Absolute numbers or rate? I thought that what data exists suggests that the rate is higher for police shooting of black people. A source.
Anyway, justice systems exist to sort this out. Let the evidence come out through that.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Up: 94 year old former SS-Guard convicted for Auschwitz
- Thread starter Chariot
- Start date
- Status
Anyway, justice systems exist to sort this out. Let the evidence come out through that.
believing that 94 year old men who committed crimes 70 years ago doesn't equal "nazi defense force".
I don't agree on the modern belief that jail is for rehabilitation purposes only. So he should stand trail no matter his age. For those who say "what's the point?" he is too old and doesn't look like he needs rehabilitation......the point is that if we don't put him on trial, it will send a clear message to other criminals who have evaded justice long enough that there is a certain time or age you can reach that authorities will no longer prosecute you.
That is a precedent (like the Cosby/Palanski bullshit) no one wants to see.
That is a precedent (like the Cosby/Palanski bullshit) no one wants to see.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
Baggage clerk IE man who just processed items brought in regrets his actions and speaks out against deniers.
Put his actions on record. No reasonable person would sentence him for this.
Put his actions on record. No reasonable person would sentence him for this.
littleworm
Member
Dude should face trial, crimes of this magnitude need to be examined no matter how much time has past. As for punishment if he is guilty I don't really care either way, at that age a guilty verdict alone might just push him over the edge.
dream
Member
No, but it does suggest that the Holocaust is a crime that should have a statue of limitations, not to mention is something that is forgivable.
Drilbit777
Member
I know what he was part of was horrible but the guy is 94.. WW2 was a very long time ago and I'm pretty sure by now he's had time to reflect on his actions and at least they should just let him croak instead of wasting time and money on a trial.
People that actually endured the concentration camp have forgiven him. People who weren't even born are the ones calling for him to burn etc. Its also quite the stretch to try and say he had a hand in the actual killings. Justice is supposed to be pursued clear of emotion.
NYR
Member
Yes it does. Especially if a literal nazi did the crime.
Paracelsus
Member
He should be sentenced harshly but jailed for what? Think about what he did? Reform? For being a danger? It's all factually too late, he's a waste of space in a jail where you can put actual threats.
dream
Member
Sure, and that's genuinely great. But the Holocaust was a crime against humanity of a magnitude that we still can't even fathom. For every known survivor who may or may not have forgiven him, there are countless others who are living with the intergenerational trauma of the Holocaust because it was that monumental of an event. Saying that he doesn't have to answer for his crimes is tantamount to saying, "it happened a long time ago, and we're all over it now."
Subpar Spatula
Banned
What crimes is he guilty of?
HomerSimpson-Man
Member
94 years? I keep thinking there would be no one left of the Nazi from then by now.
Man, he's lived a long life.
Man, he's lived a long life.
dream
Member
300,000 counts of accessory to murder, allegedly.
What is this reform talk? The crimes that Nazis committed got them sentenced to life in prison or execution. There is no reform for these guys. You just put them away and throw away the key or execute them. None of them are meant to get parole and go home better.
Subpar Spatula
Banned
Accessory to murder? Can you detail how how him being a clerk makes him an accessory?
dream
Member
Personally? I think his role, particularly his admission to witnessing "cattle cars full of Jews ... brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the people stripped of their belongings and then most led directly into gas chambers" speaks to an inhumanity that is aligned with the Nazi party that he worked with and for. But the level of culpability is ultimately going to be decided in the court room.
SenorArdilla
Member
He was stationed at Auschwitz and was aware of the atrocities but did not take any action.
Was he willing working there? Did you have a choice with the SS and Hitler?
Idk... What has he been doing the last 30 years? Was he being a racist jack ass killing Jews still?
Part of me is like "haha bet you thought you get away with it"
Another part of me wonders if he has alzheimers and has no clue what's going on
Subpar Spatula
Banned
He wasn't bringing them in or stripping them of their belongings. He went through the items after. This doesn't make him accessory to murder. If this was a smaller scale IE 1 guy murders someone and you went along but didn't know and you did nothing then, yeah, I could understand accessory. This is a package mover in a warehouse who's being charged with accessory to fraud because the leadership in Amazon was doing something funky with the books and you and every other employee knew and all those packages were somehow linked to the fraud: it's a system too big to collapse on the weight of a single tiny piece. All would have to denounce it or else nothing would actually happen.
