Posted on 12/26/2012 4:55:04 PM PST by nickcarraway
Anton Geiser, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who fought deportation after settling in Pennsylvania, has died, his lawyer said. He was 88.
Geiser, a retired mill worker with three American-born children, was an armed guard for the Nazis at the Buchenwald concentration camp, federal prosecutors said. Geiser, who was originally born in Croatia but settled in Sharon, Pa., after the war, said he was forced into service by the Nazis as a teenager and never participated in the systematic slaughter of Jews and other prisoners inside the camp.
Federal prosecutors disagreed and were seeking his deportation to face a trial as a war criminal, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said Thursday.
"People need to look at him as an individual, and I think that he actually stood for something he believed in," said Adrian Roe, Geiser's attorney. "He hadn't believed in the Nazis. He had been forced into it. He didn't want to be kicked out. He wanted to stay with his family."
His death brings the government's case against Geiser to a close, Roe said.
The British soldiers in that film were nothing short of saints.
I read where the wives of the officers, Himmler, Hess, Goring and others were sent to the internment camp at Goggingen. Until after the Trials. Made to sleep in the same bug infested cabins their prisoners were made to use and fed mushed peas twice a day. Ironic and very amusing to me. Justice.
We had relatives at Buchenwald.
According to some looking around, it says Geiser was “forced” into the SS at age 17, in 1942.
From what I learned, the SS did not conscript until very late in the war. Especially not for the SS-Totenkopf; the Waffen-SS needed the warm bodies for the front. The Totenkopf originally were the true believers; the only ones almost as fanatical were the Einsatzgruppen.
As the war drew to its end, they began rotating Waffen-SS who could no longer fight, into the camp guards along with the Auxiliary SS right at the end. So it was pretty much an assumption that ALL of the SS knew of the camps, and not just the Totenkopf.
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