Nazis

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.

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.

Reporting from Los Angeles and Vancouver, Canada -- Once Dorothee Burkhart had squeezed through a window and escaped, only two things mattered: Finding Harry and getting out of Germany. It was September 2007 in Frankfurt. Four months earlier, police had arrested Burkhart in a string of thefts and sent her to a woman's prison to await trial. Separated from Harry, her 19-year-old son who suffered from a slew of mental disabilities, she had grown increasingly anxious. Without her, Harry was alone and unprotected in a city that she believed was filled with people set on hurting them.

His hands. I won't forget them, the way they wrapped tightly around mine last summer, the first time we met. I remember thinking: " These are the hands of a man who has lived longer than a century?" They were old hands, but also firm, sure, strong hands. The hands of a man who endured the very worst a human being can endure and then lived on ... and on ... and on, making the most of every decade, every day. Until last week. On Dec. 28, in the early morning, Leon Weinstein died.