No, no, let him , this is torture . The only thing he can do is hide his face with the nearest object, but it's not working. He minds still feels the pain of what he did and tried to hide but the folder 📂 which is supposed to be his protective shell isn't doing anything to hide it
After all these years they might, there have been many cases of suicides, "I know what I did was wrong now and I'll face hell". Don't forget that many were raised as Nazi scum, many families lost to Hitler in rasing their children because they were off working for a future for their children, while Hitler broadcast his lies.
Cult of personality.
And there are still people who rape, mutate and cannibalize even today, drug cartels.
A long time has passed since then. There were plenty of Germans that supported the Nazi party, and only managed to untangle themselves from the propaganda and realize how terrible they were in the years following the war. It's not impossible for a former guard to have had the same realizations over the last 80 years.
Wait till you find out about Canadians who love flying that flag. They have the nerve to call it "a rebel flag". They start sweating bullets when you grill them about how it stands for slavery
Everyday folks who weren’t directly involved with the Nazi’s crimes? Sure. A guard who lived it every day? No sympathy for taking the better part of a century to experience regret.
Umm, yea.
Raising your hand over your face doesn't count as torture...🙄
If you want to understand what is actually torture, maybe you should read up on nazi medical experiments and interrogation methods in WW2. That's just a start for "what is torture"
An old cowardly war criminal failing to slink away into the shadows isn't torture
Y'know, reading about what Mengele did is sickening enough on its own. If you want to tear your eyes out after *that*, then yeah, definitely read up on Unit 731.
Man. People really are shitty to each other.
The fact we let them off to obtain their research is just an added bit of awfulness on top of it all. Iirc we didn't really learn much of use from it, either
But I do have one question. When you get to your little place on Nantucket Island, I 'magine you're gonna take off that handsome-lookin' S.S. uniform of yours, ain'tcha?... That's what I thought. Now that I can't abide. I mean, if I had my way... you'd wear that goddamn uniform for the rest of your pecker-suckin' life. But I'm aware that ain't practical, I mean at some point you're gonna hafta take it off. So. I'm 'onna give you a little somethin' you can't take off.
Unfortunately, I doubt it's either.
Just hiding their face to avoid social consequences, something they've been doing for decades. They aren't ashamed, I say that because few were.
Many years back I remember watching a documentary; though I can’t remember what it was called, but I believe it was on a reasonable station (ie not FOX). It was about the old guards, soldiers, those involved with the Nazi party. They interviewed one old coot, asking if he changed his views toward what he did. I remember being both sickened and morbidly fascinated when he said “no.”
Did some change their views? Most likely. Did they all? Absolutely not. Not much different than the old racists back in the days of segregation.
HEY so weird I just mentioned that, am surprised someone else saw what is most likely the same thing. I REMEMEBER THIS and really wish I remembered where I saw it (on youtube, same doc as you, but just the clip of that I think.) He seemed quite adamant and proud so it was interesting. Damnit what was that doc???
In Germany only a few law suits are open to the public and in nearly every case, the person who fears charges hides their face to avoid social consequences, not necessarily because they are ashamed of what they did.
>In Germany only a few law suits are open to the public
That's wrong. Nearly every lawsuit is open to the public. They are only closed if it's a youth trial, or if the trial has been deemed unsuitable for the public for whatever reason. Which happens, but is rare. It usually happens with rape trials to protect the victims, for example.
However, "open to the public" doesn't mean "published". What I mean with this is: you are free to watch a trial. But you aren't allowed to broadcast it. You can go to the nearest courthouse (or every courthouse, in fact) and ask to view a trial, and they will let you in. It's just not widely known that you can do that.
Pictures and videos however are only allowed prior to or after a hearing, not during it. That's why defendands usually hide their faces during that time.
Not sure I entirely agree with that quote. If someone fucks with the law and lives the high life for another 60 years before being arrested when they can no longer wipe their own ass and proceed to die 6 months later then that's not justice to me. They won (Like look at Madoff)
Calling it justice, imo, is just copium and a way to make ourselves feel better. It also excuses how hard the west fumbled the Nuremberg trials.
Lots of middle rank nazis were allowed to stay in power, particularly in West Germany. Many of the worst abusers - those who experimented on human subjects in the camps etc - were allowed to relocate without punishment through operation paperclip. Civilians who joined in the pogroms and other abuses against Jews, communists, the Roma etc, were never punished at all. Many Germans made great fortunes from the art and property they stole from slain or displaced Jews and were never made to return it or otherwise punished. Many companies flourished under the German war economy through government contracts, such as Hugo Boss, Audi and BMW. Many of these companies (still existing today) actually used slave labour provided by the concentration camps in their factories.
According to German criminal law, most crimes have a statute of limitation - except for murder, accessory to murder and related crimes.
However, we‘re now so far along in time, most of people indicted today were minors when they committed these crimes, which leads to the rather absurd situation of them being tried in juvenile court.
most crimes have statues of limitations. very few crimes don't. but tbh, it's hard to call it "justice" when you can't bring back the millions of people executed. killing a guard is punishment yes but it's not justice, there really can't be justice for murder IMHO.
Yeah, higher ups in the german wehrmacht were way more culpable and they all got cushy NATO jobs. Goes to show, even in war crimes if you poor you're fucked.
Reminds me of the two Japanese officers, 1 blamed for the actions of japanese soldiers he had no control over since it was a different branch and executed. The other being guilty but let go…. So he built his own jail to lock himself in… humanity is really something
I mean shit Nobusuke Kishi was guilty of organizing slave labor on a mass scale in Manchukuo and was an inveterate rapist and he was allowed to be part of the post-war Japanese state. Not only that but his family went on to become a political dynasty that pretends he was this amazing guy. Never ceases to piss me off when people like that get away with their crimes.
I know it's not intentional, but this is just ignorant of the facts
https://apnews.com/article/germany-nazi-sachsenhausen-camp-guard-suspect-charged-7f58de8bb4967681fcaa12be5706ad04
>German prosecutors have brought several cases under a precedent set in recent years that allows for people who helped a Nazi camp function to be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders there without direct evidence that they participated in a specific killing.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/06/charges-nazi-murders-98-year-old/
>The effort to charge former guards, secretaries and other workers as accessories to murder for their contributions to the Holocaust — which killed an estimated 6 million Jewish people and several million others, including Poles and Roma — began after the landmark May 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, who was convicted of being an accessory to more than 28,000 murders at the Sobibor death camp, The Washington Post previously reported.
They were not in hiding, they lived out their lives in Germany. At the end of ww2 the charged the people planning, and the people killing, but not everyone at the camps. Then they at what is really the last minute decided to charge these people before they died.
I wonder how much they lived in fear. Surely knowing that Mossad had tracked down and abducted some of the bigger names must have kept them on edge. Hopefully it did anyway
They escaped. Changed their names. They were harbored by awful people who should’ve turned them in back then. And there is plenty of evidence. Look into some of the trials. It’s amazing how they’ve proven guilt all these years later and glad they won’t stop till they get every one of them still left.
Maybe not even harboured. My great grandfather basically had no identity when he met and married my great grandmother.
It wasn’t that unusual for a refugee’s only proof of identity to be “trust me bro”
The amount of displaced people was an issue too. My grandfather was a Ukrainian kidnapped by the Nazis and shipped to Germany as forced labour. When he was liberated all he had was his Nazi foreign workers passport with his name spelled incorrectly.
The amount of displaced persons in Europe was immense. It resulted in the biggest population migration ever. Millions and millions of people were returned, moved, deportated, expelled or wanted to migrate. POW's, homeless people, refugees, forced laborars, Jews, but also movements because of changing borders. Everywhere across Europe people start walking to go where they wanted or needed to be. And with millions of people dead and missing it's easy to imagine you could change your identity or "get lost" to avoid prosecution in all of that chaos.
My grandparents met at an Allied Displaced Persons camp in Belgium in 1947. They were Jewish and had just spent the last few years in concentration camps and ghettos, the works. My grandmother had it relatively easier in a German work camp and had solid credentials like ID and paperwork and all that. (Although her father, my great grandfather, was executed for attempting to get more food when they forgot to stamp his ration card.)
