ENOUGH!
Direct comparisons of posters to Nazis and demands that posters be fucked simply because they disagree with one’s position have no legitimate purpose in this thread.
Knock it off or I will begin handing out Warnings.
[ /Moderating ]
I have no problem with people killing concentration camp guards, however:
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You have the problems inherent in mob/summary justice, particualry identification and culpabilty. Some of those killed claimed to something other than guards, some of the guards were conscripts who had only been assigned to the camp for a matter of weeks or days to allow the real perperatrators to escape. I think the only thing that really disturbs me about the massacre is how can we be sure that all of those killed really ‘deserved’ what was quite a terrible fate?
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With respect to the soldiers who killed camp guards, I don’t think indvidual soldier should be able to decide when basic humatarian rules such as killing prisoners do or don’t apply. Despite the extreme circumstances that’s still a fairly serious breach of discipline.
I would not though have advocated punishing the inmates who killed the guards in any form.To do so would’ve been peverse and would’ve served no purpose. An extreme and unique set of circumstances existed and I refuse to judge those people in those circumstances. I can sit at my computer in comfort typing this 65+ years later with the benefit of a fair degree of detachment and hindsight, but if I place myself in that situation I cannot say their (the inmates) actions were at all unreasonable. Quite frankly if that was me who had been treated in that way, I think I may well’ve be leading from the front.
The soldiers maybe should’ve been punished, but again due to the extreme and unique circumstances, I think it should’ev been a low level disciplinary punishment certianly below court martial. The purpose served by the punishment would merely be to say taht, yes their existed a special set of circumstances, however there are no circumstances were it is correct for soldiers to summarily execute prisoners in their charge.
I am not at all perturbed by the events nor the outcome of the investigation.
I am interested however in knowing by what twist of logic do those that feel the GI’s should have been prosecuted give a pass to the prisoners?
Indeed.
Those that were murdered while on duty in the towers only arrived a couple of weeks before.
The regular guards and commandant (Weiss) had fled on the 28th
Leaving behind only a skeleton crew of conscripts for guard duty and 2nd LT (Untersturmfuhrer) Wicker to surrender the camp to the allies.
Furthermore Dachau was a big complex. Besides the Prison camp for “politcal prisoners” and a large number of seperate slave labour camps , it also housed an infantry training school and a military hospital.
So besides the conscript guard there were, most probably, also quite a few murdered from the school and, worse, the hospital was full of wounded from the Eastern front.
The executions continued well into the night. Stopping at about 22:00 hours.
As the “incident at the wall” alone is estimated to count some 30 to 50 dead, the total number is certainly to be more then “a few dozen”.
Eisenhower himself estimated the total at 300.
When you decide to prosecute, one factor always taken into account by both the prosecutor and the judge is whether it serves the public interest to prosecute. Clearly there’s a distinction betweem prosecuting inmates who have been subjected to unbelievable ill-treatment who kill their former captors and prosecuting soldiers who summarily execute POWs for their crimes.
Secondly there’s the fact that the soldiers were also subject to rules that the inmates were not, such as the rules of war and the US army’s own codes. Discipline is important in an army and the minute you start allowing soldiers to kill prisoners it could be seen as a green light for those or other soldiers to take action in breach of the rules of war and the US army’s codes of conduct where and when they felt it was appropiate.
Whether it was morally right to prosecute the GIs is another thing, but I don’t see any real equivalency between the situation of the inmates and the situation of the GIs and certainly not enough for an all or nothing “well if you prosecute the GIs, you have to prosecute the inmates too” approach.
This happened more frequently in death camps liberated by Soviet soldiers. In my opinion anyone who on a voluntary basis was involved in the Holocaust ought to have been killed on the spot, or executed. A trial and speedy execution would have been better, but I will not pass judgement on soldiers - especially if they were Jewish - who became overwhelmed with anger and hate, and acted impulsively.
Looking at it from a legal standpoint I am willing to accept this.
