What's the deal with all these "war criminals" they're catching?

Great Debates
1

I hope I put this on the correct board; it’s simply a question, but it might spark a debate as well.

It seems that every time I turn on the radio, they’ve arrested some 87 year-old German guy living a quiet life in some small town in America, and charging him with Nazi “war crimes.”

I thought we generally believe in not changing laws retroactively?

Let’s say that tomorrow, we enact a law that says it’s illegal to wear a red hat, and all people wearing red hats are to be shot on sight.

Of course, some police officers will do the right thing, and see this as wrong, and refuse to enforce the law. If the police chief is doing his job, those officers will be held accountable for their actions, and perhaps fired.

The rest of the officers will proceed to shoot and kill people who wear red hats, and people will say “they’re just doing their jobs.”

Then, ten years later, we decide to repeal the law. People are now free to wear red hats wherever and whenever they choose.

Do we now charge those police officers with murder? I was pretty sure that we wouldn’t.

If the German guy was a German citizen, and employed by Hitler’s military, wasn’t he just “doing his job” and “enforcing the laws” in existence at the time?

Maybe it’s as simple as “We Americans won the war; therefore, your German laws were never valid.”

I’m still somewhat unsure of my opinion on all this, and I really don’t have enough information to make a decision, so I’m hoping to learn more here.

P.S. I do not sympathize with people who do terrible things to others. I also sincerely wish more people would let their morals take precedence over their “duties.” But it sure appears that the world doesn’t work that way.

2

You don’t give a specific case, but…

Are they arresting soldiers or officers? It would make very little sense to arrest a soldier, unless they went out of their way to inflict harm. But officers are more understandable, as since they can issue orders, they’re responsible for what happens when those orders are carried out.

3

First of all, IIRC, “Crimes against Humanity” as defined, superceed all national laws. The World Court gets to try someone regardless if their own nation believes there was no crime. Granted, there are lots of practical problems with this, especially if you haven’t defeated the gov’t in question, but with WWII the point is pretty much moot.

Second, a lot of these cases have resulted in the person being deported from the US for lying on their immigration forms. They were asked if they were members of the military, the SS, etc, and many people apparently lied to be allowed into the US. There is no statue of limitations on that, they have entered the US under false terms and can get deported. This is often right back to the country they came from which are often interested in prosecuting them for war crimes which took place on their soil.

4

I think Mr. Pratchett’s term, though applied differently, is rather useful here:

We’re prosecuting people for crimes so horrible you can’t make a law against it.

5

Ok

Do a Google search for “Neurenburg Trials”. I’m sure you will find plenty of info on the legal precidence and procedures of the trials that will explain these things. Or you could rely on the ramblings of college students and bored office workers on a message board.

“Just following orders” was determined to not be an acceptable defense. A soldier has a moral obligation to disobey an order considered immoral or unjust.

Also, IIRC the German regular military was not held to the same level of accountability as the SS since their role was more of a traditional military mission and not genocide.

6

Uh, most of the Nazis I’ve heard of that have gotten arrested were doing more than just their job as soldiers- they were orchestrating mass murder. Ivan Demanjunik (sp?) was arrested, but let go due to insufficient evidence (IIRC). Adolf Eichmann, on the other hand, was found in South America and extradited to Israel, where he was subsequently executed. These aren’t mere soldiers, just take a look at the following Eichmann quote:

“I am going to jump into my grave laughing because the knowledge that I have the deaths of millions of people on my conscience is a source of extraordinary satisfaction to me.” Adolf Eichmann.
March 14th, 1945

7

The International Court of Justice didn’t exist prior to WWII. The central reason for the codification of human rights, as well as the creation of the United Nations and the ICJ, was the Nazi atrocities. They didn’t want people like them to be able to claim that they hadn’t broken any laws. I don’t recall exactly how it was justified in the case of the Nurumberg (note spelling) trials, but I believe that the acts were considered violations of customary international law. Customary international law exists when countries generally follow a rule, believing that they are bound by law. The concepts of jus cogens and erga omnes are relevant here, though I don’t think they were very developed prior to that time. They basically say that there are no exceptions to the prohibitions on genocide, torture, etc. Not all international law is written down.

8

Oops. That’s Nuremberg.

Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter reads:

9

Chris, your OP is premised on the assumption that the acts that lead to war crimes charges were legal under German law at the time.

They weren’t.

The Holocaust was never legal. The war crimes were never legal. There are many instances where German army officers refused to carry out orders relating to both, on the grounds that the actions ordered were illegal. And those officers weren’t punished.

There may be some argument that the reclassification of those illegal acts as new offenses - crimes against humanity, etc. - was improper. But the predicate acts themselves were always illegal.

Sua

10

You hit the nail on the head with your second point. I used to work for the Office of the Immigration Judge (aka Immigration Court), and had the, ummmmm, pleasure of dealing with a number of these cases (BTW, in a purely administrative capacity). Basically, in immigration law, a cardinal sin is lying to INS in order to obtain any type of benefit; if you commit fraud and are granted an immigration benefit because of it, INS can take the benefit away from you no matter how long after the fact they discover the fraud.

The way the war criminals get sucked into this mess is that most of them entered the U.S. after WWII as displaced persons, an immigration category which specifically excludes people who have engaged in the persecution of others. So if you can prove that an individual, no matter how long he’s been a U.S. permanent resident or naturalized citizen, gained his initial admission to the U.S. based on fraud (i.e. that he said he was a war refugee, but can’t be in the legal sense because he spent the war massacring Jews, etc.), the government can take it all away and deport him back to the country of his nationality.

There is an entire Office of Special Investigations within the Justice Department that is devoted to investigating allegations that Joe Schmoe, formerly known as Ivan Schmoeski, longtime U.S. resident/citizen, is actually a former concentration camp guard from German-occupied Ukraine or whatever; INS used to send us boxes and boxes of witness affidavits, archival evidence from Germany and the former Soviet Union, etc. that had been collected by OSI to prove their cases. The reason many of these cases are just coming about now, so many years after the fact, is that after the fall of the Iron Curtain, much evidence became available from heretofore unfriendly governments that previously wasn’t. I’m sure that the Feds had had suspicions about some of these guys before, but just didn’t have enough to back it up. After 1989/1990, I started seeing lots of DOJ job postings looking for German translators with historical background and experience reading archival documents; extra bonus if you knew another area language.

If the person in question is a U.S. citizen when OSI decides he’s a war criminal, it gets even messier; his citizenship has to be stripped (under the same general principles re: fraud) in District Court, where it was granted, before the guy can be placed in deportation proceedings. Of course, then by the time he’s in deportation proceedings, all the evidence from the denaturalization proceeding can be recycled for the deportation case. By then, it’s been pretty well established in court that Joe Schmoe is actually Ivan Schmoesky, so things tend to move a little faster.

Any other questions? It was an interesting, but stressful thing to be involved with; I once had to ask my boss to remove me from front desk duty on a day where a case like this was scheduled, as I was afraid I’d commit assault on an 87-year-old guy after having read the evidence INS planned to present in court.

11

Section 1251(a)(4)(D) says that anyone who “assisted in Nazi persecution or engaged in genocide” is deportable. So you don’t have to catch him lying, though that’s probably the easiest route.