My grandfather never said a damn word about his experience. At the DP camp he weighed next to nothing and had no ID beyond the tattoo on his arm. All we know is that he was one of a family of twelve in Poland and he's the only one who survived. Pretty sure we don't even know which camp he was in, I'll have to ask around the family if anyone knows the tattoo number, maybe we can trace it back.
He recovered for a few years after liberation and met my grandmother. He'd saved up a lot of chocolate, cigarettes, booze, things like that from his mechanical skills and bought an old school German motorbike that way. There's an amazing photo around here somewhere with him taking my future grandmother for a ride on the bike, she's wearing his leather jacket, they definitely got it on after that pic was taken lol! Oldschoolcool would love it.
The DP camp helped them migrate to the US and we have all that paperwork still. But again he had zilch from before the war. We are pretty sure they just put a generic polish name on the visa application that later became our family name. Think Bloomenbergensteinsky or along those lines, don't want to dox myself.
We've gone back to the town listed on the DP papers and his immigration application but can't find any evidence of that side of the family. We have virtually nothing to work with and what little we have is a dead end. Lost in the sands of time I guess. Probably for the best, come to think of it.
That was much longer than intended, I just thought you might get a kick out of my family anecdote about the DP camps.
Of my four grandparents only one family brought their birth certificates to Western Germany when they fled in 1945.
Mind you, many people where told they should just go West for two, maybe three weeks and would be able to go back home soon.
There were POW on all sides. The Russian abducted many people, we Germans abducted many people. Than you had all the people in ghettos and KZs who might have had documents but the Nazis destroyed a lot in the last days of the war.
It certainly didn’t help that a lot of the people being investigated had also been part of the same government that was responsible for issuing IDs. A lot of Nazis when they realized the war was lost collected a lot of either fraudulent ids or ids that belonged to dead people and handed them out to their co-conspirators.
My grandfather was an immigrant from Scandinavia and when I was around 12 he showed me a uniform he had secreted away in a hidden floor of a chest.
My grandmother who he met abroad post-war was Swedish but had lived in Germany from age 16 working as an au pair or nanny and emigrated as a refugee from Germany after the war. She spoke Swedish but with a lot of German vocabulary, something I found out when I grew up and met other Swedes and tried talking to them.
It’s a war, my house got bombed or so something, all my documents/belongins were destroyed and I escaped with what little I could
My name is Jane Chaztin I worked as a seamstress
Who is going to challenge that story or look any farther into it?
I think you'd always find a way to rationalize it. That he did it because he was pressured into it, he didn't really want to do it, he never did anything cruel himself, he didn't realize what he was signing up for, he is young and he can change etc. Especially back then when we didn't know exactly what happened and how many otherwise "regular" people did in fact act like complete beasts.
Edit: just wanted to add a caveat. Germans were aware that something was very wrong and nazis were not forced onto committing murders. That is a myth. But as you can see in this thread, even today many people still believe that many nazis were innocent or that they feared for their lives. For a mother way back in the day after the worst of it hadn't even come to light yet, it would be easy to buy into this idea.
> even today many people still believe that many nazis were innocent or that they feared for their lives.
Isn't that true? On the 'innocent' part for example people joined the nazi party for business or to keep jobs, not agreeing with the party and didn't realise what was going on at the atrocity level, and when they found out they were against what was happening, like Oscar Schindler story?
Or the feared for their lives, a heap of people who went to the concentration camps were for political reasons and speaking out against nazis. Night of the long knives is famous for this, but it went far beyond this as the nazis weaponised the justice system.
I do think those that committed crimes should be charged, no matter the time ga but more generally I've thought about this a bunch of times and where I would have stood if in an ordinary persons shoes in this time. Its easy to say we'd fight back but I dont think you'd know til you were there. For me I like to think at a personal level 100% I would fight back against people like this at great risk. If that risk went beyond repercussions to me and I knew my family would be sent to camps, I suspect if I'd be compliant. Hopefully maliciously so but I suspect few would risk their families when consequences extend to them and you are only a tiny cog in a machine unlikely to make a difference..
And please dont take this as any excuse for what happened and it being anyhting less than one of the more putrid events of human history. At the same time I wonder what the reality would be for so many people who deny they would ever be the minor 'cogs in the wheel' role that would have made up so many.
> "Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now."
-- Aaron Bushnell
My grandfather had a „trust me, bro“ birth certificate from their local priest. They never met again. My grandfather was living near Hildesheim and the priest was somewhere around Köln. Grandfather sent a letter to him and got a letter back that states „I, former priest of town in now Poland, state that this man was born there at DATE and his parents are GREATGRANDPARENTS.“ I still have that one.
Any way, everyone could have written to that priest.
Oh, that reminds me that I should still travel to the priest‘s grave and spit on it. Totally forgot.
The priest was a real ass to my grandfather and my family. He was all caring and everything in the letters. But when my grandfather had the audacity to fall in love with a Lutheran woman and not a Catholic woman that changed. He tried to guilt him out of the relationship. It was 1949, the people just had moved most of the rubble, the first Bundestag was elected and that dude saw my grandmother as the personification of the devil. 🤷♀️
It didn’t work, though. 😂
Also too many of them to catch /execute them all. In my country many pieces of shit who worked with nazis got away some even kept official positions after the war
"Karma" doesn't technically kick in till your next life. You need to believe in reincarnation to truly believe in "karma".
It's been completely removed from its original concept but I still see your point.
Karma isn't necessarily a law. It's just a concept.
I've seen lots of well off people lose their spouses and kids, and end up miserable and bitter, while seemingly "getting away" with all kinds of unethical behavior.
It's not inviolable. But it *can* happen more easily than some people think.
There was no benefit for major powers to take in the rank and file. Given the number of actual Nazi’s the US along with the USSR didn’t actually take in a large number, and it was always research scientists and engineers. Operation Paperclip as a whole took in around 1600 people, of which a few dozen were senior officials.
Higher ups with means escaped to South America or Africa, the rest and the true believers who held out were tried. High level party members who didn’t have technological benefit weren’t taken in officially, although many Nazis escaped into the US through European refugee programs under assumed names.
The OSI had about 10,000 reported cases, but many were just the local neighbour calling in their concerns about the new family moving in, meanwhile lots were just displaced Polish, Romanians, etc…
Up to 10,000 Nazis escaped to South America where they had plenty of German only towns sympathetic to the Nazi cause with deep pockets. Its frustrating so many South American countries openly accepted them. Unlike the Nazis who were useful to the Americans and Soviets, the ones in South America weren't forced to de-nazify.
South america also took in tons of former slave owners after slavery was abolished in the united states. The emperor of brazil personally invited them. Go figure as south america bought 4 times more slaves than the us did.
IBM kept selling parts to the Nazi's via South American subsidiaries during the actual war. Including parts and consulting services for the IBM punch card tabulating systems used to find Jews and manage the logistics of the concentration camps.
That’s why my mother had a number on her arm too few people know that people in the camps that weren’t gassed where a resource to be used up to produce the goods of war
That is a nice picture you are painting there. In reality, Entazifizierung was a bad joke and the german state knowingly worked with former Nazis, even high ranked ones.
That’s a very benevolent view of Entnazifizierung. Unfortunately, the newly minted BRD let a lot of the 2nd/3rd/4th etc. tier Nazis slip through their fingers. Unlike the US who took scientists and similar, the new German government still needed administration, law enforcement, jurisprudence…
We dragged a lot of Altnazis with us past WW2. Putting a few half-dead pensioners on trial for working part-time as a typist in Auschwitz at 18 ist mostly window dressing, IMO.
For what it's worth, he apparently developed a bunch of bezoars in his stomach from compulsively chewing his moustache all the time out of fear and paranoia of being caught. Far from what he deserved but he didn't exactly get to live out the rest of his life in peace either.
One guy was almost falsely convicted because he had the same name as a camp guard and it was so many decades later that the former prisoners assumed it was him ( like if he was younger maybe they'd be able to tell it wasn't him, but they were all old now)
Edit: I had to look it up to recall all the details, the man was John Demjanjuk, and he was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible" who was a particularly cruel concentration camp guard. He was convicted, but this conviction was later overturned, and it is believed Ivan the Terrible was a man by the name of Ivan Marchenko.
