Posted on 05/12/2011 7:08:48 AM PDT by Old Teufel Hunden
MUNICH — A German court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison on Thursday for his role in the killing of 27,900 Jews at a Nazi death camp.
Lawyers for Ukraine-born Demjanjuk said they would appeal the verdict.
The Munich court found the 91-year-old guilty of being an accessory to mass murder as a guard at Sobibor camp in Poland during the Second World War.
Demjanjuk, who emigrated to the United States in the early 1950s, became a naturalized citizen in 1958 and worked as an engine mechanic in Ohio, had been exonerated in a separate Holocaust trial two decades ago in Israel. In that trial he was initially sentenced to death for being the notorious "Ivan the Terrible'' camp guard at Treblinka in Poland, but the ruling was overturned by Israel's supreme court after new evidence exonerated him.
Demjanjuk, who was once top of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's list of most wanted Nazi war criminals, said he was drafted into the Soviet army in 1941 then taken prisoner of war by the Germans.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
That’s true, but I tend to separate the Waffen SS from the “Death’s Head” SS units, by the end of the war, more than half in it weren’t even Germans.
The SS was purely voluntary early in the war. As the war ground on, however, SS units had to be replenished through the draft. Also, many of the Waffen SS units were raised in captive countries, and you could have a spirited debate over how “voluntary” some of the enlistments in those units were.
A topical movie about contemporary German attitudes is “The Reader” featuring Kate Winslet and Ralph Finnes.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0976051/
Re your comments, it brings to mind Sgt. Schultz of Hogan’s Hero’s fame (”I know nuzzink”)
The German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was against denazification and granted amnesty to those involved in the Holocaust. Denazification was opposed by majority of German population at the time, and when West Germany was established in 1949, Adenauer made ending it one of his main priorities. Together with other German parties he passed a number of amnesty laws that overturned the process of denazification; he appointed a former Nazi official who had written commentaries on the racist Nuremberg Laws, Hans Globke, as his chief of staff in 1949; and he was pushing hard for the release of various war criminals. By January 31, 1951, the amnesty laws covered over 792,176 people. Those pardoned included people with six-month sentences, 35,000 people with sentences of up to one year and include more than 3,000 functionaries of the SA, the SS, and the Nazi Party who participated in dragging victims to jails and camps; 20,000 other Nazis sentenced for "deeds against life" (presumably murder); 30,000 sentenced for causing bodily injury, and 5,200 who committed "crimes and misdemeanors in office." By 1958 only a few of the original Nuremberg defendants were still in jail.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Konrad_Adenauer_and_the_end_of_denazification
I’m not an expert on the evidence, but there is quite a bit of doubt that he was even a Nazi. If he really was a POW in Germany, what is all this about anyway? Israel let him go if I’m not mistaken. Even if that wasn’t true, there are many Nazi’s still alive in Germany that probably did more heinous things than he did as a guard. If he wasn’t Ivan the Terrible, then maybe he was just following orders to stay alive. Anyway, I just think it’s over kill. Even letting him go home, he is now tainted with something that he may not have done. He has spent the last 20 years of his life worrying that he may be executed for something he probably didn’t do.
You still haven’t explained, then, the recent German prosecutions that I cited.
Those most anxious to pursue him in general seem to be liberals/leftist, apparently as part of their general quest to make “Nazi” a term of evil so egregious none other comes even close.
Which is more than a little silly. The Nazi ideology was perhaps more evil than any other that has gained significant power in human history, but they have a good deal of healthy competition in this field.
What I find odd about the liberal fixation on putting this old man and other old Nazis away is that liberals in general claim prison is, or should be, for rehabilitation, not punishment. That punishment never does any good.
Yet this old dude appears to have done an excellent job of rehabilitating himself, assuming he ever really needed it. AFAIK, nobody has ever claimed he led anything but an exemplary life from his arrival in the country to the time his legal troubles started.
So why the obsession with locking away a 91-year old man? Why should debated actions over a period of a few months more than 60 years ago outweigh a decent life of decades?
I suspect it is because liberals have gotten a great deal of mileage out of equating Nazism with the ultimate in human evil, then equating Nazism with conservatism and rightism.
They’re about to run out of victims to sacrifice on this altar and must take advantage of their few remaining opportunities.
Those most anxious to pursue him in general seem to be liberals/leftist, apparently as part of their general quest to make “Nazi” a term of evil so egregious none other comes even close.
Which is more than a little silly. The Nazi ideology was perhaps more evil than any other that has gained significant power in human history, but they have a good deal of healthy competition in this field.
What I find odd about the liberal fixation on putting this old man and other old Nazis away is that liberals in general claim prison is, or should be, for rehabilitation, not punishment. That punishment never does any good.
Yet this old dude appears to have done an excellent job of rehabilitating himself, assuming he ever really needed it. AFAIK, nobody has ever claimed he led anything but an exemplary life from his arrival in the country to the time his legal troubles started.
So why the obsession with locking away a 91-year old man? Why should debated actions over a period of a few months more than 60 years ago outweigh a decent life of decades?
I suspect it is because liberals have gotten a great deal of mileage out of equating Nazism with the ultimate in human evil, then equating Nazism with conservatism and rightism.
They’re about to run out of victims to sacrifice on this altar and must take advantage of their few remaining opportunities.
Sorry. Sorry.
Friedrich Engel and Josef Scheungraber were investigated and first convicted in Italy for killing Italians. Engel was not imprisoned because of his age. Heinrich Boere was a Dutch citizen, convicted in Holland of killing Dutchmen, who fled to Germany after the war.
All these men were convicted of direct involvment in murder. Can you name a German-born, German citizen imprisoned for war crimes like Demjanjuk for being drafted as a camp guard?
So basically you're going from a position of "No Germans have been prosecuted" to a position of "Okay, Germans have been prosecuted, but they were murderers. And volunteers."
...unless they are first convicted of murder on another country.
Disagree?
on another country —> in another country
When you think about it, what it all comes down to is that Demjanjuk's only real crime was that he was an auto worker and not a rocket scientist.
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