To me it seems especially obvious why they would go after a non-German. It’s an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to justice and prosecuting Nazis without the worry about a backlash of domestic sentiment. They don’t need to worry about addressing th issue of, “why go after this particular poor schmuck, when we all own a piece of the guilt for that era?” Though I’m sure some will bring that up, the public controversy will be insignificant compared to what it would be if they were going after “one of their own.”
I think the issue the people who question the need for this have is that it seems harsh to hold an individual responsible for what Nazi Germany was institutionally responsible for, and I somewhat agree with that sentiment. Problem is, Nazi Germany ceased to exist, and all the world was left with was individuals like Mr. Demjanjuk, but even those of us who believe he should be prosecuted have to admit that it’s an imperfect response to the Holocaust.
Furthermore, Germany can try to divide their own history all they want, but there’s something fundamentally troubling about a nation prosecuting people for crimes that they themselves aided and abetted. Israel’s prosecution didn’t have that problem, but they saw fit to release Demjanjuk for whatever reason.
They tried him for being a particular guard. He was a guard, but not the one who committed the crimes he was tried for. He is now to be tried for crimes he committed as another guard.
If individuals hadn’t obeyed, the government could not have committed the rimes.
That’s a copout, IMHO.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
See what you did? 
Opinions are like noses.
Everybody has one.
I submit your opinion would be different if the Government was taking folks from your ethnic or religious group and shoving them into gas chambers.
Emphasis added.
That’s my point. Going after Demjanjuk is an imperfect response to the crimes of Nazi Germany. Would the crimes he’s accused of committing have even happened but for the actions and sanction of Nazi Germany? The “following orders/I was conscripted” defense was rejected not because it was obvious it should be rejected, but because it was the only way the victims were going to get any kind of justice.
You know he did that for sure?
While I agree with your larger point about holding these bastards accountable for their actions, I think you actually undercut your own argument by drawing a moral distinction between extra-legal (“was told to do by a government official…”) and legal (“section ___ of code…”) murders.
Though not directly concerned with the Holocaust, Hitler’s notorious Commissar Order is an example of the Third Reich explicitly, publicly mandating that individual soldiers murder in cold blood some of their captives. IIRC, the Soviets took a dim view of those who killed these people, and I am in sympathy with them.
I would turn your second sentence on its head: Would the crimes of Nazi Germany even have happened but for the actions of countless individuals? I would also add that my understanding is that the Nuremberg Defense (“I was only following orders”) was rejected not because of the logistics of prosecution, but rather:
“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
It doesn’t undercut my argument in the least. It isn’t relevant to my argument because it wasn’t the case. Even if it were the case, the post to which I was responding was about ex post facto laws. That comes from our constitution, which wouldn’t, alas, be applicable elsewhere. Even if it were, all that would change is the venue where this bastard should be tried; if not Germany, then surely some international court could handle it. I didn’t bring up ways in which there having been a law to authorize it would change how to approach it; merely that isn’t the law and wasn’t the law so the argument is a red herring. However, he might have thought it was a law, so it was an opportunity for him to figure that out for himself while looking up a cite.
As I’ve said, murder is bad. And certainly no one here has argued otherwise. But there’s a difference in scale between murdering some people and attempting erase from history an entire race of people. Both are bad. One is just bad on a scale for which there is no comprehension.
The Soviets are hardly in a place to pass judgment from a moral standpoint. They killed, if memory serves, somewhere around 20 million people themselves. You figure that somewhere around 100 million died in the war. Subtract out the 6 million jews and others in the concentration camps and the soldiers who died and that leaves lots of other people who got dead.
Of course, the figures on how many people died aren’t known. Some people just make guesses, albeit they consider them good ones. I think once we’re past the 6 million people executed mark, the numbers no longer matter. Yes, 100 million dead people are worse than say a million, but the million itself is so egregious and such an affront that it’s hard for me to appreciate something 100 times larger. That isn’t to say that I can actually appreciate the devastation of such a minor magnitude of even 100,000 murders. The numbers are just too big, and the pain is too great to weed through.
