Italian tax collectors have ordered the president of Rome’s Jewish community and a TV reporter to pay the court fees of convicted Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke, who lost a lawsuit against them in 1996.

“I won’t pay,” Jewish Community President Riccardo Pacifici told Italian media, but under Italian law, “all parties involved” must pay the fees to register the sentence if the guilty party is judged to have no assets.

Pacifici and TV reporter Walter Vecellio recently received a bill from the state tax collection agency for about $345, according to reports.

Priebke, 99, a former SS captain, is serving a life sentence under house arrest for his role in the 1944 massacre of 335 Romans, including about 75 Jews, in the Ardeatine Caves south of Rome.

His suit against Pacifici and Vecellio stemmed from the clashes that erupted after his initial trial in 1996, the year after he was tracked down in Argentina and extradited to Italy. A Rome military court found him guilty but freed him because of extenuating circumstances.

Scores of protesters, many of them militant young Jews, battled with police and tried to storm the courthouse. After eight hours, Italy’s justice minister ordered Priebke rearrested. He was retried in 1998 and sentenced to life in prison.

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.”

Lithuanian police said they discovered Nazi slogans drawn on a former concentration camp after Adolf Hitler’s birth date.

The slogans “Heil Hitler,” “Jews out” in German and a swastika were scrawled on the pavement near the HKP 562 labor camp in Vilnius, Evelina Pagounis of the Vilnius police told the French news agency AFP.

The graffiti was discovered on Tuesday, two days after Hitler’s 124th birthday.

Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius stated, “It is especially horrific that these anti-Semitic slogans appeared near two historically sensitive sites for the Jewish nation.”

The work camp also is situated near an area where Nazis selected which Jews would be sent to work and which to death.

Richard Falk, U.N. Human Rights Council official and the Obama administration’s unofficial pain in the neck, has written that the Boston Marathon terrorist bombings were a cheap price that the United States paid for trying to dominate the world. He also said the government’s supposed “Israel First” policy is also to blame.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon did not condemn or even hint criticism of Falk’s remarks, explaining through a spokesman that he is “not responsible” for Falk’s “independent views.”

Bitter criticism was fast and furious from other quarters, especially from Jewish groups, but Falk, who has described himself as a Jewish American, never has been bantered by condemnation.

This time around, after years of spitting on Israel, calling it Apartheid and often comparing it with Nazis, Falk castigated the United States and related to the casualties in Boston with a chilling and methodical reasoning of “proportionality” that is shocking coming from anyone, especially a “human rights” activist.

Writing in the Foreign Policy Journal, Falk stated, “The scale and drama of the Boston attack, while great, was not nearly as large or as symbolically resonant as the destruction of the World Trade Center and the shattering of the Pentagon. Also, although each life is sacred, … the Marathon incident has so far produced three deaths as compared to three thousand, that is, 1/1000th of 9/11.”

Of course, 9/11 may actually have been an inside job in Falk’s mind, or whatever makes him tick.

He wrote in 2004 that  the Bush administration may have been complicit in the Al Qaeda- terrorist attacks.

He implied that the U.S. government was involved, writing, “It is possibly true that especially the neoconservatives thought there was a situation in the country and in the world where something had to happen to wake up the American people. Whether they are innocent about the contention that they made that something happen or not, I don’t think we can answer definitively at this point.”

Falk dumbfounded just about anyone who is not anti-American by explaining that the Marathon bombings were to be expected because “the American global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the post-colonial world.”

He then went off the deep end altogether, explicitly stating that the United States is darned lucky the attack was not worse, because that is what America deserves.

“In some respects, the United States has been fortunate not to experience worse blowbacks, and these may yet happen, especially if there is no disposition to rethink US relations to others in the world, starting with the Middle East,: he wrote.

Falk almost never can complain about the state of the world without blaming Israel, and this time was no exception.  ”The war drums are beating at this moment in relation to both North Korea and Iran, and as long as Tel Aviv has the compliant ear of the American political establishment, those who wish for peace and justice in the world should not rest easy,” according to him.

“Now at the start of his second presidential term, it seems that Obama has given up altogether, succumbing to the Beltway ethos of Israel First,” he added.

Not surprisingly, Jewish groups demanded that the Council remove Falk from his position, a request that the U.S. government has previously made to no avail.

His “latest string of inflammatory remarks – whether it be on the Internet or in one of his ‘reports’ to the council – has no place in the United Nations and his continued presence at the UNHRC further undermines the credibility of the system,” said B’nai Brith International.

The American Jewish Committee also denounced Falk.

“Here he goes again,” said AJC Executive Director David Harris. “Given his public record, the question is why Richard Falk still occupies a UN position. Is there no shame?

“Falk’s unhinged diatribes against the U.S. and Israel are well-known….

“His malicious propaganda regarding the U.S. and Israel — and his glaring inability to see the stark truth about extremist violence and terrorism — has no place in any international body that takes itself and its mission seriously.”

Falk has a weird history of seeing terrorists and Muslim radicals through the lenses of “Human Rights.”

The London Board of Deputies of British Jews is launching a new Righteous Muslim Exhibition with 70 photographs and stories of Muslims who sheltered Jews during World War II, the BBC reported.

The Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Israel honors ‘Righteous Gentiles” who helped save Jews from the Holocaust gas chambers and death camps

One of the stories in the exhibition is that of Bosnian Muslims who kept the Nazis from seizing a 600-year old Passover Haggadah that was n the hands of Jew until it was sold to the Bosnia Nationa Museum in 1894.  A Muslim cleric kept it hidden in a mosque until the end of the war.

Fiyaz Mughal, co-author of an exhibition booklet The Role of the Righteous Muslims, was quoted by BBC as saying, “One of the main drivers of the project is that there are some small sections in Jewish communities who are trying to rewrite history and say that Muslims overwhelmingly helped the Nazis. And on the other side, there is a small section of the Muslim community who do not want to talk about the Holocaust for the sake of not wanting to build up an empathy with Jewish communities.

“That is unacceptable, because factually it’s untrue.

“Besa, a national code of honor in Albania – similar to the Pashtu code in Afghanistan – led the Muslims to provide sanctuary during the Nazi occupation. This is why the number of Jews actually increased in Albania during the Second World War.”

It appears that the Germans have been expecting to be forgiven for those memorable years 1933-1945, especially when considering all the goodness and stability Germany has been spreading around the continent. But the continent is refusing to be grateful, and have become quite insolent, in fact. Germany’s push for austerity during the ongoing euro crisis has prompted Nazi depictions of Chancellor Angela Merkel in many parts of Southern Europe and mass demonstrations pushing the same idea, namely that today’s Germany is pursuing the same old targets, using economic means.

This weekend, Spiegel interviewed Brendan Peter Simms, a professor of the History of International Relations in the Center of International Studies at Cambridge University, asking poignantly: “People talk of a Fourth Reich, and the hatred is palpable. Is this just absurd dramatics, or is it a reaction to a true power shift in Germany’s favor?”

Prof. Simms enlightened Spiegel’s editors—and their German readers—on the fact that the “German question” is still very much on everybody’s mind in Europe, despite the German reunification, and perhaps because of it.

“There is no doubt Germanophobia exists,” said Simms. “Look at Greece, at Italy, even Ireland, a country that has never before expressed hostility toward Germany, but which is now full of anger over increasingly painful cuts to its standard of living, an anger that comes from people feeling they have been hung out to dry. Then, of course, there is also anti-German sentiment that stems from World War II, for example in Greece.”

According to Simms, the problem starts with German politicians who tend to emphasize almost exclusively the poor conduct of the countries at the periphery of the EU, insisting that those countries change this conduct as a prerequisite for changing the EU’s political structure.

“By taking this position, they’re failing to recognize that this poor conduct was in part a result of a design flaw in the way the euro was implemented, which led to the countries at Europe’s periphery being flooded with new, cheap money… My fear is that Germany’s policies on this point consist solely of setting the European periphery conditions it can’t fulfill.”

The Holocaust “cries from the prayer shawls the hair, the shoes that we see with our own eyes, resonates as we step on the stones of the ghettos, [and] it floats like a ghost in the barracks of the camp, President Shimon Peres said at the beginning of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day Sunday night.

“The noise of those murderous trains which have ceased stills rings in our ears, said the president in the presence of IDF officers, Knesset Members, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the Quartet’s Middle East envoy Tony Blair and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada, John Baird,

“The Holocaust will not sink into the dark hole of history. It is here with us, burning, real,” President Peres continued.

“Nothing can remove the greatest darkness that mankind has known The 74 years which have passed are more biography than history. Millions of names are still missing, of parents and children, of whole Jewish communities who were murdered….

The Jewish people are a small nation in number but large in spirit. That spirit cannot be burned in the ovens. From the ashes of the Holocaust rose spiritual redemption and political rebirth. We rose and we built a state of our own….

“The Holocaust is an orphan with no comfort and a moral responsibility without compromise.

“Not all the flames have been extinguished. Crises are once again exploited to form Nazi parties, ridiculous but dangerous. Sickening anti-Semitic cartoons are published allegedly in the name of press freedom.”

IDF Chief of Benny Gantz, whose mother survived the Holocaust, wrote in the visitors’ book at Auschwitz Sunday that “the IDF will make sure that a horror [like the Holocaust] will not happen again.”

It has been said the true revenge for the Holocaust is to bring more Jews into the world in Israel and to return to the Nazi chambers with head held high to show the world who were the eventual and eternal victors over evil.

Gantz will fulfill that concept Monday as the first Israeli Chief of Staff to lead the “March of the Living, when he will lead 10,000 Jewish youth from around the world from the site of the Auschwitz death camp to that of nearby.

“On a clear, cold day, it is hard to understand or sense the gap between the silence all around and the horror that took place here, among the camp barracks, and inside of them, ” Gantz wrote. “The State of Israel is the security that an atrocity like this will not happen again. The IDF is the shield for the national home – the safe haven for the Jewish people….

“I am proud to stand at the head of the army and the delegation that, with great humility, seeks to bow its head in memory of the deceased and respect for the survivors, and to shoulder the responsibility of learning lessons from the past and ensuring future security.”

Israel began to mark Holocaust Memorial Day Sunday night at the Yad VaShem Holocaust Memorial.

Most of the nation will stand in silence when the one-minute siren wails Monday morning in Israel.