Auschwitz Guard on trial in Germany

[KevinNYC]

It's pretty astounding that some folks who worked at Auschwitz are still alive. (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/22/world/europe/oskar-groning-auschwitz-birkenau-guard-trial.html?_r=0)

[QUOTE]L

[HitandRun Reggie]

#notallnazis

[DonDadda59]

300,000 murders in 2 months in one location... that is frightening efficiency.

[Nick Young]

He probably felt guilty his whole life and is an old f*ck at 93 years old. I'd say forgive the old gramps. He probably did some dark shit he'll never admit to, but there's no way to prove it. Let him die. I wonder how the camp survivors feel though. It would be best if they got to deliver the verdict.

#notallnazis

[gigantes]

i read the other day that there was some legal wrinkle that made the case particularly more interesting in germany-- something about specific victims needing to be identified in order for charges of this sort to stick.

not because germany looks more kindly on nazis, but because of the way their law is written.

still, i see little if any point to punishing a very old man over this stuff. the very knowledge of what he was complicit in has given him decades to transform as a human being... which is exactly what it sounds like happened, given his testimony.

if there was a justice system that made more sense, this guy would be sentenced to go on speaking tours for the rest of his life to tell younger folks all the things he witnessed and was party to. especially the gang of pitiful idiots who think the holocaust was nothing but propaganda.

[The Iron Sheik]

the holocaust was forever ago. what he did was awful, but it sucks he has to get penalized for something that isn't really hurting people today

[DonDadda59]

the holocaust was forever ago. what he did was awful, but it sucks he has to get penalized for something that isn't really hurting people today

You can't have a direct hand in the systematic annihilation of hundreds of thousands of people and then just shrug it off because it happened when you were younger. I want to know why it took this long to get him to finally face the legal system for his crimes.

[DonDadda59]

I want to know why it's taking u so long to eat the booty

Statute of limitations.

[Dresta]

Pointless. Considering how young he was, how many superiors he would have had willing to shoot him had he raised a fuss, i don't see how the man can be found culpable, or how there can be any direct evidence that this was his fault, or if less people would've died had he not been there. This need to find low-level Nazis in their 90s, and prosecute them simply because of where they were stationed, doesn't make much sense to me. I mean, do they prosecute the surviving Jews that were complicit also? (and they were the ones doing the most disgusting jobs, calming down the arrivers, and then later poring over the bodies for anything of value - gold fillings etc.). How much is a young man stationed there responsible for such a ghastly construction, and the perverted command structure that ran it?

Ukrainian nationalists currently unfurl banners of nazis who engaged in the systematic extirpation of the Poles, and no one seems to care about that. So we offer our support to nazi ideas (call them a 'democratic revolt' even) while prosecuting 90+ year old former nazis just because they didn't commit suicide at Auschwitz? Unnecessary: there are many great crimes that haven't been punished anything like as rigorously as the Holocaust - this is one of the few things where people actually have been held accountable, and so this effort to chase down people like the above, looks to me, like little more than a witch-hunt (is there any evidence? that article did not make it seem as if there was).

[He Strong]

You can't have a direct hand in the systematic annihilation of hundreds of thousands of people and then just shrug it off because it happened when you were younger. I want to know why it took this long to get him to finally face the legal system for his crimes.

Agreed.

[gigantes]

it doesn't sound at all like he's shrugging it off. it sounds like he's taking direct responsibility for it and offering himself up if that's what's needed.


i agree with dresta... some of the worst and most brutal situations in life are where you're caught in the middle between the underdogs and the overdogs with damn well little you can do other than slit your throat.

a justice system which punishes such hapless folks is a pretty pointless justice system IMO.


one thing people seem to have kind of a weird concept about is justice. as in, every bit of suffering must be blamed on someone or something in life and that thing must be corrected or punished if possible.

but life is just rife with suffering and injustice either way. justice is something that only exists in the sphere of social creatures. it has no other existence across life, the cosmos and nature.

even a useful tool or concept like justice can be obsessed upon and/or abused IMO.

[rufuspaul]

“It is beyond question that I am morally complicit.