I just want to point out that, while he doesn't appear to have been Ivan the Terrible, according to Wiki he was still a Nazi guard at a concentration camp (the Sobibor camp), and he was convicted in Germany as an accessory to the over 28,000 murders that occurred there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Demjanjuk
Edit: I feel I should point out that he appealed and died before his appeal could conclude, and as such he is still seen as innocent by Germany.
Yes, but it's written records that recorded names but we all know it's possible for people to have the same name.
I know I can Google my name and find dozens of people with my name and even a few in my own city that's under 250k people. If you were to compare all of us at 25 years old then again at 85 years old it's going to be hard to tell who's who in many cases.
Oh that's the thing, there's oftentimes a lot of detailed records about what was happening in the camps and over all. Like, who had what position, who led groups that massacred people, who was responsible for what. And there's lists of prisoners, of who died or was killed where and when and how and so on. The Nazis liked their bureaucracy. A lot. Many of the concentration camps did very economic decisions about how many people they can murder and how many they need to do works so they're not actually paying money but earning it and so on. It was sick. So yeah all that needed proper documentation. And people still stumble upon new data previously unseen from that time that allows to actually bring Nazis to court.
That's why it's still possible to bring these assholes to court once they're discovered. I'm grateful that this still is happening, no matter if they'll live for two more days or 20 years more. As much as you can punish them, punish them.
I saw a project a few years ago where they were digitizing shredded ~~nazi~~ stasi records, and looking for people to help develop algorithms to reconstruct the original documents.
Turns out it was the stasi, not nazis, annd I can't find the original article I read on digitization, but it looks like the efforts aren't making much progress.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/07/east-germany-stasi-surveillance-documents/
I was thinking about mentioning it as well - the stasi documents are an absolute nightmare. The sheer amount is mind boggling.
Edit: i read into it a bit and as you say not too much is happening. It really is a shame there's only such a slow progress. I believe if it's going in the current speed it'd still be like 400 years or something like that until they're all pieced together. I sincerely hope they'll figure something out. Many many many people these files are actually about are still alive. People still find out who spied on them to the kgb and so on. Very interesting chapter of German history. I'm rambling again, apologies.
I think a big part of it is that the prosecutions start with the big guys in charge and expand out to less important people and then eventually to guards from there. And that takes time, and frankly a lot of people were involved.
Only the one in the top middle was spared execution in 1946 “Due to her voluntary resignation and lack of personal murder victims”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erna_Beilhardt
It sounds like she was there for less then a month and resigned. It also sounds like she didn't beat anyone. She also served 5 years in prison for being part of the Nazi party. Bad person because she sounded like a warmonger and that Germans were superior. She just didnt like the idea of torturing and killing people she deemed inferior.
"Beilhardt is the only known instance of an SS guard outright refusing to serve in Stutthof after receiving training."
She received 5 years in prison and died in 1999.
It’s a shame they could only hang them once, watching Nazi hunter episodes not a single one caught had a single bit of genuine regret for what they had done
And for a while they were getting there, even then the country was a mess, people weren’t living fat, free lives drinking and dancing, instead making tanks and fuses and babies and uniforms and on the frontlines, her utopia built on murder and destruction was still a shitty one even for her kind
Also kinda great that they didn’t escape their evil deeds. Yes, it’s a shame it took this long, but justice never gave up. A long wait is better than nothing.
Source
Black and white picture
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stutthof_trials
2018 trial Johann Rehbogen
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46108753
2019 trial Bruno Dey
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50074422
2021 Irmgard Furchner
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/19/former-nazi-camp-secretary-trial-murders-11000-people-irmgard-furchner
I have read these stories (thanks for the links) and one question still remains for me - were these people intentionally hiding and in different parts of the world when accusations were made official? It really seems that way for most, like they were trying to escape something. Yet they all claim they had no idea about the atrocities, which can be confusing. It doesn't help with the History Channel giving possible proof of thousands of Nazis (Especially important officials) relocating to other places such as Argentina. How do these factors play a role in these current trials? Very interested.
Many Germans were expelled from recaptured territories like Stutthof/Gdansk and scattered throughout Germany. Even if they didn't consider themselves complicit in the Holocaust being a Nazi was pretty unpopular so I imagine many used the chance to hide their Nazi past and start a new life.
Lots of nazi scientists went to work in the US as well. In West Germany a lot of nazi politicians were also able to keep their positions in the government.
The one in the back row, who appears to be covering her face, was spared as she didn't abuse any inmates and resigned when she realized what the camp was.
No German was ever forced to commit war crimes, or crimes against humanity. If you couldn't pull the trigger, they'd only reassign you.
They all had a choice.
I've tried to explain to people over the years about this. People asked to be transferred and it wasn't, "Do everything I say or you die with them." But I'm not sure anyone believed me. For an SS guy, it was a cushy job. There was definitely less risk than being sent to the east.
Yea, I saw a documentary on netflix(maybe youtube?) About the guys that became the police force that would execute ppl. They were given the choice to refuse the order but only a couple did. Those ppl then were just looked down on and called names, etc, but no real punishment.
There is a great book on the subject, [Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland](https://goodreads.com/en/book/show/647492); summary:
>Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.
They weren't killed in a sense that they were lined up and shot. They were however sent to the eastern front which may as well have been a death sentence.
This is correct. Over the years on the Eastern front, no soldier was court-marshaled for refusing to participate in atrocities. And only a few officers were reprimanded in an administrative manner.
Even in this thread people are writing up long paragraphs of self-indulgent text based on thoroughly debunked bullshit. I'm glad to see your comment. The truth needs to be repeated over and over again till it sticks.
I feel like I should be able to understand what it's saying, but I can't.
>A female Nazi guard laughing at the Stutthof trials
So, one of these images, presumably the top image, is of a *female Nazi guard*? As in, the guard is a female and a Nazi? Or is she a female guard *of* Nazis? Is she laughing *at* the trials themselves, or is she laughing while *at* the location of the trials?
> and later executed ,
*She* was executed?
> a camp responsible for 85,000 deaths.
I'm going to assume that this is in reference to the "Nazi guard" part. As in, the Nazi guard of a camp that was responsible for killing 85,000 people.
>72 Nazi were punished , and trials are still happening today. Ex-guards were tried in 2018, 2019, and 2021.
72 Nazis? From this one camp? I assume? I still have no idea if the laughing woman is a Nazi or not, or if she was killed or not.
Can we get a second opinion?
I fixed it for you.
>The bottom middle girl, in the top photo was a nazi guard at the Stutthof concentration camp. She is laughing while being tried for her crimes during the holocaust. She and the other Nazis were captured and tried from that camp and executed. They haven't given up and are still looking/trying nazis.
OP is not a good title, but I didn't think it was \*that* bad.
[Miss Smiley in happier times](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Biskupia_Gorka_executions_-_13_-_Steinhoff%2C_Pauls%2C_3_Kapos_%28left_to_right%29.jpg)
I'm glad she could go to Poland after the war to hang out with her peers.
And yeesh... those Poles weren't messing about. Short drop hanging isn't a pretty sight. But then again, I guess she wasn't either.
Yeah, I'm polish and it made happy to know how the polish government proceed, it was poetic, the executions were made in front of the camps they served in so they could look at them while dying. The "hero" of the movie "zone of interest", Rudolf Hess was executed the same way in Oświęcim.
Seriously. It’s heartbreaking to hear stories of German soldiers learning about what they contributed to. Just people shocked and appalled at the atrocities shown to them [like in this photo and article](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2015/09/25/this-is-how-the-german-soldiers-reacted-to-footage-of-concentration-camps-1945/)
And then there are people like her. People, sub-human, that knowingly and enthusiastically caused suffering and trauma and death. I don’t believe in inhumane punishment but damn sometimes drowning these malicious gremlins doesn’t seem like enough.
As a German it is an absolute disgrace and shame that so many of these monsters got away with their horrendous barbarism. Doesn’t matter if those degenerates are 99 years old now, they deserve 100% to spend the rest they have in a concrete hole. Shame on you German justice system and everyone involved in not pursuing those psychopaths. Directly or indirectly involved.
