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“He knew from the beginning exactly what was going on in the camp,” Alt said.
But he said that since Demjanjuk had already been imprisoned on remand for two years, more time in jail seemed inappropriate at his age. “The defendant is to be let go,” he said. A court statement cited two other reasons: Demjanjuk had already spent eight years in prison in Israel and the crime was 68 years old."
Taken from http://www.torontosun.com/2011/05/12/demjanjuk-convicted-of-nazi-war-crimes
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Again, I'm not really sure how the fact that you were subject to punishment if you dissented is any excuse for supporting the genocide and slaughter of millions.
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Yeah, I actually already read that post before I posted (*GASP* a poster reading the thread before posting). What I was talking about, however, is not really about whether it is right to try a prison guard (what most of the thread seemed to be griping about), but whether the reasoning behind the conviction, "that he should have chosen to take the risk to run away or not participate" is really valid.
Basically, for this reasoning to be valid (to me at least), you have to prove: - that the thought even crossed his mind that he could run away - that he would have been able to run away - that he was aware of how he could have run away
As far as I can tell from reading this thread, the second one is the only one that has been demonstrated to be true is the second one given that there were others who managed to flee.
If you can't demonstrate all three, then you enter all sorts of crazy gray areas of morality and culpability.
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On May 13 2011 02:46 YipMan wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2011 01:39 Chill wrote: Whoa this is pretty nuts. I'm surprised he was found guilty... I would have imagined #2 would be fairly easy to prove. Very enlightening post, well done! Show nested quote +On May 13 2011 02:10 AlphaWhale wrote: An eight nine year old is tried for twenty seven thousand and nine hundred accounts of accessory to murder? Sentenced five years?
The numbers alone make this sound ridiculous. The Nazi reign was 70 years ago, this doesn't change anything. They didn't imprison a threat to society or war criminal, if this happened a long time ago they would have.
Germany needs to chill out on the Nazi stuff. It was 70 years ago, it's cool bros. I think the families of the victims which bodies may never be identified think the same way you do. The fact you forget is, that this kind of racial ideology and the support of a modern genocide is still in the mind of million of peoples around the world. BUT YEA, I GUESS ITS JUS HISTORY BRO'S! ignorant dumbhead... Show nested quote +On May 13 2011 02:18 EmeraldSparks wrote: My line is drawn well above the level of responsibility that an ordinary prison guard gets. If you insist on drawing a line such that there is absolutely no room for argument whatsoever, then I draw it all the way at the bottom where everybody who wasn't part of the resistance should have been stripped of their citizenship. An ordinary prison guard? This guy actively committed murder, presented himself as an innocent Prisoner , concealed the facts and never showed any signs of remorse. According to your argumentation, every mother, every child is as guilty as he is, makes totally sense. Sorry, I must have missed this. Did he actively murder people of his own initiative?
On May 13 2011 02:46 YipMan wrote: If you were given a gun to kill hundreds if not even thousands of people, you ALWAYS have a choice, at this point you are NOT determined - dont tell me anything fuckin else, that would just be a sad shame... Like I said, most Wehrmacht members temporarily drafted into killing squad work went along with it.
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On May 13 2011 02:46 YipMan wrote:I think the families of the victims which bodies may never be identified think the same way you do. The fact you forget is, that this kind of racial ideology and the support of a modern genocide is still in the mind of million of peoples around the world. BUT YEA, I GUESS ITS JUS HISTORY BRO'S! ignorant dumbhead...
You make it sound like when this man enters a cell the world will become suddenly less racist.
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On May 13 2011 05:07 Fleebenworth wrote: Again, I'm not really sure how the fact that you were subject to punishment if you dissented is any excuse for supporting the genocide and slaughter of millions.
I am not sure what entitles you to make that sort of statement. It is very easy to say something like this from the comfort and safety of your own home. This sort of "how could people do this, this could never happen to me!" attitude just...pisses me off. And is such a dangerous mentality. I wish people would spend less time condemning and feeling moraly superior, and instead think about what can be learned from the whole thing. And on a personal sidenote: the people who feel so secure about their moral high ground might very well be the first to be won over. Because they don't really THINK about this stuff, and just make assumptions that are very likely not even their own.