Hell the whole country was morally complicit. My great grandfather helped liberate one of the camps (can't remember which one) and I remember him saying you could smell the stench of rotting corpses from a few miles outside of the town. They forced the locals of the town to walk through the camp and help in the cleanup.

[Nick Young]

Hell the whole country was morally complicit. My great grandfather helped liberate one of the camps (can't remember which one) and I remember him saying you could smell the stench of rotting corpses from a few miles outside of the town. They forced the locals of the town to walk through the camp and help in the cleanup.
Yeah. You know all that shit about "we wanted to help but couldn't do anything to stop it. We would have been killed ourselves!" excuse many ex-nazis use is bullshit. A huge majority of them were in to it. Mob mentality swept them up. All you have to do is watch video footage of Hitler rallies to see how into the Nazi movement they all were. They didn't give a shit about dying Jews and gypsies and homosexuals and Poles until after the fact when the allies swooped in.


Still, this dude is 93. Let him die. No one is going to prove shit. He probably played a hand in personally killing a bunch of people but he would never admit to that and there's no way to prove it. Let him die and rot with his guilt.

[Akrazotile]

Yeah. You know all that shit about "we wanted to help but couldn't do anything to stop it. We would have been killed ourselves!" excuse many ex-nazis use is bullshit. A huge majority of them were in to it. Mob mentality swept them up. All you have to do is watch video footage of Hitler rallies to see how into the Nazi movement they all were. They didn't give a shit about dying Jews and gypsies and homosexuals and Poles until after the fact when the allies swooped in.


Still, this dude is 93. Let him die. No one is going to prove shit. He probably played a hand in personally killing a bunch of people but he would never admit to that and there's no way to prove it. Let him die and rot with his guilt.


It is funny how these dudes were all aryan pride, we da bess, kill em all when that was the zeitgeist... And now theyre all tolerance and humanity and support the treasure of diversity, once social pressure has made that the view a la mode.

Reality is these dudes are your everyday, common humans. Most people today are just like em. Go with the flow, take other people's word for what's important and sensible, and when it changes, make sure to adjust your own lipservice in concord.

All the libs who stopped complaining about civilian casualties and drone strikes and torture and war debts the MOMENT a democrat took office, theyre comparable in many ways to ol Mr. Gr

[Shade8780]

The man is 93. Let him live out the rest of his life in peace.

[DonDadda59]

The man is 93. Let him live out the rest of his life in peace.

Didn't the German government turn the concentration camps into museums? They should put the old dude in a small glass display for a few weeks. Make him wear his nazi uniform and then put him in a gas chamber at the end of the exhibit period.

Fair is fair.

[rufuspaul]

Everyone today thinks theyre far more moral and driven by their own internal compass than the average nazi soldier. Simply not true. People's mentalities are just products of being raised with different norms. 99% of people today dont come to their own moral conclusions - they dont even think about them.


It's true that antisemitism was widespread in Europe long before Hitler and you can see it rearing its ugly head nowadays too. But the way it was institutionalized and executed with such fervor and efficiency is beyond frightening. If you gotta punish a few 90 yr olds to keep it in the people's memory then have at it.

[Patrick Chewing]

The man is 93. Let him live out the rest of his life in peace.


He's been living his whole life in peace up until now. Now is when the real hell begins.

[KevinNYC]

Yeah. You know all that shit about "we wanted to help but couldn't do anything to stop it. We would have been killed ourselves!" excuse many ex-nazis use is bullshit. A huge majority of them were in to it. Mob mentality swept them up. All you have to do is watch video footage of Hitler rallies to see how into the Nazi movement they all were. They didn't give a shit about dying Jews and gypsies and homosexuals and Poles until after the fact when the allies swooped in.

There's a huge difference between and a rally in Germany and a death camp in Poland. This is especially true when the footage you are talking about is from the 30's before the Holocaust begun.

[KevinNYC]

The people are home were often lied to as well. (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007822)

Here's a German Propanganda film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEQPjvDXeZY) about a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Check out the soccer matches and music concerts.

[rufuspaul]

The people are home were often lied to as well. (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007822)

Here's a German Propanganda film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEQPjvDXeZY) about a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Check out the soccer matches and music concerts.


Nice. However, the German populace wasn't stupid. They lived through Kristallnacht. By 1942 they all had a good idea of what was going down.

