Two artworks sold under duress during the Nazi occupation of Germany will be returned to the heirs of New York art collector Michael Berolzheimer, who died in 1942 after escaping from Germany and settling in suburban WestchesterCounty.

Berolzheimer and his family fled from Germany in 1938 after selling his art under duress, traveling first to Switzerland before immigrating to the United States. He lived in WestchesterCounty until he died at the age of 76.

In 2011, the Holocaust Claims Processing Office of the financial services’ department opened a claim to recover works for the heirs of Berolzheimer, an attorney who pursued a lifetime interest in fine art and served on the acquisitions committees of several art museums. The HCPO earlier had recovered three other artworks for the heirs; it is working on 26 other restitution claims for the estate.

A Dutch antiquarian bookseller who owned one of the two drawings agreed to return it after learning of its origin, according to a statement from the office of Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of financial services for the State of New York.

The 1834 pen-and-ink portrait of a geographer by Reinier Craeyvanger was bought by the Dutch bookseller at a Sotheby’s auction in 2005.

The Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany is returning a drawing attributed to the 17th century Italian artist Giacomo Cavedone. The museum acquired the drawing in 1941.

The works once belonged to an art collection of more than 800 pieces.

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.

Though Sophie Scholl and the students of the White Rose resistance were executed by the Nazis seventy years ago last month, the example they set of courage in the face of authoritarian repression is as relevant today as it was seven decades ago.

Their crime: Daring to rouse the consciousness of their countrymen in the face of Nazi Germany’s destruction of all civil rights and its mass murder of European Jews.

In 1933, when Sophie was twelve and her brother, Hans, was fifteen, the Scholl siblings rejected their Lutheran upbringing and their parents’ Christian humanism and instead embraced Hitler’s philosophy of racial superiority, becoming leaders in the Hitler Youth.

But when Hans was arrested and convicted in 1938 for a same-sex relationship he had had three years earlier, when he was sixteen, their admiration for Hitler quickly ended. Gradually they became activists against the Nazi cause. By 1942, the siblings were engaging in daring forms of nonviolent resistance.

In May 1942, they dubbed themselves the White Rose and joined with a handful of friends at the University of Munich to produce what became a staccato burst of six impassioned anti-Nazi leaflets. Reproducing thousands in their secret headquarters over a nine-month period – ages before the push-button efficiency of the Internet – they made dangerous train trips to distribute the leaflets throughout Germany. They mailed them to sixteen cities – Stuttgart, Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin and Hamburg among them – in a bid to mislead the Gestapo into thinking theirs was a broad-based movement and not just a handful of students.

“Since the beginning of the war,” they declared in their second leaflet in June 1942, “300,000 Jews have been murdered in the most bestial manner. This is a crime unparalleled in human history – a crime against the dignity of Man. But why do we tell you these things when you already know them? Everyone wants to be exonerated, but you cannot be, because everyone is guilty, guilty, guilty.”

In their fourth leaflet, they wrote: “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!”

On Feb. 18, 1943, Sophie and Hans climbed a high gallery at the University of Munich’s vast atrium. From there they scattered hundreds of their sixth leaflet down upon the heads of astonished students below in what was called the only public protest by Germans against Nazism ever to be staged.

Spotted almost immediately, they were arrested by the Gestapo and subjected to grueling interrogation. Sophie, Hans and their comrade Christoph Probst were tried in a show trial in Munich by Hitler’s “hanging judge,” Roland Freisler. They were condemned to death. Just four days after their arrest, the three were beheaded by guillotine. Hans was twenty-four, Sophie twenty-one.

But their message lived on. Their last leaflet, smuggled out to the West, was dropped by the tons over Germany. Nobel laureate Thomas Mann broadcast back to Germany from American exile, praising the “splendid young people” who “at the time when Germany and Europe were still enveloped in the dark of night, knew and publicly declared” the ugly truth about Nazism in an attempt to bring about the “dawning” of a “new faith in freedom and honor.”

Today, the White Rose students are icons in Germany. In a nationwide TV competition to choose the top ten most important Germans of all time, German voters chose Sophie and Hans Scholl for fourth place – beating out Goethe, Gutenberg, Bach, Bismarck, Willy Brandt and Albert Einstein.

A German film, “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days,” was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006, the same time that “Sophie Scholl and the White Rose” was published. Its Hebrew edition just appeared in Israel in time for the seventieth anniversary of their extraordinary protest and executions.