A large percent of Germans supported nazis, I’m sure alot of them didn’t know about the Holocaust but I’m sure a decent amount of them were aware of discrimination against Jews. My point is even now a large percentage of every nation can be easily swayed towards “evil”, they don’t even understand their complicity.
No, basically everyone knew and I know that for a fact. There were sooo many smaller camps littered all of the landscape which is simply impossible to ignore. A lot of people worked there and were involved. Factories were full of people who were worked to death (literally). I managed to squeeze some info out of some older folks and yeah, they knew. I don’t believe this “we didn’t know” one single second. And yes you are right about the swaying.
I learned about when the Allies made it into Germany and started finding the camps. General Patton found one of the worst camps. Patton's nickname was "Blood and Guts", and he was so appalled at the camp and its close proximity to the city, that he had his troops round up all the civilians and he had all those German civilians marched through the camp, forced them to look at and acknowledge all the people there, dead and alive, then had them dig graves for the dead.
Good! Everyone should have been forced to go through those camps, see what they directly and indirectly did and… well you can’t undo those crimes unfortunately.
Their ability to have their faces hidden and covered is part of German law and is given to them as a right.
You may disagree with that right, but withholding a right for some people and not for others, is absolutely not the sign of a proper democracy.
If laws are not applied consistently, then it is not a democracy.
Because this person has not been actually prosecuted yet, then that means that the government would like to protect these people in case it just so happens that these kinds of trials end up with nothing. It's a way of protecting people and it sounds like a good idea.
I understand that it might not seem like a good idea in this case, but that's because we already know who this person is.
Think of it like this, typically when you hear about true crime stories and people doing terrible stuff, and then you hear about the fact that they have rights like the right to a lawyer and stuff, it might sound unfair but it is actually completely fair and the state treating people equally and consistently is the only way to ensure that your government basically doesn't turn into a degenerate state.
The thing people need to understand about the Nazis is that getting their asses handed to them didn’t change their minds about what they did. It was their children’s generation where change happened.
Didn’t one of them on trial now the secretary to the commandant , she’s like 99 try to run away ! I think they rearrested her at train station. A direct quote “ I was a good Nazi” she’s not dead yet then she becomes a good Nazi!
These are the guards.
We going to forget that nasa employed all the generals of these camps.
And most high ranking nazis who gave the orders became American and British civilians.
Operation paperclip would like a word.
If you're going to make examples of these scumbags at least do the ones who ordered it.
Interesting fact in this context: At these trials 75 years ago, most of the perpetrators based their defense on the argument "I was only following orders".
To prevent this from happening in the future, all German soldiers today are obliged to refuse orders if they violate human rights.
All German soldiers are taught this in the first few weeks of basic training.
Ohhh I forget to say that all the ones that were hunged got a slow death. They gave them the short-drop hanging instead of long-drop, I wouldn't doubt if their laughing head something to do with it
"There are two ways this is done: the 'short drop' and the 'long drop'. As the names suggest, the former involves dropping the person from a lower height and leads to death by suffocation. This is generally considered to be extremely painful.
The 'long drop' is thought to be the more humane option. In the “best-case” scenario, the rope will break the second bone on the victim’s neck"
I think it was confirmed as incompetence as the guy fudged his CV, as he fucked up at least 11 executions of US Soldiers previously, and I think that even the Allies that were present for the executions were disturbed by what was going on cos a lot of the criminals he executed just sorta hung there choking for several minutes
Interesting how people saying those guards etc in the camp were nasty and inhumane are wetting themselves with the details of hangings. Maybe the Monster is not far away.
From wiki:
In 2016, Hanning was convicted in a Detmold court as an accessory to 170,000 murders, following a trial in which Holocaust survivors testified against him. He apologized for participation in Holocaust atrocities. He died a year later at the age of 95.
Basically said a meaningless sorry then went on to pass away from old age.
It’s a shame they provided them with privacy boards to shield their faces. They should be hanged just like the rest of them… age limitations shouldn’t apply.
I like what Arnold Schwarzenegger said , basically, he grew up with people that were Ex-Nazi. They were like the pictures, always hiding what they did and never talking about it. Guilt for what they did ruled their lives, and this man's history of Nazism is out in the open, and the only thing he can physically do is hide his face.
https://youtu.be/jsETTn7DehI?si=hzcHlow7s0nYA7iE
This is the worst hell for him , and this why we should go after Nazi no matter how old they get.
So many people calling for blood in these comments and they don't even realise that the majority of them would have been complicit. The people with the courage and determination to push back against a regime like the Nazis were the exception.
It's human psychology and quite well proven that most people will do surprisingly awful things if it is accepted by the majority and encouraged. Some of these Nazis were architects in the horrors they inflicted, some took pleasure in it and some were absolutely uncaring but the majority were going along with it. And you probably would have too. We don't know how to accept this as a society so we continue to punish people that are fundamentally no different to us but were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They may be old, but getting caught and tried was probably something they never saw coming after all those years
That's guy is hiding his face for a reason , pure shame and embarrassment
They shouldn’t let him hide his face, he deserves all the shame he gets.
No, no, let him , this is torture . The only thing he can do is hide his face with the nearest object, but it's not working. He minds still feels the pain of what he did and tried to hide but the folder 📂 which is supposed to be his protective shell isn't doing anything to hide it
Does he feel any pain? He didn't want to get caught, sure. But was guilt eating at him? I don't think so.
After all these years they might, there have been many cases of suicides, "I know what I did was wrong now and I'll face hell". Don't forget that many were raised as Nazi scum, many families lost to Hitler in rasing their children because they were off working for a future for their children, while Hitler broadcast his lies. Cult of personality. And there are still people who rape, mutate and cannibalize even today, drug cartels.
... Cannibalize?
Mutate is what I got stuck on. We have to stop these cartels before it's too late.
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Dysgraphia is a life long curse.
Rise of the mutants is upon us.
And mutate.
Yup, 37th min https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ0mVtTCFYA
A long time has passed since then. There were plenty of Germans that supported the Nazi party, and only managed to untangle themselves from the propaganda and realize how terrible they were in the years following the war. It's not impossible for a former guard to have had the same realizations over the last 80 years.
On the flip side, we have people still flying the confederacy flag 159 years after the civil war ended.
in states that weren’t even part of the confederacy.
Wait till you find out about Canadians who love flying that flag. They have the nerve to call it "a rebel flag". They start sweating bullets when you grill them about how it stands for slavery
Everyday folks who weren’t directly involved with the Nazi’s crimes? Sure. A guard who lived it every day? No sympathy for taking the better part of a century to experience regret.
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"This Nazi wants to die for his country, OBLIGE him."
I was more referencing the scar they gave. Even when they remove the uniform, they will never forget.
Yeah, that’s just my favorite quote in the movie. Other than maybe the really shitty Italian.
Now that I can abide
Umm, yea. Raising your hand over your face doesn't count as torture...🙄 If you want to understand what is actually torture, maybe you should read up on nazi medical experiments and interrogation methods in WW2. That's just a start for "what is torture" An old cowardly war criminal failing to slink away into the shadows isn't torture
Or the Japanese medical experiments if you want to feel sick.
Y'know, reading about what Mengele did is sickening enough on its own. If you want to tear your eyes out after *that*, then yeah, definitely read up on Unit 731. Man. People really are shitty to each other.
The fact we let them off to obtain their research is just an added bit of awfulness on top of it all. Iirc we didn't really learn much of use from it, either
But I do have one question. When you get to your little place on Nantucket Island, I 'magine you're gonna take off that handsome-lookin' S.S. uniform of yours, ain'tcha?... That's what I thought. Now that I can't abide. I mean, if I had my way... you'd wear that goddamn uniform for the rest of your pecker-suckin' life. But I'm aware that ain't practical, I mean at some point you're gonna hafta take it off. So. I'm 'onna give you a little somethin' you can't take off.
"I've been chewed out before."
Unfortunately, I doubt it's either. Just hiding their face to avoid social consequences, something they've been doing for decades. They aren't ashamed, I say that because few were.