[Nick Young]

There's a huge difference between and a rally in Germany and a death camp in Poland. This is especially true when the footage you are talking about is from the 30's before the Holocaust begun.
Lol stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Those rallies were getting the people hyped up on Hitler and preparing them for the coming holocaust and getting them pumped up to join in.

No, that shit wouldn't happen in any society on earth, and not every country would let a man like Hitler rise in to power.

Don't make any excuses for the German people and their bullshit behavior.

[Nick Young]

The people are home were often lied to as well. (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007822)

Here's a German Propanganda film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEQPjvDXeZY) about a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Check out the soccer matches and music concerts.
LOL dumbass, you seriously think average Germans didn't know about the death camps? Even people in the United States were hearing about them by 1940.:facepalm

Get your bullshit revisionist history out of here.

[gigantes]

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gcn6v7IaIfA/mqdefault.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcn6v7IaIfA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcn6v7IaIfA)


"That kid's long gone, this old man is all that's left, and I have to live with that."

[KevinNYC]

Nice. However, the German populace wasn't stupid. They lived through Kristallnacht. By 1942 they all had a good idea of what was going down.
There's still a giant gap between Kristallnacht and Treblinka.

I'm not claiming that Germans didn't know about antisemtism in 1942. I'm claiming that that mass of Germans didn't know for a fact that extermination camps with industrial gas chambers were in use in 1942.

In 1942 it was not clear that deportation meant annihilation. In fact, it wasn't until January 1942 that the "Final Solution" was formalized and the death camps were built. A lot of people confuse concentration camps with extermination camps and they are not the same. Dachau (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp#Purpose) was a concentration camp and a forced labor camp, people were released from Dachauand back into Germany society similar to a convict getting out of jail.Belzec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82%C5%BCec_extermination_camp) was an extermination camp. Only 7 Jews are thought to have survived it, so it's much less famous that Auschwitz. Auschwitz was both a concentration camp and an extermination camp. Birkenau was the extermination camp within Auschwitz. We know a lot more about Auschwitz because thousands survived Auschwitz including memorists like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi.

I've read I Will Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer) diaries from 1933-1945. He was a Jewish professor who converted to Protestantism and married a German woman. Because his was married to German woman, he lost his job and other humiliations but he was not deported.

I just checked on Google books and in early 1942 he heard a rumor that some deported Jews were shot as they exited the train. In December 1942 he said and I quote:
According to several reports the worst thing about the camp business so far is said to be the delousing of the women. While they ran around naked in the place from one station of the cross to the next, they were photographed by the Gestapo. In cold rainy weather they were made to stand in the yard for a long time with wet hair

In October 1943 he is talking about the possibility of surviving a concentration camp and risk of being killed. This is someone who was educated and actively seeking out information on the camps for his own survival.

[KevinNYC]

Lol stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Those rallies were getting the people hyped up on Hitler and preparing them for the coming holocaust and getting them pumped up to join in.

No, that shit wouldn't happen in any society on earth, and not every country would let a man like Hitler rise in to power.

Don't make any excuses for the German people and their bullshit behavior.
LOL dumbass, you seriously think average Germans didn't know about the death camps? Even people in the United States were hearing about them by 1940.:facepalm

Get your bullshit revisionist history out of here.Ignorance plus Arrogance? Oh yes, looks like Nick Young is back with his patented ahistorical asshat arrogance.

A. The revisionist history I linked to from the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum.

B. The view given by the USHMM tracks pretty well with the accepted history for decades after the war. It's recent revisionist history that says more Germans knew about the Final Solution as it happened. (Note: that revisionist doesn't equal inaccurate.)

C. No, the Holocaust is not the same as Nazi anti-semitism and it was certainly not mentioned at rallies in 1930s for the same reason that the Holocaust was not mentioned at these rallies. "The Final Solution" hadn't been decided yet.

D. "The Final Solution" was not formulated until January 1942 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference) and the first death camp, Belzec was only opened in March 1942. [QUOTE]The first concentration camps in Nazi Germany were established in 1933 as soon as the National Socialist regime developed. They were used for coercion, forced labour and imprisonment, not for mass murder. The camp system expanded dramatically with the onset of World War II.

