Jewish & World News

A leading American prosecutor who works to bring Nazis war criminals to court on Thursday criticized nations for not doing all they could to aid in such cases. “Without doubt it is still possible to secure a measure of justice in the Nazi cases,” declared Eli Rosenbaum, the US Justice Department’s director of human rights enforcement, strategy and policy, at a ceremony commemorating the Holocaust. “In many countries, however, the political will to do so is not being mustered.”

Harry Grenville and his sister Hannah didn't know what had happened to their parents during World War II for nearly 70 years. That uncertainty came to an end last month following an initiative of a Polish citizen who visited the Auschwitz concentration camp museum. According to a report in London's Times newspaper, the Polish visitor photographed a vast pile of suitcases left by victims murdered in the Holocaust, each of which had a name and serial number painted in white letters on the front.

The Swiss government knew about the Nazi program to wipe out Jews in 1942 -- earlier than previously known -- documents publicized by a Swiss television station suggest. A report aired by the German-language station SRF on Sunday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, said the government was aware of German leader Adolf Hitler’s extermination plan and the existence of German concentration camps as early as 1942, the year that Germany decided on its so-called “final solution” for the Jews.

A ceremony marking the 68th year since the liberation of Auschwitz was held at the site of the former Nazi camp. The ceremony held Sunday, on International Holocaust Memorial Day, at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum was attended by ex-prisoners and liberators of Auschwitz. The honorary patron of the ceremony was Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski.

During the inauguration of a Holocaust memorial in Milan, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Benito Mussolini's fascist regime had carried out some positive policies. “The fact of the racial laws was the worst fault of a leader, Mussolini, who in many other ways did well,” Berlusconi said in informal remarks to the media at the ceremony on Sunday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The memorial dedicated at Milan’s train station is located at Track 21, from which 700 Milan Jews were deported to Nazi camps.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center ranks Germany, Italy and the U.S. as the most successful at investigating and prosecuting Nazi war crimes over the past year. In its annual report covering April 1, 2011 to March 31, 2012, released Thursday, the center said there was a fivefold increase in convictions from its previous report, from two to 10. Nine of those convictions were in Italy and one was in Germany.

A documentary that aired in New Zealand on Friday featured a first look at an investigation that tracked Nazi war criminals who fled to New Zealand after World War II and evaded prosecution. Simon Wiesenthal Center's chief Nazi hunter, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, told Ynet he became involved with the film after the director, John Keir, a non-Jewish New Zealander contacted him a few years ago. One of the Nazis interviewed in the film is Jonas Pukas, a Lithuanian residing in Auckland since 1950. During his interrogation by the New Zealand police in 1992, when he was 78, he recalled the slaughtering of Jews.

Pope Benedict, during his first visit to Rome's synagouge, on Sunday defended the actions of the Vatican to help Jews during World War Two, saying it "acted in a discreet and hidden way". The pope spoke after a Jewish leader told the pontiff bluntly that his wartime predecessor Pius XII was "silent" and should have spoken out more forcefully against the Holocaust. "The silence of Pius XII before the Shoah still hurts because something should have been done," Riccardo Pacifici, president of Rome's Jewish community told the pope, using the Hebrew word for the Holocaust. "Maybe it would not have stopped the death trains, but it would have sent a signal, a word of extreme comfort, of human solidarity, towards those brothers of ours transported to the ovens of Auschwitz," he said. In his speech in the synagogue, Pope Benedict balked at the accusation, saying: "The Apostolic See itself provided assistance, often in a hid...