Besides which is the fact that if 6 million deaths aren’t enough to persuade someone of the evils of the Nazis, then I don’t really believe for them there is a number sufficiently great. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this dude only killed 29,000(ish?) people, a small, small number in comparison. But this isn’t an absolute magnitude; it’s a relative one to what we’ve known before.
I’m not sure that a couple of murders warrant the execution of people, but the line where it drops off, for me, will fit comfortably between, say, 1 and a 100. 1 murder? Okay, we’ll put you in a jail and let you die there. 10 murders? Ok, we’ll stick your ass in a small, padded room and let you die there. 100 murders? Sorry, you’re dying ASAP. 29,000 murders? I don’t think there’s a speed within the laws of physics fast enough to kill something like that. Whatever it is, it isn’t a human being as I understand the concept. Sure, it walks like one, but it doesn’t act, think, or talk like one.
Anyway, all of that to say that I do take your point, but just keep in mind that it wasn’t an argument I was offering that if there had been a law it would have been okay. I was merely pointing out a flaw in the post to which I responded.
Chelmo was shut down in March of '43, but it was “reopened” on an ad hoc basis, with gas vans to help facilitate the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto. The last killings there were in November of '44, of a Sonderaktion 1005 work detachment. Belzec stopped operation in June of '43, Sobibor in October of '43 after the uprising, Treblinka II in November of '43, and Majdanek operated until the Soviets captured it in July of '44, but most of the mass extermination killing had stopped after Operation Harvest Festival in November '43.
There’s a kind of psychic danger in studying the Holocaust, necessary though it is. The enormity of it is so great, the actions so heinous, the magnitude so great, the mind rebels against it, it becomes incomprehensible, and it causes an ache in one’s soul.
I know. But I think it does a disservice to those who were slain not to at least try. But it does bring home the idea of being how careful you study the devil. I don’t know that I even want to understand why this sounded like a good idea. I mean, I have my own batshit crazy things in my mind, but something like this really takes the taco.
But nor will it do to just let if fade into history and say "bygones’. It’s a necessary evil which I hope casts a long shadow on humanity so that never again shall the world be torn asunder.
Israel released Demjanjuk because they had accused him of being the Treblinka guard known as “Ivan the Terrible” (probably Iwan Martschenko, probably died in 1943). “Ivan the Terrible” was known for such hideous crimes as cutting the breasts off women and forcing (at gun point) a prisoner to rape and sodomize a 12 year old girl. There was overwhelming proof showing that Demjanjuk was not “Ivan the Terrible”, so he was released.
Currently Demjanjuk is on trial for a completely different crime: being a guard at Sobibor and being an accessory to the murder of 29.000 people. There is currently no proof of him having directly killed anyone, but since Sobibor was purely a death camp he can’t defend himself by saying he didn’t know what was going on.
Also, Germany is not loathe to prosecute any of it’s own citzens that worked as guards at the deathcamps, so I don’t see anything troubling in the actions of the prosecution. The problem is that most of the people involved in “Aktion Reinhardt” weren’t Germans. The “Einsatzsstab Reinhardt” consisted of 92 German and Austrian “experts” (they got their start in the euthanasia projekt “Aktion T4”) and about 1000 Ukrainian and Lithuanian volunteers (Trawniki). Demjanjuk is accused of being one of the Trawniki.
Aren’t you kind of contradicting yourself? You say murder is bad, but you want to murder Demjanjuk for killing 29,000 people (or at least for being an accessory for the murder of 29,000 people)? My hope is that he had lots of nightmares for most of his life, unlike his boss Odilo Globocnik who killed himself with a cyanide capsule.
Since Germany doesn’t have a death penalty he won’t be murdered anyway. I do hope he rots in jail for the rest of his (probably short) life though. Killing him won’t bring back the 29,000 that died in Sobibor.
Yes, it’s contradictory to say that killing 1 person doesn’t invoke the death penalty, but killing a 100 does and extending to a man who did it 29 thousand times over.
