Posted on 06/22/2003 10:56:17 AM PDT by yonif
Chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust Lord Greville Janner has welcomed news at the weekend that British police have launched their biggest-ever investigation into Nazi war criminals who found refuge in Britain after World War Two.
The breakthrough has come with the decision to allow officers from the anti-terrorist branch to examine patient records held by the National Health Service to determine how many of the 7,100 SS troops permitted to Britain after the war are still alive.
According to the Sunday Telegraph here, all those identified - estimated to be about 1,200 people will be investigated, either as possible war criminals or as witnesses to atrocities carried out by their former SS colleagues.
The original 7,100 people on the so-called "Rimini List" were Ukrainian members of the 14th SS Division that operated in Eastern Europe during the war. Most of those who arrived were not questioned about their wartime activities.
Details of names on the "Rimini List" - so-named because the men spent two years as prisoners of war in the Italian coastal town before their arrival in Britain in 1947 - have never been released and successive governments have refused requests to investigate the backgrounds of the men on the list.
Janner said he was delighted that an investigation is now underway: "It is about time," he said. "I hope that they will move fast and with swift efficiency to see that justice is done."
A government official close to the inquiry was quoted as saying the investigation has been "a very long time coming, but it is now going to be completely comprehensive. Officers are doing a lot of traveling and if at all possible there will be charges."
Attempts by both Holocaust investigators and by the American authorities to help track down war crimes suspects have been consistently rebuffed by Britain.
But a 2001 television documentary, "The SS in Britain," is believed to have sparked an investigation after new evidence was uncovered that suggested former SS members who had participated in two horrific massacres in Poland are now living in Britain.
The atrocities involved the murder of about 800 inhabitants of the village of Huta Pieniacka in February 1944 by members of the 4th SS Galizien Volunteer Police Regiment, and the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in the same year by an associated unit called the Ukrainian Self Defense Legion.
The units later became part of the 14th SS Division, which formed in 1943, two years after the Germans overran Galicia, the area formed by south-eastern Poland and western Ukraine.
The police investigation was given added impetus earlier this year when the Telegraph revealed that Dr Swiatomyr Fostun, a Ukrainian-born academic now living in south London, had served as a Nazi death camp guard and that army rosters listed him as having been present at two notorious massacres.
Fostun later admitted that he was a guard at the infamous Trawniki camp "for a short time" and went on to join the 14th SS Division.
Well, after all, there was a documentary about it.
The world-citizen journalists - screen and print - who give politicians their cues issue free passes to all of that lot (and the Islammunists as well). But cut slack for a bunch of octogenarian Ukranians that fought Stalin? No way! Hound 'em all to cardiac infarctions and let Marx sort 'em out!
(The last line needed to be accompanied by leftist spittle, but I don't know the HTML command for it.)
Britain has repeated riotng in the streets by their moslem "Asian" population, has seen UK-born islamic terrorists blow up people and themselves in Israel, sent the USA the "shoebomber" - and they're worried about 90-year-old wheelchair-bound Ukranians???
How lovely of you to infer that I support "this human refuse." If they participated in atrocities, I have no truck with them, and I greatly resent your vile and incomprehensible personal conclusions (I am taking "umbrage," for those not from Rio Linda). I wasn't even close to giving these Ukranians absolution - as if I could, or would - yet you have bestowed upon me the dubious honorific of being as one with them. Your making me the moral equivalent of a sonderkommando is more than unwelcome, and comes across as an example of breathtakingly absurd invective.
My point was that certain people will carry water for today's terrorists and despots while trying to balance some metaphysical ledger of the past. Apparently it is more important for modern Britain to make sure a number of old men - who are close to becoming, as I once heard it put, "biological footnotes" - pay for their sins than it is to examine their current hagiography of Marxism and radical Islam. They never tire of fighting the "fascists," as long as it is the right kind of fascism. Too bad the BBC can't muster the ability to get some eighty-something members of the Cheka or NKVD kicked out of the Russian Federation... but then, they killed European citizens for the right reasons.
That's about as temperate a reply as I can make to your strident mischaracterization, and if you persist in believing I am equal in morality to an SS unit, then I suggest - in advance - that you take a less than scenic route to perdition.
-Yes! Because it has the appearance of moral righteousness and it doesn't require the courage needed to address real issues.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.