Nazi Germany

Setting aside regular classes, eighth-graders at Sudbrook Magnet Middle School spent the past two weeks studying a topic that is part of their lives every day: prejudice."

There is a shrillness about the sound of splintering glass that sometimes defies the quieting of it, even with the passage of time. Seldom, if ever, was the sound more prevalent than throughout Nazi Germany and Austria the night of Nov. 9-10, 1938. It was die Kristallnacht, Crystal Night, the Night of Broken Glass. Six decades have not stilled the clatter in the memory of those who were there.It is a sure bet that in any commemoration of the event, the speakers will call it the prelude to the Holocaust.

IN MOST Maryland suburbs, the president of the County Council is chosen by his or her fellow legislators. But Harford County's system is like Baltimore City's: The head of the council is elected by voters and, as in the city, can wield great influence on the success of the executive.This year's race for council president in Harford pits Republican Mark S. Decker, 38, a liquor store owner and first-term member of the council, against Democrat Gunther Hirsch, 72, a retired physician who was a mayor and councilman in Havre de Grace from 1983 to 1997.

For Gerd W. Ehrlich, the painful memories and ghosts of growing up in Nazi Germany never went away.Dr. Ehrlich, who taught political science for 18 years at Towson State University until retiring in 1983, died Tuesday of leukemia at his Towson residence. He was 76.In "The Story of My Life," an unpublished memoir, he wrote that he and his parents -- his father a decorated World War I officer and his mother born into a respected German banking family -- were nonpracticing Jews.That didn't keep him from being taken out of a German high school in 1938 because he was a Jew."

THE 200-PAGE report by U.S. government agencies on neutral countries' use of gold and assets looted by Nazi Germany during World War II provides perspective on an earlier report that highlighted the moral guilt of Swiss banks.Other neutral countries were also profiteering; Spain and Argentina had governments sympathetic to Adolf Hitler; Switzerland, like Sweden, was surrounded by Nazi forces and not a free agent. Turkey's gold supply mushroomed.These countries also helped Jewish refugees and others escape camps and ovens, even while selling Germany war materiel.

Walter Spiro, 74, a refugee from Nazi Germany who built Spiro & Associates, one of Philadelphia's most successful advertising agencies, died of cancer Tuesday in Philadelphia. Pub Date: 9/21/97

BONN, Germany -- Still reeling from charges that it helped prolong World War II through financial dealings with the Third Reich, Switzerland faced newly published accusations yesterday that its wartime arms industry profited from -- and favored -- Hitler's Germany in a weapons trade worth millions of dollars.The disclosure will heap further discredit on a nation that cast itself as a wartime neutral but whose actions are seen increasingly, both by outsiders and some Swiss, as those of a power that collaborated broadly with Nazi Germany under the cloak of that neutrality.

WASHINGTON -- Seymour Rubin, an enduring lawyer who arrived in Washington as a Roosevelt-era Wunderkind, gently sipped his martini, deciding how to defend his reputation in a controversy rooted 50 years deep in history."

THREE BIG SWISS commercial banks have made a start at righting wrongs from the Nazi era by setting aside $71 million in a fund to compensate needy victims of the Holocaust under terms to be agreed with Jewish organizations. This is more than the $30 million the Swiss suggested earlier and less than the $250 million that some Jewish leaders had proposed. They also suggested that the Swiss government and central bank participate.Almost immediately, a movement to boycott Swiss banks subsided.

THE UPROAR over Switzerland's hidden bank assets, deposited by Jewish victims of the Holocaust or by Nazi looters in the 1940s, has had a salutary effect. The inquiry has spread to Sweden and France.One casualty of the dispute is the early retirement of Switzerland's ambassador to the United States, Carlo Jagmetti. A Zurich newspaper printed parts of an adversarial cable he sent to his government. He advised it to "wage war" in behalf of bank secrecy against allegations by the World Jewish Congress and by Sen. Alfonse M. D'Amato, R-N.Y.