However, from a purely moral/ethical view point, how is it any less murder if the now armed inmates indiscriminately kill their former captors than if the GI’s kill them? I struggle with this as it seems there is an assumption being made that the prisoners only killed those that “deserved it”. Well if they deserved it, does it really matter who the executioner is?
Why do Jewish soldiers get a special dispensation? They weren’t the largest grouping in Dachau by any means.
People do realise Dachau wasn’t strictly an extermination camp, right?
Dachau wasn’t an extermination camp at all, actually. I mean, a lot of prisoners died and were killed, of course, about 15,000 over the course of a few months near the end, but it didn’t have the facilities to systematically kill people the way that Birkenau or the Aktion Reinhard camps were.
+1
I disagree.
Give me a weapon and transport me back in time. I’ll do it.
There is a flaw in humanity when it comes to our concept in justice: we tend to believe that when one causes suffering, he must feel equal or greater suffering. Today, we shy away from the death penalty or public flogging, but there are still some crimes so horrible that we tend to think of them outside of any legal or moral consideration.
If civilized men went to war, we wouldn’t have wars to fight.
This convo reminds me of the Why We Fight episode of Band of Brothers.
:dubious: I meant before our modern, foward-thinking, democracy-loving, all up in each other’s business and Westernized world. Just look at our media. There wasn’t the same level of dissent 60 years ago. Back then, they were heroes. There was little humanizing of the enemy. Newspapers didn’t run touchy-feely articles about Japanese Americans or publish sauerkraut recipes.* It was Us v. Them.
I understand there was some German sympathy before our entry into the war, but I’m talking about our direct involvement in and up to the war’s end.
…which we regularly violated as a matter of policy.
But most of the Nazis were just ordinary men. I won’t put Hiroshima on par with the Holocaust, but we weren’t much better.
At any rate, I still doubt there’s any legit research done on the OP…but we have war movies all the time that deal with illegal and immoral acts. Saving Private Ryan was mentioned by a few Dopers. *Defiance * and Munich also comes to mind. Maybe I am rather uncivilized for my (as I assume it would be) “F— you, A-hole” mentality.
That was because Japan wouldn’t surrender and it was the least-bloodiest option while still breaking Japan’s stubborn and wicked will. It was a normal military operation.
That’s kind of what I meant. Understatement, you know…
Sorry. I thought you meant it wasn’t strictly an extermination camp…that it was an extermination camp as well as other things.
So in other words, before WW2.
Which means 1) You were entirely wrong as describing it as before the Geneva Conventions and 2) Since the mistreatment of prisoners was a matter of policy, you shouldn’t have a problem citing it. I don’t have any recollections of the US having a policy to kill prisoners, or even to use them for inappropriate labor or denying them mail or access to the Red Cross. I look forward to evidence that this was a matter of policy.
My bolding:
Not at all like the admirable iron-willed steadfastness and will of e.g. the Brits in the Blitz. No, the Japanese national will, that’s stubborn and wicked. No doubt inscrutable, too.
It’s not like the Japanese had made moves towards surrender before the bombs at all, or anything. Or like the Russian entry into Manchuria was a big factor.
It was not, and the people doing it, and having it done to them, knew this at the time.
I drop a bomb from a bomber on a group of people during a war and that is legal even though I have no way of knowing their actual involvement in the war.
Yet I put a bullet in the brain of a guard at a concentration camp that I am liberating and somehow that is illegal even though there is a high probability that he was shoving people into ovens moments before.
Baffling.
You are confusing ‘right’ with ‘legal’. Not always the same thing.
Steadfastness is only a good thing when you’re not the xenophobic assholes who are trying to take over the world. There is no hypocrisy here even if you don’t recognise a difference.
You have obviously not read up about the event in question .
- Dachau was not an extermination camp, like Auschwitz. There was no “shoving of people into ovens”. This was a camp for the internment of political prisoners, resistance fighters and slave labour (for which there were seperate sub-camps)
2)The regular guards had fled the day before, those left to surrender the camp were new arrivals.
3)Not only guards were murdered but also personell from the Infantry school that was on the Dachau grounds, as well as wounded combat-soldiers, that were in the military hospital, also on those grounds.