oe ai Raat Oe | WORLD ee iHow the two Germanies | mark defeat of fascism + BERLIN — The issue of how to mark the day of May 1945 is separating the sheep from the goats in the two German states, the GDR and the FRG. Thatis to say, itis Showing the world which Germans will celebrate the day Of Hitler’s final defeat and which Germans will mourn or | deplore it. | _ Here in the GDR, the Socialist Unity Party, Council of isters, the State Council and the National Front have 7 agreed that this May 8, the 40th anniversary of the crush- hg of the nazi dictatorship, will be celebrated as a na- | “onal holiday. They have called upon the people to ) Prepare for it as a decisive turning-point in German Story. | In the FRG, on the other hand, Chancellor Helmut | Kohl and other government leaders have declared that final victory over Hitler is not a holiday and not Something to celebrate. The GDR’s official proclamation of the 40th anni- Versary as a holiday declared: “‘This victory was the Second historic act of liberation which the Soviet people Carried out during our century. The victory saved world Civilization from fascist barbarism. It also brought the German people freedom from the yoke of the nazi dictatorship. It opened the road to the founding of the German Democratic Republic. It is the basis of the de- Cades of freedom in Europe.” .In contrast to this official anti-fascist stand of the IDR, West German Chancellor Kohl declared that May ) Cannot be considered a jubilee of victory and libera- | lion. Alfred Dregger, Chairman of the ruling CDU-CSU a Tour ‘inappropriate’ In a bid not to embarrass the FRG government, the White House said last week that President Reagan will not tour the nazi death camp at Dachau when in the FRG in May. As reported above, Bonn _ does not see Hitler’s defeat as something to celebrate. The tour would be ‘‘inappropriate’’ said a Reagan From Berlin Fils Delisle parties in Bonn’s parliament, backed up Kohl with the declaration that May 8, 1945, was ‘‘a black day” and a ‘‘catastrophe”’ for the German people. Thus the anniversary of Hitler’s defeat will be marked in the cities of the GDR by official ceremonies, meetings, celebrations, lectures and testimonials to all those, in- cluding anti-fascist Germans, who fought and defeated Hitlerism. In the FRG there will be no official cere- monies whatsoever that treat the nazi defeat as an event in the interests of the German people. There will, however, be meetings and gatherings organized by Communists, anti-fascists, democrats with a small ‘‘D*’, peace workers and others. These gather- ings will take place despite the official government policy of viewing Hitler’s defeat as a ‘‘catastrophe’’. That pol- icy has already brought vigorous protest from leading West German social democrats, representatives of the Greens (environmental party), Communists and many others. The Bonn government’s stand that the outcome of the Second World War was a tragic event paralleled another development that underlined the now incontrovertible truth that leading West German circles refuse even to accept the results of the war. Thus Chancellor Kohl, after a lot of shadow-boxing, has agreed to attend a revanchist rally which will claim part of the territory of Poland for an enlarged New German Reich. The rally is sponsored by a ‘‘Silesian Landmannschaft’’. They are people who consider that they were expelled from Silesia, which was a part of the Hitler Reich of 1937, and demand the return of Silesian territory to German pos- session. Along with similar revanchist organizations, they also demand other territories that are part of Czechoslovakia, Poland, the USSR and of course all of the GDR. SS. The massive bronze memorial to Soviet soldiers who died liberating Berlin at Treptow cemetary, East Berlin. could not take part in the Silesianirredentistgathering if it stuck to its motto of, ‘“‘Forty Years of Expulsion — Silesia is Ours’’. In the end the motto was changed to mean exactly the same thing, in other words: “*Forty Years of Expulsion — Silesia Remains our Future in a Europe of Free Peoples’’. Under that motto, which some commentators found even worse than the original, Chancellor Kohl will participate in the gathering. All this moved the Warsaw Communist newspaper, Trybuna Ludu, to write that one must conclude from the statements of Dregger and his colleagues that it would have been a source of joy for them if Hitler Germany had not lost the war. ‘Somebody in Bonn,”’ it wrote, “‘is very anxious to free the Third Reich, at least symbolical- - The Pope’s four-nation Swing through Latin America (Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru and Trinidad-Tobago) again | Serves to illustrate