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Amsterdam council has vowed to probe revelations that it forced Jews returning from World War II concentration camps to pay rent arrears, even if their homes had been destroyed or occupied by Nazis.The scandal, involving an unknown number of Jews and non-Jews living in city-owned properties, was uncovered by a young art history student in Amsterdam’s archives.
Less than a quarter of Amsterdam’s Jewish population survived the war, with the Netherlands occupied by the Nazis from 1940 to 1945.

“On their return, Jews received letters from Amsterdam council demanding the settling of their back rent,” the art historian, Charlotte van den Berg, 23, told AFP.

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Today in history: April 9, 1898 - Paul Robeson born.Robeson was a well-known college football player, then had an international career in singing, acting in theater and cinema. He popularized black spirituals, and became a global hero when he learned over twenty languages to sing international folk songs in their original tongue.
At the height of his fame, when he was likely the most famous African-American in the world, Paul Robeson made the bold decision to become a political artist, getting involved in trying to stop the threat of fascism in the Spanish Civil War, as well as fighting other social injustices.
Robeson, whose father had been a slave, was outspoken in the Black freedom movement, the labor movement, in support of the Soviet Union and the socialist countries, anti-colonial movements around the world, and other progressive political movements. On his first visit to the Soviet Union, he said, “Here, I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life. I walk in full human dignity.”
Because of his political views he was blacklisted during McCarthyism, he had his passport revoked, and he confronted ongoing government repression as well as the threat of mob violence when he performed. To the end he remained unapologetic for the political stances he took.

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GERMAN television viewers are used to frequent programmes exploring the Nazi era and the second world war. But rarely has such a programme triggered as much debate and interest as the screening in mid-March of a three-part drama, “Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter” (Our Mothers, Our Fathers), which tracks the lives of five young German friends from 1941 to 1945.


The fictional drama, based on scrupulous research, had on average 7.6m viewers per night. Suddenly the few survivors of Germany’s wartime generation are being sought out as never before by talk shows and newspapers. Grandfathers and grandmothers, who for years kept silent, or were never asked, are facing questions about how it could happen, what it was like and whether they saw atrocities. Some more painful questions about who committed what atrocity are resurfacing, too.

Nearly 70 years after the end of the Third Reich, Germans feel compelled to keep their country’s Nazi history alive. “It’s not about guilt any more, but it is about collective responsibility,” says Arnd Bauerkämper, professor of history and cultural studies at the Free University in Berlin. The suspicion, however irrational, says Der Spiegel, a weekly, is that the German people are a special case, a historical outlier, who are unsure of themselves and must time and again seek reassurance. “It’s never over,” read a headline for an interview with Nico Hofmann, producer of the series, and a bunch of young Germans in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a daily.(...)

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