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Just finished reading William Golden’s Marathon Man yesterday - compliments of the library free shelf.
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Why should Germany take him back? Wearing a german uniform doesn’t make you a german national. The US government is of the same opinion:
There is: International Criminal Court. But the USA chose not to part of it and at times is actively opposing it.
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Wishing suffering on people who commit crimes leads to things like the American prison system, and all of its myriad issues, as far as I’m concerned. Justice being served is one thing, and it certainly seems it wasn’t here. Wishing misery on a living person, no matter how vile, I think tarnishes people. The karmic cycle, what a grand adventure it is!
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Tell that to the people of Rwanda, who as I understand largely decided that in order for their country to move on, reconciliation was necessary — which included people who committed murderous acts of genocide going free, often even living in close proximity to those they attacked. It’s difficult to imagine being able to to do that in such a circumstance, but I’d wager it helps the victims as much or more than the perpetrators.
This happens here in the USA, when people forgive the crimes of a killer or attacker, and request that the justice system not go after the death penalty. I find people who do this to be admirable like few others.
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Okay, so I hadn’t looked into his background. His citizenship is complicated by the fact that he was Polish, but his hometown is now part of Ukraine. I read that he’s eligible for Ukrainian citizenship. I don’t know if he still has Polish citizenship - possibly. If he’s stateless that makes things harder.
But, the goal is not just to get him out of the US. I think that would be shortsighted. It’s to get him somewhere where he can be prosecuted, I’m sure you’ll agree! Germany would be such a place.
Send him to San Francisco first. UA58 SFO-MUC is 11 hours, and the economy seating is 10-across. I’ve done it and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone but a war criminal.
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Why do you think that message would have to be sent to those who faced justice for their crimes against humanity?
This needs to be emphasised.
This is exactly the situation where I would think the ICC would be best suited to deal with the situation.
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My point is actually more about what forgiveness does for the forgiver, and less so about what it does for the forgiven – although in my belief system, that itself is an utterly false dichotomy, which is what leads me to this belief in the first place. heheh 
Why not send him to Venezuela or El Salvador? We don’t seem to have any problems deporting people to those countries.
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ICE never seems to have any trouble just locking people up and figuring out the details later.
Except in a case like this?
It’s as if they see Nazi death camp guards as kindred spirits rather than as illegal criminal aliens.
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That is basically false. Rwanda not only forced the Hutus out of the country (directly involved in genocide or not), they have had many military conflicts and several wars over the displaced Hutus even to modern day. Inside Rwanda’s borders there have been projects to forcibly make whoever is left get along in recent years, but I doubt you would agree with the methods used since complaining about the law alone can get you arrested.
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Did you really just stop in to let us all know what is and what is not justice for holocaust victims?
Those poor poor notzee fucks, who would apologize for them if you were not here?
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And a signifcant population of German ethnicity.
Do we have to go over this “holocaust” thing again from the beginning?
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As you apparently didn’t bother to read the article I repeat myself:
He never was a german citizen.
Additionally:
The USA had no problems prosecuting nazis before.
The USA had no problems sheltering nazis before. Unfortunately this one wasn’t as useful as the others.
Look beyond the clickbait headlines. You come close to saying, “there are some crimes so heinous that innocence is no defense.”
Make it clear: I am not defending the Nazis. I am not defending a convicted war criminal. I am not defending war crimes. The crimes of the Nazis were heinous, and the convicts at the Nuremberg trials got their just deserts. There was abundant evidence against them - including orders that they personally signed.
I am defending the process of law - which I hope that we all enjoy, no matter what the accusation. When I hear arguments, against any accused criminal, that began, “he gave up his rights when he…,” my only answer is “what part of ‘inalienable’ did you not understand?” Similarly, the argument that “many thousands of others, less guilty than he, are detained and deported by ICE without a fair hearing, and dozens are imprisoned at Guantánamo with no legal process at all,” argues in favour of their getting a fair hearing, not of his being denied one.
The case at hand is not directly the case of even an accused war criminal. This person was a private, aged twenty when the war ended. He was conscripted as a guard at a death camp. He was by no means a Nazi mastermind. Even the accusation that he “helped to train” the executioners of Project Reinhard is twisting the facts in evidence. He guarded the camp where they were being trained. The alternative was to be shot for desertion.
Even the Nuremberg tribunals declined to try every rank-and-file German soldier, even among those who guarded the camps. They tried the officers; they tried the soldiers against whom there was personal evidence of atrocities. They did not erect concentration camps to execute systematically every member of the German army. While it established that “Beispiel ist Beispiel” is not an absolute defense, the clemency that the victors exhibited to the rank and file surely showed that there was diminished responsibility ascribed to the common soldier. (As an aside, this applied as well to the German people. The US could have executed the Morgenthau Plan. It didn’t.)
In this one case, because the person erred by, in effect, checking the wrong box on a form that asked, “were you ever a Nazi?” The case for his deportation builds from this simple fact of concealment, not from any further crimes that it may or may not have concealed.
It sounds as if many here would subject him to summary execution without trial. It must be without trial, because over seventy years later, it’s impossible to marshal evidence and witnesses against him. Still, he must be punished, because a soldier drafted in his teens to serve the Nazis must be guilty of genocide. Or perhaps he can be accorded a show trial, without witnesses, without evidence, without rules. Do you have the confession written that he would be compelled to read? Or would you prefer he simply be executed on the street? Are you willing to pull the trigger yourself?
If he is guilty of a crime worse than failing to desert the army, and failing to report his former conscription, I have yet to see any mention in the press of what that crime was. Do you have information I lack? As far as I know, personal responsibility under our law must stem from a personal act, or a dereliction of a duty personally to act. (“Extreme duress,” such as would surely be argued in this case, could possibly stand as an affirmative defense against the accusation of dereliction.)
Nearly everyone in this forum agrees that there are prominent Americans who have committed crimes against humanity. I dread the day that they are brought to your sort of ‘justice’, because I shall surely stand condemned for being at too few degrees of separation from them.
“I would give the Devil himself the benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”
He was party to one of the worst crimes in the 20th century and he got off most of his life free from consequences. Fuck that.
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Um, yes, while true, they specifically singled out Jews for extermination. That actually does matter here. It certainly doesn’t lighten other crimes, but the actual attempt to wipe out Jewish people is worth noting for that alone. Even the Armenian genocide, which the nazis often compared their attempt to exterminate the Jews to, wasn’t really an attempt to kill all Armenians, as much as it was an attempt to eliminate what was seen as a dangerous political enemy.
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