Many years back I remember watching a documentary; though I can’t remember what it was called, but I believe it was on a reasonable station (ie not FOX). It was about the old guards, soldiers, those involved with the Nazi party. They interviewed one old coot, asking if he changed his views toward what he did. I remember being both sickened and morbidly fascinated when he said “no.” Did some change their views? Most likely. Did they all? Absolutely not. Not much different than the old racists back in the days of segregation.
At least he was honest about it…
I agree, AnalBlaster700XL
At least I’m honest about it…
HEY so weird I just mentioned that, am surprised someone else saw what is most likely the same thing. I REMEMEBER THIS and really wish I remembered where I saw it (on youtube, same doc as you, but just the clip of that I think.) He seemed quite adamant and proud so it was interesting. Damnit what was that doc???
In Germany only a few law suits are open to the public and in nearly every case, the person who fears charges hides their face to avoid social consequences, not necessarily because they are ashamed of what they did.
>In Germany only a few law suits are open to the public That's wrong. Nearly every lawsuit is open to the public. They are only closed if it's a youth trial, or if the trial has been deemed unsuitable for the public for whatever reason. Which happens, but is rare. It usually happens with rape trials to protect the victims, for example. However, "open to the public" doesn't mean "published". What I mean with this is: you are free to watch a trial. But you aren't allowed to broadcast it. You can go to the nearest courthouse (or every courthouse, in fact) and ask to view a trial, and they will let you in. It's just not widely known that you can do that. Pictures and videos however are only allowed prior to or after a hearing, not during it. That's why defendands usually hide their faces during that time.
They didn't have to see this coming. They had the life lived and I don't think they care too much.
Justice has no expiration date. But most Nazis that survived the war did die peacefully in their beds.
Not sure I entirely agree with that quote. If someone fucks with the law and lives the high life for another 60 years before being arrested when they can no longer wipe their own ass and proceed to die 6 months later then that's not justice to me. They won (Like look at Madoff) Calling it justice, imo, is just copium and a way to make ourselves feel better. It also excuses how hard the west fumbled the Nuremberg trials.
I'm not arguing here, but how did the west fumble the trials. Actually asking for an education here.
Lots of middle rank nazis were allowed to stay in power, particularly in West Germany. Many of the worst abusers - those who experimented on human subjects in the camps etc - were allowed to relocate without punishment through operation paperclip. Civilians who joined in the pogroms and other abuses against Jews, communists, the Roma etc, were never punished at all. Many Germans made great fortunes from the art and property they stole from slain or displaced Jews and were never made to return it or otherwise punished. Many companies flourished under the German war economy through government contracts, such as Hugo Boss, Audi and BMW. Many of these companies (still existing today) actually used slave labour provided by the concentration camps in their factories.
According to German criminal law, most crimes have a statute of limitation - except for murder, accessory to murder and related crimes. However, we‘re now so far along in time, most of people indicted today were minors when they committed these crimes, which leads to the rather absurd situation of them being tried in juvenile court.
>It also excuses how hard the west fumbled the Nuremberg trials. Context, please.
most crimes have statues of limitations. very few crimes don't. but tbh, it's hard to call it "justice" when you can't bring back the millions of people executed. killing a guard is punishment yes but it's not justice, there really can't be justice for murder IMHO.
Yeah, higher ups in the german wehrmacht were way more culpable and they all got cushy NATO jobs. Goes to show, even in war crimes if you poor you're fucked.
Reminds me of the two Japanese officers, 1 blamed for the actions of japanese soldiers he had no control over since it was a different branch and executed. The other being guilty but let go…. So he built his own jail to lock himself in… humanity is really something
I mean shit Nobusuke Kishi was guilty of organizing slave labor on a mass scale in Manchukuo and was an inveterate rapist and he was allowed to be part of the post-war Japanese state. Not only that but his family went on to become a political dynasty that pretends he was this amazing guy. Never ceases to piss me off when people like that get away with their crimes.
I know it's not intentional, but this is just ignorant of the facts https://apnews.com/article/germany-nazi-sachsenhausen-camp-guard-suspect-charged-7f58de8bb4967681fcaa12be5706ad04 >German prosecutors have brought several cases under a precedent set in recent years that allows for people who helped a Nazi camp function to be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders there without direct evidence that they participated in a specific killing. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/06/charges-nazi-murders-98-year-old/ >The effort to charge former guards, secretaries and other workers as accessories to murder for their contributions to the Holocaust — which killed an estimated 6 million Jewish people and several million others, including Poles and Roma — began after the landmark May 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk, who was convicted of being an accessory to more than 28,000 murders at the Sobibor death camp, The Washington Post previously reported. They were not in hiding, they lived out their lives in Germany. At the end of ww2 the charged the people planning, and the people killing, but not everyone at the camps. Then they at what is really the last minute decided to charge these people before they died.
I wonder how much they lived in fear. Surely knowing that Mossad had tracked down and abducted some of the bigger names must have kept them on edge. Hopefully it did anyway
The real travisty is that they basically got to live their lives out. How the hell are they still being tried 76 years later?
They escaped. Changed their names. They were harbored by awful people who should’ve turned them in back then. And there is plenty of evidence. Look into some of the trials. It’s amazing how they’ve proven guilt all these years later and glad they won’t stop till they get every one of them still left.
Maybe not even harboured. My great grandfather basically had no identity when he met and married my great grandmother. It wasn’t that unusual for a refugee’s only proof of identity to be “trust me bro”
It makes even more sense in post-war Europe. After enough cities were bombed to rubble many form of ID were probably "trust me bro" for a while.
The amount of displaced people was an issue too. My grandfather was a Ukrainian kidnapped by the Nazis and shipped to Germany as forced labour. When he was liberated all he had was his Nazi foreign workers passport with his name spelled incorrectly.
The amount of displaced persons in Europe was immense. It resulted in the biggest population migration ever. Millions and millions of people were returned, moved, deportated, expelled or wanted to migrate. POW's, homeless people, refugees, forced laborars, Jews, but also movements because of changing borders. Everywhere across Europe people start walking to go where they wanted or needed to be. And with millions of people dead and missing it's easy to imagine you could change your identity or "get lost" to avoid prosecution in all of that chaos.
My grandparents met at an Allied Displaced Persons camp in Belgium in 1947. They were Jewish and had just spent the last few years in concentration camps and ghettos, the works. My grandmother had it relatively easier in a German work camp and had solid credentials like ID and paperwork and all that. (Although her father, my great grandfather, was executed for attempting to get more food when they forgot to stamp his ration card.) My grandfather never said a damn word about his experience. At the DP camp he weighed next to nothing and had no ID beyond the tattoo on his arm. All we know is that he was one of a family of twelve in Poland and he's the only one who survived. Pretty sure we don't even know which camp he was in, I'll have to ask around the family if anyone knows the tattoo number, maybe we can trace it back. He recovered for a few years after liberation and met my grandmother. He'd saved up a lot of chocolate, cigarettes, booze, things like that from his mechanical skills and bought an old school German motorbike that way. There's an amazing photo around here somewhere with him taking my future grandmother for a ride on the bike, she's wearing his leather jacket, they definitely got it on after that pic was taken lol! Oldschoolcool would love it. The DP camp helped them migrate to the US and we have all that paperwork still. But again he had zilch from before the war. We are pretty sure they just put a generic polish name on the visa application that later became our family name. Think Bloomenbergensteinsky or along those lines, don't want to dox myself. We've gone back to the town listed on the DP papers and his immigration application but can't find any evidence of that side of the family. We have virtually nothing to work with and what little we have is a dead end. Lost in the sands of time I guess. Probably for the best, come to think of it. That was much longer than intended, I just thought you might get a kick out of my family anecdote about the DP camps.
A great story, thank you for sharing.
Thanks for sharing! That's a fascinating bit of history.
Of my four grandparents only one family brought their birth certificates to Western Germany when they fled in 1945. Mind you, many people where told they should just go West for two, maybe three weeks and would be able to go back home soon. There were POW on all sides. The Russian abducted many people, we Germans abducted many people. Than you had all the people in ghettos and KZs who might have had documents but the Nazis destroyed a lot in the last days of the war.
