Germany reopens hundreds of Nazi probes

[scandal 951]

We don't want to wait too long, so we've already begun our investigations

Yes, please don't wait too long....... like 66 years since the end of the war .... Still, better late than never.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2011-10-05/germany-nazi-investigations/50665364/1

Germany reopens hundreds of Nazi probes

BERLIN (AP) – Nearly seven decades after the end of World War II, German authorities have reopened hundreds of dormant investigations of Nazi death camp guards in an eleventh hour attempt that could result in at least dozens of new prosecutions, The Associated Press has learned.

Special Nazi war-crimes investigators reopened the files after the conviction of former U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk, whose case set a new legal precedent in Germany, said Kurt Schrimm, the prosecutor who heads the unit.

Given the advanced age of all of the suspects, investigators are not waiting until the Demjanjuk appeals process is over, he said.

"We don't want to wait too long, so we've already begun our investigations," Schrimm said.

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, welcomed the news that the files were being re-examined and urged prosecutors to act quickly.

"As our numbers — those of the victims — have also rapidly dwindled, this represents the final opportunity to witness justice carried out in our lifetimes," he said. "Time is the enemy here."

Meanwhile, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's top Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff, told the AP he would launch a new campaign in the next two months to track down the remaining Nazi war criminals. He said the Demjanjuk conviction has opened the door to prosecutions that he had never thought possible in the past.

"It could be a very interesting final chapter," he said by telephone from Jerusalem. "This has tremendous implications even at this late date."

Demjanjuk, now 91, was deported from the U.S. to Germany in 2009 to stand trial. He was convicted in May of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

It was the first time prosecutors were able to convict someone in a Nazi-era case without direct evidence that the suspect participated in a specific killing.

In bringing Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. autoworker, to trial, Munich prosecutors argued that if they could prove that he was a guard at a camp like Sobibor — established for the sole purpose of extermination — it was enough to convict him of accessory to murder as part of the Nazi's machinery of destruction.

After 18 months of testimony, a Munich court agreed and found Demjanjuk guilty, sentencing him to five years in prison. Demjanjuk, who denies ever having served as a guard, is currently free and living in southern Germany as he waits for his appeal to be heard.

Schrimm said his office is going over all of its files to see if others may fit into the same category as Demjanjuk. He said there were probably "under 1,000" possible suspects who could still be alive and prosecuted, living both in Germany and abroad. He would not give any names.

"We have to check everything — from the people who we were aware of in camps like Sobibor … or also in the Einsatzgruppen," he said, referring to the death squads responsible for mass killings, particularly early in the war before the death camps were established.

It has not yet been tested in court whether the Demjanjuk precedent could be extended to guards of Nazi camps where thousands died but whose sole purpose was not necessarily murder.

Murder and related offenses are the only charges in Germany that aren't subject to a statute of limitations.

Even the narrowest scenario — looking at the guards of the four death camps used only for killings: Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Treblinka — plus those involved in the Einsatzgruppen could lead to scores more prosecutions, Zuroff said.

"We're talking about an estimated 4,000 people, to round it off," he said. "Even if only 2 percent of those people are alive, we're talking 80 people — and let's assume half of them are not medically fit to be brought to justice — that leaves us with 40 people, so there is incredible potential."

Immediately after the war, top Nazis such as Hermann Goering were convicted at war crimes trials run by the Allied powers, while investigations of the lower ranks eventually fell to German courts.

But there was little political will to aggressively pursue the prosecutions, and many of the trials ended with short sentences, or the acquittal, of suspects in greater positions of responsibility than Demjanjuk allegedly had.

For example, Karl Streibel — the commandant of the SS camp Trawniki, where Demjanjuk allegedly was trained — was tried in Hamburg but acquitted in 1976 after the judges ruled it hadn't been proven that he knew what the guards being trained would be used for.

But the current generation of prosecutors and judges in Germany has shown a new willingness to pursue even the lower ranks, something applauded by Zuroff.

"Our goal is to bring as many people to justice as possible," Zuroff said. "They shouldn't be let off if they're less than Mengele, less than Himmler … in a tragedy of this scope, their escaping justice should not in any way mean that people of a lesser level would be ignored."

