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The only photos of French Resistance agents facing the firing squad at the Nazis’ largest execution site in France are on public display for the first time.

They are being displayed to the public for the first time in Mont Valérien, a 19th century fort outside Paris where the Nazis executed more than 1,000 resistance fighters and hostages during the Second World War – the largest number in one site in France.

The Nazis arrested Resistance members and “hostages” – mainly Communists or Jews arrested in reprisal for the death of German soldiers – and sentenced them to death in military tribunals. The convicted were then driven by military lorries to the isolated fort, west of Paris. They were kept in a chapel, and some of their scrawled final messages on the walls with their name, date of death and “Vive la France” have just been restored…

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At least 495 skeletons, many with head gunshot wounds, have been unearthed in a mass grave probably dating back to purges under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the 1930s, Vladivostok authorities said.

At least 3.5 tons of bones were extracted from the site on the outskirts of the Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok after it was discovered by workmen building a road, City Hall said in a statement.

Millions of Soviet citizens were executed or died in labor camps during Stalin’s rule from the 1920s until his death in 1953, but discoveries of mass graves became less frequent after a surge in finds that followed the 1991 Soviet collapse.

Experts were checking the hypothesis that the bodies were victims of Stalin’s purges.

“Practically all of the skulls have bullet wounds,” said Yaroslav Livanksy, the head of a group of volunteers who helped to excavate the site.

He said money and clothes from the 1930s had been found at the site. A crushed child’s skull was discovered close to a bead bracelet and a small slipper.

Irina Fliege, a senior researcher with human rights group Memorial, which collects information about Stalin-era killings, said she had no doubt that the victims were shot by Stalinist forces.

She said far more bodies were likely to be found as adjacent sites are studied.

“This happens all over the country, it’s impossible to say how often,” Felige said. “All we can do is put up monuments to remember the dead.”…

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It has long been known that German civilians fell victim to Czech excesses immediately following the Nazi surrender at the end of World War II. But a newly discovered video shows one such massacre in brutal detail. And it has come as a shock to the Czech Republic.

For decades, the images lay forgotten in an aluminum canister — almost seven minutes of original black and white film, shot with an 8 mm camera on May 10, 1945, in the Prague district of Borislavka during the confusing days of the German surrender.

The man who shot the film was Jirí Chmelnicek, a civil engineer and amateur filmmaker who lived in the Borislavka district and wanted to document the city’s liberation from the brutal Nazi occupation. Chmelnicek filmed tanks rolling through the streets, soldiers and refugees. Then, at some point, his camera also caught groups of Germans, who had been driven out of their houses and into Kladenska Street by Red Army soldiers and Czech militiamen.

Chmelnicek’s film shows how the Germans were rounded up in a nearby movie theater, also called the Borislavka. The camera then pans to the side of the street, where 40 men and at least one woman stand with their backs to the lens. A meadow can be seen in the background. Shots ring out and, one after another, each person in the line slumps and falls forward over a low embankment. The injured lying on the ground beg for mercy. Then a Red Army truck rolls up, its tires crushing dead and wounded alike. Later other Germans can be seen, forced to dig a mass grave in the meadow…

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Young Japanese infantryman Sawamura turned numb when he was ordered to bayonet a Chinese peasant as fellow soldiers looked on and taunted him.

“You captured him, so you get rid of him,” his lieutenant barked, yanking the 21-year-old soldier toward his writhing victim, only days after Japanese troops had overrun the Chinese city of Nanking in December 1937.

“I stumbled forward and thrust the blade into his body until it came out on the other side,” said Sawamura, who is now 94 years old. “We were told not to waste bullets. It was training for beginners.

“I have told myself for the rest of my life that killing is wrong,” said the veteran of the Imperial Japanese Army, who declined to give his surname, in an interview with AFP at his home in Kyoto.

Sawamura is one of a fast-dwindling number of Japanese former soldiers who took part in the Nanking massacre, considered by historians the worst wartime atrocity committed by the Japanese army in China.

Historians generally estimate about 150,000 people were killed, thousands of women raped and thousands of homes burned down in an orgy of violence until March 1938 in what was then the capital of the Chinese Nationalist government.

In a joint study by a Japan-China history research committee released this year, China said the true number was above 300,000 victims, while Japanese scholars estimated that anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000 were killed.

Sawamura — who now spends his days tending his pot-plants and decorating his house with his grandchildren’s pictures — is one of the last Japanese alive who played a part in the massacre in the city now called Nanjing.