Despite all this, the story of the White Rose resistance remains barely known by the general public outside Germany.

But heroism like theirs is being replicated in countries around the world. There is Malala Yousafazai, the now-thirteen-year-old Pakistani children’s rights activist who was shot in the head by the Taliban last October and now says she’s ready to fight on. There are Chinese dissidents like Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2010 but is languishing in a Chinese prison.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1934 - Mrs. Stephen S. Wise, president of the Women’s Association of the American Jewish Congress, who has just returned from a visit to the German refugee centers in Europe, will be hostess this afternoon to 500 Brooklyn women who have pledged to support the establishment of a center in New York City for refugees from Nazi Germany.

The center, to be known as Congress House, is now being established at 50 West Sixty-eighth street, under the supervision of the Women’s Association of the American Jewish Congress.

This afternoon’s reception will take the form of a linen shower for the benefit of Congress House. Those who attend represent the Brooklyn division of the Women’s Association which has undertaken to supply all linens for the establishment. The affair is also in the nature of a preview to an invited list of guests, prior to the formal opening of Congress House later this month.

Mrs. Charles J. Turow, acting chairman of the Brooklyn Division, will lead the Brooklyn delegation. Mrs. Wise, who returned to the United States on Saturday, following a two-months trip abroad, will describe conditions among the refugees and relate the decisions of the Geneva world Jewish conference.

Congress House is designed to provide recreational, shelter and food facilities gratis for refugees from Germany. The institution is designed to ease the process of reorientation for German refugees.

Facilities for the establishment of Congress House were made available through the courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Jewish Institute of Religion, which turned over the West Sixty-eighth street building to the Women’s Association for this purpose.

Hungary’s House Speaker László Kövér has replied to Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who recently renounced a Hungarian state honor in protest at what he sees as the government toleration of rising anti-Semitic sentiment, the Budapest Times reported.

Kövér defended Hungarian writer József Nyírõ, who was a member of parliament for the wartime fascist Arrow Cross Party, which collaborated in the extermination of Hungarian Jews at Nazi Germany’s bidding. Nyírõ was recently made compulsory reading in Hungarian schools.

“When passing judgement on creative minds, it is primarily their creation that should be considered, and double standards in that must not be applied,” Kövér wrote. The founding member of the ruling centre-right Fidesz party described Nyírõ’s political activities as “negligible but doubtlessly and tragically mistaken”.

According to the BT, Wiesel acknowledged Kövér’s reply but declared it unsatisfactory. Kövér failed to address Wiesel’s concerns about a growing cult around the inter-war regent Miklós Horthy, who led Hungary into the Second World War as an ally of Nazi Germany.

It is ironic that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel’s only university bearing the name of the Jewish state’s founding father, has become a hotbed of anti-Israel propaganda at the expense of proper scholarly endeavor.

So much so that an international committee of scholars, appointed by Israel’s Council for Higher Education to evaluate political science and international relations programs in Israeli universities, recently recommended that BGU “consider closing the Department of Politics and Government” unless it abandoned its “strong emphasis on political activism,” improved its research performance, and redressed the endemic weakness “in its core discipline of political science.” In other words, they asked that the Department return to accurate scholarship rather than indoctrinate the students with libel.

The same day the committee’s recommendation was revealed, Professor David Newman – who founded that department and bequeathed it such a problematic ethos, for which “achievement” he was presumably rewarded with a promotion to deanship of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, from where he can shape other departments in a similar way – penned an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which he compared Israel’s present political culture to that of Nazi Germany.

“I will no doubt be strongly criticized for compared making such a comparison,” he wrote, “but we would do well to paraphrase the famous words of Pastor Niemoller, writing in 1946 about Germany of the 1930s and 1940s: ‘When the government denied the sovereign rights of the Palestinians, I remained silent; I was not a Palestinian. When they discriminated against the Arab citizens of the country, I remained silent; I was not an Arab. When they expelled the hapless refugees, I remained at home; I was no longer a refugee. When they came for the human rights activists, I did not speak out; I was not an activist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.’ ”

Even if every single charge in this paraphrase were true, Israel would still be light years apart from Nazi Germany. To begin with, which Israeli government has denied “the sovereign rights of the Palestinians”? That of David Ben-Gurion, which accepted the 1947 partition resolution with alacrity? Or those headed by Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, which explicitly endorsed the two-state solution? Has Newman perhaps mistaken Israel’s founding father for Hajj Amin Husseini, leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the early 1920s to the 1940s, who tirelessly toiled to ethnically cleanse Palestine’s Jewish community and destroy the nascent state of Israel? Or possibly for Husseini’s successors, from Yasir Arafat, to Ahmad Yassin, to Mahmoud Abbas, whose commitment to Israel’s destruction has been equally unwavering?

