Where? There certainly is one here (but not for crimes against humanity), and I don’t know about Germany.
I kind of agree here. I’d also go after anyone who went beyond “following orders” and was known for particular cruelty or torture - beyond being a cog in that horrible machine. But this guy was 19 or 20 years old when the war ended - he really couldn’t have been more than a cog in the machine. Was he a Nazi - yea, apparently pretty enthusiastic. I can imagine a 12 year old boy in Germany (of German decent) pretty easily falling for the propaganda at the beginning of the war and buying into it - Hitler was GOOD at it. Did he participate in the systematic murder of millions - maybe. But a lot of Germans participated in that.
Or had been given the choice between that and starving to death in a PoW camp, like the other Russians.
How about the “innocent” Germans who when their Jewish neighbors were hauled away, walked into their homes and helped themselves? Have they returned any property?
But then, it was worse in Poland where in many cases returning surviving Jews came back to their homes and some Pole had moved in and some were even murdered trying to get their property back. Not sure about how returning Jews were treated in Holland and France.
Find out something new everyday. There is none in the US; in my defense I did some quick googling last night before simply assuming this is the norm worldwide, apparently not enough quick googling though. There is none in Germany, and none in any American state:
You’re drawing a much duller line than existed. Part of the problem (which you certainly are not alone in) is using the term concentration camps. These camps, Konzentrationslager are not the camps being talked about. These are the camps that Germany’s Jews and other “racially undesirable elements” were hauled off to in the years before the war, where some bad things happened and the average German saw their neighbor being hauled off to. The camps where the genocide was done were termed extermination camps (vernichtungslager) or death camps (todeslager). They were set up starting in late 1941 mostly in former Polish territory for the mass extermination of all Jews and other “racially undesirable elements” from all of occupied Europe. These camps, and for that matter the actual concentration camps, were run by the SS-Totenkopfverbände. None of them weren’t there by choice. The ‘consequences’ of backing out was transfer to a Waffen-SS combat unit; all SS-TV camp personnel were administratively folded into the Waffen-SS in 1942 to allow for easier rotation of personnel for just this reason. At the trial of Treblinka camp personnel, it was in fact proven that there had never been a single case in the SS where someone was killed for refusing to carry out an illegal order and that such persons were simply transferred into combat with the Waffen-SS.
I think you may also not realize just how few people it actually took to carry out mass murder on such a huge scale. The Einsatzgruppen, who were all also there entirely by choice, murdered more than 2 million people, mostly by mass shootings. The number of personnel in the Einsatzgruppen was 3,000.
Id add to Dissonance’s point above that Waffen SS members would be transferred to death camp duty, usually after receiving wounds that would prohibit their serving in a frontline unit. I believe that only SS-VT members were eligible for this sort of transfer, not that the frontline division Totenkopf had a good human rights record either…
The reverse was true too: camp guards could ask to be assigned to frontline units. No guarantee their commander would agree (see the example of Oskar Groneing, who had to petition three times to leave), and I don’t know what kind of frontline assignment the ex-guard would get. I don’t think the Waffen-SS used Soviet-style ‘penal battalions’ but I could be wrong. Assignment to a penal battalion was a practical death sentence. This only pertains to ethnic German SS-VT members, not the foreign auxiliaries they frequently used to help out in various Aktions. Non-participation by, e.g., a Ukrainian militiaman at Babi Yar probably would have cost him his own life.
It’s true there is no de jure SoL for murder in Anglo-American common law, but I submit that there is a de facto one, for the evidentiary concerns I laid out in my previous post. Whether those concerns fade in order to try and convict a Reinhardt camp guard of no other crime save his job title, is a question for a judge. A question, since I really don’t know: were camp guards tried in the immediate post-War period for their membership? I know about the exceptional cases of guard brutality and the, IMHO, just death sentences those people richly deserved.
:dubious: Whoa. This is skating perilously close to the if-you-weren’t-guilty-we-wouldn’t-be-accusing-you line of thinking in law enforcement.