Few veterans have ever spoken about what in Japan remains largely a taboo subject, and most have taken their testimonies quietly to their graves…

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Activist Tamaki Matsuoka is challenging Japanese perceptions of the country’s war record with a new documentary on the atrocities known as the Rape of Nanking.

Her film, Torn Memories of Nanjing, combines the memories of Japanese war veterans with accounts by Chinese survivors of the massacres of 1937-38, after Japan captured the former capital city of Nanking.

The film was shown at the Hong Kong International Film Festival on Sunday in its first screening outside Japan.

In the documentary, Matsuoka captures former soldiers admitting for the first time to mass rape and to the masscre of unarmed civilians in Nanking, which is now called Nanjing.

This runs counter to the accepted wisdom in her country, where history textbooks gloss over atrocities during Japan’s invasion of China, and Second World War veterans are thought to have battled and lost an honourable fight .

“Chinese and Japanese perceptions of this war are totally different,” Matsuoka said Tuesday. “That’s why this documentary is called Torn Memories of Nanjing. My mission is to help more Japanese people learn the facts,” Matsuoka said Tuesday.

Tomokazu Takeda, a young Japanese who helped produce the documentary, said he had no knowledge of the wartime experience of Nanking…

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Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday became the first Russian or Soviet leader to join Polish officials in commemorating the anniversary of the murder of thousands of Polish officers by the Soviet Union at the beginning of World War II. Mr. Putin cast the executions as one tragedy out of many wrought by what he called the Soviet Union’s “totalitarian regime.”

“We bow our heads to those who bravely met death here,” Mr. Putin said at a site in the Katyn forest close to the Russian city of Smolensk, where 70 years ago members of the Soviet secret police executed more than 20,000 Polish officers captured after the Soviet Army invaded Poland in 1939.

“In this ground lay Soviet citizens, burnt in the fire of the Stalinist repression of the 1930s; Polish officers, shot on secret orders; soldiers of the Red Army, executed by the Nazis.”

The circumstances surrounding the massacre have long been a major source of tension between Poland and Russia, and Wednesday’s tribute, held jointly with Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, appears to be the latest step in an effort by both countries to patch up relations.

Germany and the Soviet Union had effectively divided Poland between them as part of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact just before the war began. Only in the waning days of the Soviet Union, half a century later, did Moscow officially acknowledge the country’s role in the Katyn massacre. Earlier, the Soviet government had suppressed all information about the shootings, placing blame on Nazi soldiers.

Mr. Tusk said he hoped the ceremony on Wednesday would be a first step toward reconciling the conflict over the massacre. “I want to believe that the word of truth can bring together two great nations, which have been painfully separated by history,” he said.

Some Russian leaders have continued to deny Soviet responsibility for the murders, even though Russia released archival documents in 1992 showing that Stalin’s Politburo ordered the massacre in March 1940.

Russia’s Communist Party chastised Mr. Putin on Wednesday for “going to Katyn to apologize.” In a statement on its Web site, the party said, “You can apologize as much as you want about the so-called Soviet guilt, but no one can hide the fact of German responsibility for the shootings of Polish soldiers.”…

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More than 60 years after the end of the Second World War, the name “Unit 731” still has the power to generate shock, revulsion and denial in Japan.

The Imperial Japanese Army’s notorious medical research team carried out secret human experiments regarded as some of the worst war crimes in history.

Its scientists subjected more than 10,000 people per year to grotesque Josef Mengele-style torture in the name of science, including captured Russian soldiers and downed American aircrews. The experiments included hanging people upside down until they choked, burying them alive, injecting air into their veins and placing them in high-pressure chambers.

Now new detail about their victims’ suffering could be revealed after the authorities in Tokyo announced plans to open an investigation into human bones thought to have come from the unit.

A new search is also due to be carried out for mass graves that may contain more victims of human experiments.

The bones are thought to be from up to 100 people and were discovered in a mass grave in 1989 during construction work.

They bore the marks of saws and some of the skulls had drill holes and portions of the bone cut out. But the issue is so controversial in Japan that they have since been stored in a repository…

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A public document has recently come to light that shows the U.S. military ordered Occupation authorities to censor the mail of former members of Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army section that conducted bacterial warfare experiments on people, a Tokyo-based historian said.

The document, stamped “secret,” was discovered by Taketoshi Yamamoto, a professor of media history at Waseda University in Tokyo, from a microfilm archive at the National Diet Library.

The document was sent from the U.S. Army to the private censorship bureau of the U.S.-led Occupation authority on Feb. 15, 1946.

