Obama Blogger: U.S. and Terrorists are Morally Equivalent Adds blood libel of Israel, hopes the world will forget the Nazi Holocaust. (Why not just deny that there ever was a Holocaust? That would work a lot faster!) This was posted to my.barackobama.com, which is under Mr. Obama’s editorial control. Note that: (1) The page has a link to click for reporting objectionable material. Either no one found it objectionable, or Obama’s moderators found it perfectly acceptable. (We expect, though, that it will disappear after it becomes an Internet-wide scandal, same as for the National Black Panther Party page that had...

Last week, Russia's lower house of parliament passed a resolu tion insisting that Josef Stalin's man-made 1932-33 famine... wasn't genocide. Not even the Russians dispute that the Soviet government deliberately starved millions. But the Russian resolution indignantly states: "There is no historical proof that the famine was organized along ethnic lines." It notes that victims included "different peoples and nationalities living largely in agricultural areas of the country." Translation: We didn't kill millions of farmers because they were Ukrainians; we killed millions of Ukrainians because they were farmers. And that's all it takes to be acquitted of genocide. The United...

Thirty Iranian expatriates living in Berlin will visit Auschwitz in April. The ex-pats want to show Iran's president, who has denied the scope of the Holocaust, that they have no doubt about the facts of the Holocaust, "the most massive, industrialized extermination in the 20th century," a statement by organizers said. The trip, from April 11 to 14, is sponsored by the Iranian Dialog Circle of Berlin and the Berlin educational branch of the Heinrich-Böll Foundation, which is associated with Germany's Green Party. The group also will meet with the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor in Krakow and with the...

A new exhibit in Gaza portrays the Jewish state burning Palestinian children in ovens. A group called the National Committee for Defense of Children from the Holocaust unveiled its premier exhibit last week, entitled "Gaza: An exhibit describing the suffering of the children of the Holocaust." Rather than teach about the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, the exhibit portrays Israel as the perpetrators of the holocaust; Palestinian children are "burned" in a model crematorium by "Israelis." According to the Ramallah-based Al-Ayyam daily, "The exhibit includes a large oven and inside it small children are being burned. The picture speaks for...

In its most recent efforts to inculcate anti-Semitism into its youth, Palestinian media has turned to a new variety of Holocaust imagery. In Gaza, on March 20, 2008, the National Committee for Defense of Children from the Holocaust - a new group, according to the Palestinian Media Watch - unveiled its premier exhibit, entitled "Gaza: An exhibit describing the suffering of the children of the Holocaust." Rather than teach about the Nazi genocide of European Jewry, the exhibit portrays Israel as the perpetrators of the Holocaust; Palestinian children are "burned" in a model crematorium by "Israelis." According to the Palestinian...

From doctors to opera singers, teachers to truant schoolchildren, the extermination of European Jews was the work of roughly 200,000 ordinary Germans and their helpers. Years of research -- not yet complete -- reveal how sane members of a modern society committed murder for an evil regime. Walter Mattner, a police secretary from Vienna, was there in October 1941 when 2,273 Jews were shot to death in Mogilyov in Belarus. He later wrote to his wife: "My hand was shaking a bit with the first cars. By the tenth car, I was aiming calmly and shooting dependably at the many...

It is one of the enduring mysteries of the second world war. More than 800 Jews based in this hospital in the middle of Nazi Berlin survived the war, seemingly — and bizarrely — protected by Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution. So who were they and why were they saved? Russian soldiers fighting their way through the rubble of Berlin in the last days of the war turned the corner of Iranische Strasse, in the district of Wedding, and came across an elegant building almost intact. Fanning out to search the structure, the Russians ransacked the place,...

More than once during these talks I referred to Luther and what always occurred to me as his destructive influence. I pointed out that even in such an admirable book as Rohan Butler's “The Roots of National Socialism” the spiritual origins of Nazism and Luther's influence had not been given the necessary importance. Then I was asked if I would be prepared to elaborate to them—about a dozen of the very senior boys, that is—my own views on Luther and Lutheranism. I agreed—with the proviso that they would be my own views and nothing else. Admittedly, I had read more...

Przemysl, Poland, 1944: Two SS men knock at the door of Stefania Podgorska, a Catholic seamstress. Her cottage is wanted for personnel of the field hospital across the street; she and her younger sister, Helena, have two hours to move out, on pain of death. The challenge of finding a new place to live is a bit stiffer than the SS men can imagine: Stefania, seventeen, is sheltering thirteen Jews in her little house. She spends nearly two hours running from house to ruined house. After occupation by the Germans, the Soviets and the Germans again, there is nothing left...