You know, maybe instead of prosecuting some old man who was only a minor figure, maybe a better idea is to get them to spill the beans and tell all that they know about the operations. Their are still some gaps in the knowledge of what happened and their memories could serve as valuable tools.
I’m okay with continuing the pursuit. Say they find out a wanted Nazi died in 1980. While investigating the circumstances of his post-war years, investigators uncover evidence of a network of Nazi-sympathizers who helped the fugitive. Some members of this network may still be alive. I can’t say I object to this information coming to light.
Yeah he was only “Ivan the Bloody”!
BTW, the above sentence isn’t meant as a joke or parody.
I think 70 years is about enough.
Do these “Nazi hunters” really have nothing better to do?
I think 70 years is about enough.
Do these “Nazi hunters” really have nothing better to do?
Like double posting to message boards, you mean?
If you honestly think anyone who worked at an extermination camp may have “at most” made a minimal contribution to the holocaust, you’re high.
That’s sort of the point we are trying to make. Why are “new legal theor[ies]” being invented seventy years after the fact? Because of mission creep.
They can’t just pack up and go home; they have to keep scraping the bottom of the barrel, prosecuting people further down the food chain. It won’t end until every German alive in 1945 is dead.
Also, while I appreciate Germany taking responsibility for its role in the holocaust, it has no moral authority to prosecute these people. They were acting under the direction of the German government! It would be like Alabama prosecuting a white student for attempting to block the admission of blacks to the University of Alabama in 1963.
Did you even read what the new legal theory (singular) is, or did you stop reading there? Because nothing you wrote follows from it; it does not involve scraping the bottom of the barrel, prosecuting anyone further down the food chain, or any desire to prosecute everyone alive in Germany in 1945 on some vague moral principle. Here, I’ll even repeat the actual legal theory for you:
Yes it does. The new legal theory states that merely by being on the staff roster of a concentration camp is per se evidence of commission of the atrocities. Previously the state had to show actual crimes being committed.
That leads to scraping the bottom of the barrel and it’s only one step removed from “merely being a German citizen shows material support for the atrocities” and the same presumption of guilt.
So where does a guard fall on the spectrum? He’s obviously more complicit than a mailman, but he also wasn’t the one turning the valves on the gas chamber.
It shouldn’t be different. I’d support some kind of statute of limitations even for murder.
At any rate, I’m still not convinced that pursuit-until-death would be any kind of motivating factor to not commit war crimes. Suppose the alternative was that we stopped after 25 years. Would anyone really think “Changing my identity and living in fear of capture for 25 years doesn’t sound too bad, but for the rest of my life? I better rethink this!”?
This is a genuine question because obviously I’m fairly ignorant of the structure of Nazi forces–but was Johann Breyer a part of the Einsatzgruppen? The article says he was Waffen SS stationed at Auschwitz, but it’s not clear to me that it implies he was necessarily Einsatzgruppen.
No, he wasn’t a member of an Einsatzgrupe. Per Dissonance’s post, not many were. They were under the Reich Security Administration at first, and eventually, the SS, but they weren’t part of the SS-TV that ran the concentration and death camps. Breyer was in the SS-TV. Unlike the SS-TV, which drew its membership from the SS, Einsatzgruppen were formed from a wide variety of sources: SS; various police groups like the Orpo and Sipo; native auxiliaries. They followed behind the regular Wehrmacht units they were attached to, and who provided logistical support, like hyenas follow lions. Once the Wehrmacht pushed through an area, the Einsatzgrupe in that area would start gathering together all of the Jews, Communist Party officials, and anyone else the Nazis wanted dead. They then incited pogroms by the locals, and later, when the killing wasn’t going fast enough, took on themselves to organize and carry out massacres like Babi Yar.
Breyer, OTOH, volunteered/got drafted by the Waffen SS, which put him in the SS-TV, and shipped him to Buchenwald to be a guard. When he pissed off the commandant there, he got transferred to Auschwitz, also as a perimeter guard. He then later deserted his post by not coming back from a family leave, and then rejoined the Waffen SS, fighting in a combat unit during the last days of the Reich. The opinions for his numerous legal cases, as the US tried to kick him out, are fascinating reading.