Working in favor of the new investigators is the fact that most suspects would likely have lived openly under their own names for decades, thinking they had no prosecutions to fear.

Those who are harder to locate will be the focus of the Wiesenthal center's new appeal, which Zuroff said would include reward money for information that helps uncover a suspect.

On the other hand, Schrimm said it only makes sense to try to bring new cases to trial once the Demjanjuk case is through the appeals process, rather than expend all the resources needed to charge a suspect only to have the case thrown out if Demjanjuk wins. But the appeal could still take at least another six months to a year — or longer — and the suspects are not getting any younger.

"It's very clear that they're old, that's why we're preparing everything now so that as soon as there is a final decision, we can move immediately with charges," Schrimm said.

Zuroff said he hoped that the appeal could somehow be fast-tracked so that new charges against others could be filed before it is too late.

"This … is a test for the German judicial system to see if they can expedite this in an appropriate manner to enable these cases to go forward," he said.

[Brother Hesekiel 2,236]

As a German, I'm troubled with the waste of taxpayers' money to hunt down people who are long dead, "only" dead, or about to die of a very old age.

As an American I'm trouble with how much influence the Jews not only have on U.S. policy, but German politics as well.

[scandal 951]

As a human being I am disgusted with the filth just above.

As a Jew, I am glad to be living breathing evidence that Hitler failed, that the Third Reich failed, and that the Final Solution failed, and that apologists for it, like the poster above, prove themselves to be naught but filth. You fail. You failed, and you still fail. We live.

I hope these 80 and 90 year old men are terrified, truly terrified, at the prospect of facing the charges against them.

And I hope those found guilty are removed from their homes and families and comforts to live the rest of their few years left incarcerated.

[Danno 1,228]

Q: When Jewish Folk say "never again" does that extend to others or is that a commitment that it will never again happen to the Jews?

On the topic of your post, if they can find convincing evidence of guilt, God bless em, I don't care how old someone is.... they should be made to answer.

It makes me sick that those who are guilty have gotten off scott free for all these decades.

If I am honest I would have to question the ability of proving these cases convincingly after so much time. Memories get cloudy, identities are uncertain documents to prove ones innocence are long gone.

The John Demjanjuk case is perhaps an example, wasn't he acquitted by an Israeli court, yet another court found him guilty.

How could all these decades have passed with so little action?

[scandal 951]

Q: When Jewish Folk say "never again" does that extend to others or is that a commitment that it will never again happen to the Jews?

A.

Firstly, I cringe at the phrasing "When Jewish Folk say". Jews are a community but we don't all have identical viewpoints on anything. We're just like anyone else - we think and believe as individuals. It's the odious use of the phrase "the Jews" in post #2, regarding the conspiratorial influence Jews supposedly have on politics in this country, which bluntly shows the bigotry of the poster in question.

Having said that, I think that most Jews, and most people, subscribe to the view that the Holocaust, with capitalized 'H', was a unique tragedy, an unimaginable horror of genocide that claimed 6 million innocent Jews as well as other millions of Roma, Slavs, homosexuals, political opponents of the Nazis and many others caught up in the death machine of the Third Reich. When we say "Never Again", we mean quite literally that never again should a monstrous society be allowed to roam the Earth with a mechanized death industry of einsatzgruppen, concentration camps and gas chambers for industrialized murder. And Never Again shall the Jewish people allow themselves to be victimized in such a way. But we also mean Never Again shall ANY society be subject to genocide and mass brutality. Tragically, we have failed. Within living memory of the Holocaust we've had genocides in Bosnia, in Cambodia, in Rwanda. And we've had mass brutality in countless other places. None of this should be acceptable to any of us. It's an outrage to the philosophy of "Never Again".

Here, for example, is a press release from 2005 by Abraham Foxman of the AntiDefamation League, one of the premier watchdogs of antisemitism and intolerance in the wake of the Holocaust, an embodiment of Jewish "Never Again", regarding the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by Serb war criminals a decade earlier. This too is a key part of the message of "Never Again":

http://www.adl.org/NR/exeres/B98FDB92-EA14-4CF8-B661-42CC86F4AF83,0B1623CA-D5A4-465D-A369-DF6E8679CD9E,frameless.htm

Srebrenica Anniversary: ADL Calls for Arrests of Bosnian Serb Leaders

Update: On July 21, 2008, Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Serbia and charged with genocide and war crimes.

