Posted on 09/25/2013 11:37:46 AM PDT by nickcarraway
As Germany runs out of time to bring ex-Nazis to justice, we examine a country trying to come to terms with its history
It is a week in which Germany’s history has seemed inescapable. Yesterday, the German president Joachim Gauck became his country’s first head of state to visit Oradour-sur-Glane, the perfectly preserved French village where, in June 1944, 642 men, women and children were massacred by a Waffen-SS company. On Tuesday, German federal authorities announced that 30 men and women alleged to have acted as guards at the Auschwitz death camp should face prosecution. And at the start of the week, former SS officer Siert Bruins went on trial at a court in Hagen, western Germany, accused of murdering a Dutch resistance fighter while serving with a German border patrol.
The renewed focus on the Third Reich comes at a time when it is rapidly slipping beyond living memory. Bruins is 92; the oldest of the alleged death-camp guards facing indictments is 97. Nazi-hunters, fearing that time will cheat justice, launched a poster campaign in German cities and the Baltic states this summer to track down the last surviving perpetrators. The campaign, Operation Last Chance, told the German public that the hour was Spät – aber nicht zu spät – late, but not too late.
But there are signs that, despite the flurry of 11th-hour prosecutions, the tone of Germany’s national conversation about the Holocaust has shifted – that, for some Germans, it is already too late.
Hans Kundnani, author of Utopia or Auschwitz, a book about Germany’s 1968 generation and the Holocaust, says: “Some time around the millennium, a shift took place – the collective memory of Germans as perpetrators started to become weaker, a collective memory in which Germans are victims starts to become stronger.” The Allied bombings
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
It’s no less murder. But fairly obviously murdering a larger number of people is worse than killing a smaller number.
The Communist murderers of 100M+ innocents have been forgotten, while low-level camp guards implicated even remotely in the approximately 12M killed by the Nazis are still being pursued.
Does that seem right to you?
At least Germany has made a good effort to admit what happened and bring criminals to justice. The country that concerns me is Japan, where so far as I can tell there is still widespread denial about the crimes they perpetrated.
I’ve never understood the whole thing. Not excusing it, not denying it, just saying there’s more to this story than meets the eye.
As far as I’m concerned there has never been a solid public explanation offered as to why the Holocaust occurred. The Germans just woke up one morning and said “F it, let’s kill 10-12 million people”? It doesn’t make sense. You have to be really really (really) pissed off to scale up for that kind of wholesale slaughter. Nothing I’ve read or seen offers an explanation for the scale and intensity of what occurred.
That one should be pursued..Yes. That the other not...No. But politics will always be more important than morality and no hand is too bloody for a politician to shake in partnership.
I agree it's not right that certain people are not punished, but what your saying is going down a weird road.
In the United States, some people are convicted of murder, while other people get away with much worse crimes. (possibly their identities are never discovered)
Do you really think the United States should not prosecute murderers, if "worse" murderers have not been prosecuted? Because that's the comparison.
Now if you limited your debate to the level of Nazi that should be prosecuted or the fact that evidence is murky after that long, that is a difficult point,
Personally, I think a criminal should be punished for murder no matter how long after their crime is. But obviously, evidence is difficult at this point. It's also hard to say whether certain people were involved to a level of culpability.
In the case of Nazi Germany, war criminals could be punished at the Nuremberg trials, and subsequently by Germany, the U.S., and Israel in trials in those countries.
I wish Stalin or Mao could have gone on trial. I wish others beneath them could have. But how was that going to happen? Unless Russia, China, etc. did it? And that was never going to happen. Israel was able to kidnap Eichmann in Argentina, but because of the nature of communist countries such kidnappings were not possible.
If you guys have Superman's number, let us know so we can call him. Other than that, how was it possible to punish these terrible people?
(More than 30 years later they are holding some trials against the Khmer Rouge)
And Leftists demand I give up my rifles.