....

The Nazis had decided to undertake the European-wide Final Solution to the Jewish Question during the Wannsee Conference, which was called by Obergruppenf

[gigantes]

Yeah, poor nazi

Throw em in a hole and let em die
well, could you at least let them snap in to a slimjim?

it requires even less effort from you than usual. :cheers:

[iamgine]

He was just a nameless soldier for the losing side. Punish the heads, but leave the common soldiers alone.

[daily]

Nice. However, the German populace wasn't stupid. They lived through Kristallnacht. By 1942 they all had a good idea of what was going down.

Exactly I read an account by a german woman whose father would come home from his deliveries, some took him to one or at least near one of the camps and he'd come home and cry for days. She never knew why until she was older and saw for herself what her father had seen

[KNOW1EDGE]

Why does his age or how long ago his crimes took place make it so he shouldn't be held responsible?

[Dresta]

Lol stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt. Those rallies were getting the people hyped up on Hitler and preparing them for the coming holocaust and getting them pumped up to join in.

No, that shit wouldn't happen in any society on earth, and not every country would let a man like Hitler rise in to power.

Don't make any excuses for the German people and their bullshit behavior.

Yes they would: it's called the mob, and what happens when someone capable of whipping up the mob emerges in periods of civil unrest and economic hardship (of a kind people today really cannot appreciate). Germany was arguably the most advanced nation with one of the most revered cultures in the world at the time - what happened there was proof that yes, something similar could well happen anywhere (if people are so quick to break-down and destroy the things that gave us success in the first place, and to replace them with new ideals, rationalised high-ideals).

I've always thought that characteristically, Germans are most like the English (they both have long histories of moral fanaticism), are both Northern subtypes, dedicated to industry and the Protestant ethic (as also in the North of America). When i look at a good old American fanatic like William Jennings Bryan, i see the only difference between him and a person like Hitler as a difference of degrees - their mentalities are the same (what i am doing is right, everybody better get with the program, or else); the furthest they got in the US was alcohol prohibition (which was tyrannical in itself - and who could forget the Mann Act? :lol ), but that isn't because of the character of the American people, but because America has a sensible Constitution and was founded on solid principles (that still have some resonance), and wasn't undergoing anything like the same degrees of hardship. If the mob ever got total control of the levers of power in the US i would expect something rather ghastly to happen too.

Not to mention that Bomber command was also happy to execute mass amounts of the German civilian population by incineration, with little or no clear tactical advantage to be gained from such barbarity. And the Americans, funnily enough, dropped a couple of nukes on Japan just to show off to the Soviets. It's very widely acknowledged that the punitive and arrogant 1919 Versailles treaty planted the seed for the next war, you ignore this too. Are you going to blame the individual pilots for this too?


it doesn't sound at all like he's shrugging it off. it sounds like he's taking direct responsibility for it and offering himself up if that's what's needed.


i agree with dresta... some of the worst and most brutal situations in life are where you're caught in the middle between the underdogs and the overdogs with damn well little you can do other than slit your throat.

a justice system which punishes such hapless folks is a pretty pointless justice system IMO.

.
Ah, i got called a 'nazi supporter' for that one, as if i've ever said anything pro-nazi in my life, how bout you?

The simply point I was making is: he wasn't an instigator, he was just a cog in the machine, and literally anyone could have replaced him - why is this so difficult for people to comprehend? Yes, you would have sat idly by as well, and don't forget it. Have some humility for Christ's sake - the vain moralisers, so infernally certain of their own rectitude, are always the ones to first cast others into the fire. Hitler, from my perspective, was just one of those types, but so extreme that his rectitude became a kind of insane mania. What can a person in his early twenties do in such a situation? Dragging one's heels seems to be the best an individual can do if they want to keep their lives.

[BasedTom]

keep statues for the soviets that destroyed your cities and raped your women, but treat your war veterans and servicemen like shit

The Allies were impressive bastards

[JohnnySic]

Why does his age or how long ago his crimes took place make it so he shouldn't be held responsible?
What's the point in prosecuting a 93 year old man who could drop dead at any moment? Even if he's guilty of crimes, its too late for justice. Its symbolic bs, and a waste of time and resources.