the serious. Contradictions between the Destitution and oil wealth: Liberation theology challeng- ing papal authority as John | Paul I! tours Latin America. fort to stamp out liberation theology, keep women “‘in their place’’ and maintain the institutionalized church intact has carried him to 24 foreign countries in his six years as Pontiff. But threaten, expel, excommunicate as he will, the process of national and social liberation continues, including within the church. And so we see the incredible sight of John Paul in Venezuela lecturing his followers against the evils of birth control and social action in the very shadow of the slums of Caracas. We see him issue a suspen- sion order against four Nicara- guan priests for their refusal to end their activities in support of the Sandinista revolution and the Nicaraguan people. We see the Vatican demand public recantation by 97 American Catholics, including 24 sisters and four priests, for placing an ad in the New York Times last October differing with the Church’s stand on abortion and women’s rights. In Merida the Pope warned Catholics to avoid ideas on so- cial injustice contrary to church dogma. To shantytown dwellers, ground down by poverty, illiteracy and disease, U.S. warns Catholic women that the abortion issue is ‘‘not debatable,”’ and when it comes to church doctrine, “‘we are not free to make up our own minds.” Small wonder one follower remarked, ‘‘There was a time when the church sanctioned slavery and cheerfully burned heretics.”’ It would seem that time isn’t over. Let them eat snow In their own particular form of blindness, the Reagans joined 5,000 other Republicans at the inaugural ball in Washington and danced the night away. Just blocks away people were freezing to death on the streets of the capital of Reagan’s America. An esti- mated 10,000 persons live (and die) homeless, hungry and fro-: zen in Washington, D.C. —the figure for the country is two million. They live where they can, in depots, parks; on steam grates and in back alleys. And how was Nancy Reagan’s evening? The First Lady beamed in her party dress costing $22,500. Israeli general Ariel Sha- ron’s $50-million libel suit against Time magazine, while couched in legalese, raised again the horror in 1982 when hundreds of civilians were but- chered in the Palestinian camps at Sabra and Shatila by Christian’ Phalangist troops under Sharon’s command dur- ing the occupation of Lebanon. The New York jury con- cluded that, while the magazine had not acted in ‘actual malice’’ its reporters were careless. Sharon’s suit failed. Be that as it may, the facts are clear: Sharon was Israel’s Defence Minister; he did meet with the Gemayel family the day after the Prime Minister’s death; the Israeli army did order the Phalange into the camps where the mass mur- ders took place behind a screen of Israeli secrecy. An Israeli commission sub- sequently found Sharon re- sponsible for what happened and forced his dismissal as De- fence Minister. A more objec- tive commission would have had him jailed as a war crim- inal. But Sharon’s U.S. publicity stunt was just that. Its purpose was to propel the right-wing general/politician into an Is- PACIFIC TRIBUNE, FEBRUARY 6, 1985 ¢ 9 : | Spokesman. Chancellor Kohl, sensitive to charges of revanchism ly, of the responsibility for the crimes committed in the ‘ levelled against him and his government, at first said he war.” i = ~ | International Focus Tom Morris Cc. Catholic church hierarchy and __ he spoke of the need forfamily A killer raeli Prime Minister, and Sha- 4 oe : ti the real world. planning. by any name ron freely admitted as much on ming neretcs John Paul II’s herculean ef- The church hierarchy in the y any NBC’s Today Show. War criminals and ‘justice’ On the subject of war crimi- nals, Klaus Barbie, former Gestapo chief in Lyons, Fr- ance, will finally face trial this year, culminating 23 months of investigations by French au- thorities. But of eight original charges against ‘‘the butcher of Lyon’’, only three will be heard, including deportation of 650 adults and 44 children to nazi death camps in Germany. and Poland. Five other charges were dropped, says French justice, because they do not constitute ‘‘a crime against humanity”’ and therefore fall under the sta- tute of limitations. These in- clude responsibility for the kil- - lings of French resistance fighters and Barbie’s personal murder of resistance leader Jean Moulin. + ae Last week Italy released Nazi Major Walter Reder, sen- tenced to life imprisonment for directing the murder of 1,830 Italian villagers, despite a referendum vote in the village in which only one person ag- reed to. Reder’s release. 3 ieee Su eS.