< spits>
no hand is too bloody for a politician to shake in partnership
Well.... I suppose you could start with Mein Kampf....where Hitler goes into great detail about his disgust and loathing of the Jewish people his belief that that are rats and parasites feeding off the host of the German people. Anti-Semetism is DEEPLY ENGRAINED in European history.
Leaders don’t like to hang other leaders since the political winds can go against them too.
“How/who would punish them?”
There is no real means. And then how far down the food chain does one go to punish the guilty?
Yeah, but one nutter with a screwed up monograph doesn’t make the trains run on time to Treblinka. Like I said, I’ve read the major works, and the closest I’ve come to seeing a candid discussion of contributing factors is Marci Shore’s recent *The Taste of Ashes*. There is more to this story than some thrice-gassed Austrian corporal with a poorly written rant the size of a Manhattan phone book suddenly waking to find everyone had hit the “like” button and deciding to whack over ten million of their fellow Europeans. There’s a lot of good research and publishing coming out of the region. Shore’s book and Snyder’s *Bloodlands* indicate there is a measure of revisionism or at least reevaluation occurring in the field.
Since that’s not my contention, I’m unclear who you are disagreeing with.
As others have pointed out, there are no high-level Nazi war criminals left alive.
There are also many, many Communist and other war criminals living happy and unpursued lives around the world.
Yet we persist in chasing down very elderly SS guys, as if the SS was the most egregiously evil institution in all world history.
I agree they were among the worst, and a contender for #1. But the time and energy spent on pursuing low-level Nazi war criminals relative to that spent pursuing much higher level criminals of other ideologies indicates to me that the issue for the pursuers is not the crimes they committed.
It’s that their ideology (and all other ideologies that can be associated with it, however illogically, such as American conservatism) must be demonized. I agree that Nazism should be denounced. What I’m objecting to is the disproportion in the reaction to Nazism vs. other murderous ideologies.
Good points. The only way to punish them is for their own present governments to be willing to do so. Since they aren’t, they won’t be.
Even the conventional history recognizes that the Nazis initially had no intention of killing all the Jews. What they had in mind was grand scale ethnic cleansing. With the Jews and other undesirables expelled from Europe, not murdered en masse. Though nobody was going to be bothered if a few, or a few hundred thousand, got killed in the process.
It wasn’t until January, 1942, at the earliest, if I remember correctly, that the decision was made to launch mass killing. And the major reason was that it had become obvious that due to the war there was just no way to exile the Jews in any reasonable timespan. Also the extensive German conquests in eastern Europe had multiplied by many times the number of Jews they would have to exile.
So they’d just kill them, instead.
The mass murder of Jews began in the summer of 1941. By that time, conditions in the Ghettos in Poland were abysmal. The Nazi's were purposely starving the Jews to death in all of the major ghettos. Thousands a month were already dying in Warsaw alone. Hitler made the decision to kill the Jews in 1939. He stated it publicly many times. In January 1939 he said, "Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"
I remember that episode from ‘’World At War’’. It frequently shows up on ‘’The Military Channel’’. The atrocity was the work of the 2nd. Waffen SS Panzer Division ‘’Das Reich’’. This unit was under the command of SS General Heinz Lammerding. Lammerding was in British custody after the end of the war. The French tried him in abstention and sentenced him to death but the Brits would not extradite him to France. Lammerding was released and returned to Dusseldorf where he was from and he became a successful business man, retiring in 1971 and dying peacefully in his sleep which is more than his victims ever got.
And what Olivier didn’t mention was that the women and kids were locked in that church and then it was set on fire. This was a favorite tactic of the SS. Real tough guys. Killing women and kids. Bloody bastards is all they were.
The mass murder of Jews began when Adolph Hitler opened his mouth and the German people shut theirs.
From 1958 to 1961 we lived in Poitiers, France. My Father was a career Army officer. One of the few things I remember clearly from that time was our visit to Oradour.
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