Nazi war criminal held in Canadian jail

A cowardly convicted Nazi war criminal living in Canada was in jail this weekend after an appeals court upheld an extradition order from Italy, where he was convicted in absentia.

Michael Seifert, the so-called "Beast of Balzano," was sentenced to life after being found guilty in 2000 of nine counts of murder, committed during his term as an SS guard at the Bolzano prison transit camp in northern Italy.

The Italian government alleged the 83-year-old Seifert beat, tortured, starved and murdered inmates. People testified that Seifert starved a 15-year-old prisoner to death, gouged out a person's eyes, beat prisoners before shooting them and tortured a woman before killing her and her daughter.

While admitting he was a guard at the camp, Seifert has denied being involved in atrocities.

The Canadian court said the crimes were of the worst order, but Seifert's lawyer, Doug Christie said he was appalled by the decision.

Christie said he would appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of Canada.

"The government of Canada has promised in the past to try any war crimes in Canada," Christie said.

The Canadian court ordered that Seifert be surrendered to Italian officials on seven of the nine counts.

There is a complete CBC file on Seifert here and here.

Net closing in on top Nazi criminal Aribert Heim

Investigators are closing in on one of the last living top Nazi war criminals, Germany's Der Spiegel magazine reported on Saturday. Spiegel magazine said investigators were focusing on Spain and Austria in their hunt for 93-year-old Aribert Heim, known as "Dr Death" at the Mauthausen concentration camp. Germany has for decades been searching for Heim, an SS doctoraccused of having killed hundreds of concentration camp inmateswith heart injections.Earlier this month, Austria said it was offering a 50,000 euro(e68,260) reward for information leading to the arrest of Heimand Alois Brunner, an aide to Adolf Eichmann who helped organisethe deportation of Jews to death camps. The 93-year-old is presumed to be living in Spain or LatinAmerica, according to the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Even at the age of 93, the nazi bastard is too cowardly to show his face. Why he got to live to age 93, while millions of Jewish children under the age of 6 were slaughtered by German nazi rubbish, is one question I will have to ask HaShem when I get to heaven, please G-d.

Today in Jewish History - Tammuz 5

Sponsored by Aish.com:

In 1946, Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, with no other place to go, returned to their hometown of Kielce, Poland -- and were attacked by the townspeople in a bloody pogrom that left 42 Jews dead and 80 wounded. The pogrom began when rumors spread that Jews had kidnapped a Polish child. Polish policemen and soldiers entered the Jewish residences and began the violence; the Jews were then attacked outside by mobs in a fray that lasted five hours. Some 3 million Polish Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust, yet this pogrom -- occurring 15 months after the end of World War II -- was a horrific aftershock.

Kurt Waldheim dies at 88; ex-UN chief hid Nazi past

Kurt Waldheim, the former UN secretary general and president of Austria whose hidden complicity in Nazi war crimes was exposed late in his career, died Thursday in Vienna, Austrian media reported. He was 88. He died of heart failure, the state broadcaster ORF reported.

Although it was never proved that Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II, he was a lieutenant in army intelligence, attached to brutal German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps from 1942 to 1944. Waldheim lied about his wartime service in the Balkans, maintaining that his military career ended in 1942 after he was wounded in a battle on the Russian front.

But more than four decades later, his assertions were disputed by witnesses, photographs, medals and commendations given to Waldheim, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres and deportations.

Folks, Waldheim's service with a World War II German army unit guilty of war crimes in the Balkans resulted in his being barred from entering the United States after his election as President of Austria.

Rot in hell, nazi bastard.

Italian welcomes rejection of Nazi war criminal's lawsuit

From JPost:

Goni, an Argentine researcher and journalist said he feels "a strong sense of relief" after a three year battle in Italian courts ended with convicted Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke's lawsuit against him being thrown out. Goni was referring to a Milan court's March 23 decision to reject a claim by Priebke, who had sued Goni and his Italian publisher for 50,000 euros for libel. The court not only tossed out Priebke's claim as unfounded but assessed him legal costs of nearly $11,000.

Priebke is known for filing lawsuits, and Italian newspapers and magazines rejected many other articles for fear of being sued byPriebke or his lawyer, Lorenzo Borre, Goni said. Priebke was discovered in 1995 living in Bariloche, a city in Argentina's western Andes Mountains, by an ABC-TV team of reporter Sam Donaldson and producers Harry Phillips and Delilah Herbst.

He was deported to Italy, where he was found responsible for thedeaths of 335 people in what has come to be known as theArdeatine Caves Massacre. Priebke and a group of SS officers rounded up Jews and Italian partisans in Rome, led them to the caves outside the city and shot and killed them with bullets to the back of the neck.

Priebke was given a life sentence, which he has been serving under house arrest in the home of his attorney, Borre. He has become an assiduous reader of articles about himself, and he and Borre have become infamous for their spate of lawsuits.

It's not too late to convict Nazis

From JPost:

Despite the more than 60 years that have passed since the Holocaust, the number of Nazi war criminals being convicted is on the rise, a report released Thursday by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles shows. Nineteen Nazi war criminals were convicted over the last year,up from 16 a year earlier and five the year before that, according to the center's seventh annual report. Fourteen of the 19 Nazis found guilty last year were convicted in absentia in Italy.

The report slams Germany, Austria and Poland for failing toachieve "any progress" against the war criminals over the lastyear despite hundreds of cases under investigation.

"While it is generally assumed that it is the age of the suspects that is the biggest obstacle to prosecution, in many cases it is the lack of political will, more than anything else, that has hindered the efforts to bring Holocaust perpetrators to justice, along with the mistaken notion that it was impossible at this point to locate, identify, and convict these criminals,"Zuroff said.

The center commends Italy for becoming the second most successful country, after the United States, in the prosecutionof Nazi war criminals, even if the Italian convictions were carried out in absentia and the criminals have yet to be extradited or to serve jail terms.