A federal appellate court will hear arguments March 3 in the case of a Sharon man stripped of his citizenship because he was a Nazi concentration camp guard.
Anton Geiser, 83, of 411 Cedar Ave., has appealed U.S. District Court Judge David S. Cercone’s Sept. 29, 2006, order that revoked Geiser’s citizenship; vacated the March 27, 1962, order of Mercer County Common Pleas Court granting him citizenship; canceled his naturalization certificate; and ordered that his naturalization certificate, passports and other citizenship papers be surrendered.
Oscar Wilde went to prison in 1895 for flaunting his homosexuality. Ezra Pound was indicted for treason in 1943 for broadcasting on behalf of the Italian fascists in the Second World War. Dylan Thomas died in 1953 after proclaiming that he had just downed 18 straight whiskeys and wondering if it were a record.
I mention them to emphasize that not all poets are whispering pixies. Some are maniacs, some are drunks and some are general hell-raisers. Which brings us to Charles Bukowski, who was probably all of the above. Although those who knew him might agree that he was a raving, brawling alcoholic, the question has arisen: Was he a Jew-hating Nazi sympathizer? I knew you'd wonder.
The speed of Germany's recuperation after World War II brought its own kind of curse. It allowed the generation of Nazis and their sympathizers to turn their back on the past; what they had done became, literally, unspeakable.
But as we all know, repressed memories don't just go away. It was left to the following generations to make sense -- or, since that was impossible, to make art -- of atrocity. Among the most eloquent of those artists is Bernhard Schlink (born 1944), whose quietly troubling 1995 novel ``The Reader'' became an international best-seller and even an Oprah's Book Club selection.
A MILLION fallen German soldiers are being reburied more than 60 years after the fall of the Third Reich. And, more controversially, the skeletal remains of thousands of Waffen SS Nazis recruited from other European countries are also being reburied.
The operation is taking place across Eastern Europe, where more than 15 million civilians were killed by the German war machine. Resentment against the reburial program is running high in many countries.
A group of German scientists, many of them former Nazi Party members, guided Huntsville, Ala. into its position as a high-tech hub.
Obviously, then, these modern-day ideas about Jewish power were imported from Europe, and Küntzel makes a bold and consequential argument: the dissemination of European models of anti-Semitism among Muslims was not haphazard, but an actual project of the Nazi Party, meant to turn Muslims against Jews and Zionism. He says that in the years before World War II, two Muslim leaders in particular willingly and knowingly carried Nazi ideology directly to the Muslim masses. They were Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, and the Egyptian proto-Islamist Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. The story of the mufti is a familiar one: he was the leader of the Arabs in Palestine, and Palestine’s leading anti-Jewish agitator. He eventually embraced the Nazis and spent most of the war in Berlin, recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the SS and agitating for the harshest possible measures against Jews. Küntzel writes that the mufti became upset with Himmler in 1943, when he sought to trade 5,000 Jewish children for 20,000 German prisoners. Himmler came around to the mufti’s thinking, and the children were gassed.
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