Nazis

In a reversal, Volkswagen announced that it will open a private fund to pay slave laborers who worked for the company under the Nazis. Volkswagen said last month that the Nazi regime was responsible for wartime slave labor and that claims should be directed to the regime's successor--the current German government.

A newly unsealed document from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services--the predecessor of the CIA--says that jewelers in Sweden bought diamonds stolen by the Nazis and smuggled into the country by a Count von Schwerin and that the sales were arranged by a doctor at the German legation, Swedish media said. The matter is being examined by a commission formed this year to investigate Sweden's acquisition of Nazi gold, the commission chairman said.

A doctor who worked at a clinic where Nazis killed thousands of children will not be put on trial because he suffers from severe dementia, Austrian Justice Minister Karin Miklautsch said. Dr. Heinrich Gross, 89, who faced charges in the deaths of nine children, is not capable of following court proceedings, Miklautsch said.

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 Josef Goebbels was the author of an unpublished novel.

The skeletal remains of at least 51 people -- many of them children -- have been unearthed in Menden, Germany, and authorities suspect that some were killed by the Nazis because they were disabled and considered worthless by the regime. Prosecutors have opened a murder investigation despite the difficulty of finding evidence and living culprits more than 60 years after World War II.

An Austrian doctor accused of killing hundreds of inmates in a concentration camp during World War II may be in Spain, the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center said in Jerusalem. Aribert Heim, 91, earned the nickname "Dr. Death" for experimenting on inmates at the Nazis' Buchenwald and Mauthausen camps.

An immigration judge has ordered the deportation of an elderly man accused of being a Nazi death camp guard during World War II. Prosecutors said Theodor Szehinskyj, 79, of West Chester, served in a Waffen-SS Death's Head unit during the war and helped guard prisoners at the Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen and Warsaw concentration camps from 1943 to 1945. Szehinskyj, a retired machinist, has denied that he was a guard.

Austria's parliament unanimously approved a $415-million fund to compensate aging victims who were forced into hard labor by the Nazis during World War II. An estimated 150,000 people are thought to be alive today who worked as slave and forced laborers in Austria. Under the law setting up the fund, one-time payments will range up to about $7,250 for slave laborers--those forced to work in concentration camps.

About 200 people picketed outside the Lansdowne, Pa., home of a former member of a Lithuanian police force that helped Nazis kill Jews to protest delays in his deportation. "It has nothing to do with us being Jews. It has everything to do with our America fighting these guys in World War II and now he's living in America's back yard," said Matthew Burg, 17, a student at Rambam Mesivta Maimonides High School in Lawrence, N.Y. Most of the protesters came on buses from the high school.

Re "Long After War, Taint of Nazis Remains in Europe," Opinion, Nov. 3: How tragic to read Walter Russell Mead's article on the Swiss banks' complicity during and after the war in preventing billions in Jewish gold, including, possibly, gold pulled from victims' mouths and jewelry taken from millions of victims on their way to death camps, from being returned. What is even more tragic, the sad story of survivors, clad only in secondhand clothing, housed in barracks frequently the sites of former concentration camps, who lingered in the camps from the moment of liberation in 1945 till 1950 (including this writer)