Also I find this whole think very much a farce. Let's assume he is guilty of everything they charge him with. What good does it do ANYONE to see him sentenced to prison time he will NEVER have to serve? I can't understand why that would help the victims in any way. Also I find it pretty bizarre that this is about a crime not commited in germany, and not commited by a german. I don't feel we germans have the right to bring him to court. Maybe it's just that Germans feel that need to jump at every opportunity to show that (guess what!) we are not nazis anymore.
Don't get me wrong, it should be despised. It should not be forgotten. It should also not be trivialized. People should be able to talk about this. But Demjanjuk is one of the last relics from that time. It is time to move on. Not time to forgive and forget. Time to move on. But Germany will probably be the very last to do so, and it seems that almost seventy years later, this process has SLOWLY started in other countries.
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People keep saying that this whole kind of thing is partly because Germany is still trying to show that they aren't Nazis anymore, but what I want to know is...what kind of ignorant dumb fuck still thinks that the Germans are all Nazis? Germans are just Germans....the Nazi regime ended quite some time ago......
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He was sentences to 5 years, will not serve a day till after his applies, more then likely will die before ever going to jail.
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On May 13 2011 17:51 AlphaWhale wrote:Show nested quote +On May 13 2011 02:46 YipMan wrote:I think the families of the victims which bodies may never be identified think the same way you do. The fact you forget is, that this kind of racial ideology and the support of a modern genocide is still in the mind of million of peoples around the world. BUT YEA, I GUESS ITS JUS HISTORY BRO'S! ignorant dumbhead... You make it sound like when this man enters a cell the world will become suddenly less racist.
Demnjanjuk enters this world. Diablo's minions grow stronger...
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As a perhaps unnecessary addendum, Pat Buchanan has come out with a spirited defense of Mr. Demjanjuk:
“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on the BBC. The lede began:
“A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.”
Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced that he committed a specific crime.”
That is correct. No evidence was produced, no witness came forward to testify he ever saw Demjanjuk injure anyone. And the critical evidence that put Demjanjuk at Sobibor came—from the KGB.
First was a KGB summary of an alleged interview with one Ignat Danilchenko, who claimed he was a guard at Sobibor and knew Demjanjuk. Second was the Soviet-supplied ID card from the Trawniki camp that trained guards.
There are major problems with both pieces of “evidence.”
First, Danilchenko has been dead for a quarter of a century, no one in the West ever interviewed him, and Moscow stonewalled defense requests for access to the full Danilchenko file. His very existence raises a question.
How could a Red Army soldier who turned collaborator and Nazi camp guard survive Operation Keelhaul, which sent all Soviet POWs back to Joseph Stalin, where they were either murdered or sent to the Gulag?
As for the ID card from Trawniki, just last month there was unearthed at the National Archives in College Park, Md., a 1985 report from the Cleveland office of the FBI, which, after studying the card, concluded it was “quite likely” a KGB forgery.
“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.”
This FBI report, never made public, was done just as Demjanjuk was being deported to Israel to stand trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the murderer of Treblinka. In a sensational trial covered by the world’s press, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to hang.
But after five years on death row, new evidence turned up when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia opened up. That evidence wholly validated the claims of Demjanjuk’s defenders.
Not only had Demjanjuk never even been at Treblinka, the Soviet files contained a photograph of the real “Ivan”—a larger and older man.
To its eternal credit, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed the conviction, rejected a request to retry Demjanjuk as a camp guard elsewhere in Poland, freed him and sent him home to America.
Exposed as a laughing stock, and denounced for fraud by Ohio district and appellate courts, the Office of Special Investigations began crafting a new case, John Demjanjuk of Sobibor, to deport and try again the old man whose defense attorneys had made fools of them.
Thus the Sobibor story and Demjanjuk’s supposed complicity in the murder of 28,000 Jews—though, as the BBC notes, no one testified at the trial that they ever saw John Demjanjuk injure anyone.
Consider the life this tormented American has lived.
