The Courier-Mail
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, Wednesday, June 12,
2002
Coast
link to Nazi gun case
By Chris Griffiths
THE alleged mastermind of an audacious international scam to sell
Hitler's suicide pistol and the gun of Hitler's niece and
lover Geli Raubal for $4.75 million has surfaced in Queensland
as the head of a militant Jewish group.
Michael O'Hara, a.k.a. Zeev Gideon Korwan, is facing
139 fraud charges in Melbourne after elaborately forged documents
authenticating Hitler's Walther PPK 7.65mm handgun and Ms Raubal's
Walther Special 8, 6.35 calibre, were planted in archives in Germany
and Russia.
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Note:
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Although
all other articles of today's Courier-Mail are
available on the newspaper's
website,
this one has already vanished. It will be permanently
archived here; we will add updates as, when, and if this
case proceeds.
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CHARGED … Zeev Gideon
Korwan … a.k.a. Michael O'Hara, above, faces charges
over an international Hitler pistol scam.
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The actual gun believed to be
Hitler's suicide weapon.
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These documents include wartime letters from SS chief Heinrich
Himmler, Hitler's driver and bodyguard Emile Maurice and
the Walther gun factory.
At one stage, a page was removed by razor blade from a file at the
Bundesarchiv in Koblenz and a letter by Himmler in 1935 identifying
the guns by serial numbers substituted.
The phony Nazi documents were designed to entice traders into
thinking the guns were genuine.
O'Hara, who police say perpetrated the
document frauds, has emerged on the Gold Coast as Korwan, the
Queensland head of the Jewish Defence League, whose leader was
arrested last year over an alleged plan to blow up a mosque in Los
Angeles.
Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies president David Paratz
said the local Jewish community totally dissociated itself from the
JDL and he had no reason to think Korwan was Jewish.
But in an e-mail to The Courier-Mail, Shelly Rubin, whose
husband Irv Rubin was arrested for plotting to bomb the LA
mosque and a Muslim public affairs office, said Korwan was the JDL's
Queensland leader.
O'Hara as Korwan was quoted in The Jewish Journal of Los
Angeles in April as having raised $US2.25 million for an
international campaign to re-establish the outlawed Israeli Kach
party of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the JDL's founder, who was
assassinated in New York in 1990.
O'Hara this week said he had information that terrorists would
target an Australian monument and that about 10 terrorists operated
from Lakemba and Auburn mosques in Sydney. He said he had spent
decades hunting Nazi war criminals and Palestinian terrorists, but a
source said he simply had reinvented himself as a JDL activist to
claim a political motive for the Hitler gun plot.
O'Hara said the Hitler gun ploy aimed to flush out anti-Jewish
international gun traders.
"Through the Hitler guns scenario the JDL have identified several
major sources of illegal arms operators supplying to so-called
legitimate Arab royals who, in turn, passed on the arms to the
terrorist cells in the Middle East and now Australia a king other
places," he said. He claimed an Arab royal had offered $US1 million
and another had offered $US2.5 million.
