Posted on 01/06/2014 7:24:35 AM PST by Olog-hai
The lawyer for a 92-year-old former Waffen SS member charged with killing a Dutch resistance fighter in 1944 asked a German court Monday to find his client not guilty.
Dutch-born Siert Bruins, now a German citizen, went on trial in September in the western city of Hagen. He is accused of killing resistance fighter Aldert Klaas Dijkema in September 1944 in Appingedam, near the German border in the northern Netherlands. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
the article didn’t give much background on this.
was the resistance fighter in plain clothes? spies are pretty much shot on the spot in a war setting.
I am not backing the SS, but the piece need to publish what went on(both sides, in detail) a little better.
At what point to you say “War is hell...Get over it!?”
Civilian clothing...occurring after invasion....very little in terms of witnesses at the scene. Mostly ‘he-said’ stories tied to this. I don’t see how Sherman now avoids being taken into court (150 years after the fact) for crimes against humanity in the south.
I agree with the prior sentiment. War is Hell. People get shot. If you start trying to make criminals out of one side or the other, its going to come back and bite you in the ass the next time around.
When are we going to Hanoi to arrest those for torturing and murdering our POW?
agreed.
I never see any trials condemning the Russians for the deaths of German prisoners or the rape of any female of any age that they committed upon entering Germany.
the germans were no angels...they were devils. But the Soviet Union was in my opinion as bad or worse.
but we never hear about them in the MSM.
Yeah, it left me a little baffled too. The resistance were fighting the Germans and the Germans were fighting the Resistance. So what? Unless they’re taking the position that the entire war was a war crime and anything done therein by the bad guys is prosecutable.
When you have an evil bastard from the SS. He is WAY late to his dirt nap and final reckoning!
Anyone in Hanoi who tortured our pilots should be held to account. Guarding the gate, even aggressively, is what soldiers do.
Sadistic predatory BS against surrendered powerless prisoners is wrong.
I think this guy probably deserves his fate for two reasons. He was convicted and sentenced to death in absentia in 1949 for this. The minute they were liberated, the Dutch were out to prosecute this guy. Second, the SS rolled into his homeland and his response was to become a traitor and join that lowlife organization.
And sounds like the facts in the case were that he and another guy on the post with him took the loyal Dutch citizen to a warehouse and executed him.
I’d actually have more sympathy for him if he was a German, (as opposed to a traitorous Dutchman) who could actually say he was acting under direct orders.
Imagine America was invaded, and your brother was resisting the foreign invader in some way, but your old neighbor joined the worst of the enemy. He murders your brother in cold blood. I doubt most here would be willing to just shrug and say “that’s war” and let the treasonous neighbor have their nice golden years in happiness.
Most here, if they could find the SOB, would show up one night at the old traitors home with a suppressed 22 pistol.
USSR was indeed as bad. However, they were never conquered and dismantled like Nazi Germany was. That’s why NKVD killers as bad or worse than this SS guy are never punished. Same for the Hanoi Hilton animals.
But I fail to see why a Nazi thug should be excused simply because others just as bad aren’t able to be dealt with. That’d be like refusing to prosecute some bank robbers because others of them made a successful getaway.
And you are correct, we will never hear about Soviet bad guys in the MSM because they like marxists. The Che worship is another example.
But caring that Nazi SS murderers are being unfairly singled out is way low on my sympathy list.
Since it was the job of resistence fighters to kill German troops, I fail to see where a war crime was committed here. It is not as if the person killed was an innocent civilian bystander. The whole thing is simply ridiculous. A witch hunt no less.
Not as baffling when you understand he was not a German. He was a Dutchman who joined the SS when they invaded his country. He is the same as Obama who colludes with the moslem brotherhood.
Locals who help murder people resisting the SS invaders are actually lower than the German SS invader in my opinion. At least a kraut could claim they were just being a patriotic German, believing they were serving in an elite unit, and following orders.
Traitors are worse. That’s why indian scouts serving the US Cavalry knew very well the special hell that awaited them if they were captured.
nor I if he killed someone outside of the Geneva convention rules. but by this article it is impossible to know whether he did or not.
and think about this.....there were plenty of our own GIs who were so sick of fighting the basturds (German, Japanese etc)that they took no prisoners. I cannot condemn my countrymen who watched his buddies get mowed down and then did what he though was needed as just punishment. War IS Hell.
Oh, OK, this is more like a trial for treason. Thanks for clearing it up.
And was it the job of a Dutch citizen to join the SS and kill fellow Dutchmen? That would be a crime if an American would have done the same thing.
Don’t know of it ever happening, but if an American in WWII would have decided that the Germans were right, and killed ANY American on the German behalf, that would indeed have been a prosecutable crime. He’s lucky the Dutch only intend to imprison him. And I can’t imagine a Dutch prison would be very bad anyway. Who cares?
Geneva Convention? I laugh at the legalistic gymnastics I often see used to try to excuse Nazis. Ok, Geneva convention, lets just go with that.
I bet the Dutch had laws about treason. Would you oppose his prosecution by the Dutch, for violating Dutch law? Should America have been unable to prosecute that guy who fought for the Taliban and murdered our CIA operative?
And its 180 degrees wrong to compare GIs and Marines who took no prisoners in battle, to a traitor who joined the enemy of his own free will and murdered his own countrymen.
Finally yes, war is hell. So maybe we should tell that to an SS whiner who doesn’t want his share of the hell.
He was a traitor,,, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
OK.... speculate... we have a civil war, the communist currently in office vs patriots who secede in a group of states. the POSOTUS has no problem shooting American citizens(in real life, he has already fired those general officers who wouldn't.)
the PATRIOTS are being backed by Canada, for some reason. The great white north has a professional army and those states that border Canada invite their army in and many Patriots join the Canadian army to fight the Marxist who has defiled our constitution.
I do understand the moral inversion that was the Nazis and do not in any way back them....but the Dutch and the Scandinavian countries are closely related, in society and shared mythology to the Germans. the Quislings of Norway were executed after the war....but the Finns never regretted their support of the Germans over the hated Soviets.
just an exercise in Monday morning quarterbacking...Lord knows I watched no football this past weekend..
The Dutch had no civil war in the 1940s, and didn’t exactly invite the Nazis in. Even Bendict Arnold had a better defense that this guy.
And that Nordic brotherhood silliness is very appreciated by Goebels.
And if it exists, maybe the Germans should have shown some respect to their “family members”.
He should just apologize, and go to jail. And anyway, a Dutch jail for him would probably be like an old folks home he wasn’t allowed to leave. The turd is 92, and probably sits there having tea in the morning, reads the paper, and watches TV. If he goes to prison, he’ll have morning tea, read the paper and watch TV all day. All he’ll lose is the view outside the window and the freedom to go for a long walk. No big.
The Geneva Convention would not have applied to resistance fighters because they were irregulars and not in uniform. However, other violations of Geneva occurred frequently, as we all know.
The greatest proof of this was the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, where the Germans treated captured partisans as prisoners of war, perhaps foreseeing war crimes trials in the future.
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