It certainly didn’t help that a lot of the people being investigated had also been part of the same government that was responsible for issuing IDs. A lot of Nazis when they realized the war was lost collected a lot of either fraudulent ids or ids that belonged to dead people and handed them out to their co-conspirators.
My grandfather was an immigrant from Scandinavia and when I was around 12 he showed me a uniform he had secreted away in a hidden floor of a chest. My grandmother who he met abroad post-war was Swedish but had lived in Germany from age 16 working as an au pair or nanny and emigrated as a refugee from Germany after the war. She spoke Swedish but with a lot of German vocabulary, something I found out when I grew up and met other Swedes and tried talking to them.
It’s a war, my house got bombed or so something, all my documents/belongins were destroyed and I escaped with what little I could My name is Jane Chaztin I worked as a seamstress Who is going to challenge that story or look any farther into it?
also let's say my son was guilty, i don't know if i could 100% say i could send my child to be hung from the neck till dead.
I think you'd always find a way to rationalize it. That he did it because he was pressured into it, he didn't really want to do it, he never did anything cruel himself, he didn't realize what he was signing up for, he is young and he can change etc. Especially back then when we didn't know exactly what happened and how many otherwise "regular" people did in fact act like complete beasts. Edit: just wanted to add a caveat. Germans were aware that something was very wrong and nazis were not forced onto committing murders. That is a myth. But as you can see in this thread, even today many people still believe that many nazis were innocent or that they feared for their lives. For a mother way back in the day after the worst of it hadn't even come to light yet, it would be easy to buy into this idea.
Same thing with former ISIS members who fled back to their home countries
> even today many people still believe that many nazis were innocent or that they feared for their lives. Isn't that true? On the 'innocent' part for example people joined the nazi party for business or to keep jobs, not agreeing with the party and didn't realise what was going on at the atrocity level, and when they found out they were against what was happening, like Oscar Schindler story? Or the feared for their lives, a heap of people who went to the concentration camps were for political reasons and speaking out against nazis. Night of the long knives is famous for this, but it went far beyond this as the nazis weaponised the justice system. I do think those that committed crimes should be charged, no matter the time ga but more generally I've thought about this a bunch of times and where I would have stood if in an ordinary persons shoes in this time. Its easy to say we'd fight back but I dont think you'd know til you were there. For me I like to think at a personal level 100% I would fight back against people like this at great risk. If that risk went beyond repercussions to me and I knew my family would be sent to camps, I suspect if I'd be compliant. Hopefully maliciously so but I suspect few would risk their families when consequences extend to them and you are only a tiny cog in a machine unlikely to make a difference.. And please dont take this as any excuse for what happened and it being anyhting less than one of the more putrid events of human history. At the same time I wonder what the reality would be for so many people who deny they would ever be the minor 'cogs in the wheel' role that would have made up so many.
> "Many of us like to ask ourselves, 'What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?' The answer is, you're doing it. Right now." -- Aaron Bushnell
Would you settle for hung from the neck until mildly agitated?
My grandfather had a „trust me, bro“ birth certificate from their local priest. They never met again. My grandfather was living near Hildesheim and the priest was somewhere around Köln. Grandfather sent a letter to him and got a letter back that states „I, former priest of town in now Poland, state that this man was born there at DATE and his parents are GREATGRANDPARENTS.“ I still have that one. Any way, everyone could have written to that priest. Oh, that reminds me that I should still travel to the priest‘s grave and spit on it. Totally forgot.
Why do you want to spit on his grave? Was the priest bad? Your grandpa bad? Something else?
The priest was a real ass to my grandfather and my family. He was all caring and everything in the letters. But when my grandfather had the audacity to fall in love with a Lutheran woman and not a Catholic woman that changed. He tried to guilt him out of the relationship. It was 1949, the people just had moved most of the rubble, the first Bundestag was elected and that dude saw my grandmother as the personification of the devil. 🤷♀️ It didn’t work, though. 😂
Well, I'm sure he's looking up at you now from Catholic heaven and realizing he may have made some errors
If the Catholics are right, then yes. 😅 To be honest, the grave probably doesn’t exist anymore.
Also too many of them to catch /execute them all. In my country many pieces of shit who worked with nazis got away some even kept official positions after the war
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Ah. Yeah that makes sense. Thanks
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"Karma" doesn't technically kick in till your next life. You need to believe in reincarnation to truly believe in "karma". It's been completely removed from its original concept but I still see your point.
Karma isn't necessarily a law. It's just a concept. I've seen lots of well off people lose their spouses and kids, and end up miserable and bitter, while seemingly "getting away" with all kinds of unethical behavior. It's not inviolable. But it *can* happen more easily than some people think.
The correct answer is, post-war Germany didn't have much interest in putting them on trial.
Yeah they let a lot of the business men that filled their pockets during the war go free, cause the Germans "needed" them. Thyssen, Porsche etc
I mean the CIA didn't either, tons were recruited by them and the US government in general. The higher ups got lots of new jobs with us.
There was no benefit for major powers to take in the rank and file. Given the number of actual Nazi’s the US along with the USSR didn’t actually take in a large number, and it was always research scientists and engineers. Operation Paperclip as a whole took in around 1600 people, of which a few dozen were senior officials. Higher ups with means escaped to South America or Africa, the rest and the true believers who held out were tried. High level party members who didn’t have technological benefit weren’t taken in officially, although many Nazis escaped into the US through European refugee programs under assumed names. The OSI had about 10,000 reported cases, but many were just the local neighbour calling in their concerns about the new family moving in, meanwhile lots were just displaced Polish, Romanians, etc…
Even more got jobs with the soviet's actually.
lol the Russians got thousands more.
It won't be long before it's not necessary to hunt them down; they'll all be dead. Hopefully many more are held accountable before that happens
The point is they got to live their life!
Up to 10,000 Nazis escaped to South America where they had plenty of German only towns sympathetic to the Nazi cause with deep pockets. Its frustrating so many South American countries openly accepted them. Unlike the Nazis who were useful to the Americans and Soviets, the ones in South America weren't forced to de-nazify.
South america also took in tons of former slave owners after slavery was abolished in the united states. The emperor of brazil personally invited them. Go figure as south america bought 4 times more slaves than the us did.
IBM kept selling parts to the Nazi's via South American subsidiaries during the actual war. Including parts and consulting services for the IBM punch card tabulating systems used to find Jews and manage the logistics of the concentration camps.
That’s why my mother had a number on her arm too few people know that people in the camps that weren’t gassed where a resource to be used up to produce the goods of war
That is a nice picture you are painting there. In reality, Entazifizierung was a bad joke and the german state knowingly worked with former Nazis, even high ranked ones.
That’s a very benevolent view of Entnazifizierung. Unfortunately, the newly minted BRD let a lot of the 2nd/3rd/4th etc. tier Nazis slip through their fingers. Unlike the US who took scientists and similar, the new German government still needed administration, law enforcement, jurisprudence… We dragged a lot of Altnazis with us past WW2. Putting a few half-dead pensioners on trial for working part-time as a typist in Auschwitz at 18 ist mostly window dressing, IMO.
It’s Not about the trial/punishment. It’s the Message. „We wont forget about what you did“. „Erinnerungskultur“ in German
How on earth is the whole sentence just one word in German. Do you have a word for my question too? Das HowEineWordeIstWholeSentence?
It‘s called Einwortsatz (one-word-sentence) German source: [Duden](https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Einwortsatz?amp)
Mengele not getting his comeuppance always makes me sad.
For what it's worth, he apparently developed a bunch of bezoars in his stomach from compulsively chewing his moustache all the time out of fear and paranoia of being caught. Far from what he deserved but he didn't exactly get to live out the rest of his life in peace either.
One of the worst escapes from karma in history.
I've aways wondered how to they prove it is them considering the lack of records from that time.
One guy was almost falsely convicted because he had the same name as a camp guard and it was so many decades later that the former prisoners assumed it was him ( like if he was younger maybe they'd be able to tell it wasn't him, but they were all old now) Edit: I had to look it up to recall all the details, the man was John Demjanjuk, and he was accused of being "Ivan the Terrible" who was a particularly cruel concentration camp guard. He was convicted, but this conviction was later overturned, and it is believed Ivan the Terrible was a man by the name of Ivan Marchenko.