[rufuspaul]

I lived in Germany back in the late 80s and talked with more than a few old folks about their experiences during the war. They knew what was going on. They knew deep down that the propaganda they were being fed was bullshit. When their Jewish neighbors had to give up their businesses, their kids kicked out of German public schools, eventually their citizenship taken away and then finally rounded up and herded into rail cars, they knew they weren't going to any fancy retreat. They may have rationalized it in their minds at the time, but they knew some evil shit was going down. They weren't stupid.

[Yoshi]

The Milgram Experiment kinda explained this. Any one of us could have done the same thing, even under that kind of authority.

Very true.

[KNOW1EDGE]

What's the point in prosecuting a 93 year old man who could drop dead at any moment? Even if he's guilty of crimes, its too late for justice. Its symbolic bs, and a waste of time and resources.

the point is to hold criminals accountable for their actions.

Nothing will bring back the victims or be true "justice", but holding him responsible may serve as a form of justice and comfort to the victims family.

I don't really care either way. I was just curious as to why people are so hung up on his age. Old criminals should be held accountable just like young criminals IMO.

[Nick Young]

:pimp:
There's still a giant gap between Kristallnacht and Treblinka.

I'm not claiming that Germans didn't know about antisemtism in 1942. I'm claiming that that mass of Germans didn't know for a fact that extermination camps with industrial gas chambers were in use in 1942.

In 1942 it was not clear that deportation meant annihilation. In fact, it wasn't until January 1942 that the "Final Solution" was formalized and the death camps were built. A lot of people confuse concentration camps with extermination camps and they are not the same. Dachau (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp#Purpose) was a concentration camp and a forced labor camp, people were released from Dachauand back into Germany society similar to a convict getting out of jail.Belzec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%C5%82%C5%BCec_extermination_camp) was an extermination camp. Only 7 Jews are thought to have survived it, so it's much less famous that Auschwitz. Auschwitz was both a concentration camp and an extermination camp. Birkenau was the extermination camp within Auschwitz. We know a lot more about Auschwitz because thousands survived Auschwitz including memorists like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi.

I've read I Will Bear Witness, Victor Klemperer's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Klemperer) diaries from 1933-1945. He was a Jewish professor who converted to Protestantism and married a German woman. Because his was married to German woman, he lost his job and other humiliations but he was not deported.

I just checked on Google books and in early 1942 he heard a rumor that some deported Jews were shot as they exited the train. In December 1942 he said and I quote:

In October 1943 he is talking about the possibility of surviving a concentration camp and risk of being killed. This is someone who was educated and actively seeking out information on the camps for his own survival.
Stop trying to make excuses for them. If it was getting across the Atlantic Ocean that the Holocaust was happening as early as 1942 you can guarantee that the common German knew what was going on. Get your revisionist history bullshit out of here.

[Nick Young]

Yes they would: it's called the mob, and what happens when someone capable of whipping up the mob emerges in periods of civil unrest and economic hardship (of a kind people today really cannot appreciate). Germany was arguably the most advanced nation with one of the most revered cultures in the world at the time - what happened there was proof that yes, something similar could well happen anywhere (if people are so quick to break-down and destroy the things that gave us success in the first place, and to replace them with new ideals, rationalised high-ideals).

I've always thought that characteristically, Germans are most like the English (they both have long histories of moral fanaticism), are both Northern subtypes, dedicated to industry and the Protestant ethic (as also in the North of America). When i look at a good old American fanatic like William Jennings Bryan, i see the only difference between him and a person like Hitler as a difference of degrees - their mentalities are the same (what i am doing is right, everybody better get with the program, or else); the furthest they got in the US was alcohol prohibition (which was tyrannical in itself - and who could forget the Mann Act? :lol ), but that isn't because of the character of the American people, but because America has a sensible Constitution and was founded on solid principles (that still have some resonance), and wasn't undergoing anything like the same degrees of hardship. If the mob ever got total control of the levers of power in the US i would expect something rather ghastly to happen too.

