[Canadian_Mind]

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

Canadian_Mind Canadian_Mind:

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

I never have any problems getting on to this dung pile, though in spite of the content!

Then why the fuck are you here? You do little else than lambast this site and it's members. Frankly you're fucking annoying. Stereotypical old man on the porch getting pissed off at the leaves for falling on his lawn, despite the fact he's outside an old age care centre in his underwear at -40.

You don't like it, leave, and take your piss poor attitude with you.

Oh, relax! I'm having fun on here. Did someone piss in your cornflakes, this AM?

p.s. What the hell are you going on about, anyway? ... all of the anger, vitriol? I don't even remember posting with you, before. If it's the "dung pile" comment, let me explain: I have been on several forums around the World over the last decade or so and this is the very first one that has a "fuck" thread. you will find that you can say things here that no one else anywhere can.

I don't post very often any more. As I've grown older I've come to the realization that I don't need to express everything online. Face-face interactions are so much more practicable and fulfilling.

Since you've arrived, I've read many of your posts. And it's left me with the impression that you want nothing more than to watch the place burn. And it isn't what you say, everyone is entitled to their opinions. It's how you say it that's rubbed me raw.

[Jabberwalker]

Sorry. I will leave.

[DrCaleb]

Canadian_Mind Canadian_Mind:

Since you've arrived, I've read many of your posts. And it's left me with the impression that you want nothing more than to watch the place burn. And it isn't what you say, everyone is entitled to their opinions. It's how you say it that's rubbed me raw.

Hear hear!

He called my sister a bitch, then pretended like I didn't get the joke. It'll be a long time before he gets more than token politeness from me.

[Freakinoldguy]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Jabberwalker Jabberwalker:

This guy must be well into his 90s. The chances of him being mentally fit enough to even understand any crime that he may have committed is pretty slim. It is pointless to keep pursuing these old Nazis unless raw revenge is your only motive.

Justice has only 1 motive - to dissuade anyone from ever doing it again. For that reason alone, everyone involved in such atrocities must be pursued and brought to trial.

Justice doesn't always mean retribution. It also serves to keep the memory of such atrocities alive for future generations which, may be much more important than locking up or executing the 90+ year bastard who's hate and dogmatic obedience to totalitarianism led to this horror.

Justice has no expiry date.

[BartSimpson]

The guy in question was 18/19 at the time and he's 88 now.

1) He did not have much authority at age 18/19 and was not issuing orders.

2) Questioning such orders would have been cause for his immediate execution.

3) At this point in time the question of his participation in the killings is speculative.

4) He's likely going to be acquitted or have the charges dropped for lack of evidence.

[Thanos]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

The guy in question was 18/19 at the time and he's 88 now.

Doesn't matter. No one was press-ganged into a Waffen-SS unit like the 2nd Division Das Reich. All SS up to the very end were volunteers.

$1:

1) He did not have much authority at age 18/19 and was not issuing orders.

Doesn't matter. Obeying an illegal order to commit depraved atrocities against defenseless civilians was as illegal in 1944 as it remains in 2014. The individual that pulled the trigger is as much responsible for the crime as the son of a bitch that ordered it to be done.

$1:

2) Questioning such orders would have been cause for his immediate execution.

He wouldn't have questioned it anyway so he was never in any danger of being executed by his own unit. No one in the SS ever questioned any of their orders. They came out of an authoritarian system that in their youth trained them not to question any authority figure. This was further re-enforced into them by basic military training and then even more by further intensive mental and political indoctrination if they were accepted into the SS. Very few people in any branch of the Reich armed services ever bothered to question any of their orders either, despite too much mythologizing about the "innocence" of the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, or Kriegsmarine personnel that occurred right after the war ended and as the tensions with the Soviet Union were starting to build. The vast majority of them did these things of their own free will. The Stauffenbergs in Hitler's military were in reality such a tiny minority among the overall membership that it's barely worth talking about.

$1:

3) At this point in time the question of his participation in the killings is speculative.

Which is what the trial will decide. The modern German state has the right and the responsibility to prosecute him if they've decided the evidence warrants it.

$1:

4) He's likely going to be acquitted or have the charges dropped for lack of evidence.

You don't know that so you shouldn't say it. The Germans don't have a habit of reckless or malicious prosecutions the way too many DA's seeking higher office do in the United States. If found guilty he'll probably receive the modern German equivalent of a suspended sentence due to his advanced age anyway. But at least he'll have a conviction on his name, which is all that matters, because his age is no excuse to escape what he did if he is guilty.

[Freakinoldguy]

BartSimpson BartSimpson:

The guy in question was 18/19 at the time and he's 88 now.

1) He did not have much authority at age 18/19 and was not issuing orders.

2) Questioning such orders would have been cause for his immediate execution.

3) At this point in time the question of his participation in the killings is speculative.

4) He's likely going to be acquitted or have the charges dropped for lack of evidence.

He was SS which was an organization that was populated by volunteers not conscripts of dubious loyalty. He could have joined the German Army and avoided the SS but he didn't, he chose to be in the SS and took their oath which is pretty much an indictment of his beliefs.

I will agree that had he not issued those orders he would have been shot but, then again, given his background, oath of allegiance and mental training is there any logical reason he wouldn't have issued them?

