Nazis

Police said a man identifying himself as a member of a right-wing extremist group had claimed responsibility for a nail bomb attack on a busy London street that injured dozens of people. The caller, who said he was from "Combat 18," a neo-Nazi organization, gave the only message received so far, police said. The bomb exploded Saturday in Brixton, an ethnically diverse neighborhood.

WASHINGTON -- One week after proposing a law that would punish Americans who avoid paying large tax bills by renouncing their citizenship, Sen. Charles E. Schumer scolded anti-tax activist Grover Norquist for comparing the legislation to efforts taken in Germany in the 1930s . Schumer, a New York Democrat, took to the Senate floor Thursday with a fiery speech to defend legislation he had introduced with Sen. Robert Casey (D-Penn.),...

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York melted down $23 million worth of Nazi gold bars and recast them in the 1950s, replacing the swastika with a U.S. seal, the New York Times reported today. Citing recently released memos from the Federal Reserve, the newspaper said the United States Treasury knew that the bars had been looted by the Nazis from Belgium and the Netherlands.

In 1944, as head of the Office of Strategic Services in Bari, Italy, George Vujnovich guided a team of agents who worked with Yugoslav guerrilla leader Draza Mihailovich to airlift more than 500 airmen from a makeshift runway carved on a mountaintop in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. The World War II air rescue mission, "Operation Halyard," was relatively obscure until the 2007 release of "The Forgotten 500," a book by Gregory Freeman. "We didn't lose a single man. It's an interesting history.

In an attempt to prevent neo-Nazis from building a shrine in Germany, prosecutors ordered the remains of Hitler's secretary, Martin Bormann, committed to the Baltic Sea, a magazine said Sunday. Der Spiegel said that Bormann's remains were scattered two weeks ago after prosecutors ordered his skeleton cremated. Bormann, who was sentenced to death in absentia for war crimes in 1946, was long rumored to be alive after World War II.

A roundup of entertainment headlines for Friday. A French sociologist and author has written a book arguing that the Smurfs are racist, anti-Semitic Nazis. This is going to take a bit of time to process. ( Huffington Post ) Everyone's favorite Jane Lynch has been picked to host the Emmy Awards. ( Los Angeles Times ) Disney.com is becoming a one-stop shop for Disney TV shows and movies. ( Los Angeles Times ) All the major music labels have signed on to Apple's coming iCloud service.

'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

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.

I don't know whether Errol Flynn collaborated with the Nazis or not (Calendar Letters, Aug. 7), but it's my understanding that Flynn was well known in his time for his indulgence in wine, women and song. If the Nazis actually did go out of their way to hire this man, all I can say is it's no wonder they lost the war. RUDY MINGER Hollywood

The son of Holocaust survivors, Elan Steinberg preferred to keep his family history private. But the fierce strategist and former leader of the World Jewish Congress was clearly motivated by it, according to observers, as he relentlessly pushed to obtain restitution for Holocaust survivors and strove to expose the Nazi past of former U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. Steinberg, 59, died Friday in New York after a brief struggle with cancer, said Menachem Rosensaft, a vice president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants.

Reporting from London -- John Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker convicted of serving as a guard at a Nazi extermination camp and being complicit in the deaths of more than 28,000 people, died Saturday in Germany. He was 91. Demjanjuk died in a nursing home in southern Germany as a prisoner of failing health but not of the justice system that found him guilty last year of being an accessory to mass murder. A German judge had sentenced him to five years behind bars, but he was allowed his freedom while he launched an appeal.

The riches and treasures of Europe vacuumed up by Hitler's Third Reich are still turning up, including some paintings Hitler bought for himself that were just found in a Czech monastery. But most of the Fuhrer's loot was just that: looted. Once in a while, it gets returned to its rightful owners. Los Angeles lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg joined forces with Maria Altmann in a legal battle to reclaim her family's collection of paintings, seized by the Nazis in 1938. The artworks, by Gustav Klimt, included a famous portrait of Altmann's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, that was hanging in plain sight in an Austrian state museum.

Steve Bridges Impersonator of George W. Bush Steve Bridges, 48, a comic actor and impersonator who was best known for his mimicry of President George W. Bush and appeared alongside the chief executive at the 2006 White House Correspondents Assn. dinner, was found dead Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. Bridges had recently returned home from China, where he had been performing, said his brother Phillip. He appeared to have died of natural causes, but an autopsy is scheduled.

At a reception last month in New York, I introduced myself to the Polish film director Agnieszka Holland. "Ah," she said, extending her hand. "I am sorry that I did not include your mother in the movie. " She was referring to "In Darkness," a nominee for best foreign language film at this year's Academy Awards. We'd had friendly correspondence over the last two years. So why did she feel the need to apologize before another word was spoken? Because her film is a fictionalized interpretation of the central episode in my mother's life.

The Mormon Church apologized Tuesday for a "serious breach of protocol" after it was discovered that the parents of the late Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal were posthumously baptized as Mormons. The church also acknowledged that one of its members tried to baptize posthumously three relatives of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. The efforts, at least in Wiesenthal's case, violated the terms of an agreement that the church signed in 1995, in which it agreed to stop baptizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Documents have surfaced in Egypt showing that the world's most wanted Nazi war criminal, concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim, died of intestinal cancer here on Aug. 10, 1992, Germany's ZDF television and the New York Times reported Wednesday. The report said Heim had converted to Islam and was living under the name Tarek Hussein Farid.

Originally, Michel Hazanavicius admits, "The Artist" wasn't supposed to have a Hollywood happy ending. Au contraire. When the French writer-director first conceived his black-and-white tribute to the silent film, he was influenced by the sinister stylings of German Expressionist masters including F.W. Murnau and Robert Wiene. One early screenplay proposal set "The Artist" in Berlin and drew a parallel between the rise of the sound era and the Nazis' brutal ascent. It ended with its protagonist committing suicide.

Twenty years ago, a reunified Germany opened the archives of the East German secret police, the dreaded Stasi, to the public. Thousands of Germans were horrified to learn that their friends and neighbors had been spying on them for the repressive East German government. Now, Germans are once again dismayed by their country's intelligence service. First, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution came under fire after the revelation that a group of neo-Nazis had allegedly committed at least 10 killings while eluding authorities with apparent ease.