Photos Show Auschwitz, on the Weekend

(AP) - German prosecutors formally charged John Demjanjuk today with 27,900 counts of being an accessory to murder at a Nazi death camp during World War II, reports the AP. The 89-year-old retired auto worker, who was deported from the US in May, faces 15 years for every count. Prosecutors accuse Demjanjuk of serving as a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland in 1943, but he insists he spent the war in prison. More»

Death camp doctor who decapitated Jewish teen heads the list

(NEWSER) - A doctor at barbaric Mauthausen concentration camp heads the list of the 10 most-wanted Nazis sought by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, AP reports. Aribert Heim, 93, is believed to be living in South America, and has a $485,000 reward on his head. One witness recalled how the physician-butcher decapitated a teenage Jewish athlete and saved his skull for display because of his perfect teeth. More»

Dachau, other German sites say they're running out of cash to support programs

(NEWSER) - Nazi concentration camps need to start charging visitors an entrance fee, those who run them say; subsidies from the German government aren't adequate for upkeep and tour guides for millions of pilgrims who visit every year. The proposal has prompted outrage from German Jews, the London Times reports. More»

Medical association sorry for role physicians played

(NEWSER) - Better very, very late than never. The organization of German physicians has issued an official apology for the role doctors played in the Holocaust. “Outstanding representatives of renowned academic medical and research institutions were involved” in organizing and carrying out the mass extermination of millions, and participating in barbaric medical experiments, said a statement from the German Medical Association, issued six decades after the end of World War II, notes MSNBC . More»

Auschwitz Memorial Museum prints Birkenau inmate drawings

(NEWSER) - The Auschwitz Memorial Museum has published a collection of death camp sketches by a mystery inmate of Birkenau that was found stuffed in a bottle. The chilling pencil sketches of the camp, by a prisoner who signed them "MM," show children being torn from the arms of their parents, and a guard smoking a cigarette as gas chamber bodies are loaded onto a truck, reports Der Spiegel. "These sketches are the only work of art made in Birkenau that depict exterminations," said a museum spokesman. The sketches, made in 1943, were discovered four years later near the camp's crematorium by a former prisoner working as a watchman at the site. More»