There is no moral equivalence whatsoever between the Nazi persecution, exclusion, segregation, and eventually industrial slaughter of European Jewry, and Israel’s treatment of its Arab population. Not only do the Arabs in Israel enjoy full equality before the law, but from the designation of Arabic as an official language, to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal resting days for their respective communities, Arabs in Israel have enjoyed more prerogatives than ethnic minorities anywhere in the democratic world.

To put it more bluntly, while six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis in the six years that Hitler dominated Europe, Israel’s Arab population has not only grown tenfold during the Jewish state’s 63 years of existence, its rate of social and economic progress has often surpassed that of the Jewish sector, with the result that the gap between the two communities has steadily narrowed.

It is precisely this exemplary, if by no means flawless, treatment of its Arab citizens that underlies those citizens’ clear preference of Israeli citizenship to that of one in a prospective Palestinian state (a sentiment shared by most East Jerusalem Palestinians). This preference has also driven tens of thousands of African Muslims illegally to breach the Jewish state’s border in search of employment, rather than to stay in Egypt, whose territory they have to cross on the way. The treatment of mass illegal immigration (hardly the hapless refugees presented by Newman) is a major problem confronting most democracies in the West, where there is an ongoing debate about what are the basic responsibilities of governments for their citizens’ wellbeing and the right of nations to determine the identity of those entering their territory.

Even more mind-boggling is Newman’s equating Israel’s attempt to prevent foreign funding of Israeli nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in the international Israel de-legitimization campaign – along the lines of the U.S. Foreign Agents Legislation Act – with repressing political opponents by the Nazi regime. What “human rights activists” have been unlawfully detained by the Israeli government, let alone rounded up and thrown into concentration camps?

But Newman is not someone to be bothered by the facts. His is the standard “colonialist paradigm” prevalent among Israeli and Western academics, which views Zionism, and by extension the state of Israel, not as a legitimate expression of national self-determination but as “a colonizing and expansionist ideology and movement” (in the words of another BGU professor).

It sounds like a contradiction in terms. An oxymoron. If only it were.

Jewish anti-Semitism is a modern disease. The world is experiencing an explosion of it. Among the most malicious and venomous of all bigots, Jewish anti-Semites are at the forefront of just about every smear campaign against Israel and other Jews.

Such Jews are leaders in the campaigns to boycott and divest from Israel. A number of them make pilgrimages to the terrorist camps of Hamas and Hizbullah, with some even rationalizing or justifying terrorist atrocities against Jews. Such Jews pioneered the smear campaign painting Israel as an apartheid regime. Denouncing Israel as equivalent to Nazi Germany is their favorite pastime.

Western campuses are crawling with them. A Jewish judge chaired the UN commission that demonized Israel over Operation Cast Lead. A Jewish member of Britain’s Parliament compared Hamas terrorists to Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto and denounced Israel as a Nazi entity.

Israelis and ex-Israelis comprise a shockingly large number of this group.

Most Jews dismiss such people as “self-hating,” but that term is misleading. These rogues do not hate themselves. Indeed, they are masters of narcissism. They hate other Jews and wish them harm.

These are not assimilationists of Jewish descent who have simply lost interest in their Jewish heritage or are indifferent to Jewish history and Israel. No, these Jews often make a point out of waving their own Jewish “roots” as artillery support for their extremist positions.

In some extreme cases they collaborate with neo-Nazis, Islamist terrorists, and even Holocaust deniers. No, that is not a misprint; there are today in the world Jews who are Holocaust deniers or who ally themselves with Holocaust deniers.

* * *

Jewish anti-Semitism was once considered a bizarre irrelevance. Touched upon gingerly in the 1947 film “Gentleman’s Agreement,” the subject was long ignored by the organized Jewish community. Modern Zionists expected that the very creation of Israel would put an end to any neurotic self-hatred afflicting Diaspora communities.

