Wiesenthal Center

NEW YORK -- For six months, Israeli free-lance journalist Yaron Svoray, working for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, infiltrated a number of neo-Nazi groups in Germany.Yesterday, Mr. Svoray surfaced at a news conference sponsored by the Wiesenthal Center to describe his experiences and to assess the strength of the German neo-Nazis and their skinhead partners.Mr. Svoray, a former police detective in Israel, used the alias Ron Furey to pose as an Australian journalist seeking to interview leaders of Germany's neo-Nazi movement for a non-existent rightist publication.

When Simon Wiesenthal died yesterday in his sleep at age 96 in Vienna, Austria, he had outlasted almost all of the thousands of former Nazis whose dossiers he meticulously collected in his Vienna offices. But surviving them had not been Mr. Wiesenthal's goal. Making them pay for their atrocities was. Partly because of dogged pursuit by Mr. Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, many did pay, including the Gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank in her secret attic, the commandant of two death camps in Poland and, most spectacularly, Adolf Eichmann, the industrious technocrat who used his knack for solving problems to contrive the mechanics of the Nazis' Final Solution.

LOS ANGELES -- With piercing blue eyes, a computer graphic of Adolf Hitler tells players in an underground video game that they have been "promoted" for running a skillful Nazi death camp and efficiently gassing the "parasites" from the German population.In a chilling commercialization of the Holocaust and an exploitation of computer game technologies, a game centered on the killing of concentration camp prisoners is one of scores of anti-Jewish and anti-Turk games now circulating among computer software users in Austria and Germany.

HBO Pictures seldom miss."Barbarians at the Gate," "Citizen Cohn," "Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture" have all been worth going out of your way to see."The Infiltrator," a new HBO film premiering at 8 tonight, is not in that class. But it's definitely worth a look and better than most made-for-TV movies premiering on a Saturday night in June.It's an intelligent film that combines action, good technical quality and some exceptional acting. But, in the final analysis, it's a thriller that fizzles instead of sizzles down the homestretch, a setup without much of a punch line.

VILNIUS, Lithuania -- Lithuania's new government has begun issuing certificates of exoneration for thousands of people who had been condemned as Nazi war criminals by Soviet courts.Among those who have already had their convictions as collaborators expunged by the chief prosecutor are people who confessed to mass murder in appearances before Soviet courts soon after the war.For the Lithuanians, the fundamental aim of the rehabilitation of people, living and dead, is to challenge and revoke the authority of Soviet Communist courts to judge the behavior of Lithuanians during a war in which their country was first overrun by Soviet troops and then, two years later, was occupied by the Nazis.

BONN, Germany -- The skinheads and neo-Nazis he hung out with thought Ron Furey was a bumbling, Australian journalist intent on providing favorable reports on them for a newspaper called the Right Way. They also thought he would help them get money from a millionaire friend.For six months, Yaron Svoray, a 39-year-old Israeli, pretended to be Ron Furey, reporter for the nonexistent newspaper and friend of a fictitious millionaire.Yesterday, Mr. Svoray, who went underground for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, described the people he met: ". . . middle Germans, regular citizens, who have nice homes and nice jobs, but who believe the 'fuehrer' was the best thing to have happened to Germany, that Auschwitz never happened . . . [who are]

HBO Pictures seldom miss."Barbarians at the Gate," "Citizen Cohn," "Somebody Has to Shoot the Picture" have all been worth going out of your way to see."The Infiltrator," a new HBO film premiering at 8 tonight, is not in that class. But it's definitely worth a look and better than most made-for-TV movies premiering on a Saturday night in June.It's an intelligent film that combines action, good technical quality and some exceptional acting. But, in the final analysis, it's a thriller that fizzles instead of sizzles down the homestretch, a setup without much of a punch line.

WASHINGTON -- The father of Army Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, President Clinton's choice to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a Nazi collaborator in World War II who was rewarded with an officer's commission in the Waffen )) SS, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said yesterday.According to his unpublished memoirs, the late Dimitri Shalikashvili appears to have been so driven to fight the Communists who seized his Georgian homeland that he hoped working with the Nazis would help defeat a common enemy, Rabbi Marvin Hier said in a phone interview from the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

WASHINGTON--Charges that Lithuania has begun to exonerate people convicted by Soviet courts of collaborating in Nazi war crimes put a sudden strain yesterday into new U.S. relations with the Baltic republic.American Jewish leaders expressed shock and anger.Lithuania agreed to review two of the cases raised by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which said the accused had been exonerated despite testimony that they took part in the killing of Jews in occupied Lithuania, the Associated Press reported.

Human beings project onto heroes, says actor Oliver Platt. "They think a person gets out of bed heroically. They brush their teeth heroically. But there is no such thing as a hero. There are just people who do heroic things."Mr. Platt, a character player who recently has moved somewhat uneasily into leading roles, tackles an incidental hero in "The Infiltrator," a Home Box Office movie that will premiere at 8 p.m. June 24.He plays Yaron Svoray, a real-life free-lance journalist who found his way inside a cabal of German neo-Nazis.