Why should we automatically assume that the fact that some of these indictments are coming seventy years after the fact must imply an exceptionally high level of care and scrutiny on the part of the investigators? There could be all kinds of other reasons that such accusations have dragged out so long.
Maybe some “Nazi hunters” have become obsessively vindictive, or simply addicted to the chase, and can’t resist continuing to scrape the bottom of the barrel of possible malefactors as long as there’s anybody left who has the same name as one of the villains on the roster. Maybe the ongoing degradation of evidence over time has made it more feasible to accuse vaguely identified suspects “on spec”, so to speak. Maybe some of the investigators and prosecutors are finding the political theater of “bringing war criminals to justice” to be useful to their careers (and to have no significant danger of negative repercussions as long as the suspected war criminals they’re accusing are senile old nobodies rather than influential or wealthy public figures).
Even if we disagree about whether it’s the right moment to quit Nazi hunting, I think we should at least all be able to agree that the moment is long overdue to quit romanticizing Nazi hunting. There is absolutely no reason to take it for granted that the process of Nazi-hunting is somehow magically equipped to ferret out only suspects who are guilty, without even any “reasonable evidence that they’re innocent”, just because they’re, you know, NAZIS.
As I said, I certainly support earnest and practical efforts to prosecute and punish war crimes. But I think we’re bullshitting ourselves if we imagine that such efforts are any more immune from self-interest, ideological distortion, and political corruption than any other law-enforcement endeavor.
No, the point I was making was the exact opposite. If the mentality was “we have to find somebody to take the blame” then they would have found scapegoats long before now. If they were going to pin the crimes on patsies, it would have been easy to do it long ago. It’s making a honest case that can take decades.
And I’m not romanticizing these investigators. As far as I’m concerned they’re just tracking down another group of criminals who happened to commit a really horrible crime. But the crimes were horrible so if the criminals are still out there, they should be pursued. And when they’re found, they should be given trials just like any other criminals would be.
You’re still not quite getting it. The attitude “if you weren’t guilty we wouldn’t be accusing you” is not the same mentality as “we have to find somebody to take the blame”.
A Nazi-hunter may not intend or wish to accuse an innocent person, but that doesn’t automatically guarantee that their accusations will always be accurate or reliable.
You misunderstand me a little. When I say “minions” I mean the people actively participating in the genocide. A mailman wouldn’t count, but a triggerman would. Those people, who actively helped perpetrate the murders, are the ones being sought today and would presumably deter others in the future.
ETA: We always prosecute murderers when we catch them, no matter how many years since the crime. Why should this be different?
I still feel my point stands. Regardless of whether it’s intentional or self-delusional, any accusations based on false evidence could have been made long ago. You can complete a sloppy investigation in a week. It’s a good careful investigation that can take a long time. So the fact that these accusations are being made after such a long time are evidence that the investigations were conducted carefully.
Like John Demjanjuk, who was almost certainly not “Ivan the Terrible”, even though he was convicted of being so?
A trial after 70 years is a farce. Evidence, both testimony and physical, will have degraded to the point of being useless.
If we knew the name of a guy who shot a man in Reno just to watch him die, would we let him off just because he’s old? Hell no. These aren’t cold cases, we know who they are, it’s just the mundane matter of locating and identifying them.
When the last WWII soldier is gone, that will be the end of the hunt.
Hmmm, no. It’s not because accusations are being made long after that the enquiry has been carefully conducted for a long time, and it’s not because an enquiry has been carefully conducted for a long time that it yielded strong evidences, either. They could have received a tip yesterday regarding someone about whom they have a sloppy file made 40 years ago and never checked since, for instance.
Exactly.
This, like Little Nemo’s argument “the fact that these accusations are being made after such a long time are evidence that the investigations were conducted carefully”, is part of what I mean by “romanticizing” Nazi hunting.
There’s an unspoken assumption at play here that accusations made by Nazi hunters are ipso facto more reliable or trustworthy or accurate than those resulting from other types of criminal investigations. People tend to have a romantic picture in their minds of Nazi hunters as a dedicated league of justice sworn to capture and punish some of the most vile evildoers in recent human history. Since this looks like a quintessential example of Good Guys pitted against Bad Guys, there’s a strong presumption that whatever the Good Guys are doing must be right.
