Posted on 11/27/2009 3:34:31 PM PST by lizol
Suspect in Nazi trial proud of his SS service
By DAVID RISING (AP) – 9 hours ago
AACHEN, Germany — A man accused of murdering Dutch civilians as a member of a Waffen SS hit squad said at his trial Friday that he was proud about being chosen as a volunteer to fight for the Nazis.
Heinrich Boere, 88, made his first comments to the Aachen state court since his trial opened at the end of October. As part of that SS unit, he is charged with killing a bicycle-shop owner, a pharmacist and another civilian. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison if convicted.
Boere said he remembered his mother waking him up the night in 1940 that Germany invaded his hometown in the Netherlands and seeing Stuka dive-bombers overhead. Instead of fearing the German bombs, Boere, whose father was Dutch and mother German, said his family was elated as the attack unfolded.
"(My mother) said 'they're coming' now things will be better," he told the court, speaking animatedly to the panel of judges.
"It was better," he added later.
Boere was born in Eschweiler, Germany, on the outskirts of Aachen where he lives today, but moved to the Netherlands when he was an infant.
After the Germans had overrun his hometown of Maastricht and the rest of the Netherlands, he remembers as an 18-year-old seeing a recruiting poster for the Waffen SS, signed by Heinrich Himmler. It offered German citizenship after two years of service and the possibility of becoming a policeman after that.
He showed up with 100 other Dutchmen at the recruitment office and was one of 15 chosen.
"I was very proud," Boere told the court in a statement read by his attorney before he answered questions from the presiding judge.
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
Charming fellow.
The only thing a member of the SS deserves is a public death.
Holy smokes.
Give him a flannel shirt, darker hair, a flat top haircut and a hand rolled cigarette...and that’s my grandpa circa 1970.
Spittin image
The SS was more complicated than that. While that rule certainly applies to the General SS, many parts of the Waffen SS had no war crimes associated with them at all. An entire battalion of Waffen SS that had been fighting against the Russians, who would kill any SS they caught at that point, though they had many Waffen SS POWs that they didn’t kill, escaped the US forces, who were hanging any SS they caught, though *they* didn’t kill many of their Waffen SS prisoners, and made it to the French sector.
The French reorganized them as a Foreign Legion battalion, including their officers, and sent them to fight communists in French Indochina, where they continued to fight through the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954.
I met a Waffen SS officer who had been drafted into the SS at 17, married to a woman he had never met, and was put on a plane to take him East as the Russians were advancing on Berlin, in the final weeks of the war. After a short time as a POW, he and his wife legally migrated to the US, where he finished his college degree and became a professor. Eventually he was elected as a city councilman and then a State legislator. His son became a US Army officer.
My point in all of this is that both France and the US and, in this case, Germany, have at some point forgiven those individuals who served in the Waffen SS, but who have no known criminal association. Even the Russians returned their Waffen SS POWs to Germany for the most part, after the war.
This in effect, turns the current case from an international crime, to a disagreement between Germany and the Netherlands. If any moral relativism is to be found, it will be found there.
That being said, what is not relative are those individuals who were members of the General SS, or several other overlapping organizations.
They all do have, and maintain blanket guilt among all the warring nations, including Germany. However, in many cases they have been sent to prison, then released when their term was up. Yet this *only* applies that the nation that imprisoned them. Many still face the identical criminal charges in other nations, for which they can still be tried, even though they have already been punished.
This shows the considerable confusion in the process.
Does it matter what he the individual did, or is he guilty for crimes of "the SS". That's a pretty broad standard, one I'm not sure I can agree with.
I don't agree that my statements constitute 'moral relativism' at all. In fact I am arguing for a absolute moral code and enforcement of the Laws of War as they stood circa 1944. If he, individually is guilty of violating those laws then he should pay the price. If he is not then he should be left alone, and not harrassed out of some ancient hatred of the losing side in a long passed war.
The man was a traitor to his country who should have died a dog’s death.
But they've gone all-out against John Demjanjuk, as if to say, "See, not only Germans were Nazi War Criminals."
There are no “civilians” in a full-fledeged war.
Merely support and logistic troops.
What's your point? War is hell? Had the German's won the war I am certain that many British and US airmen and officers would have been tried and found guilty of atrocities in the fire bombing of German civilian centers. My point is that soldiers are soldiers regardless of the uniform they are expected to wear. Soldiers don't get to make the decisions about going to war and nobody appreciates peace more than a soldier.
My point is a comment regarding German civilians being upset with allied bombing.
There were no (or exceedingly few) German civilians, merely cogs in a Nazi war machine. All (or essentially all) were fair game.
“Had the German’s won the war I am certain that many British and US airmen and officers would have been tried and found guilty of atrocities in the fire bombing of German civilian centers.”
Sure. The difference being the Germans were guilty and the US airmen and officers were not.
The German nation embraced a racial evil and, like the Cannanites before them, deserved to be destroyed.
The women and children of Dresden and a dozen other German cities were as guiltless as any other victims of the war. Your hatred of all things German is as irrational as Nazi hatred of you.
Nonsense. They worked in factories, made goods and food to support the Nazis, and gladly benefited from looted goods from innocent nations and people.
I have no dislike or hatred of modern Germans as a group, but to regret for a moment the necessity of war upon their entire civilization -— and all their deaths -— at the time in question is romanticism.
With the rarest of exceptions, they were happily Nazis. They happily killed and happily subjugated others. The only reason we show them the slightest mercy is we needed them as a buffer against an even greater evil, Stalin.
Bull Shit! Before subjugating the rest of Europe the Nazi's first subjugated the Germans. The Jews were not the only and not the first to be targeted with arrest, imprisonment and death by the Nazi's. The terror bombing of German civilians may have been a necessary evil in the defeat of a greater evil, but it was evil none the less.
Bit harsh.
“Your hatred of all things German is as irrational as Nazi hatred of you.”
In fairness, while over-the-top, it’s pretty rational for Jews to hate Germans of the Nazi era.
I don’t know.
I was stationed in Germany for while. Learned to speak German easily.
The modern-day Germans were a pretty darn anti-semetic bunch. I am Scott-Irish white trash. Generic non-denominational Chrisitan. Big white guy; football player. By looks, I could have been Waffen SS.
The inner-Nazi would creep out of Germans when drunk. Consistently.
The only time I got into a fight in the Army was when two locals started going off about Jews. For whatever reason I had had enough and just couldn’t take it.
It ended with me smashing heads with a paving stone and me in German jail, then the “brig.”
I just kinda avoided Germans for the rest of my stint.
I agree it is “harsh.”
But in total warfare, one destroys the “civilian” population. This entire concept of chivalric knights fighting one another whilst leaving the serfs un-touched is a remanant of the time between fuedalism and pre-industrial society.
Now, factory attacks factory, just as tribe once attacked tribe.
Not my experience at all. They have their share of bigots and knuckleheads, but not disproportionately so. I've met as many bigots in Israel, Britain and the US as I have in Germany. There is a degree of resentment over the continued financial burden imposed for the sins of their grandparents, but they are not unlike any people I have met in dozens of countries. In any event, the few radical antisemites don't condemn the entire country to deserving of fire bombings and mass civilian casualties today anymore than it did 65 years ago.
You just justified the Holocaust. The German government (irrationally and wrongly) had declared total war on a borderless entity; the Jews. By your rationalization the death of innocents was justified. I don't buy either case.
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