The new sovereign Jewish state was expected to end not only Jewish physical insecurity but also spiritual pathology. Alas, history had a surprise up its sleeves: many of the worst examples of Jews with an anti-Jewish and/or anti-Israel agenda have emerged from the more radical fringes of the Israeli left, its academic institutions and its intelligentsia.

Take Professor Shlomo Sand, a hard-core leftist on the history faculty of Tel Aviv University. Sand last year published a book claiming to prove Jews are not and never have been a “people.” Recycling myths popularized by neo-Nazi websites, Sand’s book is a pseudo-analysis that claims most Jews today are frauds, converts from the Khazar Turkic tribe, impersonators of Jews.

All real Jews, according to the learned professor, became Palestinian Arabs centuries ago. Hence Israeli “Jews” are not Jews at all, and certainly have no right to their own state.

Sand is actually surpassed in his extremism by another Israeli professor, the now retired Ariel Toaff, who claimed to have evidence Jews use gentile blood in religious ritual.

(Other Israeli academics with anti-Jewish agendas are cataloged on the website Isracampus.org.il.)

Just what it is that makes such Jews tick is hard to explain. One of the few people to take a serious stab at doing so is Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist at Harvard and an occasional op-ed contributor to The Jewish Press. He attributes Jewish anti-Semitism in part to attempts by some Jews to gain social acceptance in an environment that is hostile toward Jews.

He also says some of it can be compared with infantile attempts at self-blame resembling those common among abused small children. And he considers it a cousin to the notorious Stockholm Syndrome, whereby victims adopt the outlook and agenda of their victimizers.

* * *

Anti-Semitism is today the main common denominator that unites the far left with the neo-Nazi ultra-right in the United States and Europe. There are Jews to be found in both those wings on the political spectrum. Many serve as columnists for the extremist Counterpunch web magazine.

It would be difficult to find Jewish writers for Counterpunch who do not make the de rigueur comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. For example, the University of Wisconsin’s Jennifer Loewenstein published there a screed titled “Gaza Holocaust” in which she wrote: “Israel and its U.S. Master have long since resided in the lowest circle of Hell for betraying the name of humanity.”

She added that Israel treats Palestinians as subhuman “Untermenschen,” a term bringing to mind German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. In a quote that could easily have been published by the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer in the 1930s, she added: “The Neo-Jewish Masters and their allies in the United States … have no intention of making a just peace with the lower forms of life in their midst.”

In Loewenstein’s take on reality, Israel engages in state terror while operating a cabal that enslaves the American government and dictates its policies. Even Yom Kippur for her is nothing more than a day to be exploited to help the terrorists and demonize the Jews.

Another Counterpunch regular is Richard Falk, a retired Princeton professor best known for serving on the UN commission that condemned Israel for genocidal war crimes even before it began its investigation of Israel’s Gaza operations.

Falk is not only one of the worst collaborators in the academic wars against Israel, he is also America’s leading practitioner of the Orwellian inversion.

For Falk, Israel is a terrorist aggressor while the Arab terrorist aggressors are innocent victims and peace-loving progressives. For him, Israel is a country essentially seeking to perpetrate genocide while the Islamofascists of Hamas and their backers are merely protesters against social inequality inside Israel; terrorist aggression against Jews is really the pursuit of peace, while self-defense by Israel is criminal, terrorist aggression and worse.

In 2007 Falk published “Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” in which he wrote it was not an “irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians [by Israel]” with the “criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity.”

In it, he accuses Israel of mistreating Palestinians on a scale comparable to the Nazi extermination of Jews:

Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy.

One of the regular contributors to Counterpunch is an ex-Israeli named Gilad Atzmon. A saxophone player living in the UK, Atzmon is so openly extreme that even some staunchly anti-Israel groups refuse to have anything to do with him. The British writer Oliver Kamm has denounced Atzmon as a Holocaust denier.

Atzmon has not only called for Israel to be annihilated but has stated, “I’m not going to say whether it is right or not to burn down a synagogue, I can see that it is a rational act.”

He heads a small clique of followers, mainly in Italy, for whom he serves as something of a cult leader. Atzmon has asserted that the Protocols of the Elders of Zionis an accurate reflection of the state of modern-day America.

* * *

Paul Eisen, another Jewish extremist in the UK, has distributed an essay titled “Holocaust Wars” which claims, among other things, that the claim of gas chambers in Auschwitz is fraudulent and that they could not possibly have worked. Among the essay’s “sources” are the disgraced historian David Irving and the neo-Nazi crank Ernst Zundel, deported by Canada and now in prison in Germany.

