Didn’t MacArthur end up commuting many of the sentences you mention in your quote?
Be that as it may, my concerns are similar to those mentioned by AK84. First, though, I reject the idea that, just because 70-ish years have gone by, a criminal should be forgiven for something as horrific as, e.g., being an executioner in an Einsatzgruppe. It’s disgusting that guys like Franz Stangl got to dodge prosecution for as long as they did, and if the 90-year-olds that were being indicted now were like him, easily identifiable and their crimes legion, I’d complain that their punishment wasn’t, couldn’t possibly be, enough.
But, how sure are the authorities that one of these 90 year olds, call him ‘Heinz Stuttgart’, is the same Heinz Stuttgart that you have a personnel record saying he might have been assigned to Treblinka? What if it’s actually someone else? How do you begin to prove that the guy in the tower is the same guy sitting in your dock? And how is he possibly supposed to be able to argue about the authenticity and accuracy of your evidence, given your evidence is likely to be 70+ years old?
Assuming you have the right Heinz though, what specific acts can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this guy did? Do you have an account of him shooting or otherwise mistreating Jews? Or is just manning a guard tower enough?
There’s a reason we have statutes of limitation, and it’s generally not because it’s merciful. Evidence is tough to preserve for that length of time: memories fade; physical evidence degrades; documents may still be around (assuming they aren’t faked in the first place) but their custodians, or anyone else who can authenticate them or discuss possible sources of error in their compilation, may be dead. That’s the reason I’d think it’d be time to quit hunting these guys, not because murder magically becomes OK after 70 years.
Yes? If it’s a guard tower in a death camp, why not? I understand the practical problems raised with burden of proof and time, but it’s not like “Auschwitz Guardtower Guard Hans” wasn’t less of the camp machinery than “Guy who drops the cyanide pellets in the water Hans”.
I have to say though that I’m always amused whenever the wife renews her US visa. She has to swear she was never a member of the Nazi Party of Germany. I always badger her about the penalties for lying and ask her if she’s sure.
Extraordinary pursuit is justified because this really was an extraordinary crime. We’re not talking about a bank robbery here.
Now if it could be shown that some random old men are being charged when there’s reasonable evidence that they’re innocent, I’d say the pursuit is going too far. But I don’t think that’s the case. If it were, they would have closed all the cases decades ago. The fact that they’re taking seventy years to find some of these people indicates that they’re taking care to find the right people.
I also acknowledge that the people who are being charged now are the low level minions. But they still deserve to be charged. I’d be happy to charge the leaders if there were any left. But the leaders didn’t commit these crimes alone. There wouldn’t have been a Holocaust if the low level minions hadn’t been down there doing their share of the crimes.
As far as I’m concerned, a minion who personally killed a hundred people deserves to be prosecuted just as much as the boss who gave the minions their orders.
What about regular infantry? If not for them, Auschwitz and the other camps couldn’t operate.
I agree with some posters here that it seems disingenuous to be going after perimeter guards after all of this time. If we are going to take this position, we should have tried, executed and/or imprisoned MILLIONS of Germans in the late 1940s.
This seems like mission creep. Sure it was right to go after Eichmann and Mengele, but once the big fish either were caught or died, instead of packing up and going home these organizations just keep going. In 2045 they will arrest the last living German survivor, a 118 year old woman who gave a crust of bread to a passing German solider and demand “justice.”
You’re being irrational. At best, a guard at Auschwitz worked specifically to enable slavery. Even if he did not torture prisoners himself, or was somehow ignorant of the fact that he was helping murder millions of people, he was there to force enslaved non-combatants to work themselves to death. You cannot reasonably conflate that with someone who once gave food to someone who served in the military of the same government who committed those atrocities.
The “everyone is guilty so nobody is guilty” argument is bullshit. I, and every other reasonable person, have no problem figuring out the difference between somebody who actively committed a crime and somebody who was just generally supported a evil system.
Nobody is suggesting that everyone who lived in Germany between 1933 and 1945 should be prosecuted. So your theoretical millions are safe. What we’re saying is that the individuals who worked in the concentration camp system be prosecuted. With no statute of limitations.
Your first point I see, but the second I disagree with. I think it can discourage other regimes from following a genocidal policy if all their minions realize they’ll be hounded to their graves for their actions.