ElectricKaibutsu
Member
He requested a transfer. What would you have done?
Agent_Carnage
Member
What is the point honestly. The guy is 94 and probably has a few years left. This is just a waste of time and money that could be used elsewhere. Had this guy been way younger then I could see having this trial but not when he could have a heart attack any moment.
orthodoxy1095
Banned
There shouldn't be anything viewed as unforgivable.
These comments make me think people don't understand the precedent that was set on dealing with Nazis and war crimes in the aftermath of the war.
Again, I don't think people are really thinking about what they're saying. By this standard, a gigantic number of Germans should have been jailed. Again, there was a precedent, which as far as I understood is that guards, orchestrators, and higher-ups (officers) were the ones who were always charged. If we jailed every single person associated with the camps or who knew about them, the prisons would have been bulging to the seams.
mullet2000
Member
I always have a tough time with this logic because, realistically, what action could one take?
Should he have refused to work and gotten himself shot/thrown into the camps himself? That's a lot of ask of a person.
I don't think he's free of any responsibility for his actions or anything like that, but when it comes to facist states such as this you're essentially stating the person should have taken action against what was happening at the expense of their own life which is...a really tough pill to swallow.
It's why I have a hard time with individual punishment in situations like this.
Claude Augario
Member
If there's any crime that shouldn't have a statute of limitations it's the Holocaust.
Patrick Bateman
Member
Germany has a problem with its past.
Of course there was more clarification and admission of guilt as maybe in Japan, but there were too many who got away with a proper trial. A lot of the earliest members of the BND and the BGH had a Nazi-history, or maybe were even in the SS and nobody wanted to know or asked for nearly six decades.
After the Nuremburg-trials there were not enough trials who went for the "middle parts" of the Nazi-apparatus.
Leading a trial against a 94-year old man is not only to give him a punishment for an involvement that's actually not forgettable, but also a signal to the public like "Hey, look, we still try."
Of course there was more clarification and admission of guilt as maybe in Japan, but there were too many who got away with a proper trial. A lot of the earliest members of the BND and the BGH had a Nazi-history, or maybe were even in the SS and nobody wanted to know or asked for nearly six decades.
After the Nuremburg-trials there were not enough trials who went for the "middle parts" of the Nazi-apparatus.
Leading a trial against a 94-year old man is not only to give him a punishment for an involvement that's actually not forgettable, but also a signal to the public like "Hey, look, we still try."
hobblygobbly
Member
Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening, 94, found guilty of facilitating mass murder and sentenced to four years in prison.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33533264
Not unexpected, he confessed before that he was morally guilty and that he was an accomplice of the holocaust and there is no denial (he also speaks out against holocaust deniers themselves), this case was to find him legally guilty.
My grandfather who was a mid teen at the time has been following this (my family's German), he lost most of his family due to the war (parents + 6 siblings) and grew up alone and separated from his surviving siblings. He said the most important part of it isn't the legal part but when Oskar accepted himself and confessed his involvement and moral guilt, even if he was just a book keeper. My family isn't Jewish but the deaths were civilian casualties and in one case suspected resistance supporter.
I guess for legal reasons this is good but the real take away is his own confession a while back.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33533264
Not unexpected, he confessed before that he was morally guilty and that he was an accomplice of the holocaust and there is no denial (he also speaks out against holocaust deniers themselves), this case was to find him legally guilty.
My grandfather who was a mid teen at the time has been following this (my family's German), he lost most of his family due to the war (parents + 6 siblings) and grew up alone and separated from his surviving siblings. He said the most important part of it isn't the legal part but when Oskar accepted himself and confessed his involvement and moral guilt, even if he was just a book keeper. My family isn't Jewish but the deaths were civilian casualties and in one case suspected resistance supporter.
I guess for legal reasons this is good but the real take away is his own confession a while back.
Well said.
Not to say I'm a "Nazi defender", but I personally feel the sentence is unjust.
You're right, because he didn't kill anyone.
Souldestroyer Reborn
Banned
What the point in even trying these guys?