Differences as I see it between his job at Buchenwald/Auschwitz and an Einsatzgrupe member, a camp guard saw brutality and evidence of massive killings of non-combatants, who were killed solely due to their ethnicity (as it wasn’t necessary to be a practicing Jew to be marked for death). It’s more likely than not that he participated in it himself, if such participation was to only actively threaten an inmate. I don’t think it’s inevitable that he would have though, however, especially given the facts in his case. As a member of an Einsatzgrupe, on the other hand, I’d need iron-clad evidence that he did not directly solicit or cause the murders of at least hundreds of people, to believe he wasn’t guilty of a war crime. I’d still want evidence tying him to a criminal act before I would convict him of a war crime but it would stretch credulity for me to think he didn’t commit any at all. The groups were too small, they killed too many people, for me to think an Einsatzgrupe member was busy having a smoke the whole time his buddies rounded up a couple of hundred Jews and Slavs and machine gunned them
And again there’s that misuse of the word concentration camp. It isn’t even the word used in Mops quote, we are not talking about the concentration camps. We are talking about the death camps or extermination camps. That name is all that went on in them; their only purpose was the mass extermination of Jews and other racial undesirables on a truly horrific scale. So yes, it’s a perfectly reasonable legal theory that being posted to a death camp is per se evidence of complicity in mass murder. There was no other function to the camps aside from committing mass murder. These were the death camps set up from late 1941 to commit genocide at, not the prewar concentration camps to throw political opponents and racial scapegoats into.
The fuck it does, and this statement shows just how ignorant you are about the topic you keep yammering about. Being a member of the SS-TV posted on the roster at a death camp is about as far from one step removed from “merely being a German citizen” can be in terms of providing material support for atrocities. There was only one reason to be posted to a death camp.
If I had to sum up my general take on it, the time to stop hunting World War II Nazis is when there are no longer any WWII Nazis.
So where is the demarcation line and who decides where that is? As was posted upthread, the mailman who delivered mail to Auschwitz saw the crematoria and the mass graves (or it should be assumed he did under this new theory). Communication by mail was essential for the functioning of these camps. Without the mailman’s service, there would be no functioning death camps.
However, you seem to agree that this would be absurd to try the mailman for crimes against humanity. But if a guy was a janitor at Auschwitz and his name mistakenly made it on the roster, he is now per se guilty. He has no way of making a case in his defense because evidence has disappeared in the past seventy fucking years. Anyone who could show his innocence is likely dead and records are lost.
Also you make much of the difference between death camps and concentration camps. Although the latter is subjectively better in the sense that I would rather be shot than drowned, the guards at the latter would seem to get a free pass even though they imprisoned people in deplorable conditions knowing that thousands would die from malnutrition and overwork.
This new “standard” is rootless, malleable, is over and under inclusive, and denies everyone accused under it basic due process rights. It only serves to keep the “Nazi hunters” from getting real jobs.
As Mops pointed out upthread, there’s a particular legal reason there’s a mass of new or reopened investigations in the past few months:
Like I said, I’m all in favor of prosecuting war crimes as a general thing. But this desperate race against time just to make a circumstantial argument that a bunch of extremely old and mostly sick or incapacitated persons, who are not even being accused of any specific crimes in the death camps, can plausibly be accused of having had clearer awareness of the general crimes in the death camps than they’ve been willing to admit…
…is this really such a triumphant victory for truth and justice as all that?
I think I’d argue that being a member of the SS and working in the death camps IS a specific crime. The SS was a criminal organization, and the extermination camps were crimes against humanity, so membership in the one and employment in the other is criminal. That includes the janitor.
But not the mailman who kept Auschwitz running just as much as the janitor?
But that’s not how we normally consider crimes. Usually factors like intent and/or awareness are crucial.
If I knowingly abet a crime, sure that’s a crime. Or if I choose to look the other way, that’s a (lesser) crime.
Now it’s probably true that to work there you probably had to do one of the above, if not directly be a murderer yourself. But that doesn’t mean we can just declare “If there, then guilty”. If someone claims they had no awareness of the crimes, or tried to stop them or whatever, yeah the prosecution has to find counter-arguments or evidence.
And as I said upthread, I think such evidence really needs to be gathered in advance for these kinds of cases. It’s in no-one’s interest to extradite some frail old man, get him in the dock, only to say “We really don’t know if you committed any crimes. You’re free to go and be ostracized for your remaining days”.
Right. What if the janitor said that once he became aware of the exterminations, he immediately asked to be transferred and told everyone that they were crazy for doing this. Then the commandant had a little chat with him and told him that if he enjoyed continuing to breathe oxygen, he would mop the floors and keep his mouth shut.
Not good enough? Still guilty for being on the roster? No innocent until proven guilty? Even if he can call witnesses in his defense, they are likely all dead. What sort of justice is that?