Posted on 04/19/2019 2:22:19 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
BERLIN (Reuters) - German prosecutors have charged a 92-year-old former concentration camp guard with being an accessory to murder, in what will be one of the last ever cases against Nazi-era war crimes.
Hamburg prosecutors accused the man, identified only as Bruno D., of aiding and abetting 5,230 cases of murder during the almost nine months he spent on duty at a concentration camp watch-tower at the end of World War Two.
According to Die Welt newspaper, which first reported the charges, the man admitted to prosecutors during a voluntary interrogation last year that he had seen people being taken to gas chambers to be murdered.
“What good would it have done for me to leave? They’d just have found somebody else,” he told prosecutors, according to the newspaper.
The case against another nonagenarian former guard at Stutthof, where more than 60,000 people died, was halted last year because the suspect was too infirm to stand trial.
Another, Oskar Groening, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz” for his job counting cash stolen from people sent to the most notorious of all the regime’s death camps, died last year aged 96 as he waited to begin his sentence.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Hitlery Rotten Clinton says what difference does it make at this time anyhow (kiss kiss mrs arafat)
Most of the Nazi deportations of Jews occurred in 1944 and halted only when Soviet troops blocked the route to Auschwitz.
That was the Russians, not the Germans, and no, they were not.
Forget it, he's rolling.
It’s a bit ridiculous at this point.
Sounds like this guy sat in a watchtower as a teen. They are going after him simply because there are so few actual Germans left alive that touched any of this stuff, even briefly.
He’s 92 and was a tower guard as a teenager. It’s really time the Germans put this self loathing stuff behind them.
I mean if he had direct involvement in mass murder, planned it, sorted the people, etc, etc, I could see making another example of a Nazi, but this guy hasn’t even got the culpability of people who worked on the railroads. It sounds like his biggest sin was that he managed to get into the SS. This alone strikes me as odd because even for concentration camp duty I have never heard of any unit of the SS taking people with heart problems. You would have thought he would have been funneled into the Volkssturm or some other national guard unit manning flak guns or similar duties.
Meanwhile, Kurt Waldheim got to be UN General Secretary
Personally, I have zero sympathy for any of these former Nazis. It should not matter how old they are or if someone else was more guilty and got off, the horrific crimes they had a part in should be punished. Some crimes deserve no leniency at all.
By this logic millions of German citizens who knew exactly what was going on and willfully ignored it should have been arrested and prosecuted. Not thousands, millions.
Same logic would say every North Korean police officer, soldier, or anyone working for the state should be arrested and prosecuted once that government falls.
Was this guy even a Nazi? Millions of Germans never joined the party. This guy managed to get into the SS and sat in a guard tower. He was part of something monstrous and horrible, but prosecuting a 92 year old for watchtower duty 75 years after the fact seems a bit excessive.
The one thing that gives me pause is his explanation of how he got into the SS. It strikes me as odd that a teenager with a heart problem managed to get in to the SS, even for concentration camp duty (and presumably not a real Waffen SS unit). With a heart problem he would have been far more suited doing civil defense stuff. So perhaps he is lying and the prosecutors know it.
Just like the victors get to write the history of what happened, they are not going to be held accountable for their actions this far into the future.
Krauts bitching about mass murder in Poland and the east. Now I’ve heard it all.
I got no problem with locking up the SOB. But I would really like ISIS members to face the same decades long pursuit.
Instead, the Brits and others give them pensions.
“And yet the blood-spattered Bolsheviks sauntered away scot-free. Why is that?”
Because they never got conquered like the nazis did. And by the mid 50’s it realistically became impossible for anyone to ever do so.
Well ironically Stalin did have most of the original Bolsheviks killed.
A watch tower guard at 17-18 years of age is not responsible for what went on in the death camp imo. Near all the Germans that survive from that era are guilty of doing nothing as the Nazi machine rose to power...it is a real long stretch to go after this kid soldier imo....
If nazi Germany would have never been conquered, but instead wound up in some WWI style defeat without occupation, I doubt anyone in the SS would have ever been arrested either.
“What good would it have done for me to leave? They’d just have found somebody else,” he told prosecutors, according to the newspaper.
This is definitely true. Though to be fair, the bulk of the real fighting in WW2 was on the Eastern Front and the Soviets lost far, far more lives than any of the other allies did. If you just watched or read US history you would not realize how horrific the war in the East was (on both sides) compared to what happened in the West.
The Soviets were never held responsible for their mass starvation, murder, imprisonment and a death count that likely far exceeded what the Nazi's did. Perhaps it was indeed a proverbial marriage of necessity, but our ally, the Soviet Union, has never been held to account by us or almost anyone else. Their crimes almost certainly far eclipsed what the Nazi's managed to do.
Nobody talks about the Soviets illegal war on Finland.
Good point. Irony can really be ironic sometimes. Stalin had a habit of killing his most prolific killers because he regularly realized they knew a little too much.
And the main executioner at Katyn fell from favor after Stalin died. Kruschev stripped away all his rank and benefits, and he committed suicide. Supposedly the biggest personal mass murderer in history.
I wonder what God expected him to do? His choices were to die for refusing to work for the Nazis (hopefully because you were a believer), or take the job and spend your day praying for the unfortunate prisoners. (Also hopefully because you were a believer.) Of course,the second choice is sort of like the devout Catholic lady I read about, who said she worked in an abortion clinic so she could baptize the babies as they died. (Not bashing Catholics. There are several churches who baptize infants).
Yes, our good friend and ally the Soviets attacked Finland and ultimately seized some of their territory (after embarrassing themselves for a few months to a much inferior opponent in terms of numbers). Not only that, the Fins had the perfect opportunity to help the German Army Group North cut off Leningrad completely during Barbarossa and declined to do so. Had they done that Leningrad probably would have fallen and Army Group North could have been largely funneled to either the center or south.
It is funny how the history we are taught almost never even makes mention of what a grotesque ally we made with the Soviet Union.
Ask most Americans what started WW2 and if they know anything about it at all they will say what our History books and various documentaries teach us - that it was started by the German invasion of Poland. So England and France declare war on Germany for the invasion of Poland - which not only did the Soviet Union do the very same thing, they actually seized MORE than half of Poland (along with the Baltics, etc). And on top of that, after the war ended, the USSR kept Poland as a satellite state. So we essentially go to war to save Poland, and ally ourselves with the USSR who militarily stole even more of Poland than Germany did. In some ways the whole thing is comical.
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