'French Anne Frank' Diaries a Hit

Great-uncle helped free Buchenwald

(NEWSER) - President Obama toured the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald today, the BBC reports. “These sites have not lost their horror with the passage of time,” said Obama, accompanied on his visit by German chancellor Angela Merkel and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Obama noted that his great-uncle, part of the infantry division that liberated the camp, "had a very difficult time re-adjusting to civilian life" afterward. More»

Boys who stood side by side in Auschwitz meet again in Israel

(NEWSER) - Menachem Sholowicz and Anshel Sieradzki don't remember crossing paths briefly in 1944, at perhaps the defining moment of their lives, but the ink on their arms leaves no doubt. Serial numbers the Nazis tattooed on each man's arm at Auschwitz are consecutive—Sholowicz is B-14594 and Sieradzki is B-14595. "I rolled up my sleeve and sure enough—I stood exactly ahead of him in line at Auschwitz," says Sholowicz. More»

(AP) - An immigration judge today revoked John Demjanjuk's stay of deportation to Germany, clearing the way for the retired autoworker to be sent to Germany to face charges of being a Nazi death camp guard. The 89-year-old suburban Cleveland man, who came to America after World War II, is accused in a German arrest warrant of 29,000 counts of acting as an accessory to murder at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943. More»

(NEWSER) - A retired Ohio autoworker born in Ukraine is facing charges in the murder of 29,000 Jews during World War II, the AP reports. German authorities allege John Demjanjuk was a guard at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland between March and September 1943. Demjanjuk, 88, maintains his innocence. He says he fought with the Russian army and was captured by the Germans in 1942. More»

Publishers roll dice on shocking French work by Yank Jonathan Littell

(NEWSER) - A novel about a Nazi officer with a taste for sodomy and incest might not scream “bestseller”—especially at nearly 1,000 pages long and translated from French. Yet Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones topped charts in France and precipitated a bidding war among US publishers. HarperCollins paid a reported $1 million, but early reviews have been deeply polarized, the New York Times notes. More»