Discussion for article #228283
All 80 would be very old if still alive, born between 1920 and 1924, Zuroff said.
âTime is running out,â he said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. âSomething has to be done.â
Or what? They mightâŚdie?
Really, youâre going to bum rush a bunch of extreme senior citizens who may or may not remember their own names, much less what happened in the 1940âs, take them to Germany to stand trial for a crime you canât quantify, calling no witnesses because theyâre all dead, and convict them of something and thenâŚgive them a suspended sentence because theyâre too old and feeble to go to prison?
What will Efraim Zuroff and the Wiesenthal bunch do in 5 to 10 years when the rest of low-grade Nazis are all dead? Who will they chase then? Will they run around shaming their children?
Also:
Schrimm has said, however, they could now be prosecuted under new German legal theory that service in a Nazi unit whose sole purpose was murder is enough to convict someone of accessory to murder â even without evidence of participation in a specific crime as had previously been required.
Seriously? The German equivalent of Ex post facto law?
How can America support this?
All the real monsters are dead. The victims are almost entirely dead. There is nothing left to do but rip the scabs off of old wounds.
Let it rest already.
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Have we located and brought to justice the plantation owners who abused their âslavesâ? How about those men who murdered slaves back then?
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Indeed. Thereâs still useful work to be done, primarily involving education, and continuing to track down looted assets (artwork, for example). But when it comes to seeking personal justice, that train really has left the station.
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Or the whiteâs that lynched returning ww2 soldiers, or the ones who lynched pregnant black women and beat their babies out of them are we going to find them! And the southern lynchers of the 60âs and 70âs where are they !!
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The point is not chasing down some nice old man who once, a long time ago, did his target shooting with human beings. The point is that unrelenting justice and punishment may dissuade a young man now from trying something like that.
Is there any civilized country with a statute of limitations on murder?
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Thank you, Mr. Buchanan.
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Schrimm has said, however, they could now be prosecuted under new German legal theory that service in a Nazi unit whose sole purpose was murder is enough to convict someone of accessory to murder â even without evidence of participation in a specific crime as had previously been required.
Uh-huh. No way THAT could go wrongâŚ
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The purpose of statutory punishment is, I think, subject to some debate. In my view, deterrence is not one of those purposes - The death penalty has been shown to not be a deterrence to people intent on committing capitol offences. Jail (or death) is largely to keep bad people off the streets, punish them for their crimes, and provide some sense of justice for the victims.
Diminishing returns in these areas, and the potential for error after so long to victimize the innocent, make this seem a bit more like a witch hunt.
âUnrelenting justice and punishmentâ are lofty goals, but there are countless unsolved murders all over the world, going back ages. Where do we stop?
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Commenters here make some sense, in that this may be an issue that has reached a natural expiration date. But there is another way to look at it. If these people are alive, they ought to be confronted with, or at least exposed to evidence that they participated in these actions. Their death cannot then be seen by them as a âway outâ from confronting exposure as participants in these horrendous actions. If guilty, they are then labelled with that guilt while they are crafting their own legacy, rather than after they die, when that legacy has been established. It actually matters little to that legacy if the guilty parties are of sound body or mind. The label attaches itself most firmly to those who are alive. Yes, itâs just about attaching guilt to bodies that are still breathing. That makes a difference.
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This doesnât seem an easy or obvious question to me at all. Yes, itâs been a long time, but that historical distance doesnât diminish the actual crime. And theyâre old, but old age is not somehow a punishment in itself. They got away with it. And Iâll bet some of them, if not all, have a quiet chuckle now and then about how for once the Yids got what was coming to them. The knock on the door after all these decades would wipe that little smile off their faces. But I can see deciding otherwise. Thing is, maybe in some future world weâll have to tell this woman, trying to shield her child from the rifle bullets, that it didnât really seem worth the trouble somehow. Not trying to make anyone feel guilty but what the Einsatzgruppen did was a pretty big deal.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Kiev_Jew_Killings_in_Ivangorod_(1942).jpg
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My point is that they canât really prove anything anymore, so theyâve created a new theory that by being enrolled in the Not-Cool-Kids list, youâre automagically guilty of this list of crimes hereâŚ
Itâs down to revenge and vigilantism now. What good is going to come from rounding up a 94-year-old retired delivery driver from Osnabruck, trying him (assuming the miserable bastard doesnât die awaiting trial), and thenâŚnot imprisoning him because heâs a feeb that is spoon-fed baby food and messes his Depends every hour on the hour?
Can you really bring âjusticeâ to someone like that?
or the killer of Michael Brown, John Crawford, Eric GarnerâŚ
I think everything youâre saying is valid, but for myself I canât lean to that side. I donât think itâs possible to be a member of one of those groups and have clean hands, first of all. These guys werenât typists or quartermasters, they were killers. And sure, suppose the guyâs 94, led a peaceful, more or less blameless life, good neighbor, half demented, all that. I still think we owe it to the victims to say âYou were in this group. What do you have to say? Can you point to any act of repentance? Can your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren remember a time you expressed a regret?â They shot, mostly, two million civilians just as if they were diseased rats. Women and children? Too bad, theyâre subhuman bacilli. Make them dig their own graves, then gun them down one after the other. It was one of the greatest crimes of any century. I canât just say itâs too late now.
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Glad to see you havenât denied the Holocaust. These people no matter the age or infirmity need to be hunted down and tried for war crimes.
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I will never deny it happened. The evidence is there, just like the evidence is there for the Greek Holocaust, the Assyrian Holocaust, the Armenian Holocaust, and the Holodomor.
I question the continued commitment of time and resources in pursuit of what will ultimately be a pyrrhic victory.
There are few if any original victims left to get justice for. And most of the remaining presumed perpetrators, while you certainly can dispense âjusticeâ, it simply has no effect on them for reasons I already stated. Itâs all about making this generation feel good for having âdone somethingâ.
The war is over. The evil have been dealt with. Itâs time for the dead to rest. Those who still breathe are already dead inside.
If youâre one of those believers in something after this world then those already having suffered manâs justice (and those very few who remain) all have something or someone much greater to answer to still.
That should be enough.
Uh-oh, theyâre on to you, shitburner!
Itâs never too late for justice to be served if the criminal vermin are still breathing.
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When I was about 12, years before the creation of James Bond, I conceived a fantasy of being some sort of secret agent with a license to hunt down and kill war criminals.
In my fantasy I would let them know they had been found and I was there to do justice.
Now that Iâm old and gray, I can only wish the Allies had captured and hanged more of these evil bastards after the war. I suspect that many got away through sheer laziness and indifference on the part of the Alliesâ.
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