Could the KKK just as easily be considered a criminal organisation - and all past members now subject to punishment?
Like many is thread - I’m not ready to “give a pass” to war criminals, sadists and those who facilitated murder.
However, as a practical matter - I don’t see what sort of exculpatory evidence you could be expected to mount as a defence 70 years after the fact. And for this alone - the trial, such as it would be, doesn’t satisfy my idea / concept of due process.
Of course - if, for whatever reason, there is strong and incontrovertible evidence that the person is question was indeed a murderer, that’s a different matter -
But just a name in a ledger as having been an 18 year old in a guard tower? That doesn’t quite cut it.
I believe his point is that perhaps they did find patsies long ago, and now they need new ones. They are Nazi hunters, perhaps they will always need new patsies.
Again, perhaps they did accuse based on false evidence years ago and concluded some sloppy investigations within a week. Now for their own reasons they need to do it again.
What if he actually did get that transfer? He transferred away from the horror and spent the rest of the war smuggling jews out of the country.
70 years later his name is on a piece of paper that says he works at the camp and he doesn’t have anybody left alive that can back up his story. Justice?
Unless we’re getting into denialist territory, why would there be a need for patsies? There were plenty of real war criminals to go around.
As for the idea that they’re “doing it again” are there any cases of somebody being accused of war crimes for which somebody else has already been convicted?
You seem to be edging into the conspiracy zone where people claim doctors invent diseases and prisons invent crimes in order to justify their existence. And Nazi Hunters invent Nazis for similar reasons. But that’s not how reality works - things like disease and crime and Nazis are all real and people are reacting to them not creating them.
It is not a wacky conspiracy theory to suggest that if you are going to be convicting people based on lists of names from almost a century ago, that there may be context to those names that time has erased.
When people argue that enough is enough and once X decades have passed, it’s no longer justifiable to pursue those guilty of serious crimes, I think of the following example:
Let’s say a 5-year-old child is kidnapped, abused and murdered. The guilty party is never caught. Fifty years later new evidence is uncovered pointing to a good suspect, who is now aged and in declining health, and has been an apparently upstanding member of the community for a long time. Do you tell the parents/siblings of that child that hey, it’s been so long, we have other fish to fry and let bygones be bygones?
There was a case presented on Forensic Files of two young couples that were brutalized by an armed man who was later stopped by police (not knowing what he was wanted for), and who shot both officers to death. He was not tracked down until decades later as an elderly man when he was arrested, tried and sentenced to prison (much to his disbelief and disgust).
Now multiply such examples by millions (as in the case of Nazi crimes).
How anyone can suggest not following up and prosecuting surviving perpetrators of horrific crimes on the basis of the passage of time and “priorities” is beyond me.
What makes you believe that if I think trying a war criminal 70 years later is too late, I would think differently about a child murderer? Especially since a war criminal might well have killed children too. So, yes, I would tell the siblings “it has been too long”.
Besides, that’s not a perfect example because my arguments included the fact that lowly guards were hunted down now while their higher ups have been left alone previously. So, a better parallel would be prosecuting 50 years after a minor accomplice in the crime while the actual rapist/murderer hasn’t been prosecuted before despite being known, because, say, he had connections protecting him. Or has been prosecuted and got a 2 years suspended sentence for the rape/murder.
Well, of course. Maybe we should have hanged Robert Byrd ;).
I’d also agree that this, you were working there, so you are an accessory is definitely “mission creep”. The cynic in me makes me wonder if the bounty hunting lobbyists were pushing for that redefinition.
I make much of the difference because you still clearly don’t understand the difference as demonstrated by your absurd attempt at a comparison above. There was exactly one function to the extermination camps: the mass murder of as many human beings in the quickest and most efficient manner possible. There was no other function to the death camps. They were not there to imprison people. Most ‘inmates’ were murdered within hours of arriving at the camps. Nobody was posted to a death camp who didn’t want to be there.
Horseshit. This new “standard” is a straw man entirely of your creation.
The thing is, though, I don’t think anybody in this thread except the OP (who AFAICT appears to have started the thread and then never posted in it again) is arguing that it’s not “justifiable” to continue pursuing suspected Nazis MERELY because “X decades have passed”.
Rather, it’s the combination of multiple factors (disappearance and degradation of evidence, the broad-brush nature of the indictment in the absence of any sustainable charges of specific crimes, incapacity of many of the suspects to stand trial or even understand the charges being made, circumstantial nature of the evidence put forth to argue for guilt, disparity in the pursuit of low-level suspects now versus high-level ones earlier, etc.) that is making a lot of posters here dubious about the value of the current incarnation of the Nazi-hunting mission.
AFAICT, nobody here except the OP ever said simply “Oh well, it was so long ago we should just forget about it now”. Rather, what the posters who disagree with you are saying is “Well, it was so long ago that pursuing the surviving suspects, none of whom is even accused of anything more specific than having some official connection with the death camps, has come to require some pretty severe point-stretching in order to scrape up some last-minute convictions before every possible suspect is dead.”
While your bolded may be technically true (the best kind of true), when the result of defiance is going to be obvious, they aren’t going to defy the illegal order. Do you really thing a guard like Feodor Fedorenko, a native Ukrainian, Soviet POW, and drafted to be a Treblinka guard, would have lasted a day past telling his Rottenführer that he wasn’t going to do this job anymore? At a minimum, back to the Soviet POW camp he’d have gone.