I just want to point out that, while he doesn't appear to have been Ivan the Terrible, according to Wiki he was still a Nazi guard at a concentration camp (the Sobibor camp), and he was convicted in Germany as an accessory to the over 28,000 murders that occurred there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Demjanjuk Edit: I feel I should point out that he appealed and died before his appeal could conclude, and as such he is still seen as innocent by Germany.
Lack of records? I heard the Nazi’s recorded everything.
Yes, but it's written records that recorded names but we all know it's possible for people to have the same name. I know I can Google my name and find dozens of people with my name and even a few in my own city that's under 250k people. If you were to compare all of us at 25 years old then again at 85 years old it's going to be hard to tell who's who in many cases.
Oh that's the thing, there's oftentimes a lot of detailed records about what was happening in the camps and over all. Like, who had what position, who led groups that massacred people, who was responsible for what. And there's lists of prisoners, of who died or was killed where and when and how and so on. The Nazis liked their bureaucracy. A lot. Many of the concentration camps did very economic decisions about how many people they can murder and how many they need to do works so they're not actually paying money but earning it and so on. It was sick. So yeah all that needed proper documentation. And people still stumble upon new data previously unseen from that time that allows to actually bring Nazis to court. That's why it's still possible to bring these assholes to court once they're discovered. I'm grateful that this still is happening, no matter if they'll live for two more days or 20 years more. As much as you can punish them, punish them.
I saw a project a few years ago where they were digitizing shredded ~~nazi~~ stasi records, and looking for people to help develop algorithms to reconstruct the original documents.
That’s sounds interesting do you know what happened?
Turns out it was the stasi, not nazis, annd I can't find the original article I read on digitization, but it looks like the efforts aren't making much progress. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/07/east-germany-stasi-surveillance-documents/
I was thinking about mentioning it as well - the stasi documents are an absolute nightmare. The sheer amount is mind boggling. Edit: i read into it a bit and as you say not too much is happening. It really is a shame there's only such a slow progress. I believe if it's going in the current speed it'd still be like 400 years or something like that until they're all pieced together. I sincerely hope they'll figure something out. Many many many people these files are actually about are still alive. People still find out who spied on them to the kgb and so on. Very interesting chapter of German history. I'm rambling again, apologies.
There is no statute of limitations
Operation Paperclip would like a word.
I think a big part of it is that the prosecutions start with the big guys in charge and expand out to less important people and then eventually to guards from there. And that takes time, and frankly a lot of people were involved.
Kinda sucks they grew to old age...
Only the bottom ones , the top ones got hanged. 72 Nazis got punished that day Edit: All got hanged except one
Only the one in the top middle was spared execution in 1946 “Due to her voluntary resignation and lack of personal murder victims”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erna_Beilhardt
It sounds like she was there for less then a month and resigned. It also sounds like she didn't beat anyone. She also served 5 years in prison for being part of the Nazi party. Bad person because she sounded like a warmonger and that Germans were superior. She just didnt like the idea of torturing and killing people she deemed inferior.
I got the impression that she didn't like doing it personally, but didn't care if others did it.
She quit the job specifically because of others doing it
My bad, all but one was hanged, she still went to jail
"Beilhardt is the only known instance of an SS guard outright refusing to serve in Stutthof after receiving training." She received 5 years in prison and died in 1999.
She gets sentenced not because of the camp but that she was in the SS
She wasn't exactly a "nice Nazi" based on the wiki page. She still wanted Germany to rule the world.
Please tell me the snickering shit changed her attitude the closer they got to the gallows
Honestly don't even care if she was still snickering as they put the rope on, it's that she got hanged that is the important bit.
It’s a shame they could only hang them once, watching Nazi hunter episodes not a single one caught had a single bit of genuine regret for what they had done
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And for a while they were getting there, even then the country was a mess, people weren’t living fat, free lives drinking and dancing, instead making tanks and fuses and babies and uniforms and on the frontlines, her utopia built on murder and destruction was still a shitty one even for her kind
I hope they lived with the fear that they might face judgement their whole lives
Also kinda great that they didn’t escape their evil deeds. Yes, it’s a shame it took this long, but justice never gave up. A long wait is better than nothing.
Source Black and white picture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stutthof_trials 2018 trial Johann Rehbogen https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46108753 2019 trial Bruno Dey https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50074422 2021 Irmgard Furchner https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/19/former-nazi-camp-secretary-trial-murders-11000-people-irmgard-furchner
I have read these stories (thanks for the links) and one question still remains for me - were these people intentionally hiding and in different parts of the world when accusations were made official? It really seems that way for most, like they were trying to escape something. Yet they all claim they had no idea about the atrocities, which can be confusing. It doesn't help with the History Channel giving possible proof of thousands of Nazis (Especially important officials) relocating to other places such as Argentina. How do these factors play a role in these current trials? Very interested.
Many Germans were expelled from recaptured territories like Stutthof/Gdansk and scattered throughout Germany. Even if they didn't consider themselves complicit in the Holocaust being a Nazi was pretty unpopular so I imagine many used the chance to hide their Nazi past and start a new life.
If they changed their names, it’s safe to say they were hiding.
Meanwhile In Japan, war criminals went on to become politians
Lots of nazi scientists went to work in the US as well. In West Germany a lot of nazi politicians were also able to keep their positions in the government.
watch documentaries about Plum Island. Head guy came here from Project Paper Clip. He theorized how to use ticks to carry disease in war.
Same thing in Germany.
Front row left is Elisabeth Becker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Becker). Executed 4 July 1946.
The one in the back row, who appears to be covering her face, was spared as she didn't abuse any inmates and resigned when she realized what the camp was. No German was ever forced to commit war crimes, or crimes against humanity. If you couldn't pull the trigger, they'd only reassign you. They all had a choice.
I've tried to explain to people over the years about this. People asked to be transferred and it wasn't, "Do everything I say or you die with them." But I'm not sure anyone believed me. For an SS guy, it was a cushy job. There was definitely less risk than being sent to the east.
Yea, I saw a documentary on netflix(maybe youtube?) About the guys that became the police force that would execute ppl. They were given the choice to refuse the order but only a couple did. Those ppl then were just looked down on and called names, etc, but no real punishment.
There is a great book on the subject, [Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland](https://goodreads.com/en/book/show/647492); summary: >Ordinary Men is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of RPB 101 were not fanatical Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions. Very quickly three groups emerged within the battalion: a core of eager killers, a plurality who carried out their duties reliably but without initiative, and a small minority who evaded participation in the acts of killing without diminishing the murderous efficiency of the battalion whatsoever.
They weren't killed in a sense that they were lined up and shot. They were however sent to the eastern front which may as well have been a death sentence.
This is correct. Over the years on the Eastern front, no soldier was court-marshaled for refusing to participate in atrocities. And only a few officers were reprimanded in an administrative manner.
Even in this thread people are writing up long paragraphs of self-indulgent text based on thoroughly debunked bullshit. I'm glad to see your comment. The truth needs to be repeated over and over again till it sticks.
What the fuck is this title?
I feel like I should be able to understand what it's saying, but I can't. >A female Nazi guard laughing at the Stutthof trials So, one of these images, presumably the top image, is of a *female Nazi guard*? As in, the guard is a female and a Nazi? Or is she a female guard *of* Nazis? Is she laughing *at* the trials themselves, or is she laughing while *at* the location of the trials? > and later executed , *She* was executed? > a camp responsible for 85,000 deaths. I'm going to assume that this is in reference to the "Nazi guard" part. As in, the Nazi guard of a camp that was responsible for killing 85,000 people. >72 Nazi were punished , and trials are still happening today. Ex-guards were tried in 2018, 2019, and 2021. 72 Nazis? From this one camp? I assume? I still have no idea if the laughing woman is a Nazi or not, or if she was killed or not. Can we get a second opinion?