Also, did this sadistic prick and his troops receive orders from his superiors to have the innocent people locked in a barn. while Machine-gunners shot at their legs, then doused them in petrol and set them alight? There's a difference between executing people to make an example of them and torturing them before doing so.

This wasn't a one off by a group of renegade SS men. The theme of murdering innocent people has followed the SS throughout the second world war including murdering Jews in Russia or Canadian soldiers in places like the Ardenne Abbey and the excuse " I was only a soldier" doesn't wash for the SS.

The only way he'll get off is if there isn't enough evidence to make the charges stick otherwise he'll be found guilty. As for his punishment, if it was me I'd still hang him in a public square but my guess is he'll live out the rest of his life at home in peace which is something his victims never got the privilege of doing.

[PostFactum]

He's so old that he even don't care. Too late, spoon is good only for a dinner.

[Xort]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

Justice has only 1 motive - to dissuade anyone from ever doing it again. For that reason alone, everyone involved in such atrocities must be pursued and brought to trial.

Unless they happen to be on the right side of history in which case everyone ignores the crimes.

The history just after WWII is mostly ignored outside of the cold war between the USA and USSR.

[PostFactum]

Xort Xort:

The history just after WWII is mostly ignored outside of the cold war between the USA and USSR.

I don't know how about US, but in USSR. KGB were looking for guys like that very thorough.

[BartSimpson]

PostFactum PostFactum:

Xort Xort:

The history just after WWII is mostly ignored outside of the cold war between the USA and USSR.

I don't know how about US, but in USSR. KGB were looking for guys like that very thorough.

I believe Xort is referring to the fact that the Allies collaborated with the Soviets in forcibly repatriating East European refugees immediately after the war - including a lot of Jews who'd survived the Holocaust - to the Soviets who, in turn, immediately sent the overwhelming majority of these people to slave labor (death) camps in Siberia.

That said, every single Allied soldier who obeyed their orders and sent refugees to die in Soviet slave labor camps should be tried for crimes against humanity. Likewise, the Soviet/Russians who are still alive who participated in the Katyn Forest Massacre should also be prosecuted for their crimes.

But we know that won't happen.

The here-nor-there of the German atrocities aside, the only reason we still make a big deal about the German atrocities is because they lost the war.

Again, it's a long time ago. Let the sleeping dog lie or else let's be honest and prosecute everyone who committed atrocities during that war.

[Thanos]

It's not a "we" situation though. Except for maybe the French, who certainly wouldn't mind seeing a few more convictions for Oradour before the remaining murderers that haven't already been tried are all naturally deceased, it's doubtful that anyone from the outside is really pressing the Germans hard on this one for action. It's the German government choosing to do this in the name of their own national honour and reputation. In the 1960's and '70's, when their government and bureaucracies were staffed by those who had served under the Reich and were known to have been involved in atrocities in the 1940's, the Germans backed off on prosecutions because it was felt it would undermine the country in the face of the Soviet threat. The NATO allies also chose to look the other way for the same reason; if it weren't for his skill set that the US military needed as the Cold War began, Werner Von Braun (for example) should have been taken outside and had a bullet put in his head the minute he was captured for what he knowingly participated in and allowed to happen to the slave labourers at Dora and the Mittelwerk. Fast forward to after the Cold War was over and the same situation doesn't exist.

Besides, like we've said before, this old fucker isn't in any danger of being deported to Poland, France, or Israel to be imprisoned. All that'll happen is that he'll have a conviction against his name, maybe be subject to house arrest, and probably die at home or in the hospital when his time is up. Lots of the Nazis that were convicted in the Nuremburg trials, and the camp guards/staffers trials afterwards, barely served ten years for what they'd done. It was only the camp commandants and the most sadistic and murderous of the guards that got life sentences. Even the surviving participants from the Wannsee Conference that hadn't been killed in the war or executed immediately after the surrender had been released by 1950. This old killer is going to receive practically nothing when compared to those other participants based on his age and frail condition alone.

[ShepherdsDog]

It`s interesting that history mentions almost nothing of the ethnic cleansing that took place in the eastern third of Germany following the war This territory is now known as western Poland and it was given to the Poles to make up for the former eastern third of Poland that the Soviets refused to return A large part of the land grant was the result of a cartographic error....wrong Oder river. German towns cities, towns and villages, that`d been German for centuries, were emptied and millions of civilians were driven from their homes. Prussia essentially disappeared into Poland and Russia. Tens of thousands died

[Thanos]

I think the Wiki article on that subject said that about two million ethnic Germans died as they were expelled all the way from the Volga to Silesia and Pommerania. The population of post-war Germany actually grew as the eastern refugees took up the places of the Germans that had been killed during the war. The unfortunate truth of ethnic cleansing, as we all saw in Yugoslavia and in India after the partition with Pakistan & Bangladesh, is that it permanently ends internecine strife in ethnically mixed areas. They're no longer hate-filled neighbours living among each other so therefore the insane levels of violence in between them no longer occurs. By doing that expulsion the Soviets essentially ended forever the tensions between Germans and Slavs, and between Poles and Ukrainians also, that had resulted in all that bloodshed over the centuries.

[Public_Domain]