Ohio man charged with 29,000 counts of accesory to murder

[between]

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Originally posted by: yowolabi

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
The dude should have been killed in 1945. Killing him 54 years later is beyond stupid. Yes, he's an evil, evil man. But he's also 88. He isn't hurting shit. And I don't know how it is in Europe, but considering how costly it is to get the death penalty here, it's a complete waste of resources to execute someone who sounds like he's going to die before this goes to trial regardless. And especially in a globally depressed economy, we're throwing money at killing old fuckheads who aren't harming anyone? Our desire for revenge should never outweigh our common sense.

So how long do you have to hide before you're cleared? In other words, If I kill a bunch of innocent people today and flee the country, how long do I have to disguise myself in Spain before you'll say I can just live my life? 10 years, 20 years? 40 years?

Sorry, but I don't believe "successfully eluded capture" is a good enough reason to drop charges. There's a reason there's no statute of limitations on murder. If you perform a crime that can never be reversed, there's no reason the hunt for you should ever end.


That said, even though I reject time as a reason to let this guy go, I don't think that the charges are fair. I doubt they have proof he killed a single person, much less 29,000. Now that they know he's not Ivan the Terrible, they have no idea what he did. Without that kind of solid evidence, I don't think he should be held personally responsible for every atrocity that happened while he was in the vincinity. Simple question... could he have stopped those people from dying if he had wanted to?

I just realized I got my math wrong; it's actually 64 years, not 54. As for your question as to a statute of limitations... well, quite frankly, I think it should be 50 years. 50 years is a vast amount of time when it comes to the human lifespan; punishing someone for something done 50 years ago is virtually pointless. 64 years? I mean... I don't know.

I'll tell you what. I will change my position on this if you can give me a single reason beyond revenge that we should punish this man for his role in the holocaust. Revenge isn't enough for me. The man has lived too long for revenge to even be significant; he's bested the average lifespan for fuck's sake. Is he likely to be a repeat offender? Will killing him make me, or anyone on the planet, safer? What good does punishment do anyone beyond the initial good feelings of "fuck you, Nazi!"?

 

[Jack Flash]

Was he an officer?

 

[Possessed Freak]

Originally posted by: MovingTarget

Originally posted by: Atreus21

Originally posted by: Possessed Freak
I don't think a soldier should be prosecuted. If he was an officer, sure. A simple soldier... no.

Think I agree with this.

No. I'd say that it depends on the situation. If it is one thing that WW2 showed us, it is that "I was just following orders" is not always a valid excuse. Sometimes it is, but that is what the courts are supposed to decide. Soldiers have a moral imperative not to obey orders that constitute war crimes/crimes against humanity/etc, if it is possible to do so.

However, what was the alternative? He says no, gets shot, and some other soldier becomes a guard. *We* might be able to say no to our officers, but I don't think Nazi soldiers really had a choice to even question their superiors.

 

[brandonbull]

I like the part about the US government waste some much time and money try to prove he lied on his immigration papers. WTF? We have 10+M that didn't even bother to fill out paperwork and do nothing more than drain money from the US economy and send it back to Mexico. This guy held a job and was somewhat productive and is getting bullied about lying on some paperwork 50+ years ago.

 

[brandonb]

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Center Zuroff needs to be charged for crimes against humanity with the Witch hunts he puts on.

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
He didn't have a choice to be honest. Just about every German male was either in the Heer or the SS.

If the war went only slightly differently, how would you feel about Americans being extradited for "crimes" they committed overseas? Is it a crime when someone holds a gun to your head? His choices were probably either guard the concentration camp or get ready to be shipped out to the Grinder in the East. Any sane person would have chosen his job.

Punish the leaders and the officers that forced the crimes to be committed, not the cogs in the machine.

This guy is Ukrainian and from what I can tell was in the Red Army and captured in 42. He had a choice to rot in a camp or join the SS. He apparently felt rotting in a camp wasnt worth his time but helping the Nazi's murder people was. He may not have been Ivan the Terrible but who cares? So he didnt turn on the engine to gas people. He was still part of the machine and volunteered to do so.

That said this guy was lucky we didnt turn him back to the Soviets. In fact does it say how he escaped to the west? Stalin's Soviet Union had a policy to execute Soviet POWs as cowards. When we liberated Soviet POWs and sent to back to Stalin it was a death sentence. Sometimes they carried it out right at the docks when we unloaded them from our ships.

 

[halik]

Originally posted by: brandonb
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Center Zuroff needs to be charged for crimes against humanity with the Witch hunts he puts on.

link?

