Nazi secretary, 96, caught after skipping war crimes trial set to start yesterday

At any rate, it’s apparent the court did Nazi that one coming…

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We can do both, though. We must procescute everyone who participated. That’s a non-negotiable moral imperative. However that doesn’t also prevent us from learning the lesson that normal people are easily coaxed into doing evil things.

The latter is more of a left/right culture war, unrelated to Nazi trials IMHO. The entire foundation of right wing thought is that people can be divided into fundamentally good and evil piles, and the good peoples’ job is to punish the evil people. Everything in their world view and policy choices ultimately boils down to that. Whereas the left sees everyone as capable of good and bad based on many factors, mostly environmental (aside from the very rare outlier cases of psychopathic serial killers and such).

So sure, the right may spin Nazi trials as “thank God we got rid of this evil person” but they spin everything that way so I see it as an independent variable.

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It’s not enough to show remorse, nor should it be.

(no paywall for this article)

For many years, Germany prosecuted only those suspects whose wartime actions could be proved to be directly linked to specific atrocities, a principle that emerged from a series of trials in Frankfurt in the 1960s.

So sure was Mr. Gröning of his own position that he went public in 2005 with long interviews retelling the minutiae of his experiences as what he termed a tiny cog in the gears of the Final Solution.

In 2011, though, German attitudes were transformed when John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian, was jailed in Munich for his involvement in the killing of 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Mr. Gröning, a stamp collector, recalled later encountering a fellow philatelist, who told him that the Holocaust did not happen, according to accounts in Der Spiegel and elsewhere. He wrote a note to the man saying: “I saw everything — the gas chambers, the cremations, the selection process. One and a half million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz. I was there.”

In what some depict as a quest for exoneration, he wrote an 87-page memoir to his sons Gerhard and Wolfgang about his experiences. In 2005, he recorded nine hours of taped interviews for a BBC documentary.

Later that same year, he told Der Spiegel, “Guilt really has to do with actions, and because I believe that I was not an active perpetrator, I don’t believe that I am guilty.”

A decade later, a court came to a different conclusion.

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It would still be a nice start. The fact that she couldn’t even manage that much speaks volumes about what kind of person she is.

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A great deal of our coursework in Film & Media Studies had to do with Nazi propaganda, and one of the main points I think I will always remember is that here, in our time, we have the complete luxury of talking about it.
In his moment, he had to make a decision and stick with it without much time for deliberation. I wholeheartedly support (wholehearted) efforts to subvert evil folks in any way reasonably possible, no matter how small the plan.

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It is claimed that she strategically avoided vaccination, thinking it would keep her out of the courtroom. Isn’t that creative.

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I strongly doubt that any “counterproductive narrative” (as you framed it) is intentional. The capture and conviction of WWII mass murderers and abettors must be given significant media coverage (with a history lesson thrown in, as a reminder), especially nowadays when the Right is working overtime to revise and eliminate history that puts Caucasians in a bad light, and with neo-Nazis and white supremacists now being our greatest terrorist threat.

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One would have thought that completely obvious.

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One should have. :expressionless:

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The apocryphal story is that Coventry (England’s 9th biggest city) was allowed to be heavily bombed, destroying most of the city centre, to hide that Enigma had been broken. Some stories confirm this, others deny it.

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So I am dropping this here, and listen to the video, but the earlier videos are even more damning in the history of the unique evil of the natzi regeime that has shifted the deep morality of the west in ways that you didn’t even know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBrrsqhAXQI

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