German police arrested on Monday one of the 10 most wanted Nazis, 93-year-old Hans Lipschis,  who is facing charges of complicity in murder as a former guard at the Auschwitz extermination camp.

State prosecutors in Stuttgart are preparing an indictment against Lipschis, a native of Lithuania who was a guard at Auschwitz from the autumn of 1941 until the Nazis abandoned the camp in January 1945, according to German news reports.

Lipschis reportedly belonged to the Totenkopf-Sturmbann, or Death’s Head Battalion, that guarded the camp, and he later became a cook for SS troops at the camp.

The Zeit online newspaper reported that Lipschis is one of the “ten most wanted Nazi war criminals.”

Lipschis told the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag last month that he was in Auschwitz “as a cook, the whole time.” He reportedly moved to the United States in 1956 but was expelled in 1982 after immigration authorities determined he had lied about his Nazi past in order to gain entry into the United States.

The arrest has been greeted by the SimonWiesenthalCenter’s top Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff as a positive step.

It follows the announcement last month by Germany’s Central Office for Clarification of Nazi Crimes, based in Ludwigsburg, that it had provided information about 50 former Auschwitz guards to German courts, with the aim of assisting in possible war crimes trials. All the suspects are around 90 years old.

The development was triggered by the 2011 guilty verdict in Munich against former death camp guard John Demjanjuk, as an accessory to murder of nearly 29,000 Jews at Sobibor in Poland. There were no direct witnesses to Demjanjuk having physically committed murder himself, but there was sufficient evidence that he was a guard at the camp.

Kurt Schrimm, who heads the Ludwigsburg agency, told reporters last month that, since the Demjanjuk verdict, “any job in a concentration camp is sufficient evidence towards a conviction as accessory to murder.”

The City of Amsterdam fined hundreds of Jewish Holocaust survivors as late as 1947 for failing to pay taxes while they were in hiding or in concentration camps.

The affair was exposed in an article in Het Parool, a local daily. Many of the houses in question were confiscated and used by members of the NSB Dutch Nazi party while the Jewish owners were in hiding or in camps.

The city went after survivors as late as 1947, the report said. Other Dutch municipalities waived such debts, Het Parool reported. The following year the city agreed to reimburse half of what it charged to some Jews who were taxed in absentia. The city’s archives contain 342 requests for reimbursement, Het Parool reported.

The documents about this taxation were discovered by Charlotte van den Berg, a 23-year-old university student. She said she found them bundled with an elastic band in the archive section of one of the city’s departments while conducting research on Jewish home owners.

A spokesperson for the city told the daily the city would investigate the matter, including how much money was collected from Holocaust survivors, together with the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

About 75 percent of Holland’s pre-World War II Jewish population of 140,000 was murdered in the Holocaust, according to the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel, a Hague-based watchdog on anti-Semitism which is known locally by its acronym CIDI.

Ronny Naftaniel, CIDI’s senior advisor, told JTA that although the discovery was “shocking,” there have been various reports of the city’s conduct after World War II, though “few facts were known. The City of Amsterdam has never, to my knowledge, taken steps to correct its actions,” said Naftaniel, who used to serve as the treasurer of Holland’s Central Jewish Board, or CJO.

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, who was a Nazi Germany army lieutenant volunteered to blew himself up along with Hitler, died at his Munich home as the age of 90.

The suicide bomb plot never was carried out, but von Kleist later was part of a group that unsuccessfully tried to kill Hitler in July 1944. He was arrested after a bombing attack failed, and he was sent to a concentration camp but later was released and continued to serve in the army.

He was born in Poland to the family of landowners, and his father was arrested by the Nazis several times for his opposition to the regime. He also failed to convince Britain to abandon its appeasement policy and back a coup against Hitler.

Von Kleist nevertheless joined the Nazi army but agreed to the suicide bomb plot when he was approached by another officer from an aristocratic family, the Associated Press reported. When he told his father of the plan, the elder von Kleist said his son must agree to die if it meant getting rid of Hitler.

Tuesday, March 12, marks the 75th anniversary of the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.  For many today, that historical episode is most firmly rooted in their memories of watching the 1965 musical “The Sound of Music,” in which the Austrian Von Trapp family climbed the Alps to escape the Nazi takeover of their country.

Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and the rest of the cast made lovely music as freedom-loving Austrians who risked their lives to flee from the Nazi regime, but we now learn that the Vienna Philharmonic, the real musicians representing Austria, did not flee but instead nearly half had joined, and more tried to, the Nazi Party.

At a press conference at the Vienna State Opera on Sunday night, a team of historians who had been given less than three months to investigate the Philharmonic’s tainted past, revealed a harvest of horrors.

In addition to orchestra members who had been low level members of the Nazi party, there were also SS – paramilitary – officials, including one trumpeter, Helmut Wobisch, who worked as a spy and who turned over more than a dozen orchestra members who were Jewish or married to Jews.  At least five of those who had been turned over by Wobisch died in Nazi concentration camps.

Although Wobisch was removed from the orchestra in a “de-Nazification” effort after the war, he was welcomed back just two years later as lead trumpeter, and later served as the Philharmonic’s executive director between 1954 and 1968.

In his role as director of the Vienna Philharmonic, Wobisch was responsible for presenting the orchestra’s prestigious Ring of Honour to a notorious Nazi war criminal, Baldur Van Schirach in 1966.  Schirach had served as head of the Hilter Youth, and was the Nazi governor of Vienna. He directed the deportation to concentration camps of tens of thousands of Jews during the war. Before and after the war the Philharmonic presented the rings to outstanding musicians, but during the Nazi era they were awarded to war “heroes.”

Schirach had originally been awarded the ring in 1942, but US troops seized it when he was arrested in 1945.  He was sentenced to 20 years in Spandau Prison for crimes against humanity by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal in 1946. Wobisch returned the ring to Schirach after his prison term ended.

The current chairman of the orchestra, Clemens Hellsberg, told Reuters the orchestra would now have to take a democratic decision as to whether to revoke the awards it made to the Nazis during that period. No guessing how that will go.

The Vienna Philharmonic is best known for its New Years concerts which are broadcast on New Years day every year and heard by many millions of people in 80 countries throughout the world.  What most listeners don’t know, however, is that the concert was begun in 1939 as a way to help spread Nazi propaganda.

The orchestra has been criticized for failing to disclose its shameful past. This past December, Harald Walser, an Austrian politician demanded that the Vienna Philharmonic examine its Nazi past and accused the orchestra of a lack of transparency and of destroying important documents from the World War II era.

Bernadette Mayrhofer of the University of Vienna, one of the independent historians tasked with revealing the details, said the ostracism of Jewish musicians had begun even before 1938 under Austrofascism.

Much of the information that has come out about the Nazi connection of the Vienna Philharmonic is now posted on the orchestra’s website.

This year’s PBS broadcast of the Philharmonic’s New Years Concert was hosted by Julie Andrews.  There has been no comment thus far from Ms. Andrews about Austria’s real-life wartime musicians.

The 70th anniversary of the rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews in WW II is being commemorated with a number of solemn ceremonies in Bulgarian capital Sofia Sunday, Sofia News Agency reports.

Unlike most other Nazi allies or Nazi-occupied countries (with the exception of Denmark and Finland), Bulgaria managed to save its entire Jewish population of 48,000 from deportation to concentration camps.

Bulgarian Minister of Justice Dimitar Peshev is credited with playing a major role in preventing the deportations, as well as Bulgarian Church officials and ordinary citizens.

The story of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II is been told in “Beyond Hitler’s Grasp: The Heroic Rescue of Bulgaria’s Jews” by Michael Bar-Zohar, an Israeli historian, politician and former Knesset member who was born in Bulgaria.

The organization of Jews in Bulgaria, Shalom, will unveil a memorial sign near the Bulgarian Parliament, after which a solemn ceremony will be held at the Sofia Synagogue.

The ceremony will be attended by official representatives of the Jewish community in Bulgaria, the state of Israel, and other foreign dignitaries.

On Sunday night, the mayors of Bulgarian towns which helped rescue Jews from the Nazis will be awarded the Shofar prize in a ceremony under the auspices of Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev.

The solemn events Sunday will also mourn the 11,343 Jews who were deported to the death camps from territories in Yugoslavia and Greece occupied by Bulgaria during WW II.