 

[Genx87]

I think there is a misunderstanding with regards to concentration camp guards. The camps were manned by the SS that had a specific duty to man these camps. These men and women went through SS training, indoctrination, and studies just like the rest of the Waffen-SS units. Meaning they werent conscripts like in the Heer. They were ideologically driven, volunteered for this srvice, and brutal.

They were there because they wanted to be.

 

[Possessed Freak]

Originally posted by: Genx87
I think there is a misunderstanding with regards to concentration camp guards. The camps were manned by the SS that had a specific duty to man these camps. These men and women went through SS training, indoctrination, and studies just like the rest of the Waffen-SS units. Meaning they werent conscripts like in the Heer. They were ideologically driven, volunteered for this srvice, and brutal.

They were there because they wanted to be.

How interesting it will be to drum up proof on that now.

 

[nobodyknows]

Originally posted by: halik

Originally posted by: brandonb
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at Israel's Simon Wiesenthal Center Zuroff needs to be charged for crimes against humanity with the Witch hunts he puts on.

link?

I believe he's the top Nazi hunter because he's the only Nazi hunter. He has to justify his job somehow and after 65 years the pickin's are getting pretty slim.

 

[0marTheZealot]

Originally posted by: Genx87
I think there is a misunderstanding with regards to concentration camp guards. The camps were manned by the SS that had a specific duty to man these camps. These men and women went through SS training, indoctrination, and studies just like the rest of the Waffen-SS units. Meaning they werent conscripts like in the Heer. They were ideologically driven, volunteered for this srvice, and brutal.

They were there because they wanted to be.

That's not entirely true.

The SS was composed of several divisions, including foreign legions (the 17th SS Division, "The Scimitar" was composed of mainly Syrians and Hungarians). Only part of one division, along with Die Ensatztruppen, were responsible for the concentration camps.

For example, Die Liebstandarte, Das Reich, Viking and other like them were military units tasked with objectives. Only Das Totenkopf, the Death Heads, were tasked with guarding concentration camps.

Furthermore, only the first three divisions, the 1st, 2nd and 3rd SS divisions, were indoctrinated into the Nazi dogma. They were the "Die Liebstandarte", "Das Reich" and "Das Totenkopf". Starting around 1944, when the war was turning against Germany, that anyone that was "Aryan" enough was allowed into the SS. Previously, it was only German/Austrian citizens that had proven Aryan ancestry that could join the SS.

Meh, once you see enough video footage of the camps you start to realize that the guards were not innocent at all. Take a look at the movie Night and Fog (1959 out of copyright). If he is guilty he deserves to be killed.

Well, yea, the concentration camps were hell. You also have to remember that the guards had a role to play. The studies done by Milgram and Zaprado showed that decent people can be coerced to do horrible things when the orders come from above.

This man had no real choice. Anyone here could be him if the situation called for it. Think about it, you just got captured by the Nazis, you are given ~1200 calories of crap food a day. You are subjected to near inhuman conditions (or completely inhuman conditions if you were racially impure) and then one day, a well dressed SS officer tells you have a choice. Either stay where you are or put this uniform on and guard these men. You would have done the same. There are stories of Jewish men becoming guards for Jews in the camps, believing that it would earn them a way out of hell. Of course they were killed after they did their duty, but it shows how little morality has to play when your back is against the wall.

A lot of the concentration camp guards had no choice. It was either go to the Grinder in the East or guard some malnourished Jews. I'm not excusing or condoning the Holocaust, but the people in charge should be persecuted, not the low-level grunts. If it was isolated incidents, then yes, prosecute the grunts. However, this isn't the case, it was a system that produced these men.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

update:
He was given a stay of deportation due to medical conditions.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/...azi.suspect/index.html

If you read the new link you'll see just how screwed up people really are. The guy was tried in Israel and ultimately found not guilty and set free. IF the Jews don't want to do anything why the hell are the Germans so gung ho on this guy.

"He wants to plead the sense of fairness that he regularly denied all of the victims at Sobibor," Hier said.

He called Demjanjuk's comparison of his planned deportation to torture "preposterous coming from a person that served the [Nazi organization] S.S. in a death camp. It is a preposterous argument and insulting to the survivors of the Holocaust."

