Nazis

In the destitute months before and after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the blond, blue-eyed toddlers from the orphanage in this Saxon village walked along the rubble-strewn roadside each day, holding fast to a rope trailed by a matron to keep them together. The skinny foundlings caught the eye of a lonely war widow who eventually took one of the girls, Aud Rigmor Harzendorf, then 3 years old, into her home and her heart.

The German clothing factory that eventually became the international menswear powerhouse Hugo Boss manufactured Nazi uniforms during World War II and most likely did so using slave labor. The revelation appeared in the latest issue of the Austrian current affairs magazine Profil. A statement from Hugo Boss AG, which is based in Metzingen, Germany, details and confirms much of the account. "The clothing factory founded by Mr. Hugo Boss manufactured work clothes and we think SS uniforms as well .

Southern California has been the cradle to many odd cults, credos, utopias and dystopias. Among the most mysterious are the ruins of a Rustic Canyon enclave once known as Murphy Ranch. The mansions of Hollywood elite -- Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Cosby, Steven Spielberg -- sit in splendor atop the ridges of the canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains.

For more than seven decades, Gretel Bergmann has been haunted by a recurring dream. "I'm in the middle of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, with 100,000 people staring at me and it's my turn to jump, but I just can't, I can't move a muscle," she says. "My legs are like jelly." The scene never happened: The Jewish high jumper, now 95, was robbed of the chance to take part in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which Adolf Hitler notoriously used to show off Aryan sporting prowess to the rest of the world.

Nearly four years after remains unearthed from a Brazilian cemetery were identified as those of Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious Auschwitz death camp doctor, the U.S. government refuses to close its books and make public its final report on the case. The Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations has rejected requests by a Holocaust survivors group and by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles to release the lengthy report under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Leopold Engleitner toiled in three Nazi concentration camps for refusing to renounce his faith as a Jehovah's Witness. In the decades after the war, he tried to tell his tale but rarely found an audience. Now, at 100, he finally is reaching listeners, thanks to the efforts of an Austrian filmmaker who was taken with his story of endurance. Engleitner has toured the United States since May 1, sharing his life story to encourage others to stick by their principles.

For more than 50 years, Nazi hunters and historians have tried in vain to discover what happened to Gestapo chieftain Heinrich Muller, who vanished in 1945 at the end of World War II. Of all the major Nazis, Muller, who was Adolf Eichmann's immediate superior, is the most important still unaccounted for, according to numerous Holocaust experts. Now, efforts to solve the mystery are resurfacing, including attempts to answer the most provocative question of all: Was Muller briefly in U.S.

Fyodor Fedorenko, the first person to be deported from the United States to the Soviet Union to face charges that he committed Nazi war crimes, has been executed, the official news agency Tass reported Monday. Fedorenko, 79, was sentenced to death by a court in the Crimea in the Soviet Ukraine in June, 1986, on charges of treason and taking part in mass executions at the Treblinka death camp in Poland. The Tass account did not say when he was executed or provide any other details.

So how did Suri deal with the eye patch? That would be Suri Cruise and her dad, Tom, who famously wears a black pirate-esque patch in his new film, "Valkyrie," a World War II thriller about a plot to assassinate Hitler that opened on Christmas. Cruise plays the coup's real life ringleader, the aristocratic Col. Claus von Stauffenberg.

To prepare us for the ironies in "A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Emigres and Exiles in Southern California," Dorothy Lamb Crawford first calls our attention to the intellectual pretensions of the Nazi elite. Adolf Hitler and his inner circle may have been thugs and murderers, but they imagined themselves to be the saviors of high civilization. Hitler, of course, was a failed artist and a devoted fan of Wagner. Josef Goebbels was the author of an unpublished novel.

If you know the name Rezso Kasztner, you won't need any encouragement to see "Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis." If you don't, that is even more reason to see this documentary on the strange and compelling life and death of one of the most morally complex figures to come out of the Holocaust. From one point of view, Kasztner sounds like a classic hero. He negotiated face to face with Adolf Eichmann for the freedom of Hungarian Jews, a process that eventually resulted in a rescue train that brought 1,684 Jews to the safety of Switzerland.

'Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis' MPAA rating: Unrated Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes Playing: At Laemmle's Music Hall, Beverly Hills

Congregants at Temple Beth El who had gathered to celebrate the last night of Hanukkah were met by a group of neo-Nazi demonstrators who waved red-and-black swastika flags outside the Reform synagogue in Riverside on Friday evening. Rabbi Suzanne Singer said the demonstration was the third such protest at the temple in recent months. She said she thinks it was connected to a counter-protest held in September by members of the synagogue and others responding to a neo-Nazi protest at a day labor site.

Martin Haas struggled to hold back tears as he recalled how in 1943 his life was saved thanks only to the actions of a quick-thinking family friend. "I remember that it was a rainy day," the 73-year-old UC San Diego oncologist said in slow but measured German. "The woman hid me under her cape, and took me away just in time." The 7-year-old Haas found shelter with a Catholic family in the Dutch countryside as the German Gestapo began rounding up members of his family and other Jews in the Netherlands, he said this week in a Munich, Germany, courtroom.

The United States has secured more legal victories against suspected Nazi war criminals than any other country over the last eight years, but progress has slowed over the last year, according to a Jewish human rights organization in Los Angeles. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a new report that U.S. authorities have been responsible for 37 of 82 legal actions against suspected Nazis worldwide since 2001, when the organization began keeping statistics. The center's chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, who graded more than three dozen countries on their efforts to prosecute Nazis, gave the United States an A despite a falloff in deportations and new investigations in the latest annual evaluation.

For more than seven decades, Gretel Bergmann has been haunted by a recurring dream. "I'm in the middle of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, with 100,000 people staring at me and it's my turn to jump, but I just can't, I can't move a muscle," she says. "My legs are like jelly." The scene never happened: The Jewish high jumper, now 95, was robbed of the chance to take part in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which Adolf Hitler notoriously used to show off Aryan sporting prowess to the rest of the world.

To prepare us for the ironies in "A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Emigres and Exiles in Southern California," Dorothy Lamb Crawford first calls our attention to the intellectual pretensions of the Nazi elite. Adolf Hitler and his inner circle may have been thugs and murderers, but they imagined themselves to be the saviors of high civilization. Hitler, of course, was a failed artist and a devoted fan of Wagner. Josef Goebbels was the author of an unpublished novel.

Re "His own history liberated," June 7 I was delighted to read the story about Josh Lipsky and his grandfather, Samuel Smulowitz, who survived Buchenwald. When I was growing up, my family patronized Smulowitz's kosher butcher shop. He was also a member of our synagogue. As a child, I was surrounded by several Holocaust survivors, who were distinguishable by their strong Eastern European accents, yet I had no idea of their individual stories. Individuals such as Samuel Smulowitz defied the Nazis by surviving, and now his grandson, Josh, visits Buchenwald as part of President Obama's advance team.

The Austrian city of Linz has acted to return a masterpiece by Gustav Klimt to the heirs of a Jewish woman killed by Nazis in the Holocaust. Mayor Franz Dobusch has recommended the painting of a woman, believed to be worth about $19 million, be transferred from Lentos art gallery to the descendants of Aranka Munk, the city said. The city cited the findings of an independent expert, Sophie Lillie, who confirmed the painting had been seized from Munk by the Nazis after she was deported to a concentration camp where she died in 1941.

For a young opera company that has yet to stage Messiaen's bird-besotted "Saint Francois d'Assise," Stravinsky's "The Nightingale," Rossini's "The Thieving Magpie" or Hans Werner Henze's "The Hoopoe and the Triumph of a Son's Love," mounting Walter Braunfels' "The Birds" ("Die Vogel") is clearly cuckoo. But this endearingly obscure operatic representation of Aristophanes' Greek comedy, which premiered in Munich in 1920 and has long been out of mass circulation, is the latest in Los Angeles Opera's "Recovered Voices" project, and it received its first U.S. performance Saturday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.