ANDREW CUTLER
Publisher/Editor
KATHRYN B. BROWN
Owner
ERICK PETERSON
Hermiston Editor/Senior Reporter
THURSDAY, JANUARY 13, 2022
A4
Founded October 16, 1875
OUR VIEW
State needs
equitable
way out
of timber
lawsuit
T
he courts are full of cases in
which one party agrees to do
something in return for money
or other assets and, for one reason or the
other, welches on the deal.
That, in short, is the case the state of
Oregon recently lost. It took possession
of 700,000 acres of timber land from
14 counties in the 1930s and 1940s. In
return, the state said it would generate
income from that timber and split it with
the counties.
When the state reneged on the deal
and decided it would manage most of the
land as wildlife habitat and for recreation
instead of timber production, the counties
were out their land and the income the
state promised to generate from it.
It’s really a fairly straightforward case
of one party, the state, unilaterally chang-
ing the conditions of a contract. In turn,
the other party, the counties, want their
money.
At least that was the assessment of a
Linn County jury when it agreed with the
counties and several tax districts that the
state had massively shortchanged them.
The jury set the amount at $1 billion.
This has the lawyers at the Oregon
Department of Justice scrambling in a
quest for loopholes to get the state out of
its jam. They have appealed to the state
Court of Appeals, which will take up the
dispute Feb. 22.
This makes us wonder what the state
is trying to do, and why. It is arguing that
one part of the government, counties,
cannot sue another part, the state.
We’re not lawyers, but the fact the state
has taken the position of trying to wiggle
out of a mess it created is unsettling.
The basics of the case are that the
state shortchanged the counties. We have
seen no evidence otherwise. When the
state says it will manage land to generate
income and then doesn’t do that, there is
no other way to interpret it.
Ultimately, the case could end up in
the Oregon Supreme Court.
How it will turn out, we cannot say.
But we can say the state is the irrespon-
sible party and owes the counties their
money, their timber land, or both.
These are not rich counties. They
have been victimized by the state and by
federal environmental laws, which have
reduced the timber industry upon which
they depended to a shadow of its former
self.
The result: the counties are on finan-
cial life support. Congress provides some
money to help keep the lights on, but the
state, at least in this case, has taken a hard
line.
The sad irony is Oregon’s taxpayers
will pay for the state’s poor judgment no
matter the outcome of the legal case.
If the state loses, taxpayers will be on
the hook for $1 billion.
If the state wins, it will have stuck it
to the 14 counties and tax districts that it
shortchanged.
Either way, the state will have done
real damage to Oregonians.
We urge the attorney general and
governor to sit down with the counties
and negotiate an equitable resolution to
this dispute. That’s the only reasonable
way to settle the mess the state created.
The German landmark overlooked by tourists
BRIGIT
FARLEY
PAST AND PROLOGUE
I
f you love history and culture and
fine things, there are few cities more
attractive than Berlin, the heart of
Europe.
You can roam the estate of Freder-
ick the Great, sample the city’s unparal-
leled museum scene and inspect Berlin’s
Cold War sites — the remnants of the
Berlin Wall, the Bridge of Spies and
Cecilienhof, the palace where the Pots-
dam conference took place. The best
high-end shopping and food await on
the Ku’Damm, Berlin’s Fifth Avenue.
And this January in particular, 80 years
on, it is worth recalling a landmark that
visitors might miss: Wannsee, where
Nazi bigwigs planned the murder of the
European Jews.
Nazi Germany’s leadership was
obsessed with race and space. Its leader,
Adolf Hitler, believed Nazi Germany’s
destiny lay in expansion. A virulent
anti-Semite, he intended to purge the
lands his armies conquered of what he
considered racial “undesirables.” This
process began in Germany when the
Nazi party took power.
A 1933 boycott of Jewish-owned
shops preceded the firing of Jewish civil
servants and the expulsion of Jewish
students from schools and universities.
The 1935 Nuremberg Laws effectively
stripped German Jews of their citi-
zenship. The anti-Jewish campaign
escalated in 1938, with countrywide
state-orchestrated attacks on syna-
gogues. The point was to force Jewish
residents to leave Germany, but rela-
tively few did. The price of an exit visa
was prohibitively high, and few coun-
tries admitted refugees in the depres-
sion-plagued 1930s.
The Nazis’ ensuing conquests in both
western and eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union presented a problem —
every European country had a Jewish
community, so the population of Jews
under Nazi jurisdiction was increasing
rather than decreasing. In the lands east
of Germany, specially-trained murder
squads (Einsatzgruppen), gunned
down almost a million Soviet Jews in
1941 alone in what we now know as the
“Holocaust by bullets.”
But Nazi officials feared such brutal
tactics might backfire in the more “civi-
lized” countries of western Europe.
There was no room anywhere in the
Nazi empire for Jews, whom the regime
considered subhuman. Another means
of getting rid of them had to be found.
One option was a forced mass reset-
tlement in Madagascar, then a French
island colony off the southeast coast of
Africa. Some 7,000 German Jews were
deported to France in anticipation of a
possible move there. But the logistics
of moving millions to a remote island,
and the very real bloodlust of the Nazi
leadership, pointed to a truly final solu-
tion of the “Jewish question.” In January
1942, top Nazi officialdom convened in
a villa in Berlin’s Wannsee neighbor-
hood to work out the details.
When you approach the site of the
Wannsee conference, you are struck
by its picturesque surroundings. It sits
on a beautiful lake, where locals swim
and sail in summer. Nearby houses
showcase the best of Berlin’s architec-
tural talent and the parked cars range
from luxe Mercedes sedans to whimsi-
cal Smart cars covered in plastic daisy
stickers. The villa itself recalls the
gentility and prosperity of late 19th-cen-
tury Berlin.
Once you are inside, however, the
reverie ends quickly. There is no official
record of the Wannsee proceedings, but
because the villa has become a museum,
the curators position the exhibits to
tell the story. In the entryway, visitors
sample the publications that demonized
Jews as enemies of the German people,
for example the Nazi daily The Stormer,
whose headline — “Ritual Murder!”
— recycles the old and pernicious myth
of Jewish crimes against Christian chil-
dren.
The dining room, which opens out
onto the lake, features a replica of the
table where Nazi officials formulated
plans to deport the Jews of Europe
to concentration camps in occupied
Poland, for immediate execution or
forced labor in the service of German
corporations. Photographs of Berlin
Jews being removed from their homes
and forced into camp-bound trains,
sometimes to the tune of lighthearted
vacation songs sung by cynical Nazi
police, adorn the walls of adjoining
rooms. And then, amongst the photos,
evidence of the murder machinery: a
receipt from Topf and sons, a Berlin
firm hired to construct industri-
al-strength ovens for Auschwitz crema-
toria. Herr Topf included a thoughtful
note: “We would like to thank you for
placing the order with us.”
A visit to the Wannsee house/
museum does much more than clar-
ify the origins of the death camps. It
removes evil from its usual precincts
and stages it where you least expect: in a
leafy, peaceful, lakeside neighborhood.
It underlines the use of euphemism
in the Nazi murder machine — the
Wannsee conference was to “solve”
the Jewish “problem,” as if the fate of
millions were a math equation. And in
its understatement, it brings home to
you the visceral horror of the Holocaust
as no written accounts could.
If 2022 makes European travel possi-
ble again, you really should consider a
visit to Wannsee.
———
Brigit Farley is a Washington State
University professor, student of history,
adventurer and Irish heritage girl living
in Pendleton.
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