Human beings project onto heroes, says actor Oliver Platt. "They think a person gets out of bed heroically. They brush their teeth heroically. But there is no such thing as a hero. There are just people who do heroic things."Mr. Platt, a character player who recently has moved somewhat uneasily into leading roles, tackles an incidental hero in "The Infiltrator," a Home Box Office movie that will premiere at 8 p.m. June 24.He plays Yaron Svoray, a real-life free-lance journalist who found his way inside a cabal of German neo-Nazis.

John Demjanjuk returned to the United States yesterday, turned loose by an Israeli judicial system unable to convict him of being the arch war criminal "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp but still certain he was a smaller cog in the immense engine of the Final Solution.His case has bred fears in some quarters that the near eight-year imprisonment of Mr. Demjanjuk, the grueling 15-month courtroom struggle and its inconclusive outcome might hurt the effort to bring to justice remaining perpetrators of Holocaust crimes.

WASHINGTON -- The father of Army Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, President Clinton's choice to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a Nazi collaborator in World War II who was rewarded with an officer's commission in the Waffen )) SS, the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said yesterday.According to his unpublished memoirs, the late Dimitri Shalikashvili appears to have been so driven to fight the Communists who seized his Georgian homeland that he hoped working with the Nazis would help defeat a common enemy, Rabbi Marvin Hier said in a phone interview from the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

BONN, Germany -- The skinheads and neo-Nazis he hung out with thought Ron Furey was a bumbling, Australian journalist intent on providing favorable reports on them for a newspaper called the Right Way. They also thought he would help them get money from a millionaire friend.For six months, Yaron Svoray, a 39-year-old Israeli, pretended to be Ron Furey, reporter for the nonexistent newspaper and friend of a fictitious millionaire.Yesterday, Mr. Svoray, who went underground for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, described the people he met: ". . . middle Germans, regular citizens, who have nice homes and nice jobs, but who believe the 'fuehrer' was the best thing to have happened to Germany, that Auschwitz never happened . . . [who are]

NEW YORK -- For six months, Israeli free-lance journalist Yaron Svoray, working for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, infiltrated a number of neo-Nazi groups in Germany.Yesterday, Mr. Svoray surfaced at a news conference sponsored by the Wiesenthal Center to describe his experiences and to assess the strength of the German neo-Nazis and their skinhead partners.Mr. Svoray, a former police detective in Israel, used the alias Ron Furey to pose as an Australian journalist seeking to interview leaders of Germany's neo-Nazi movement for a non-existent rightist publication.

PHILADELPHIA -- Jonas Stelmokas definitely was not hiding.So why did it take the U.S. Justice Department 43 years to find him and accuse him of complicity in the Nazis' murder of Lithuanian Jews?This, after all, was a man who stepped off the boat in 1949, earned a master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951 and joined the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects a year later.Here was a man who flew the Lithuanian flag in front of his suburban Philadelphia home and kept a high ethnic profile: as president of the local chapter of the Lithuanian Engineers and Architects Association; as chairman of the local chapter of the Lithuanian-American Community of the U.S.A.

John Demjanjuk returned to the United States yesterday, turned loose by an Israeli judicial system unable to convict him of being the arch war criminal "Ivan the Terrible" at the Treblinka death camp but still certain he was a smaller cog in the immense engine of the Final Solution.His case has bred fears in some quarters that the near eight-year imprisonment of Mr. Demjanjuk, the grueling 15-month courtroom struggle and its inconclusive outcome might hurt the effort to bring to justice remaining perpetrators of Holocaust crimes.

PHILADELPHIA -- Jonas Stelmokas definitely was not hiding.So why did it take the U.S. Justice Department 43 years to find him and accuse him of complicity in the Nazis' murder of Lithuanian Jews?This, after all, was a man who stepped off the boat in 1949, earned a master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951 and joined the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects a year later.Here was a man who flew the Lithuanian flag in front of his suburban Philadelphia home and kept a high ethnic profile: as president of the local chapter of the Lithuanian Engineers and Architects Association; as chairman of the local chapter of the Lithuanian-American Community of the U.S.A.

WASHINGTON--Charges that Lithuania has begun to exonerate people convicted by Soviet courts of collaborating in Nazi war crimes put a sudden strain yesterday into new U.S. relations with the Baltic republic.American Jewish leaders expressed shock and anger.Lithuania agreed to review two of the cases raised by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which said the accused had been exonerated despite testimony that they took part in the killing of Jews in occupied Lithuania, the Associated Press reported.

VILNIUS, Lithuania -- Lithuania's new government has begun issuing certificates of exoneration for thousands of people who had been condemned as Nazi war criminals by Soviet courts.Among those who have already had their convictions as collaborators expunged by the chief prosecutor are people who confessed to mass murder in appearances before Soviet courts soon after the war.For the Lithuanians, the fundamental aim of the rehabilitation of people, living and dead, is to challenge and revoke the authority of Soviet Communist courts to judge the behavior of Lithuanians during a war in which their country was first overrun by Soviet troops and then, two years later, was occupied by the Nazis.