Discussion for article #236972
To what extent is this issue about them, the war criminals, and to what extent is it about us, nominally a nation of laws? Yes, we shouldn’t have let war criminals in in the first place, and we should have expelled them when we found out about them. But absent a law or a ruling covering the issue, someone who paid into social security during their working life gets benefits when they retire. Same as (absent a relevant ruling) even the nastiest dictator or international criminal who buys a treasury note gets interest payments and their principal back if they hold the note to maturity.
Should the government have done more to expel war criminals and terminate their benefits? Almost certainly. But also almost certainly that action couldn’t have been justified on the grounds of conserving government money.
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I am no Nazi appoligest, but the article failed to account for the money paid into the SS System by these people.
If these people are not allowed to receive SS benefits shouldn’t they and their former employers be given a refund for the money they paid in for benefits they were not allowed to receive?
Being a Nazi does not mean you are a War Criminal any more than being a part of the US Government makes you a War Criminal.
This article is click-bait, fersure.
C’mon. You make it too easy bringing up Nazis and “the SS System” . . . . .
If you read the article and look at the links, you can see that the people in question were not merely members of the party but credibly accused of committing war crimes. (Not to mention that failing to disclose nazi connections when immigrating to the US is/was a violation of applicable law).
But if there’s legislation or a court decision in place, I don’t see any problem with depriving someone of their retirement benefits as a punishment for bad acts. You see it not uncommonly if public-safety officers or members of the military are convicted of a crime and expelled from service. In this case, however, it’s mostly a plausible punishment if someone leaves the US, because otherwise (just like medical care for the poor) you’d be spending that money one way or another.
Exactly. I recall running into something like this years ago, in my snivel servant days. The media were outraged to discover that we were allowing a company to bid for Government contract work, despite the fact that the company was under investigation for some nefarious dealings. Our spokespeople hemmed and hawed, for some reason unwilling to provide the correct response, which was that legally, we were not permitted to bar someone from bidding simply because they were under suspicion. There were clear legal requirements for debarring a bidder, and the fact that the FBI had paid a visit to your corporate offices wasn’t on that list.
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“The large amount of the benefits and their duration illustrate how unaware the American public was of the influx of Nazi persecutors into the U.S …”
Like Operation Paperclip?
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We seem to be attacking the small people when we gave great praise and wealth to the worst.
Verner von Braun, the mastermind and enabler of Hitler’s terror weapons that rained down on Britain, became an American hero. We sanitized this Nazis history to make him palatable so that we could use him make our own weapons of mass destruction even more lethal.
Its a tough story all around.
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$20.2 million over how many years? Hell, that’s a rounding error for a month of work on the F-35.
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