Free Republic

Three Catholic martyrs executed under the Nazi regime were beatified in Germany today, June 25. The event was also noteworthy for its rememberance of their Lutheran companion.Fathers Hermann Lange, Eduard Müller and Johannes Prassek, along with Lutheran pastor Karl Friedrich Stellbrink, were guillotined in a Hamburg prison in November 1943. The Nazi regime found them guilty of “defeatism, malice, favoring the enemy and listening to enemy broadcasts.” At a ceremony in the northern German city of Lubeck, Cardinal Angelo Amato, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, declared the trio of Catholic clergy to be ‘blessed.’ He...

No one really knows how bad it is, but it’s much worse than I thought possible. Piecing together information from satellite images and eye witness accounts, Amnesty International suspects that the horrific concentration camps in North Korea are growing. Some 200,000 people live as slaves – enduring starvation, torture, and rape while performing hard labor. Many die every year, only to be replaced by fresh bodies. Of those that survive, few will ever be released. Deemed ‘prisoners’, the victims of North Korea’s political pogroms are interned for the smallest criticisms of the regime of Kim Jong-Il, and when they are...

Claws bared in row over shelter for Auschwitz cat OSWIECIM, Poland (Reuters Life!) - A cat living at the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz has caused fur to fly between an animal care group and Polish authorities refusing to allow a shelter to be built for it. The grey and white cat, known variously as Rudolf or Bruno despite being female, can often be seen sitting near the notorious "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work sets you free") sign at the entrance to the camp. She has seemed unperturbed by an unusually cold winter in Poland that has seen night temperatures...

Closure of Soviet Concentration Camps Where ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ First Appeared Recalled 23 December 2009 By Paul Goble VIENNA – The theft of the sign, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which hung over the entrance to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz has not only sparked international outrage but also called attention to the place where those words first hung at a place of detention of the innocent in the 20th century – the Solovetsky Camps of Special Assignment in the USSR. Seventy years ago this month, Yury Brodsky writes in today’s Novaya Gazeta, Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrenty Beria shut down...

Rome, Jul. 11, 2006 (CNA) - The Diocese of Osnabrück in Germany has announced it is building a convent on the site of the Nazi concentration camp of Esterwegen, where four religious sisters of the Franciscans of Münster will take up residence to serve those visiting the camp. The Kath.net news agency reported that the construction of the convent will entail demolishing the old building that housed the offices of the Nazi officials who ran the camp.  The land where the camp is located belongs to the municipality of Emsland, which has granted approval for the construction. The Franciscan sisters...

They call it "the Killing Compound" – the area of Camp 22 in North Korea's largest concentration camp. Hidden away in the mountains in a remote northeastern corner of North Korea, close to its borders with Russia and China, Camp 22 has been purpose-built for the regime's scientists to have an unlimited number of prisoners on which to experiment. Thousands of men, women and children are trucked to the nearby town of Haengyong. There they wait and, just as Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele did at Auschwitz, the North Korean physicians single out those who will die in gas chambers, or...

TAMPA - Before David Kelley went to Iraq, he bought his wife a "Support Our Troops" sign to display outside the couple's home in the Westchase subdivision. When Kelley, an Army private, went overseas in November, Stacey Kelley posted the sign outside their home. For her, the sign is a daily reminder of the sacrifice her husband and fellow soldiers are making. But officials of Westchase, in northwest Hillsborough County, view the sign differently. They say the 2-foot-high sign violates community rules. Stacey Kelley, 24, received a letter from the homeowners association last month stating she could be fined $100...

Bush Has Harsh Words for Kim Jong-il U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday poured oil on the flames by again calling North Korean leader Kim Jong-il a "tyrant". He also said Kim was a "dangerous person" with "huge concentration camps" who "starves his people" and "threatens and brags." North Korea already cites U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's description of it as an "outpost of tyranny" as one of the reasons it is boycotting six-party nuclear disarmament talks, demanding the withdrawal of the statement and an apology. During a press conference at the White House on Thursday, Bush answered...

Sixty years on, the world must not forget Belsen, says liberator Sixty years ago 24-year-old Dick Williams set off through the woods of northern Germany in search of a "refugee" camp. The previous day, a German officer had agreed to hand the camp over to the advancing British. With only a map reference to guide him, Williams crossed the German frontline by jeep and turned left down an unmarked track. It was then that he found it: a vast concentration camp surrounded by a 10ft high barbed-wire fence and still guarded by armed SS soldiers. Yesterday Major Williams, now 84,...

THE REALLY AWFUL THING ABOUT AMY RICHARDS TALE AS TOLD TO AMY BARRETT in The New York Times Lives: When One Is Enough is that Amy Richards put her name on her shameful tale of selfishness. "I found out I was having triplets when I went to my obstetrician. The doctor had just finished telling me I was going to have a low-risk pregnancy. She turned on the sonogram machine. There was a long pause, then she said, ''Are you sure you didn't take fertility drugs?'' I said, ''I'm positive.'' Peter and I were very shocked when she said there...

Just in, from the Ha'aretz ticker: 00:16 U.S. federal judge rules that former Nazi concentration camp guard, 78, living in U.S. will be deported (AP)

Builders Boycott Abortion Clinic AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 14, 2003 Abortion foe and building contractor Chris Danze is shown at a stack of foundation braces outside his contracting office in Austin, Texas. (Photo: AP) "This is going to be a battle. God does not want this thing built." Chris Danze, Boycott Leader (AP) Weeks into the project, the contractor hired to build an abortion clinic hit a brick wall: Plumbers and carpenters would not work for him. Drywall installers and heating subcontractors would not do business with him. Cement suppliers for miles around would not touch the job. He had been...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Kim Yong seemed to have it all. He was a trusted lieutenant colonel in a North Korean police agency and worked for a company that exported fish to Japan. He had access to dollars, foreign goods and a chauffeur-driven car. Then one day, North Korean authorities learned that Kim had been living for decades under an assumed name. He actually was the son of a man who, decades earlier, had been executed as a spy for the United States. Kim was immediately sent to a detention facility in Pyongyang, where he was forced to kneel for...

US President George W. Bush starts his trip to Europe and the Middle East somberly - with a visit to the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz meant to drive home the "dangers of evil unchecked." In a rare visit for a US president, Bush has allowed himself some 1 1/2 hours Saturday to tour the former gas chambers and other horrors at the vast site in southern Poland where more than 1 million people, 90 percent of them Jews, perished in the Holocaust. His visit comes after the US-led war to topple an Iraqi regime that Bush placed in...

Bottled Note Found in German Concentration Camp After 60 Years Berlin, April 17 (Bloomberg) -- A worker found a bottled message by two inmates of a German concentration camp almost 60 years after it was hidden in a wall. The bottled note was sealed into a hollow space in a wall of the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, the site's memorial center said. It was secured with a wire in the wall's cavity and broke when a builder tore down the wall as part of measures to build a visitor center. ``Homewards I want to go again,'' inmate Anton E....

Hollywood Has the Best Means to Expose N. Korean Human Rights Abuses "If Steven Spielberg or (Director) Shin Sang-Ok shows his interest, it will save 200,000 political prisoners in N. Korean concentration camps, which are worse than Auschwitz." Amid the escalating N. Korean nuclear crisis, the N. Korean defector, Kim Yong(age 53: former lieutenant colonel of the Ministry of State Security (of N. Korea)), gave a press conference to reporters including American APTN and Japanese NHK, at a church in LA. He said, "The news of the brutal human right abuse of N. Korea can be best spread by using...