Not to mention that Bomber command was also happy to execute mass amounts of the German civilian population by incineration, with little or no clear tactical advantage to be gained from such barbarity. And the Americans, funnily enough, dropped a couple of nukes on Japan just to show off to the Soviets. It's very widely acknowledged that the punitive and arrogant 1919 Versailles treaty planted the seed for the next war, you ignore this too. Are you going to blame the individual pilots for this too?


Ah, i got called a 'nazi supporter' for that one, as if i've ever said anything pro-nazi in my life, how bout you?

The simply point I was making is: he wasn't an instigator, he was just a cog in the machine, and literally anyone could have replaced him - why is this so difficult for people to comprehend? Yes, you would have sat idly by as well, and don't forget it. Have some humility for Christ's sake - the vain moralisers, so infernally certain of their own rectitude, are always the ones to first cast others into the fire. Hitler, from my perspective, was just one of those types, but so extreme that his rectitude became a kind of insane mania. What can a person in his early twenties do in such a situation? Dragging one's heels seems to be the best an individual can do if they want to keep their lives.
A man like Hitler would not be able to rise to power in just any society on earth.

[Jailblazers7]

Why is everybody like "He's 93 just let him live it out"? Dudes got like 1 or 2 years left of basically being a cripple. I say let that mother****er burn.

[rufuspaul]

Of course the US certainly isn't without blame in the "we had no idea this was going on and we were helpless to change anything" game. After the war the US made a special effort to re-patriate many of the Nazi's top scientists despite any atrocities they may have committed or been an accessory to, Werner Von Braun being probably the most famous of these.


per Wiki:

[Quote]
SS General Hans Kammler, who as an engineer had constructed several concentration camps, including Auschwitz, had a reputation for brutality and had originated the idea of using concentration camp prisoners as slave laborers in the rocket program. Arthur Rudolph, chief engineer of the V-2 rocket factory at Peenem

[32jazz]

What's the point in prosecuting a 93 year old man who could drop dead at any moment? Even if he's guilty of crimes, its too late for justice. Its symbolic bs, and a waste of time and resources.


To let anyone who has committed or thought of committing murder, atrocities ,etc.....that there is no statute of limitations.


If a guy (or guys) , killed & raped a loved one of yours or mine & DNA only catches them 60 years later when they are 85 should we just let him/them go?

Not waste time & resources & 85 year old murders & rapist of our loved one?


Its a bit more than just 'symbolic'.

[KevinNYC]

Stop trying to make excuses for them. If it was getting across the Atlantic Ocean that the Holocaust was happening as early as 1942 you can guarantee that the common German knew what was going on. Get your revisionist history bullshit out of here.

So no acknowledgement that your basic facts were wrong? Hitler rallies in 1930's did not involve cheering the Holocaust. Americans were not hearing about the Holocaust in 1940. No apology for being the one pedaling bullshit while accusing me of it?

Nice to see you have now moved the goalposts up to 1942. That's a nice touch. However, the fact is the Holocaust did not happen before the war and it was not planned before the war. The Final Solution was planned in Jan 1942. The Holocaust happened mainly in Poland. Why you think they average German in war time Germany would know was going in certain small places in Poland they never heard of is a bit baffling.

As Rufus points out if you feel like laying blame there was enough evil going on with the concentration camps, some of which, unlike the extermination camps, were located on German soil. There were no extermination camps operating inside Germany. Ask yourself why that was? Even French Jews from the Western front were shipped to Poland. Why go through that extra time and expense?

Why you think that pointing you that you have your facts wrong means I making excuses I have no idea. However, I do think it's unseemly to engage in cheap moral heroism while engaging in hindsight bias and the historian's fallacy and I think your simplification of what actually happened creeps up to that line.

[KevinNYC]

It's actually quite clear when Americans learned about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. An official with the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland sent a telegram about the reports he was hearing to colleagues in NY and London and they then informed the State Department and the British Front Office. This didn't become public knowledge until very late 1942 and even then, it was not front page news.

[QUOTE]FIRST NEWS OF THE HOLOCAUST
The extermination of European Jewry began when the German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. The Nazis attempted to keep the Holocaust a secret, but in August 1942, Dr. Gerhart Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, Switzerland, learned what was going on from a German source. Riegner asked American diplomats in Switzerland to inform Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, one of America

[KevinNYC]

Note that mid-1942, the telegram describes this plan as a future event.