Perhaps the most venomous Jewish-born Jew-baiter of all is one “Israel Shamir.” An ?migr? from the Soviet Union, “Shamir” moved to Israel and later left for Sweden, where he changed his name to Adam Ermash and reportedly converted to Christianity.

As just one example of his poison, in an interview with the Islamist Mohamed Omar in August 2009, Shamir said:

“I think it is the duty of every Muslim and Christian to deny the Holocaust, to reject this belief, just like Abraham and Moses rejected idolatry.

“Every person who profess [sic] their [sic] faith to God should deny the Holocaust. I think it’s much more serious that people deny God, isn’t it?”

In other cases prominent Jews endorse Holocaust deniers while carefully tiptoeing around explicitly endorsing Holocaust denial itself. The best known of these is Noam Chomsky, an extremist anti-U.S. and anti-Israel professor of linguistics at MIT.

A long-term apologist for the Khmer Rouge, Chomsky seems to despise Israel almost as deeply as he hates America. He speaks of “points of similarity” between Nazi Germany and Israel and has campaigned on behalf of the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson and other European neo-Nazis. He not only demands that this hate be protected under freedom of speech but as Professor Werner Cohn has noted, Chomsky also endorses the contents of their speech:

“But in fact we saw that Chomsky justified Faurisson’s Holocaust-denial, we found Chomsky publishing his own books with neo-Nazi publishers, we saw him writing for a neo-Nazi journal, we saw that the neo-Nazis promote Chomsky’s books and tapes together with the works of Joseph Goebbels. It is this complex of anti-Semitic activities and neo-Nazi associations, not his professed ideas alone, that constitutes the Chomsky phenomenon.”

Within Israel, one of the most openly anti-Semitic Jews was the late Professor Israel Shahak, who taught chemistry for decades at Hebrew University. He specialized in endorsing medieval anti-Jewish blood libels. He insisted that Judaism teaches Jews to worship Satan, to connive against non-Jews and to murder them. He stopped just millimeters short of saying Jews use gentile blood for ritual purposes.

Shahak claimed the Talmud is filled with calls to murder gentiles, and that Jews regard gentiles as subhuman. He collaborated with neo-Nazis all over the planet.

In an analysis of Shahak, the British writer Paul Bognador wrote:

“According to Shahak, the Jews think of nothing but making money for the benefit of the Jewish state (‘The force of Jewish devotion in assembling money is thought to be infinite’).

“According to Shahak, the Jews plan to dominate much of the world through an Israeli empire…. According to Shahak, the Jews facilitate the spread of vice in order to enslave the masses . Shahak also found excuses for the near-genocidal Chmielnicki pogroms, which he classified as a ‘revolt of the oppressed.’ ”

And then there’s Norman Finkelstein, who had been on the faculty of DePaul University until he was fired three years back (and has been unemployed ever since).

Finkelstein has built an entire career out of smearing Holocaust survivors as frauds and liars, and cheering on Islamofascist terrorism against Jews.

His personal website is a vulgar gutter of juvenile anti-Semitic catcalls. He claims Zionists exaggerate the dimensions of the Shoah to steal money and invent Holocaust survivors to exploit Germany. He has visited with Hizbullah terrorists and was denied entry into Israel on grounds that he associates with terrorists.

Finkelstein wrote a book titled The Holocaust Industry that fast became a favorite with neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers. He considers David Irving a reliable historian.

While Finkelstein is dismissed by serious historians, he is nevertheless celebrated by Jews with an anti-Jewish and/or an anti-Israel agenda.

* * *

The creation of Israel was supposed to turn Jews into a “normal” people. But the psychosis of Jewish anti-Semitism has no comparable analogue among the nations, making the Jews a therapist’s sui generis.

The disease of Jewish anti-Semitism not only illustrates the absence of normality among 21st century Jewry, it threatens the very survival of Israel and of Jewish communities around the world.

Steven Plaut is a professor at the University of Haifa. His book “The Scout” is available at amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.

All of the above sound familiar? It does to Norwood, who says he sees frightening similarities between what has been happening on American campuses since the early 1990s and what transpired in the 1930s.

Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press, is a professor at Haifa University. His book “The Scout” is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.