Dachau

Some six or seven years ago I happened to see an Academy Award-winning documentary, "The Last Days," directed by James Moll and with Steven Spielberg as executive producer. It was of interest to me because, like the novel I was then writing, it dealt with the Holocaust and tangentially with the role of African American troops in World War II. In the film, Paul Parks, an African American WW II veteran and civil rights activist, recounts being one of a number of black troops of the then-segregated U.S. Armypresent at the liberation of Dachau, the first concentration camp the Nazis built and one of the last to be liberated.

BOGOTA, Colombia - The recent revelation of the secret Nazi past of one of Colombia's best-known anthropologists - and onetime visiting professor at UCLA - has shaken academic circles here to their core. To many scholars, the late Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was a charismatic Indiana Jones-like character, admired for his exploration of isolated Indian communities in the Andes, the jungles of the Panamanian isthmus and the northern Guajira Peninsula desert, places others had feared to tread.

Dachau, best known as the site of a Nazi concentration camp, plans to give camp visitors a free color guidebook to improve the image of the Bavarian town. The book will feature such sights as the Renaissance castle of the Bavarian royal Wittelsbacher family, the 19th-Century painters colony and the birthplace of poet Ludwig Thoma.

Some six or seven years ago I happened to see an Academy Award-winning documentary, "The Last Days," directed by James Moll and with Steven Spielberg as executive producer. It was of interest to me because, like the novel I was then writing, it dealt with the Holocaust and tangentially with the role of African American troops in World War II. In the film, Paul Parks, an African American WW II veteran and civil rights activist, recounts being one of a number of black troops of the then-segregated U.S. Armypresent at the liberation of Dachau, the first concentration camp the Nazis built and one of the last to be liberated.

President Reagan said Thursday that he has decided not to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp during his trip to Europe next month because he wants to focus on peace rather than the past. He added that he believes West Germany's present sense of collective guilt for the Holocaust of World War II, in which millions of Jews were killed, is "unnecessary."

About 300 survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau in West Germany gathered to remember the joys of liberation by U.S. troops 45 years ago and the horrors that went before. Participants said the gathering at Brive-la-Gaillarde, southwest of Paris, was the largest such reunion ever and the first to which Eastern Europeans were free to attend.

William "Bill" Basch, a retired Los Angeles garment industry executive who was one of the Holocaust survivors whose stories were told in the Oscar-winning documentary "The Last Days," has died. He was 82. Basch died of age-related causes Monday at his home in Marina del Rey, said his grandson, Max Basch. A survivor of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps who had helped save Jews while working in the underground resistance movement in Budapest, Hungary, Basch arrived in the United States penniless in 1947 and launched a successful high-end women's apparel manufacturing business, Basch Fashions, in 1971.

BOGOTA, Colombia - The recent revelation of the secret Nazi past of one of Colombia's best-known anthropologists - and onetime visiting professor at UCLA - has shaken academic circles here to their core. To many scholars, the late Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was a charismatic Indiana Jones-like character, admired for his exploration of isolated Indian communities in the Andes, the jungles of the Panamanian isthmus and the northern Guajira Peninsula desert, places others had feared to tread.

Sonnenfeldt obituary: The obituary of Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, an interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, in Wednesday's Section A reported that while he was on a reconnaissance mission in 1944 in advance of the Battle of the Bulge, he encountered the Dachau concentration camp after it had been abandoned by the Nazis. Sonnenfeldt did fight in the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45, but he did not see Dachau until spring 1945, after it was liberated by the Allies.

A far-right senator in Belgium has stepped down as his party's leader after a video of him singing a song poking fun at the Holocaust was broadcast on national television. The Senate called the actions by National Front Sen. Michel Delacroix "beyond the pale," and began an investigation. The video showed him singing an insulting song about a Jewish girl perishing at the Dachau concentration camp. The Brussels prosecutor's office also opened an investigation and will consider whether to strip Delacroix of parliamentary immunity.