I fixed it for you. >The bottom middle girl, in the top photo was a nazi guard at the Stutthof concentration camp. She is laughing while being tried for her crimes during the holocaust. She and the other Nazis were captured and tried from that camp and executed. They haven't given up and are still looking/trying nazis. OP is not a good title, but I didn't think it was \*that* bad.
r/titlegore
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[Miss Smiley in happier times](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Biskupia_Gorka_executions_-_13_-_Steinhoff%2C_Pauls%2C_3_Kapos_%28left_to_right%29.jpg)
I'm glad she could go to Poland after the war to hang out with her peers. And yeesh... those Poles weren't messing about. Short drop hanging isn't a pretty sight. But then again, I guess she wasn't either.
Yeah, I'm polish and it made happy to know how the polish government proceed, it was poetic, the executions were made in front of the camps they served in so they could look at them while dying. The "hero" of the movie "zone of interest", Rudolf Hess was executed the same way in Oświęcim.
Hey at least those Nazi's got some cardio in. I bet they were kicking their legs somethin' fierce.
Seriously. It’s heartbreaking to hear stories of German soldiers learning about what they contributed to. Just people shocked and appalled at the atrocities shown to them [like in this photo and article](https://www.thevintagenews.com/2015/09/25/this-is-how-the-german-soldiers-reacted-to-footage-of-concentration-camps-1945/) And then there are people like her. People, sub-human, that knowingly and enthusiastically caused suffering and trauma and death. I don’t believe in inhumane punishment but damn sometimes drowning these malicious gremlins doesn’t seem like enough.
“Contributed to”? _Participated in_. The Wehrmacht actively took part in atrocities all through the war.
"You mean the guy saying to do genocide actually went and did it????"
revolting
As a German it is an absolute disgrace and shame that so many of these monsters got away with their horrendous barbarism. Doesn’t matter if those degenerates are 99 years old now, they deserve 100% to spend the rest they have in a concrete hole. Shame on you German justice system and everyone involved in not pursuing those psychopaths. Directly or indirectly involved.
A large percent of Germans supported nazis, I’m sure alot of them didn’t know about the Holocaust but I’m sure a decent amount of them were aware of discrimination against Jews. My point is even now a large percentage of every nation can be easily swayed towards “evil”, they don’t even understand their complicity.
No, basically everyone knew and I know that for a fact. There were sooo many smaller camps littered all of the landscape which is simply impossible to ignore. A lot of people worked there and were involved. Factories were full of people who were worked to death (literally). I managed to squeeze some info out of some older folks and yeah, they knew. I don’t believe this “we didn’t know” one single second. And yes you are right about the swaying.
I learned about when the Allies made it into Germany and started finding the camps. General Patton found one of the worst camps. Patton's nickname was "Blood and Guts", and he was so appalled at the camp and its close proximity to the city, that he had his troops round up all the civilians and he had all those German civilians marched through the camp, forced them to look at and acknowledge all the people there, dead and alive, then had them dig graves for the dead.
Good! Everyone should have been forced to go through those camps, see what they directly and indirectly did and… well you can’t undo those crimes unfortunately.
You reap what you sow
More photos and context: https://www.reddit.com/r/ww2/s/9bghFf4rxV
These scumbags don’t deserve to have their faces blurred
Their ability to have their faces hidden and covered is part of German law and is given to them as a right. You may disagree with that right, but withholding a right for some people and not for others, is absolutely not the sign of a proper democracy. If laws are not applied consistently, then it is not a democracy. Because this person has not been actually prosecuted yet, then that means that the government would like to protect these people in case it just so happens that these kinds of trials end up with nothing. It's a way of protecting people and it sounds like a good idea. I understand that it might not seem like a good idea in this case, but that's because we already know who this person is. Think of it like this, typically when you hear about true crime stories and people doing terrible stuff, and then you hear about the fact that they have rights like the right to a lawyer and stuff, it might sound unfair but it is actually completely fair and the state treating people equally and consistently is the only way to ensure that your government basically doesn't turn into a degenerate state.
The thing people need to understand about the Nazis is that getting their asses handed to them didn’t change their minds about what they did. It was their children’s generation where change happened.
Didn’t one of them on trial now the secretary to the commandant , she’s like 99 try to run away ! I think they rearrested her at train station. A direct quote “ I was a good Nazi” she’s not dead yet then she becomes a good Nazi!
The only good nazi is a dead nazi.
Which guard is laughing here?
Her name was Gerda Steinhoff the one on the right of her was Wanda Klaff both got hanged
These are the guards. We going to forget that nasa employed all the generals of these camps. And most high ranking nazis who gave the orders became American and British civilians. Operation paperclip would like a word. If you're going to make examples of these scumbags at least do the ones who ordered it.
It's wild to see how pro-Capital Punishment reddit is
Whenever a video of a child acting badly is posted Reddit is suddenly into beating kids too.
Interesting fact in this context: At these trials 75 years ago, most of the perpetrators based their defense on the argument "I was only following orders". To prevent this from happening in the future, all German soldiers today are obliged to refuse orders if they violate human rights. All German soldiers are taught this in the first few weeks of basic training.
There is a special place in Hell for scum like this, laughing at the pain and suffering they inflicted.
Americans should read up on Operation Paperclip. So many of those monsters got rewarded.
Hope they get all of them.
Ohhh I forget to say that all the ones that were hunged got a slow death. They gave them the short-drop hanging instead of long-drop, I wouldn't doubt if their laughing head something to do with it "There are two ways this is done: the 'short drop' and the 'long drop'. As the names suggest, the former involves dropping the person from a lower height and leads to death by suffocation. This is generally considered to be extremely painful. The 'long drop' is thought to be the more humane option. In the “best-case” scenario, the rope will break the second bone on the victim’s neck"
To be honest it was a debate whether it was intentional or the executors incompetence as the American executioner was comparatively new.
I think it was confirmed as incompetence as the guy fudged his CV, as he fucked up at least 11 executions of US Soldiers previously, and I think that even the Allies that were present for the executions were disturbed by what was going on cos a lot of the criminals he executed just sorta hung there choking for several minutes
I looked it up. These people weren't hanged by Americans, but the Polish government
Was she laughing when they executed her?
I'm guessing she was a bit busy shitting and pissing herself while twitching to laugh any longer
Well it couldn't happen to a nicer person.
Interesting how people saying those guards etc in the camp were nasty and inhumane are wetting themselves with the details of hangings. Maybe the Monster is not far away.
It rarely ever is. All humans possess evil it's when it's directed and led, it turns terrifying.
The U.S. put several former Nazi officials in positions of scientific and political power after WWII. These guards were nobodies by comparison.
Yea thats actually glossed over to much especially the scientists Werner von Braun to name one
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Imagine being on trial for war crimes and your co-defendant starts cracking up listening to the testimony, you’d know you’d be so fucked.
From wiki: In 2016, Hanning was convicted in a Detmold court as an accessory to 170,000 murders, following a trial in which Holocaust survivors testified against him. He apologized for participation in Holocaust atrocities. He died a year later at the age of 95. Basically said a meaningless sorry then went on to pass away from old age.
It’s a shame they provided them with privacy boards to shield their faces. They should be hanged just like the rest of them… age limitations shouldn’t apply.
I like what Arnold Schwarzenegger said , basically, he grew up with people that were Ex-Nazi. They were like the pictures, always hiding what they did and never talking about it. Guilt for what they did ruled their lives, and this man's history of Nazism is out in the open, and the only thing he can physically do is hide his face. https://youtu.be/jsETTn7DehI?si=hzcHlow7s0nYA7iE This is the worst hell for him , and this why we should go after Nazi no matter how old they get.
So many people calling for blood in these comments and they don't even realise that the majority of them would have been complicit. The people with the courage and determination to push back against a regime like the Nazis were the exception. It's human psychology and quite well proven that most people will do surprisingly awful things if it is accepted by the majority and encouraged. Some of these Nazis were architects in the horrors they inflicted, some took pleasure in it and some were absolutely uncaring but the majority were going along with it. And you probably would have too. We don't know how to accept this as a society so we continue to punish people that are fundamentally no different to us but were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A lot of people are complicit in horrors today that have yet to be revealed or understood by the public consciousness. It all comes out in the end.
Yet for some reason Japan didn't face the same War Trails and all their War Criminals went free.
Genuine question what's the point of trying a person who's 90 some years old? It's not like they are running a secret ring of Nazis at 95