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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 29 2016, @09:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-the-bookkeeper-is-no-longer-a-defense dept.

The BBC reports that the 2015 conviction of 95-year-old Oskar Groening, the so-called "bookkeeper of Auschwitz," has been upheld on appeal. Groening's case marks a significant change in prosecution policy, since he was neither a leading Nazi figure who ordered executions, nor did he apparently commit any murders (or other violent acts) directly. Nevertheless, Groening was sentenced last year to four years in prison as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people:

The verdict overturns a 1969 ruling that being a staff member at Auschwitz was not enough to secure a conviction. Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said it was the biggest change in years. [...] For decades, thousands of ex-Nazis who took part in the Holocaust escaped conviction. Monday's ruling sets a precedent for pursuing suspects, now in their nineties, accused of serving in death camps.

Last year, when Groening's trial was getting started, the New Yorker ran an extended piece by Elizabeth Kolbert on the history of Nazi trials. She described the "three waves" of prosecutions, where each held different standards of culpability. The first were the prominent public trials at Nuremberg: "The initial phase was the one scripted for the movies. The villains were demonic, the rhetoric stirring, and at the end came the satisfying snap of the hangman’s noose." The next involved lower ranking Nazis, but a line had to be drawn for prosecutions. As Groening himself said in an interview: “then where would you stop? Wouldn’t you also have to charge the engineer who drove the trains to Auschwitz? And the men who ran the signal boxes?”

Eventually, the standard settled upon in the "second wave" was to merely prosecute those who actually committed murders, and specifically those whose actions went beyond the mere bureaucratic functions of the camps into sadistic or excessive behavior. Reading beyond Kolbert's article, I have learned this standard was partly justified by new psychological research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Milgram experiments (whose results were first released around the time of trial of Adolf Eichmann) and the Stanford Prison Experiment. The first experiment claimed that most ordinary volunteers were willing to convey apparently lethal shocks to an unseen (but heard) participant in a "learning" exercise (actually an actor), merely because it was the given experimental protocol. The latter involved a wide variety of spontaneous bullying, intimidation, and even sadistic behavior that emerged in ordinary participants who were randomly divided to be "guards" and "prisoners" in a simulated "prison"; the experiment was designed to continue for 14 days but was abruptly shut down after 6 days because of ethical concerns about the level of abuse that was occurring. (Interestingly, dramatized versions of both of these experiments were released as films in the past year: Experimenter and The Stanford Prison Experiment .)

[Continues...]

But in recent years, the "just following orders" defense has been called into question as the "third wave" of prosecutions have begun. (Milgram's experiments, too, have been subject to renewed debate about their meaning.) Groening's prosecution was relatively easy, since he has been forthcoming about his role in the camps for decades. He felt a sense of duty to debunk "Holocaust denier" propaganda, to speak out against Neo-Nazis, and to tell the story of the horrors of the camps, writing a memoir and giving extended interviews to the BBC and Der Spiegel in 2003-2005. At the time, Groening had nothing to fear from the "second wave" standards of prosecution, but now his conviction represents another turning point in Nazi trials.

Beyond the descriptions of the trials, Kolbert's New Yorker article contains a great deal about her great-grandmother who died in the camps, whom Kolbert decided to memorialize in a Stolperstein, a small stone installed in memory of Holocaust victims into the sidewalks or streets in many European cities. She muses in her conclusion on whether these trials of nonagenarians are actually "justice" or something else:

There was never going to be justice for the Holocaust, or a reckoning with its enormity. The Stolpersteine, in a way, acknowledge this. They don’t presume to do too much. That is perhaps why they work. And perhaps the Gröning case and any others that may follow should be approached in a similar spirit. They should be regarded less as trials than as ceremonies—another kind of public art on the theme of its inadequacy.


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:25PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:25PM (#434440)

    Among the weak willed, plus or minus some, enough hate turns you into what you hate. People who don't keep an eye on that get pretty F-ed up. The folks attacking senior citizens are now nazis themselves, which is the greater tragedy in that people complaining about X million nazis now have 2X or 3X or some multiple of younger nazis running around.

