A 106-year-old entertainer has settled a lawsuit over a claim that he sang for Nazi guards at a concentration camp during World War II, a German court said on Thursday.
Johannes Heesters gave up asking for retraction from German author and documentary maker Volker Kuehn, who said in 2008 that the entertainer sang for SS troops at Dachau concentration camp in 1941.
The Berlin state court said in a statement that Kuehn had reiterated his position, but agreed not to call Heesters a liar anymore and to settle the lawsuit.
The court said Heesters agreed to pay the cost of the legal proceedings. Heesters’ bid for retraction and an injunction had been turned down in 2008, but he appealed the decision.
In some of his works, Kuehn cites a former Dachau inmate, Viktor Matejka, who said he pulled the curtain for Heesters before the entertainer performed for the SS.
In a 2008 interview with a Dutch newspaper, Kuehn said Heesters always tried to play down or deny this appearance.
Heesters then took Kuehn to court to try to force him to retract his statements.
In the 2008 trial, Judge Michael Mauck ruled there were “certain indications of a performance” by Heesters there, but more than six decades later it was “no longer possible to clarify whether a performance took place.”
Born on Dec. 5, 1903, in Amersfoort, Netherlands, Heesters moved in the early 1930s to Vienna and then to Berlin, where he became popular with the Nazis.
He was never accused of being a propagandist or anything other than an actor willing to perform for the Nazis, however, and the Allies allowed him to continue his career after the war.
Heesters, who has Austrian citizenship and lives in Bavaria, still occasionally performs on stage.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS