He’s 94. Can’t we send in the Man Bites Dog guy to sit next to him and yell at him?
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Does he have a passport? The country that issued his passport has to take him back. Diplomatically, that’s essentially what a passport is: a promise that “this person is one of ours, and we’ll accept him for repatriation.” (It’s not a guarantee that the passport holder won’t be arrested at the border: it’s common to deport wanted criminals to the nations where they will be tried.)
Of course, if we’re trying to repatriate him to a place where we don’t want to cause a diplomatic hubbub, and they refuse to honour the guy’s passport, that’s another thing. If he’s, say, legally a Pole and Poland won’t take him back, and we don’t want to get into a diplomatic fight over it, then the limbo in which he finds himself is about as good as we can do. Is exacting revenge aganst a 94-year-old who stands accused of committing war crimes at the age of twenty worth starting a trade war?
If the person is stateless - the Nazi regime left thousands if not millions of stateless persons in its wake - then he’s really the problem of whatever nation finds him within their borders. There are international conventions regarding the treatment of stateless persons - it’s a war crime, for instance, to subject them to summary execution - but they do have very few legal rights beyond those conventions.
I suppose we could convene a Nuremberg-style war crimes tribunal over here, but given that he’s 94, I don’t think he’s a great threat to society. At this late date, it’s going to be difficult to find documentary evidence and witnesses, and the prosecution may fail simply because the case is cold. (The INS case is not that he committed war crimes; it’s that he’s alleged to have lied about them. I don’t know how they could have adjudicated the statement that he lied about the crimes without reaching the facts of whether the statement was true, but perhaps he’s held to have confessed.)
Simply sitting still and waiting for him to meet his inevitable end might well be the best course of action at this point. I know it doesn’t satisfy the lust for revenge, but maybe we can step beyond that, just this once?
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–I know it doesn’t satisfy the lust for revenge, but maybe we can step beyond that, just this once?–
When six million people get out of their graves and live again, and we kill him anyways, then it’s revenge. Until then, it’s justice.
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Won’t work. Nazis are like dog shit on the bottom of your shoe: nearly impossible to get rid of.
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Simple problem with a simple solution: label him an “enemy combatant”…
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They’d have some things in common…
Ideally at high tide.
Seriously though, put the fucker on a United Airlines flight to Germany and keep sending him back until they clean up their own dog’s shit. If nothing else the law of averages and UA’s tender graces will catch up with him eventually.
I wonder why Trump isn’t all over this. It’s not like our President is buddy buddy with Na…oh.
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Make him a Cabinet Secretary.
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A tabloid would avoid an untruthful headline by phrasing it as a question. But that’s a higher standard.
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The trouble is that no one wants to pay for the privilege of being on geriatric Nazi deathwatch. No one wants to accept him as a deportee. No one want to go through the trouble of trying him when he probably won’t live to see the end of the legal process. No one at the State Dept. wants to grind this axe with Germany instead of the hundreds of useful things they could do with the same time and goodwill. No prison really wants to deal with a prisoner who will probably be handcuffed to a hospital bed more often than he will actually be behind prison walls.
A horrible man got away. Had he been younger when we caught up with him, we could be a little more heartless, and the process would work better. But now it’s a hassle that everyone just wants to ignore until it goes away.
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When killing him does anything to make the six million whole, it’s justice. When it’s out of a primal desire to make him suffer for the evil he’s done, it’s revenge.
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I’m not sure we have laws that would allow us to do that. His crime against the USA has already been dealt with. Do we have a legal framework in NY or in the USA for prosecuting war criminals who’s crimes weren’t committed against the USA or its citizens? If there is a framework is it free from a statute of limitations clause?
From Nazi concentration camp to American gulag.
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Yeah, let’s do that one.
They should apply the old end-of-the-party rule: “you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” As others have said, I’m sure Israel will be glad to offer him a visa along with free room and board.
Poetic justice.
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Wait, wut!?
Mad Magazine did a one or two page satire (of sorts) on this very subject back in the 90’s called “Fritz Next Door”.[1] However, I can’t seem to find any reference to it, and If I have the issue in question, it’s likely in a box deep in my pile o crap at home. And Mad Magazine’s web site is nothing but a single page with a ‘buy a subscription’ button, so no luck there. The satire was set in cleveland (because why the hell not?) and the nazi in hiding was working as a tv repairman, of all things. (you know, back when TVs were roughly cube-shaped, weighed a ton, and if you were lucky you got more than 10 stations on them, and could actually be fixed when they broke.)
- My google-fu turned up empty and borderline NSFW results; YMMV
Dudes…he is at least 90 years old. Leave him alone.
94, and that’s the worst part. Fucker got 94 years while his innumerable victims got an unmarked mass grave. May he suffer the more for every year he outlived all those people he butchered and ordered butchered.
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Stop understating the depths of the Nazis’ crimes. They killed not only Jewish people, but targeted gay people, and Rom. Then there was the wide spread killing of civilians in conquered territories. The non-soldier death toll is probably over 15 million.
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