    Might makes right; we won either the german government in the 30s, or WWII, so we can imprison and kill whom ever we want. If you base all your ethics and morals on the fist and the bullet, well, this kind of uncivilized savage behavior is what you get.

    The proper response to lack of hope is terrorism. The German people were convinced the Russians would destroy Europe unless they took extreme measures, some against civilians, which would probably be categorized now as terrorism (or war crimes). Likewise part of why post WWII Germany did not end up like Afghanistan or Iraq was people were willing to (apparently temporarily) let the past die. Now it seems the only possible outcome of your life is swinging on the end of a rope with your family destroyed, well, I see no moral or ethical argument against going out shooting, may as well take some of those bastards with you. I don't know how good 90 year old people are at building IEDs, but theres no remaining moral or ethical argument against it. If you want eternal war until your last enemy is dead, well, that sounds fun and patriotic at first glance, but it turns into an eternal bloodbath no matter if its Germany in the 30s, the 10s, or the USA re-enacting Crusades in the middle east.

    The proper way to do diplomacy is to never turn the other cheek to assume moral supremacy. Nothing says Christianity quite like turning the other cheek. Damn that Ghandi and MLK for their mostly nonviolent civil disobedience, that is the nuclear option of politics. Of course the few Germans left who aren't overrun by Muslims now are cowardly Satanists, do onto others before they do onto you, do whatever feels good, F all this morals and ethics stuff. On a small scale this means weak little damaged people full of hate endlessly repeating tragedy from the past, if they're gonna punish us we are fully justified in repeating our side and having another pogrom or holocaust, I mean the whole point of never letting the past die is to kill a lot of people to keep past grudges alive. On the large scale in foreign diplomacy this kind of idiocy has always lead to eternal pointless war.

    There are judicial issues. Israeli control of the media has slipped pretty bad, and probably isn't coming back, for a variety of technological and cultural reasons, so they kinda have to shoot their load now while they have what little influence they still have. Everyone laughs at the propaganda on CNN or CBS but a rapidly shrinking fraction of the population at least still watches, for now, so they need to act now. The left has vastly overextended itself and is getting pushed rather forcibly back, which frankly is good. Also the globalists have overreached and are getting pushed back and globalist or neocon means basically Israeli for all practical purposes. Essentially the whole topic is Israel is weakening so is making a show of force to appear less weak. Nothing says "failed judicial system" quite as well as a system where individual court cases are tried primarily on international politics and economic forces and the facts of the case be damned someone has to be made to pay. The Jews and Germans of 2010s are doing an excellent job of emulating the kangaroo courts of the nazi 30s and 40s, they're such good little nazis, more devout than the American alt-right in many ways.

    Its interesting to compare the whole "roman salute" thing in the USA today vs Germany. In the USA some folks give the "roman salute" because they see a rise in the good aspects of nationalism. Meanwhile in Germany and Israel, they've earned themselves a "roman salute" for emulating and carrying out all the bad weak parts of nazi beliefs. Its an interesting contrast. In the USA to be a nazi or white nationalist in 2016 means to hold the revolutionary and heretical belief that maybe being anti-white or anti-male is a bad idea, which violates uncountable left wing religious beliefs but doesn't hurt anyone. In Germany to be a nazi in 2016 means to emulate all the bad parts of the good ole days of the 30s.

    Those Germans (and admittedly its mostly Israelis doing this stuff) in 2016 have turned into such good little nazis, they're not doing anything wrong, I'm sure they'd say they're just following orders.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:46PM (#434449)

    > Among the weak willed, plus or minus some, enough hate turns you into what you hate.

    Written without a hint of irony.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @01:47PM (#434451)

      Judge the post, not the poster.

      • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:15PM

        by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:15PM (#434460)

        The funniest part of the whole exchange is AC #1 doesn't realize that unless he's really, really careful in his hatred of the right, he's going to end up red pilled and hanging out on /pol/, merely a matter of when, not if.

        The winds of history will not change direction merely by anonymously pissing into them. Or, ironically taking it full circle, consider /pol/ ? Of course /pol/ might be more of an example of a million NEETs doing meme magic and that clearly pragmatically works, rationalized or ritualized don't matter much if it works.