The document lists the names and addresses of 12 Japanese whose mail should be censored, including former Unit 731 commander Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii and Kanji Ishihara, a former army officer who plotted the Manchurian Incident in 1931…

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Nazi memorabilia collectors are expected to push the price for the diary and letters of the “Angel of Death” responsible for thousands of murders at Auschwitz to at least £40,000.

Infamous as Hitler’s “Angel of Death”, Mengele experimented on prisoners at the death camp without anaesthetic and became obsessed with twins, hoping to be able to clone perfect specimens of the Aryan race. His diary’s eclectic and often mundane contents include praise for British rule in India and his love of Boris Pasternak’s novel Dr Zhivago. But he also makes chilling references to his wartime atoricities. Unless the world adopts the breeding programmes of the kind he pursued in Auschwitz, he wrote, “mankind is doomed”.

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The 68th anniversary of the Novi Sad Raid was marked today, remembering more than 1,300 Serbs, Jews and Romas massacred by Hungarian fascists. Delegations of the Vojvodina assembly, the city of Novi Sad and several political parties placed wreaths at the memorial on the banks of the Danube River.

The Jewish community and the Serbian Orthodox Church organized spiritual memorials for the victims.

The raids, which rounded up the town’s Serbs, Jews and Romas, lasted from January 21 until January 23, 1941.

The occupying Hungarian forces formed 240 patrols for this purpose. Those gathered in this way were taken to the bank of the Danube to be killed.

Their bodies were then thrown under the ice of the frozen river.

The massacre took place in what is now known as Štrand – a spot on the Danube used as a beach during summer months.

The Memorial Association Racija 1242 (Raid 1942), has called on authorities to mark the actual spot of the murders as well, and noted that many Novi Sad residents are unaware that their favorite bathing location saw more than 1,300 people perish 68 years ago…

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Suspected World War II killer of Jews may be deported. Catching former Nazis and other World War II war criminals in this country has to be getting easier. With most, if not all, in their 80s, they have to be slowing down.

Our newest suspect is John Kalymon, a.k.a. Iwan Kalymon a.k.a. Iv Kalymun, a former naturalized American citizen now accused of helping the Nazis and killing Jews during World War II.

The Justice Department has filed to have him deported. They’re not sure to where, but Poland is investigating the role of police in the deaths of Jews in the Ukraine, Kalymon’s homeland. Until 1939 the Ukrainian area from which he comes was part of Poland.

The United States says Kalymon shot Jews while serving in a Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian Auxiliary Police Force. His attorney says Kalymon guarded coal from looters.

Speaking from his porch in Troy, Michigan, Kalymon said he didn’t shoot anyone during World War II.

“I live in this country 60 years and four months. I love this country because it’s my country. I’m going to die here. They want to remove me, an old man. I never was arrested; pay my taxes. I don’t know anyone as honest as me,” he said…

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“Das KZ Bordell” (The Concentration Camp Brothel) has been hailed as the first comprehensive account of a little-known chapter of Nazi oppression during World War Two.

Robert Sommer’s 460-page book is the result of four years of painstaking research in all 10 former concentration camps where the Nazis ran brothels between 1942 and 1945. It is based on numerous interviews with a small group of survivors.

According to Sommer, Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, or SS bodyguard, was convinced that forced male laborers would work harder if they were promised sex. ”The women who were recruited for the brothels mostly came from the concentration camps of Ravensbrueck and Auschwitz,” Sommer said The German social scientist says about 70 percent of these women were Germans. The rest came from Ukraine, Poland and Belarus.

Branded anti-social

Beginning with the Austrian camp at Mauthausen in 1942, the SS opened 10 brothels, the biggest of which was in Auschwitz in modern Poland, where as many as 21 women prisoners once worked. Nazi death camp survivor Anna Stachowiak crying during the 56th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. The issue has remained a taboo topic, even for many survivors

The last brothel opened in early 1945, the year the war ended. Sommer estimates around 200 women inmates in total were forced to work in the brothels, initially offered the prospect of escaping the brutality of the concentration camps. He says the promise of freedom was never honored.

“A large majority of those forced into prostitution in the concentration camps were branded socially undesirable or anti-social by the Nazis. But there were no Jewish women among them, nor were any male Jewish inmates ever admitted to the brothels,” Sommer said. Also excluded from the brothels were Soviet prisoners of war. Tens of thousands of captured soldiers, political prisoners and people branded socially undesirable by the Nazis, including Roma and homosexuals, were held in camps alongside the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Topic remained taboo

Insa Eschebach, director of the Ravensbrueck memorial site in the eastern German state of Brandenburg, says the topic of forced prostitution had been avoided for decades, as nobody seemed prepared to talk in the same breath about sex and concentration camps…

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Poles and Germans set aside old rancor Friday and united in grief as they reburied the bones of 2,116 people believed to be German civilians killed in the final, vicious months of World War II. Wooden coffins — 119 of them, each topped with white carnations and containing the remains of more than a dozen people — were laid out side-by-side in a vast grave at a German war cemetery in Stare Czarnowo, a Polish village near the border with Germany.