However, this is not correct, what the author of the telegram didn't know was that the extermination camps were already up and running. There were massacres such as mass shootings before these camps were built and the first gassing took place not in camps but gas vans. The gas vans were operating by December 1941, but I don't think this information was known until after the war.

[gigantes]

Ah, i got called a 'nazi supporter' for that one, as if i've ever said anything pro-nazi in my life, how bout you?

The simply point I was making is: he wasn't an instigator, he was just a cog in the machine, and literally anyone could have replaced him - why is this so difficult for people to comprehend? Yes, you would have sat idly by as well, and don't forget it. Have some humility for Christ's sake - the vain moralisers, so infernally certain of their own rectitude, are always the ones to first cast others into the fire. Hitler, from my perspective, was just one of those types, but so extreme that his rectitude became a kind of insane mania. What can a person in his early twenties do in such a situation? Dragging one's heels seems to be the best an individual can do if they want to keep their lives.
hey, at least you beat the godwin's law average. maybe the best way to do that is in fact to talk about nazis in the first place. :P

but yeah, this all reminds me of the life dilemma presented when a buddhist is forced by circumstances to take up some repellant job such as being a butcher. the way forward being to treat the animals with respect and kindness, minimising stress and making their lives as pleasant as possible... until the slaughter occurred.

so yeah, people who are caught in the middle have certainly shown that they can resist and even sabotage the horror in all kinds of little ways... even to the point of risking getting caught... or even knowing with certainty that they would be caught eventually. it's either that or watch vital parts of your humanity slowly ooze out the door which in a very real way leads to madness and/or turning in to the living dead.

anyway, the examples of quiet heroes across the holocaust are legion. i see no reason why prison guards would be exempt... although of course their opportunities for helping people escape were probably a lot more limited than most. for them it would have been moreso the quiet game of resistance and little acts of kindness.

there was even an entire branch of german military intelligence (the abwehr) that worked through the war to sabotage hitler's plans. suspicion slowly but surely began to fall on them, although i forget how many of their heads rolled in the end. i imagine it helped obfuscate their cause that hitler encouraged many facets of the military to work against each other.

[Dresta]

There's no doubt it was a scary place to be, for most Germans, too. Few countries suffered as much as Germany did from the war (Poland, USSR, Serbia the only ones that suffered as much - or more, even). Few remember that Hitler, towards the end of the war, had given up the idea of winning, and was actually set on the destruction of the German people for failing him. The entire citizenry can not be held responsible for nazism, and certainly not a guy who would've been 20 at the start of the war. If there isn't any evidence of his engaging in wanton cruelty then i don't think a conviction is justified - no one can honestly say what they'd do in such a situation at such an age - only if you have lived through such an event can you possibly know. We best be focused on preventing such a concentration of power from ever again being allowed, but we seem to be forgetting rather quickly (because it is only the untrammelled state that is capable of producing such an environment in the modern world, that is the lesson of the past hundred years).

[Nick Young]

There's no doubt it was a scary place to be, for most Germans, too. Few countries suffered as much as Germany did from the war (Poland, USSR, Serbia the only ones that suffered as much - or more, even). Few remember that Hitler, towards the end of the war, had given up the idea of winning, and was actually set on the destruction of the German people for failing him. The entire citizenry can not be held responsible for nazism, and certainly not a guy who would've been 20 at the start of the war. If there isn't any evidence of his engaging in wanton cruelty then i don't think a conviction is justified - no one can honestly say what they'd do in such a situation at such an age - only if you have lived through such an event can you possibly know. We best be focused on preventing such a concentration of power from ever again being allowed, but we seem to be forgetting rather quickly (because it is only the untrammelled state that is capable of producing such an environment in the modern world, that is the lesson of the past hundred years).
The dude voluntarily went in to the SS. He wasn't forced in to the Nazi party out of fear. He joined SS because it was the cool thing to do at the time. I don't think conviction is justified either though.

[Overdrive]

A man like Hitler would not be able to rise to power in just any society on earth.