The only possibility now is so their families would know that kindly old grandpa whom they only know from pictures, wasnt this brave soldier they had heard about. Oh, and that fancy jewelry and those nice old paintings that the family hides in the attic, were probably stolen.
I’d guess many a German family keeps a secret as do many American families from the south who have to admit that their ancestor was a slave owner.
That is ridiculous. I think by your logic, we should arrest an incarcerate any American who enabled Abu Gharib and the Iraq War, I mean they paid their taxes without which the war would not have been fought.
It for this reason that the law has always demanded that an actual role be attributed to an individual, not mere connection. If Private Herman Thegerman actually shot people, operated death camp machines, raped, stole etc, yeah try and hang the bastard. OTH it his job was go simply guard a train with prisoners? That is more difficult
[QUOTE=Guinastasia]
I believe the “I was just following orders” defense was rejected at Nuremberg
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:rolleyes:
Firstly, the Germans at Nuremberg were policy makers. Superior Orders as a defence is always more limited for them. Secondly, at Nuremberg evidence was led that the German did not compel an individual to partake in war crimes,senior officers who refused were excused and not subjected to official and unofficial punishments. Thirdly even at that high grade lynching (the then CJ US words), the judges actually demanded that specific actions be attributed to the accused, not mere connection.
I don’t buy it. Genocides typically happen in an environment where it’s strongly in an individual’s interest to conform. It might be as overt as you getting thrown in prison or killed for not following orders, or something more subtle, like not getting enough rations. If you’re asked to deliver mail to Auschwitz, and the choice is between your kids starving to death vs. maybe, possibly being prosecuted for war crimes in the distant future if your country loses–well, I think most are going to act in their shorter term self-interest.
That wasn’t the case in Nazi Germany. The general population was deliberately kept out of the actual process of the genocide. All the average German was supposed to do was look the other way and not ask questions.
Nobody was drafted into participation. If you were working at a concentration camp or in an Einsatzgruppe, it’s because you had stepped forward and asked for the job. People did so because they were true believers (genuine anti-semites who saw killing Jews as a good thing) or opportunists (who either saw joining the SS as a good career move in Nazi Germany or as a means of avoiding more dangerous military conscription).
Yes and no. A lot of life sentences were commuted to 15 years, but this wasn’t something entirely of MacArthur’s machinations, much the same thing happened to a lot of war criminals in Germany at the same time. It was rather hard to commute the sentences of those executed. What MacArthur was directly responsible for was secretly granting Ishii and Unit 731 blanket immunity in exchange for turning their data over to the Americans. The notion that there was some double standard for Japanese war criminals, or that “Very few were ever prosecuted. Not just for what they did to our POW’s” is patently false. Hundreds of Japanese were sentenced to death and executed for precisely that reason.
I’d have to agree with Captain Amazing; yes its enough. This isn’t the case of a prison guard manning a guard tower at a POW camp. It’s the case of a member of the SS-TV manning a guard tower in an extermination camp set up for the sole purpose of murdering ‘undesirables’ on a scale that beggars the imagination.
Just one problem: there is no statue of limitation for murder.
I think you’re drawing a sharper line than what existed. The average German may not have known of all the atrocities, but they were certainly whipped into an anti-Jew furor and witnessed their neighbors being hauled off to concentration camps. I think they might have guessed that some bad things happened there.
And conversely, applicants to positions that led to concentration camp work were obviously not told the whole story in advance. These jobs may have even appealed to more pacifist types–sure, you might be rounding up Jews, but at least you weren’t shooting people. And maybe you had a better chance of taking care of your family. By the time they found out the truth it didn’t really matter much if they were against it or not–there were too many consequences to backing out.
Obviously I’m not claiming that this is in any way morally acceptable. I’m just trying to imagine the hypothetical person that’s actually in a position to decide whether to commit a war crime, and might be influenced by the prosecution of an 89 year old man. The actual leaders–sure. They were the driving force. I’m just not seeing it for the grunts.
The age thing seems very relevant to me, not the age now but the age at the time of the crime.
At some point the only people left to chase are those that could only have been children at the time of the atrocities. Its one thing to say that all the guards should be prosecuted, but if that guard was a spotty 18 year old then its harder to damn him completely.
If you have some 100 year old suspected of crimes then prosecute him, sure. But if your suspected Nazi is only 87 years old then I don’t really see what society gains by chasing him.