Contrary to public sentiments (and maybe to other countries legal ethos), a German court has the function to first and foremost establish the truth - punishment is secondary to this. In fact, Someone can be found guilty, but still leave the court as a free person. This man, for example, had more than 75 years to bring good to the world, to fight antisemitism, to build a better society than the one that helped him show his most evil face.
Let’s hope he made good use of the time - the judges will take this into consideration.
So what changed to start these two prosecutions now? As presumably their roles at the camps was already known. Or was there some new cache of evidence linking them to thousands of murders?
A change in juristic practice in 2011 (specifically, the trial and sentencing of John Demjanjuk) and new information uncovered in the Russian State Military Archive in Moscow.
But then again, I'm kind of amazed that Germany is still actually prosecuting anyone for Nazi-time crimes. There's lots of countries where terrible crimes against humanity have been committed, and even if they don't reach the magnitude of the holocaust, you don't usually see a lot of enthusiasm going after the perpetrators a few years down the line.
"Still" is almost the wrong word. After the war and well into the 1950s and 1960s Germany didn't really "want" to prosecute and sometimes when there were prosecutions there was also a strong impetus to avoid strong penalties (don't recall the exact nature of the uniform pockets? Well then you are clearly not reliable as a witness). Doesn't mean there were not some prosecutions and people taking that stuff serious - but not really something "popular".
Perhaps my grandparents' family died under this man's eye.
And I forgive him.
That was almost eighty years ago.
I am not a forgiving person. Were this man 40, or 50, or even 70, things would be different.
But he is an old man at the end of his life. Punishing him now is not justice. It is merely vengeance upon his family.
"Following orders" is what people do. Don't, and you are punished. Harshly. Especially in authoritarian states. Just this past month, an Air Force drone pilot was thrown in prison for blowing the whistle about the Biden administration slaughtering a family. Things then were no different than they are now.
80 years after the deed it becomes a tad rediciulous. Especially when all the higher ups have been identified, and not prosecuted, during these 80 years.
A number of high-ranking members were convicted shortly after WWII in the so-called Nuremberg trials (as they took place in the German city of Nuremberg). Here is the introductory paragraph from Wikipedia:
"The Nuremberg trials (German: Nürnberger Prozesse) were a series of military tribunals held following World War II by the Allied forces under international law and the laws of war. The trials were most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, judicial, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, who planned, carried out, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes.",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials
I agree, it seems silly to me, to be prosecuting a guard after all these years, if anything I hope he will get a chance to apologize, and then live the rest of his life full of remorse.
It’s not obvious to me that warehousing someone for life is massively less barbaric than the death penalty. Either way, you’re depriving them of a full life; one just takes a lot longer.
Some people, through their actions, have demonstrated that they’re unable to live freely in society. Society has to choose what to do with those people. There isn’t any great answer, only shades or different types of suckage.
"For life" means maximum of 20 years in Germany. There is also preventive detention afterwards for people that are insane or would still be a danger to society etc.
So there is a big difference between death penalty and 20 years. Also you can at least somehow correct the punishment if you "got the wrong guy".
> "The defendant knowingly and willingly aided and abetted this at least by conscientiously performing guard duty
In what world is this a case to charge someone with abetting thousands of deaths by performing guard duty...>50 years after the event..and that person is now 100 years old.
It's ludicrous nonsense.
No prosecutor in any other civilised part of the world would entertain this for more than 5 seconds.
In this world. Where he was the person who stopped the prisoners from escaping their death. His purpose, that he presumably performed, was to ensure those people could not escape. His purpose was not to keep the prisoners alive-his purpose was to ensure they could not escape to freedom, for them to be in a cage before being systematically killed.
He’s going to trial in this world. As he absolutely should.
I assume that the goal is not so much sending him to jail for a week before he dies of natural causes as to obtaining any valuable historical information that he could hide still. The only way to force him to talk can be a trial.
Probably also about disclosing and linking other people with the same crimes.
"Hey Nazi bosses, I'm not going do this, it's wrong!"
"Then we will shot you on the spot, and replace you with another guard who will."