J.D. Salinger A Life Kenneth Slawenski Random House: 450 pp., $27 A year after his death on Jan. 27, 2010, it's tough to know how to assess J.D. Salinger; there are too many loose ends. How can we miss a writer who removed himself from the public conversation nearly half a century before he died? At the same time, nothing in the last 12 months has suggested any loosening of the grip he maintained on his writing while he was alive. Whatever Salinger may have produced since his last published piece, the novella "Hapworth 16, 1924," appeared in the New Yorker in 1965 remains out of reach.

William "Bill" Basch, a retired Los Angeles garment industry executive who was one of the Holocaust survivors whose stories were told in the Oscar-winning documentary "The Last Days," has died. He was 82. Basch died of age-related causes Monday at his home in Marina del Rey, said his grandson, Max Basch. A survivor of the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps who had helped save Jews while working in the underground resistance movement in Budapest, Hungary, Basch arrived in the United States penniless in 1947 and launched a successful high-end women's apparel manufacturing business, Basch Fashions, in 1971.

Sonnenfeldt obituary: The obituary of Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, an interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, in Wednesday's Section A reported that while he was on a reconnaissance mission in 1944 in advance of the Battle of the Bulge, he encountered the Dachau concentration camp after it had been abandoned by the Nazis. Sonnenfeldt did fight in the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944-45, but he did not see Dachau until spring 1945, after it was liberated by the Allies.

In the late 1960s, as reports of repression of Soviet Jews began to increase, a question began filtering to the West: "Why have you forgotten us?" Si Frumkin, a survivor of Dachau and a prominent Los Angeles textile manufacturer, heard the question and it reminded him of the days before the Holocaust. A man of direct action, Frumkin founded the Southern California Council for Soviet Jews in 1968 and over the next two decades would not leave the issue alone.

A far-right senator in Belgium has stepped down as his party's leader after a video of him singing a song poking fun at the Holocaust was broadcast on national television. The Senate called the actions by National Front Sen. Michel Delacroix "beyond the pale," and began an investigation. The video showed him singing an insulting song about a Jewish girl perishing at the Dachau concentration camp. The Brussels prosecutor's office also opened an investigation and will consider whether to strip Delacroix of parliamentary immunity.

IN the 1930s, a romance kindled between two of the biggest movie stars in the world: Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier. But fearful of attracting negative publicity (both performers were married, and Dietrich had already been served a writ in costar Gary Cooper's divorce proceedings), the couple soon went their separate ways. Years later, they would reunite under circumstances right out of one of their melodramas -- when Chevalier was put on trial for treason in France after World War II. Their story is now being brought to life onstage in "Dietrich & Chevalier, the Musical.

One can understand the anguish Metzger feels when, as a Jew on a pilgrimage to Auschwitz and Dachau, she finds no place to pray, no place to meditate to seek reconciliation for the evil her people had to endure.(The Times, Aug. 19) She finds that the secular exhibits, the photographs and the documents in the two camps, did not satisfy her. She needed more than this. The nuns at Auschwitz and Dachau understand. They know that the secular is not enough. And so in their chapels they meditate and pray.

Early in April, 1945, forward elements of the 122nd Medical Battalion, 42nd Infantry (Rainbow) Division were among the first American troops to enter Dachau, a few miles northwest of Munich. I was a member of that unit and I shall carry to my grave what I saw there. The rage followed by melancholia that I experienced then is now directed at the current Administration. President Reagan will honor German war dead during his visit to that country, but he originally decided not to visit Dachau or any concentration camp or American military cemetery because he "doesn't want to open old wounds."

An artist who depicted Adolf Hitler as a pop art-style cartoon figure at an exhibition near the former Dachau concentration camp said Thursday that he would close the two-week-old show because of public outrage. Walter Gaudnek said his brightly colored artworks aimed to provoke people by showing Hitler as a human rather than a monster, but Jewish community and local political leaders see the images as dangerous.

The scene of men liberated from American internment camps showing up to liberate civilians from Nazi concentration camps was one of World War II's oddest moments. No wonder the reunion Friday in Los Angeles of a German death camp survivor and 18 of the former Japanese American GIs who saved her was so unusual.