Nazis

Anti-Semitic scrawlings on residential walls were discovered over a two-mile area of Tarzana on Thursday morning, raising anxiety in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood and triggering a hate-crime investigation by police. Residents of the upscale neighborhood just south of Ventura Boulevard awoke to find swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti spray-painted in red on four perimeter walls, police said.

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.

A federal immigration judge has ordered the removal of a retired Wisconsin sausage maker who slipped into this country half a century ago by hiding his past as a Nazi prison camp guard, authorities said Thursday. Josias Kumpf was the 100th former Nazi in the U.S. to be prosecuted by the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations.

A military tribunal convicted 10 former members of the Nazi SS in the 1944 slaughter of more than 700 people near Bologna, news reports said. The 10 received life sentences for murder, the Italian news agency ANSA and state-run RAI television said. The men were tried in absentia, and all are believed to be living in Germany. The defendants, who were members of the 16th SS Division, were tried in a military court in the northern port town of La Spezia.

Peter Sachs was only a year old in 1938 when the Nazis seized his father's collection of rare posters and the Jewish family fled to the United States. He returned to Germany on Tuesday for the first time in nearly seven decades to try to recover the thousands of first-run prints that could be worth as much as $50 million.

Newly disclosed letters written by the father of Anne Frank illuminate his desperate attempts to get his family out of the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a New York-based institution that focuses on the history and culture of Eastern European Jews, said Thursday it had discovered the file among 100,000 other Holocaust-related documents about a year and a half ago.

A special German panel ruled Thursday against returning a valuable collection of rare posters stolen by the Nazis to the son of the artwork's Jewish owner. Peter Sachs was only a year old in 1938 when his father's collection of 12,500 posters was seized and his family fled Germany for the United States. Sachs, 69, of Sarasota, Fla.

The father of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl whose diaries of life hiding from the Nazis became world-famous, sought money and help obtaining a U.S. visa from a wealthy New York friend in hopes of escaping Europe, according to documents released Wednesday. Otto Frank asked for $5,000 from college friend Nathan Straus Jr.

The U.S. heirs to a major collection of art looted by the Nazis and finally returned after years of legal wrangling have sold four paintings back to the Dutch government for $4 million and donated a fifth. Connecticut resident Marei von Saher, heir to the "Goudstikker Collection," said that she wanted to show her gratitude in particular to a professor who headed an independent Dutch commission on Nazi-era claims.

Amsterdam's City Council gave a property owner permission to cut down the chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank while she was in hiding. The large 150-year-old tree has been attacked by a fungus and is in danger of falling. The tree is familiar to readers of "The Diary of Anne Frank." It stands in the courtyard of the building where her family hid during the Nazi occupation.