"Err OK then, please forget I objected."
People think ALL Nazis had a choice, but a large majority of them were just trying to stay alive by keeping their heads down and doing a good job.
EDIT: I'm getting seriously downvoted for this, with replies stating that he had a 'choice' ... OK you try living in a totalitarian state, and see what 'choice' you have.
The Einsatzgruppen, and other kill squads, were purely voluntary affairs. Not sure about "local" guards, maybe some of those were drafted. Nobody of these guys can hide behind "we just followed orders". It is just sad that the little guys, like a secretary and lowly prison guard, are prosecuted now, when a lot of the mid-level organizers, incl. Doctors and officers in charge, were left alone in Western Germany while they were still alive.
EDIT: You didn't have a choice going to war (talking about the male population), you had a choice in volunteering for counter partisan warfare, Einsatzgruppen, concentration camp duty,... And that choice is the crucial one here.
In many cases, it was entirely possible to ask for reassignment without getting shot by a superior officer, so your accusation of cartoonish oversimplification cuts both ways...
Nobody deserves the death penalty, but I admit I’m a tad surprised at the number of responses that are anything other than “it’s okay to prosecute concentration camp guards”.
"History is written by the victors". When crimes are committed against humanity, it's the elite that get to decide which one of the crimes are deemed worth punishing
That's sort of an unhelpful truism. By definition, the losing parties don't have control of a judicial system within which a trial of the winning parties could take place.
If what you mean is "winning parties don't prosecute their own side", then I would also disagree with that, since some countries do believe that the rules they are ostensibly fighting for do apply to themselves:
There is a fundamental difference between being incompetent at waging war and organized, systematic action to erase an entire group of people simply because of their genes.
If you really want to compare Nazi to US you would have to imagine US using their industry and war machine to try and kill every single Afghani or Muslim in the world. See how ridiculous this sounds? That is because these two acts are not really comparable in any meaningful way.
My grandparents lived through the war in Poland and I spent my childhood listening to their stories.
The acts of the US do not need to be as bad as the Nazis to still be ruled as murder. Killing thousands of civilians is still terrible even though killing millions is worse.
War is a messy business. There is no way to wage war without killing innocent people. The difference between the Nazi's an the Americans or the Israelis is the former did it on purpose while the latter take every reasonable precaution to avoid killing the wrong people.
The other side, the Palestinians or the Taliban actively target innocent people. Yet I don't hear you complaining about that - maybe you're not impartial here.
"""officially governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and claiming the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Jerusalem as the designated capital; in practice, however, only partial administrative control is held over the 167 "islands" in the West Bank, and Gaza is ruled by a rival government (Hamas). The entirety of territory claimed by the State of Palestine has been occupied since 1948, first by Egypt (Gaza Strip) and Jordan (West Bank) and then by Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Palestine
I don’t know how much I don’t know about the conflict; about who (if anyone) is using Palestine as a proxy to attack Israel without the risk of direct retaliation; about the proportionality or otherwise of IDF responses; about the legality or otherwise under international law of any given village or town in Palestinian territory created and occupied by what are called “Israeli settlers” in some newspapers, nor even do I know if those settlers are or are not officially endorsed by the government of Israel. Everything I learn about this, at every level of detail, has been a surprise to me, literally everything, starting with “antisemitism wasn’t eliminated with the death of Hitler”.
Yet: treating “the Palestinians” as a unified bloc like “the Taliban” or “the USA” seems unhelpful in this case.
There's a limit to how detailed in going to be in a comment, but when I said Palestinians here I was referring to the terrorist organization of Hamas that runs the government in Gaza. Despite how it seems to have rubbed some people the wrong way, I stand by my comment. You can tell the "good guys" by the way they try to avoid hurting innocent people. There is no side without fault in a conflict, and war is indeed a messy business.
You don’t just need lots of power to do stuff like that - you need sovereignty of some sort.
For instance, the globally-speaking weak Palestine leadership fires rocket barrages willy-nilly at Israeli civilians and uses their own civilians as a human shield all the time and I’ve yet to see them go to prison.