Religious leaders blessed the remains and mourners tossed red roses onto the coffins as the service drew to a close.

“We have gathered here to properly bury and pay respect to the World War II victims,” Bishop Marian Kruszylowicz, a Roman Catholic leader from the nearby city of Szczecin, said during a 90-minute ceremony held in German and Polish. “We owe them that.”

About 300 people attended, most of them Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II when Europe’s borders were redrawn. German Ambassador Michael H. Gerdts and city officials from Malbork, where the remains were found, also attended. On Sept. 1, German Chancellor Angela Merkel plans to attend ceremonies in Poland marking the 70th anniversary of the start of the war, which began with the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Forensic experts and anthropologists believe the victims are most probably German civilians who died in early 1945 in Malbork, at the time the German city of Marienburg. However, no documents, clothes or personal belongings were found with them except for a pair of children’s glasses.

“What is most painful about these victims is that there is nothing to give them any identity,” said Sibylle Greher, a member of a group that represents Germans expelled from Eastern Europe. “And that suggests that something really terrible must have happened to them. It shows the hatred at the end of the war in that region.”..

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Gil Won-ok was 13 when she arrived at a comfort station for Japanese soldiers in northeast China. She was forced to have sex with more than 20 soldiers a day, until the war ended three years later in 1945. After she had developed tumors relating to syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease, a Japanese military doctor removed her uterus.

Gil, now 82, is one of an estimated 200,000 women – euphemistically called “comfort women” – who were forced to be sex slaves for Japanese soldiers during the war.

Historians say the Japanese military was involved in coercing and deceiving young women into sexual slavery throughout Japan’s Asian colonies and occupied territories. And many of them were taken from Korea, which was under Japanese colonial rule from 1910-1945.

With the 1990 establishment of the Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, the issue of Japan’s war-era sex slaves started gaining public attention, both in Korea and internationally.

Testimonies were given by some women who had born this horrific burden for their entire life. Now, of the 234 Korean women who have publicly revealed their war-time suffering, only 91 are still alive.

In order to urge the Japanese government to officially apologize, the surviving women and rights activists have held demonstrations in front of the Japanese Embassy building in central Seoul every Wednesday since 1992. However, no Japanese official from the embassy has ever greeted the protesters.

Despite historic documentation and testimonials, the Japanese government has not yet acknowledged its responsibility for the brutal mistreatment of the women. In 1995, Japan set up an “Asia Women’s Fund” to compensate the victims. Because it was funded through private donations and did not involve any government funding, many refused to accept any money because they did not see the measure as a sincere apology and atonement for its brutal crimes.

As other survivors have died of old age and complications from the sexual abuse, Gil has become a representative figure for the movement.

“They (the Japanese) may think the issue will be buried in history after the 91 remaining grandmothers die. But historic facts are beyond their control,” Gil said on Monday, before leaving for Sydney to participate in a global solidarity demonstration and other lobbying activities…

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“Yasukuni” Movie Review — How does a nation deal with events that its culture has been taught to despise?

In Japan, you ignore them.

More than 60 years after the end of World War II, many Japanese politicians and educators still refuse to accept much blame or criticism for a conflict that raged across the world.

Imperialist aggression? No, insists one man in the new film “Yasukuni,” this was about “the liberation of Asia!” There are millions of Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos who would disagree.

What about war crimes, like forced prostitution, slave labor, medical experiments, “death marches,” “the rape of Nanking“? “A Chinese fabrication!” another sputters. “The biggest lie in all of history!”

Apparently, in some parts of Japan, it is still 1941, all day long.

“Yasukuni” is an attempt to draw them into the present. Directed by Chinese filmmaker Li Ying, it’s an impressionistic documentary that concentrates on the Yasukuni shrine, a Japanese religious memorial to soldiers who died for the emperor.

The problem is that some of those soldiers were convicted war criminals, including the infamous General Tojo and two soldiers once celebrated for a Chinese beheading contest (the winner claimed 106 kills).

And having the Japanese prime minister come and bow before the memory of such people is something that many foreigners — and a number of Japanese — can’t abide.

Li captures the conflict by remaining uninvolved. After showing up at the shrine as just another tourist with a video camera (it helps that he speaks excellent Japanese), he simply started filming what happened…

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