He would. People like Hitler and them getting in powerful positions is circumstancial and not based on the society itself. A society weakend by economic struggles always cries for some changing figure and more often than not those figures are radicals.

btw empty your inbox.

btw No.2: The guy can only be prosecuted now, because germany recently(don't know if recent months or years) passed a law that colaborateurs, that did not physically harm people during war times can still be held accountable. Wasn't like that before. Being part of the SS wouldn't get you into jail before, if there were no evidences for other crimes. It goes that far that in the 80s we had a president who was in the SS in ex-Yugoslavia. He later became general secretary of the UN..

[Dresta]

The dude voluntarily went in to the SS. He wasn't forced in to the Nazi party out of fear. He joined SS because it was the cool thing to do at the time. I don't think conviction is justified either though.
At what age and with what intent though? It's not like one could leave. My great-grandfather spent the war in a concentration camp, and my grandparents grew up in nazi-occupied Warsaw (one of the worst places to be), so i'm no stranger to nazi atrocities, but i know things are not so black and white as they sometimes seem, particularly when it comes to low-ranking and non-influential young men caught up in something they don't really understand.

When my G.grandfather was interned, he first had a guard that was kind, brought things to make things a bit easier and stuff, but someone discovered this, and he was promptly sent to the Eastern front (pretty close to a death warrant). The next one would starve them, and then occasionally throw in a joint of meat to watch the inmates fight over it for kicks. It is hard to know where the blame lies when cruelty is so systematically incentivised.

My Grandfather also spent a fair amount of time in prisons while Poland was under soviet control, where the cell had only a barred window, and the only thing to cover oneself is a sheet/rag. Twas a different world - we are so much softer now than we were and yet i'm supposed to believe present day Americans would put their necks on the line and endure the hardship of the Eastern front for complete strangers?

Somehow i doubt it. The problem with Americans is simply that they've never endured any real hardship as a nation (due to its geographical blessings), and this makes them unduly arrogant.

edit: fyi the penalty for any Pole who helped a Jew was the extermination of their entire family - was estimated in the book i read that for each person discovered to aid a Jew, retribution against them was extended, on average, to another nine people, babies to grandmothers.

[rufuspaul]

Few remember that Hitler, towards the end of the war, had given up the idea of winning, and was actually set on the destruction of the German people for failing him.


He also kept up the Final Solution all the way to the end. Dude was definitely cray cray.

[Quote]
Sebastian Haffner published the analysis in 1978 that Hitler from December 1941 accepted the failure of his goal to dominate Europe forever on his declaration of war against the United States, but that his withdrawal and apparent calm thereafter was sustained by the achievement of his second goal

[Dresta]

He also kept up the Final Solution all the way to the end. Dude was definitely cray cray.
Yeah, you only need to read a few pages of Mein Kampf to know the guy was batshit insane.

Another reason why i don't like this kind of prosecution is because it is dishonest scapegoating: they already let some really terrible offenders live out their lives (not just like Mengele, who escaped, but others who they just never prosecuted). Erich Von Dem Bach & Heinz Reinefarth were never prosecuted despite their terrible crimes, of which we have documented proof, the latter was even awarded a General's pension by West Germany. And what these men managed (along with Dirlewanger - thank God someone decided to beat him to death or perhaps he'd have got away with it too) in just a week in Warsaw was likely greater than the destruction created by a group like IS over years. And no one was ever prosecuted over what was done to Warsaw.

Moreover: Polish attempts to extradite Reinefarth for war crimes were refused by American authorities 24 Apr 1948 (NYT 25 Apr 1948:10:1). He was the guy who said he didn't have enough ammunition to shoot all the prisoners he had. The last request from Polish authorities was refused in july 1950. It says: Allied Liaison Branch, Bad Salzuflen, 24 July 1950 -
"After careful consideration of the case of Reinefarth Heinz the British authorities have decided that for security reasons extradition cannot be permitted", signed by Maj. K.I.M.Buchanan.

Hence why this particular case doesn't really make much sense to me. It's hardly the great wings of justice sweeping in to make all things right - instead it's the worthless prosecution of an irrelevant chump. All this did was remind me of the many terrible injustices that go completely unpunished :(.

[Nick Young]

I acknowledge the points you are making and wholeheartedly agree with them Dresta.

Also overdrive my inbox is empty. I await future PMs with both fear and trepidation.