It’s not at all contradictory. Murder is still bad. Sometimes though bad things are justified. In this case, killing him is less bad than letting him live.
‘God, chemotherapy is bad, so don’t take it.’
“Well, isn’t a 100% chance to die from caner worse than chemo?”
“That’s not the point. The point is that chemotherapy itself is bad; it makes people sick, you see. So, don’t take it; it’ll make you sick.”
“Oh okay. Thank you, doctor. I’ll not take the chemo since it’s bad. Now, about this cancer you say I have . . . is it bad too?”
Usually I just lurk these boards while learning a thing or two here and there, but the particular post quoted below kinda shocked me into registering to try to find out exactly what it’s about, exactly what he means. Apologies in advance to mods and the OP if this post is too much of a hijack or whatever. To be honest I’m not really too familiar with how this board is modded 
:eek: Why?
Which Bosnian nation?
Which Bosnian special unit organized by the Bosnian government?
You were killed in the holocaust? :eek::eek::eek:
:dubious: Really? Bosnians? Obviously people of all races and creeds could be found on the axis side during WW2 (Jews and “Mischlinge” included) but there was no official Bosnian fascist organization. Nedic’s Serbia and Pavlovic’s Croatia were both happily fascist Jew-killers, but a Bosnian equivalent did not exist. How you managed to be convinced that Serbs were friends of Jews during WWII is beyond me.
A quick run-down:
You have the fascist collaborators, Croat Ustase and Serb Cetniks, fighting against the only anti-fascists, the Partizani (ie. they were not actively killing Jews or collaborating with the Nazis, unlike the aforementioned two). Tito’s communist partizani were comprised of anti-fascists and anti-collaborationists of all ethnicities (Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs included, afterwards collectively referred to as Yugoslavs). After Tito’s partizani liberated all of Yugoslavia from the Nazis they went on to put all Nazi collaborationists on trial to be executed by firing squad (including Serb hero Draza Mihailovic). In Mihailovic’s famous “instructions” he states the ultimate goal of the Cetniks was to ethnically-cleanse the boarder of his “Greater Serbia” of all national minorities. I don’t know why you think he would have spared the jews of Sarajevo or elsewhere while mercilessly killing non-Serbs.
If you need something else to wear on your lapel, the flag of Tito’s Partizani would be your best bet. Indeed, ask any Serb, Croat, Bosniak, Slovenian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, etc etc who isn’t an ultranationalist what WWII-era Yugoslavia was about and they’ll tell you that it was Tito’s forces saving the region from the genocidal Germans, Ustache, and Chetniks (and the Serbian Military Administration), and a few other, smaller, Nazi collaborators.
No one nation or people were completely innocent at that era but to say that Bosnians are as culpable as the Ustache (what I assume you meant when you said ‘Croats’) while portraying Serb Chetniks and the the entire Serbian government post-occupation as being some sort of great defender of democracy and semites is, frankly, so absurd and contrary to what I know as accepted fact that it’s kinda surreal. All of Serbia was declared cleansed of Jews (Judenfrei, is the disgusting term for it, apparently) in 1942. Hard to achieve that kind of murderous efficiency without having the hearts and minds of the constituent people, no?
If this guy was involved with a concentration camp then he is guilty by definition. It has to be established that there will be a consequences for those that just ‘follow orders’.
Anyone who was a guard at a concentration camp is a war criminal and should be executed. Same goes for all those involved in modern day war crimes from Guantanamo to all the torture holes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You were there? You did nothing? Good bye.
How? How is killing him less bad than letting him live? He will not be sending any more people to the gas chambers in Sobibor. I doubt that killing him will set any kind of example. So what exactly are the advantages to killing him, compared to letting him rot in jail for the rest of his hopefully miserable life?
I do however see many disadvantages to killing him, not the least of which is the fact that we would morally and ethically be making ourselves equal to him.
When? Who decides? By your argument, the killing of several million Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists and other “undesirables” may also have been justified.
In my opinion bad things are never, ever justified.