Even in cases of ethnic “Germans” like Johann Breyer’s, (Sudeten German, in Slovakia) where he told his entire training section in the SS that he couldn’t kill innocent people, or Oskar Groening, weren’t transferred immediately to a front line Waffen SS unit, but rather to other camps, or parts of the camp where they didn’t have to deal with prisoners usually. Groening was a clerk for most of his time at Auschwitz.
It’s a drastic expansion of our notions of criminal liability to where mere membership in a criminal organization (even one as foul as the SS-TV) constitutes accessory to murder, not proof of individual criminal acts committed by the accused, or not even proof of being in a conspiracy to commit murder. We don’t do that for Mafia members, we don’t do that for KKK members, and we shouldn’t do it here. For both of those groups, we still have to prove that the accused committed criminal acts, even if those acts are as innocuous as those required to prove conspiracy to commit the offense. Prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the guard in question bashed babies heads in on the side of the boxcar, and I’ll be right there with you demanding to hang the son-of-a-bitch, 85 years old or not. But just because he worked with people that did? Or that he didn’t overtly disagree enough with it to get transferred, so long as he didn’t have to do it himself? I can’t justify expanding criminal liability to include him.
Sure, why not? But I’m not talking hypothetically here. I’m not saying that being a member of the SS during the war should be illegal. I’m saying it is illegal. For instance, from the decision at the Nuremburg war trials:
Breyer was a member of an organization that was put in charge of genocide, that had genocide as its main purpose, and he worked at a facility created for the purpose of genocide, and people are saying it’s unfair to accuse him of genocide?
[QUOTE=Captain Amazing’s cite]
Tribunal declares to be criminal within the meaning of the Charter the group composed of those persons who had been officially accepted as members of the SS as enumerated in the preceding paragraph who became or remained members of the organisation with knowledge that it was being used for the commission of acts declared criminal by Article 6 of the Charter or who were personally implicated as members of the organisation in the commission of such crimes, excluding, however, those who were drafted into membership by the State in such a way as to give them no choice in the matter, and who had committed no such crimes.
[/QUOTE]
So I don’t see how this cite supports your point. Breyer was not guilty of a crime simply by being a member of the SS. Whether he committed a crime is something that would have to be decided in court. And, as has been pointed out several times, there is reason to doubt that a fair trial with a clear charge and sufficient data to make a ruling is possible at this stage.
This would be my points (well done suranyi!). I was listening to a piece on NPR yesterday about documented war crimes in Syria and I found myself thinking, "I’m glad we’re still chasing Nazis. The people who commit such acts need to know, deep in their hearts, that we will pursue such people forever. Not ‘for a while’ but forever. At no point will they be entirely safe from capture and imprisonment.
Which means, of course, that we should prosecute any other soldier who participated in the killing of civilians in Vietnam or Korea- even though those guys are now 70 or 80 years old and even if they acted under orders.
We sort of have a lousy record of meaningful prosecution of our own old dated war crimes.
I wanted to state upfront that I both highly respect your knowledge and highly regard your opinions on historical and military related matters. This is just something we are probably going to still have a difference of opinion on in the end.
If I can go back a second to earlier when you asked
As far as I’m concerned, just manning that guard tower is enough, regardless of whether Heinz even ever fired his rifle or not. His job in manning that guard tower was to keep the prisoners in the camp where mass murder was being conducted; the very act of performing that job makes one complicit in those mass murders regardless of if it can be proven or if he in fact did or did not personally shoot or mistreat any Jews or other “racial undesirables”. The same can be said of the camp commandant, and as far as I’m concerned the quartermaster and the baker as well.
Regarding specific individual cases you mentioned, Johann Breyer’s story sound incredibly fishy based upon what’s in wiki; “In 1942, at age 17, he enlisted in the Waffen SS and was assigned as a guard at Buchenwald and Auschwitz. He acknowledged serving as an armed guard and escorting prisoners to their work sites and denied any personal role in or witnessing of any atrocities.” The rest of his story may very well be true but he is clearly lying in claiming that yes he served as an armed guard at Buchenwald and Auschwitz but that he never witnessed any atrocities. I think you will agree that is simply not possible unless he were quite literally blind. Oskar Groening’s job sounds innocent enough as a clerk, but what did it actually entail?
His ‘objections’ to performing genocide were rather half-hearted and don’t come across as terribly noble either:
It’s not our (American) notion of criminal liability though; its Germany’s. There are laws against holocaust denial and the display of Nazi regalia in Germany that would never make it past the first amendment here. I’ve watched neo-Nazis march and as odious as it and they are they have a protected constitutional right to political speech which I believe they should have and as repugnant as they are would defend their right to. At the same time, given its history I don’t have a problem with Germany making the Nazi party or any neo-Nazi party illegal in ways that would be constitutionally unacceptable here.
In any event, it’s not mere membership in a criminal organization that is being constituted as proof of accessory to murder under this legal theory; it’s not that they were members of the SS-TV. It’s that they were members of the SS-TV posted to a death camp where tens or hundreds of thousands of human beings were murdered while they were there.