Like no fucking shit what they did was wrong. I don't see the point in wasting all this money to tell them they done wrong when there will be no punishment because they're nearly in their grave anyway.
Besides, WW2 had a lot of bad shit going on. Are we gonna prosecute everybody involved? What about the innocent Japanese people killed by 2 nukes?
It was a world war before certain laws which hope to prevent such atrocities from being committed again were implemented.
It's more important that those guys see that they were wrong and accept that they were wrong.
What the fuck has that got to do with WW2 Nazi's?
Get the fuck out of here with this shit and put it in a thread relevant to the discussion.
Also you may want to brush up on some facts and figures to give your argument some depth. It ain't as black and white as you make it out to be, and many others in this very board.
To answer your question anyway, they're perfectly fucking innocent.
Like no fucking shit what they did was wrong. I don't see the point in wasting all this money to tell them they done wrong when there will be no punishment because they're nearly in their grave anyway.
Besides, WW2 had a lot of bad shit going on. Are we gonna prosecute everybody involved? What about the innocent Japanese people killed by 2 nukes?
It was a world war before certain laws which hope to prevent such atrocities from being committed again were implemented.
It's more important that those guys see that they were wrong and accept that they were wrong.
What the fuck has that got to do with WW2 Nazi's?
Get the fuck out of here with this shit and put it in a thread relevant to the discussion.
Also you may want to brush up on some facts and figures to give your argument some depth. It ain't as black and white as you make it out to be, and many others in this very board.
To answer your question anyway, they're perfectly fucking innocent.
Yes this clerk could have surely went James Bond and shut down the nazi death machine.
This is not universally true. Some people were pressured (ie. by making direct threats to their families) into joining the Wafen-SS forces.
Locke Lamora
Member
Huh, not so sure about it. We Germans never denied our past, embraced it and learnt from our mistakes. That's what made us win two World Wars.
Shuggananas
Banned
Good.
Trickster
Member
He checked luggage, that was what he did. But hey, he was a nazi right? So it's okay to sentence him for the murders of 300 thousand people, because all the nazi's were genocidal maniacs, right?
Context is important. If you just call him "bagchecker", that sounds innocent enough, but "SS officer in auschwitz" sounds different, yes? I personally wouldn't have convicted him because of his age and his positive work against holocaust deniers and preseving the gruesome history, but I can deny that I think that eveybody who worked at Auschwitz was guilty. From the high offciers, Mengele to the guards to the janitor.
It is one thing to fight for the country at the front or guarding Hitlers location. You don't necessary know about a lot of things and propaganda hit you hard. But at Auschwitz?
Trickster
Member
Okay, so what should he have done do you think? Did he personally request to work there? No you say? What? He even requested transfer away from that horrible place...huh, that's odd.
But fuck him anyway, or something, i dunno?
Moff
Member
is that really how you want legal justice to work?
when we think someone is guilty he should be convicted?
shouln't we try to find evidence that he actually commited crimes?
I don't know the spezifics why he was convicted now, but I doubt they found said evidence, since they tried to do that and dropped the charges against hin the 80s. so my guess is they pulled another Demjanjuk and ruled that if he worked in auschwitz he is automatically guilty, without actual evidence that he commited any crimes.
now I think it's a highly interesting case, and I am not saying this is wrong. we are talking about SS officers after all. but personally, I just don't believe legal justice should work that way. people should not be convicted because of hearsay or because of what we think likely happened. we should be better than this, we should need proof. people should be innocent until proven guilty, and if we don't this even for the worst of them it really has no worth at all. that's my opinion.
I love strawmen as much as the next one, but yes, if someone wears responsibility for one of the biggest crime in history, I want to face him trial.
Its done.
What?
He was in Auschwitz. He made it possible. He wasn't just a random guy running on the streets.
This is the definition of irrelevance.
Well personally I don't think working at Auschwitz = guilty same can be said for being in the SS as well. I think each person needs to be looked at individually and based on what info I have seen posted in this thread this guy doesn't deserve to be convicted of being an accessory to 300,000 counts of murder and locked up. Now it is entirely possible that there is info out there that tells a different story about this guy. As I will admit I am not invested enough in this case to do anything more then read what has been posted in this thread so far.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Locked