1 The presses were already rolling when the German publisher decided last week to scrap publication of 'An Eye for an Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945.'
2 The book by American journalist John Sack, published in the United States in 1993, was deemed inappropriate for German readers: a chronicle of Jewish concentration camp survivors taking murderous revenge on Germans in postwar internment camps.
3 Although Sack's facts were not disputed, Germany's cultural elite decided the book was not a serious work and, worse, could be exploited by right-wing extremists to try to diminish the Nazis' murder of 6 million Jews.
4 German intellectuals do not dispute that some Jews committed atrocities against innocent Germans immediately after the war, but find it understandable considering the evil the Nazis unleashed.
5 In a country where skinhead hate-mongers periodically firebomb refugee homes, many feel they have a special responsibility to shield the public from anything that could fuel a neo-Nazi resurgence.
6 'This is the greatest filth,' Ralph Giordano, a German Jewish writer, said of Sack's book. He has not read it, but nevertheless had no trouble calling it 'vulgar artistic fetish.'
7 Citing the German Federal Archives, Sack says 60,000 to 80,000 ethnic Germans died from 1945 to 1948 at internment camps Stalin set up through the Polish Communist government's Office of State Security.
8 Many were beaten and tortured to death, or died of typhus or other diseases.
9 Sack said at least 20 percent of the total number of inmates died at the 1,255 camps, largely in the Silesia region now in Poland. Stalin deliberately put Jews in charge of many of the camps.
10 The powerful German critic Eike Geisel slammed Sack's book as sadistic sensationalism in a seething polemic that called the work a 'vile docudrama' and a gift to neo-Nazis.
11 Geisel's Jan. 26 review of the book, under the headline 'Anti-Semitic Fodder,' provoked a barrage of complaints to publisher R. Piper of Munich.
12 All 6,000 copies of the German edition were stacked in a Stuttgart warehouse when Piper publisher Viktor Niemann decided they would not reach readers.
13 'They will be recycled,' he said by telephone on Monday.
14 Niemann said he found neither the story Sack tells nor the American journalist's lively reportage-style presentation credible: 'We want a documentation that is thick and indisputable.'
15 The editor of the German edition, Klaus Stadler, conceded that the decision was self-censorship. 'But there are grounds for it,' Stadler said.
16 Sack's style and frequent use of quotations from conversations that occurred a half-century ago were the main objections, he said.
17 Sack, a 64-year-old Jew from New York, was informed that the German edition would be shelved in a fax on Thursday. It was the fourth time Sack's story had been bought by a publisher who decided against printing: An American magazine, an American publishing house and a German newspaper backed off before. Basic Books put out the English edition in 1993.
18 'No one who has backed out ever denied that the facts were right,' Sack said in an interview from the United States.
19 A key figure in Sack's book, Solomon Morel, fled to Israel last year from Poland after prosecutors began questioning him about Germans who died at the Swietochlowice prison he administered in 1945.
20 The prosecutors are weighing criminal charges against Morel, a Jew who lost his parents and two brothers during the war, and have been interviewing witnesses in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands about killings at the camp.

The book by American journalist John Sack , published in the United States in 1993 , was deemed inappropriate for German readers : a chronicle of Jewish concentration camp survivors taking murderous revenge on Germans in postwar internment camps .
deemed
Which organization deemed it inappropriate for German readers?