Born in Ukraine in 1920, as a boy he endured the Holodomor—the famine imposed on his people in 1932 and 1933 by Stalin and his hated henchman Lazar Kaganovich, which resulted in the starvation and death of somewhere between 5 million and 9 million Ukrainians.
It has been called by historians the “forgotten Holocaust.”
Conscripted into the Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured in the German blitzkrieg. Unlike American and British POWs, whom Germans regarded as racial equals, Ukrainians were untermensch who could be used for medical experiments.
Not only did Demjanjuk survive, he managed to evade the Allied order, under Keelhaul, for all Red Army POWs to be repatriated to Stalin, which was the Soviet dictator’s demand before he would return the U.S. and British POWs his troops liberated in the march to Berlin.
In the war’s aftermath, Demjanjuk married his wife Vera, who had been conscripted in the Ukraine and brought forcibly west to work in the German economy.
Thence he moved to Cleveland, became an autoworker, raised a family and practiced his Christian faith. But he made a mistake.
He sent his wife to Ukraine to tell his aged mother that he had survived the war and was living in the great United States of America.
Word got around the village. The KGB came calling. Swiftly, the payments his mother had been receiving for her war hero son were halted, and suddenly, there turned up an ID card that said John Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki to be a Nazi camp guard.
The KGB began feeding OSI from its “files,” as OSI began a manic persecution of Demjanjuk that has lasted 30 years.
Stalin died in bed in 1953. Kaganovich died with his family around him in Moscow in 1991. And John Demjanjuk, 91, after spending five years on death row for a crime he did not commit in a place he never was, is stateless and homeless in a Germany where veterans of the SS walk free.
That is justice—in our world.
I wonder if anyone has any observations on his argument.
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I hope he gets a special treatment of the "let´s hunt and torture his soul for what he has done, additional to running from his deeds" kind in a place some might call hell.
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Well at least I'm glad this came to an end, one way or another. Way, way, way too much uncertainty in the history of this case.
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Glad this is all over with.
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Like literally the LAST post before the bump was about how uncertain the entire case is and some people instantly jump on some kind of "may this dude never find peace" bandwagon. Interesting concept of justice right there.
Either way, glad this story is over.
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This is sick, you're all celebrating the death of an old man who was put on a show trial for what he has allegedly done nearly 70 years ago, barely being an adult, in one of the messiest period ever in human history.
Meanwhile the butchers of Vietnam, the Gulags, the Middle East and many other war criminals roam free. Maybe justice will come for them, too, 70 years from now? Or maybe these "nazis" are actually accused because the witch hunting must go on, the nazi hunters have to make a living too. Yes, there were a lot of sickos. Many of them were executed in Nürnberg, relying on laws that weren't even in effect during their crimes. But maybe this guy did not kill 29 000 innocents. Perhaps put away the pitchforks and think for a moment before you open the champagne.
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On March 17 2012 20:43 Doublemint wrote: I hope he gets a special treatment of the "let´s hunt and torture his soul for what he has done, additional to running from his deeds" kind in a place some might call hell. He was found innocent by the Israeli supreme court, what more do you want?
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On May 13 2011 05:07 Fleebenworth wrote: Again, I'm not really sure how the fact that you were subject to punishment if you dissented is any excuse for supporting the genocide and slaughter of millions. Because then soldiers of any nation are placed under a Morton's Fork situation where absolutely every choice they make will result in their imprisonment and death. There's a world of grey area between "monster" and "hero", and most soldiers that are following orders land in that area. A failure to be a hero should never be a crime.
Or, if you feel that strongly about soldiers committing crimes under orders, feel free to start a crusade against any US soldier not named Bradley Manning.
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I am quite aware of how intransparent this period of time still is, especially finding evidence after 70(!) years. I read about Demjanjuk in newspapers when it actually was "news" quite some time ago, and were not aware of him being found not guilty. However - being acquitted by jurisprudence does not necessarily mean he is innocent - I could be as wrong as you. That does not take away the fact that many nazis did escape and were not prosecuted properly, so in a sense it IS understandable that people do find some kind of satisfaction if someone involved in the most heinous crimes in the history of the world met his maker.
I personally want nothing. It´s over this way or another.
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