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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: 4, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:40PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:40PM (#434467) Journal

    I'm familiar with that book. Nothing in it AFAIK is technically wrong. However it can be criticized as a classic example of 1970s propaganda vs 2010s propaganda.

    So decades ago if you want to convince extremely high functioning white people you write a, no kidding, FIVE HUNDRED page book full of academic footnotes and evidence.

    I'm not sure you're thinking of the right book. "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy" was published in 2007. It's recent. It came out around the same time as Jimmy Carter's, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," which sharply criticized Israel's policies toward Palestinians. He was decried as an anti-Semite for that. Yes, Jimmy Carter, the American President who did more for Israel's actual security than any other American president, ever. It turns out he is an anti-Semite. The 11th Commandment doth say, after all, "Thou Shalt Not Criticize Israel."

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    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:01PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:01PM (#434478)

    The 11th Commandment doth say, after all, "Thou Shalt Not Criticize Israel."

    I should note that that unofficial rule apply to American Jews as well as non-Jews: If an American Jewish person criticizes current Israeli policy in any way, they become "self-hating" rather than "anti-Semitic", but are similarly ignored and punished for their transgression. Oddly, American Jews have less right to criticize Israeli policy than Israeli Jews - Americans have gotten fired from publications for putting the same kinds of arguments into the American press that are commonly published in Ha'aretz.

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    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:28PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:28PM (#434668)

      I fully expect President Trump to add me to The Great Deportation List for reading Al Jazeera reports on actual laws and actions taken by Israel against Palestinians.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 29 2016, @06:57PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 29 2016, @06:57PM (#434615)

    Oh yes same book, but old thinking patterns. Writing 500 page academic tomes is OK and I suppose required so poli sci students have something to read, but its not modern way to output propaganda memes in the sense of mein kampf or maos little red book or was cutting edge at that time or whatever.

    Kind of like Hillary ran a picture perfect 1976 campaign in 2016. Didn't work out so well, but that doesn't mean its not 2016 today or her strategy wasn't 1976 era.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 29 2016, @11:23PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @11:23PM (#434728) Journal

      That makes sense because they're academics. Propaganda is not their purpose. It's a different milieu with different standards of evidence.

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      Washington DC delenda est.