But this is not a valid assumption to make about any type of real-world crime-fighting. There is no reason to think that people tracking down Nazis are less susceptible to ordinary human mistakes or biases than people tracking down other types of criminals.
To assume that “locating and identifying” suspected war criminals from several decades back is just a “mundane matter” not liable to any serious errors, or that a seventy-year time lag is prima facie evidence for the validity of an accusation, is pure romanticizing of the Nazi-hunter mission.
Here in the real world, it’s not Captain America or Green Lantern conducting these investigations: it’s ordinary fallible human beings, relying on informants who are sometimes venal, weak, confused or mistaken, and other forms of evidence that are sometimes ambiguous or misleading, just as in any other criminal investigation.
There is a specific reason these indictments have been pursued these last few years when they were not before: a new legal theory introduced in the May 2011 verdict on John Demjanjuk.
The new theory (by the court of first instance in Demjanjuk’s case; not yet tested in any other court because Demjanjuk’s appeal died with him in March 2012 before being decided by the appelate court) is: proof of being on a death camp’s staff roster for a given period of time constitutes proof of being an accessory to all murders in that camp within that period of time.
Before that decision, prosecutors needed to prove that the defendant personally participated in murder (not neccessarily that he personally pulled a trigger).
So, suddenly what were hopeless cases for prosecutors (merely placing a person’s duty station at a death camp by paperwork) became low hanging fruit.
The unfortunate thing with that legal theory (precedent does not work in Germany like it does in common law - you need a decision by the appelate court (the Bundesgerichtshof in criminal cases) for the theory to be authoritative) is that it probably never be put to the final test - a defendant would need to survive the extradion process, be still be mentally fit for trial in Germany and then hang onto life long enough for the appeal to be decided.
So, the new theory will probably never lead to people being punished de jure by a final court verdict, just to people being punished de facto by being subjected to the criminal justice process.
Ummm…no…
If some investigator were to uncover the identity of the guy who killed Elizabeth Short in 1947 and it turns out the suspect was still alive, I’d be impressed and I say the suspect should be arrested and put on trial. I’m not advocating we follow any special procedures for investigating or arresting former war criminals that we wouldn’t use for ordinary murderers.
The only reason we tend to see more war criminals being arrested decades after their crimes is because war crimes tend to get more attention. There are probably lots of unsolved murders from the forties but who’s investigating them? But if somebody wants to investigate them, let them do so.
The other factor is that war crimes are relatively easy to solve compared to more mundane crimes. A murder or bank robbery involves only a handful or people who are trying to conceal their act at the time they’re committing it. The chances that there will be any undiscovered evidence after a few decades is really remote.
But war crimes are different. They’re committed out in public by large organizations which means there are lots of witnesses and records, even if there are later attempts to eliminate the evidence.
So you’re saying that people are being harassed for no other reason then they worked at a death camp? Well, then you’re right, this is a travesty of justice.
Great points. The general purposes of criminal prosecution, conviction, and punishment are:
- Deterring the offender from repeating the offense. How likely is it that a nonagenarian is going to get up one morning and decide that the life of a death-camp guard is the kind of life they’d like to return to?
- Punishing the offender. In other words, pure retribution and revenge. It’s way to late for that. Imagine someone came and wanted to punish you for stealing Billie’s red crayon in third grade. That’s not who you are anymore.
- Keeping dangerous people locked away and unable to harm others. Come on, is a 90 year old really likely to up and start committing violent acts if we don’t incarcerate him?
- Deterring others from committing the same offense. There’s a potential point here, but it’s pretty weak. Imprisoning this guy means what - that maybe if you become a death camp guard, it is possible, but very unlikely, that you will be incarcerated in the waning years of your life? Not that great a deterrent.
The holocaust was an atrocious act. But taking revenge against a handful of elderly people who made, at most, a minimal contribution to it isn’t how to react to it. Yeah, they may have some moral responsibility. But the fact that they are guilty of that doesn’t mean that we need to get medieval on them.