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Matthias Schlaepfer   The Toronto Star   26-Oct-1998   Get right teachers
Given the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's own strained ties to historical facts, though, Sol Littman's call for sending judges "back to school" surprises.
Additional information on both Sol Littman and Simon Wiesenthal (because Sol Littman is director of the Canadian Simon Wiesenthal Center) is available on the Ukrainian Archive.

In the case of Simon Wiesenthal, the reader will find an introduction to him within The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes � once in that article, click on SIMON WIESENTHAL in the yellow CONTENTS box.  For more information beyond that introduction, the reader can consult the Simon Wiesenthal page on the Ukrainian Archive.

In the case of Sol Littman, the reader will find him discussed toward the bottom of the same SIMON WIESENTHAL section within The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes already cited in the preceding paragraph, particularly within a subsection titled "Sol Littman's Mengele Affair."  One way to get to that subsection is to click on The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes, and once within that document, to hit CTRL+F on one's keyboard, and then search for "Mengele Affair" (don't type in the quotation marks).  Or, NetScape browsers will take the reader directly to Sol Littman's Mengele Affair when the link in the present sentence is clicked, though Microsoft's Internet Explorer will manage only to take the reader to the top of The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes, from whence the reader will have to make his way down to "Sol Littman's Mengele Affair" by other means.  Incidentally, starting at the top of The Ugly Face of 60 Minutes and repeatedly employing CTRL+F to search for "Littman" will take the reader to the several locations at which he is mentioned, where is provided some indication both of the frequency and of the quality of Sol Littman's contributions to the debate concerning war criminals.

Another insight into Sol Littman can be found in a letter to him from Neal Sher from which arises the hypothesis that the two live within a subculture in which lies circulate freely, such that if we hear any member of that subculture � for example Sol Littman � say something untrue, we cannot know whether he is lying or whether he has merely been lied to by some other member of that subculture.

Still more insight into Sol Littman can be found in the letter to the editor of The Toronto Star of Mary Radewych. Still more insight into Sol Littman can be found in the letters to the editor of The Toronto Star written by Walter Halchuk, Christopher Moorehead, Lubomyr Prytulak, and Mary Radewych.

And a veritable deluge concerning Sol Littman has more recently been added to the Ukrainian Archive, and can be accessed from the Sol Littman page.


THE TORONTO STAR Monday, October 26, 1998 A21

 LETTERS

Be sure judges
get right teachers

Sol Littman, Canadian director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre (SWC), thinks that our "effort to prosecute World War II criminals has been severely plagued by governmental callousness, lack of experience and internal conflict" (Do our jurists need Holocaust classes? 0ct.20).

He may be right.  Given the SWC's own strained ties to historical facts, though, his call for sending judges "back to school" surprises.

In January, 1998, the SWC released a report entitled The Unwanted Guests: Swiss Forced Labor Camps 1940-1944, accusing Switzerland of serious wartime crimes, and demanded compensation for the victims.

The author, Alan Morris Schom � a U.S. historian and specialist in French colonial history, had never even visited the Swiss federal archives and ignored the seminal work of André Lasserre.

Worse, a subsequent painstaking investigation by Australian businessman Ken Newman (who, as Austrian Jew Kresimir Neumann had been one of the alleged victims), revealed that the overwhelming majority of the survivors reached not only contradicted Schom's account and expressed gratitude for their wartime refuge, they had never been contacted by the SWC about any compensation demands.

In June, 1998, Rabbi Marvin Hier presented the SWC's second hatchet job entitled Survey Of Nazi And Pro-Nazi Groups In Switzerland 1930-1945.

The even more laughable allegations scraped together by Schom prompted Swiss Jewish leaders to consider a class action suit for defamation against the SWC.

Nazi hunter Wiesenthal publicly distanced himself from the centre that carries his name.

Those associated with such shenanigans, perhaps, are poorly placed to teach history lessons.

Matthias Schlaepfer
Toronto

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