Wow, so injustice was done to this Rabbi's people 60 years ago, so he doesn't give a damn about real justice now in actually finding out if this guy really is this evil monster, to hell with fairness, we want revenge and we'll take it on anyone we can get our hands on.
Where's the fairness in actually determining if this guy is actually associated with killing 29,000 people. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Is it worth dragging an 89 year old man half way round the world to subject the probably last year or 2 of his life to hell going through a trial and being treated like shit, to only find out in the end after he dies that he wasn't the guy they were looking for, or are we at a point as a nation and "world society" that we don't give a shit about a person but rather care more about happy happy feelings in some form of vengance that ultimately does nothing? It doesn't bring back the dead, it doesn't make anyone better.
I'd rather they be damned sure they have the person they think they do before they drag someone through the kind of shit they are planning.

 

[BladeVenom]

The guy was proven innocent once. Isn't that enough. Sounds like a witch hunt now. Old age is already executing him. You can't kill a man twice.

 

[spittledip]

Originally posted by: Possessed Freak
I don't think a soldier should be prosecuted. If he was an officer, sure. A simple soldier... no.

Yeah, it doesn't quite make sense to charge a regular soldier. He was already tried and found innocent.

 

[Ronstang]

Originally posted by: BladeVenom
The guy was proven innocent once. Isn't that enough. Sounds like a witch hunt now. Old age is already executing him. You can't kill a man twice.

It is kind of funny to see all the liberals crying for this guys execution yet if he was a minority on death row in the US for committing a grizzly murder WITH ACTUAL PROOF OF GUILT they would be crying for his sentence to be commuted due to being inhumane.

 

[JohnOfSheffield]

Ronstang... you are so very very pathetic.

Hang him low.

 

[dahunan]

Originally posted by: JohnOfSheffield
Ronstang... you are so very very pathetic.

Hang him low.

LOL.. I would feel safe to bet that he has several confederate flag decals or bumper stickers in his possession.. and may even KNOW this guy
http://extras.mnginteractive.c..._094901_allgiermug.jpg

 

[Zenmervolt]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Well, yea, the concentration camps were hell. You also have to remember that the guards had a role to play. The studies done by Milgram and Zaprado showed that decent people can be coerced to do horrible things when the orders come from above.

This man had no real choice. Anyone here could be him if the situation called for it. Think about it, you just got captured by the Nazis, you are given ~1200 calories of crap food a day. You are subjected to near inhuman conditions (or completely inhuman conditions if you were racially impure) and then one day, a well dressed SS officer tells you have a choice. Either stay where you are or put this uniform on and guard these men. You would have done the same. There are stories of Jewish men becoming guards for Jews in the camps, believing that it would earn them a way out of hell. Of course they were killed after they did their duty, but it shows how little morality has to play when your back is against the wall.

A lot of the concentration camp guards had no choice. It was either go to the Grinder in the East or guard some malnourished Jews. I'm not excusing or condoning the Holocaust, but the people in charge should be persecuted, not the low-level grunts. If it was isolated incidents, then yes, prosecute the grunts. However, this isn't the case, it was a system that produced these men.

Well stated. I'm shocked that it was this long before someone mentioned Milgram.

While he is not being tried again for the same crimes as in the 1980s (he's being tried for actions at the camp he actually guarded this time), there isn't much in the article to go on as far as determining whether he is accused of being exceptionally bad or whether he was following orders. Though the fact that he's being tried for 29,000 counts seems to indicate the latter.

Truth be told, I'm not sure how I feel about this. I support the idea of a fair trial, but I'm not entirely sure that a fair trial is possible, even now.

ZV

 

[Fern]

Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
-snip-

Interesting post

IDK what to think.

Being tried once and held in prison for 7 years only to be left go due to innocence doesn't sit well with me.

A trip to Germany sounds like a death sentence, and one before he is even convicted.

I would like to think that he US government wouldn't extradite a US citizen abroad for charges unless they were damn sure he was likely guilty. However, we know they already screwed that up once before.

I don't see how at this late date there can be any 'eye-witnesses' (and they are notoriously unrealiable anyway), certainly no forensic evidence, and paperwork back then was spotty at best. What's the evidence?

Quite sad if truly a case of mistaken identity.

If guilty, bah, he'd probably die before the trial is over anyway. How the heck long would it take to legitimately try thousands of murder cases against someone?

Weird story, I thought this was over long ago.

Fern

 

[nobodyknows]

If they could produce some outstanding evidence or saolid proof that this man was guilty of some terrible crime against humanity other then the fact that he was a guard at a concentration camp then I could see having a trial. I haven't seen any evidence they have anything so just drop it. Let the "top nazi hunter" find another job.

 

[spittledip]

What really would be lost if they just let him go? Forgiveness is ok sometimes.