__________

New York, NY, July 12, 2005 ... In the wake of the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has called for fugitive Serb leaders to be arrested and brought to justice.

In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran the area around Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, despite its status as a UN "safe area". Around 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically slaughtered and their bodies dumped into mass graves, in the worst example of mass murder on European soil since the Second World War.

Some of the participants in the massacre have been tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, but the two men most closely identified with the atrocity – Radovan Karadzic, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, and Ratko Mladic, commander of the army of the breakaway 'Bosnian Serb Republic' – remain at large.

"At a time when we are marking the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, we renew our call for justice," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "It is imperative that Karadzic and Mladic are caught and brought to trial. As Jews, we know only too well that if justice is to be done, the perpetrators of murder must be made to answer for their crimes."

On the topic of your post, if they can find convincing evidence of guilt, God bless em, I don't care how old someone is.... they should be made to answer.

It makes me sick that those who are guilty have gotten off scott free for all these decades.

If I am honest I would have to question the ability of proving these cases convincingly after so much time. Memories get cloudy, identities are uncertain documents to prove ones innocence are long gone.

The John Demjanjuk case is perhaps an example, wasn't he acquitted by an Israeli court, yet another court found him guilty.

How could all these decades have passed with so little action?

Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel and tried on charges that he was Ivan the Terrible, an infamous guard at Treblinka and Sobibor death camps. He was ultimately acquitted of those charges and returned to America. He was then re-arrested and extradited to Germany to stand trial on charges that he was a guard at Sobibor although not Ivan the Terrible. He has been found guilty of those charges.

You are correct that with the passage of time it is much more difficult to gather evidence, mount a case, prosecute and convict these criminals. But I also think that this burden shouldn't prevent us from throwing the criminal justice system at these evil men as hard as we can.

As to how the decades went by..... I wish I had a good answer. I do not.

[TBoneTX 46,041]

with the passage of time it is much more difficult to gather evidence, mount a case, prosecute and convict these criminals. But I also think that this burden shouldn't prevent us from throwing the criminal justice system at these evil men as hard as we can.

Barbecue the unspeakably evil bastards, fully and now.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

As a German, I'm troubled with the waste of taxpayers' money to hunt down people who are long dead, "only" dead, or about to die of a very old age.

As an American I'm trouble with how much influence the Jews not only have on U.S. policy, but German politics as well.

Germany hid thousands of it's NAZI war criminals after the war, yet they go after foreigners. Go figure.

http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-hundreds-nazi-probes-reopened-061508463.html

Special Nazi war-crimes investigators reopened the files after the conviction of former U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk, whose case set a new legal precedent in Germany. It was the first time prosecutors had been able to convict someone in a Nazi-era case without direct evidence that the suspect participated in a specific killing.

As a human being I am disgusted with the filth just above.

As a Jew, I am glad to be living breathing evidence that Hitler failed, that the Third Reich failed, and that the Final Solution failed, and that apologists for it, like the poster above, prove themselves to be naught but filth. You fail. You failed, and you still fail. We live.

I hope these 80 and 90 year old men are terrified, truly terrified, at the prospect of facing the charges against them.

And I hope those found guilty are removed from their homes and families and comforts to live the rest of their few years left incarcerated.

Israel harbors Bolshevik war criminals and refuses to hand them over. Every Ashkenazi Jew who is physically able to kneel on their knees, should kneel down and pray not only for the millions of Holocaust victims, but the tens of millions of victims of the Jewish Bolsheviks who didn't have a problem with butchering men, women, and children in the most vile, sickening and inhuman ways possible known to man. From starving to death millions of Ukrainians to the point they committed cannibalism to sticking entire villages inside of cattle cars in the middle of winter and shipped them to Siberia where most of them didn't even survive the trip and the ones that did begged for a quick death. You speak of 6 million Jews? Try 20 million Eastern Europeans, Russians, and Tatars who were lucky if they caught a bullet in the head by a Jewish guard instead of starving to death in a Bolshevik gulag.

You want to tell people on here why Eastern Europeans couldn't help the NAZI's quick enough when Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941 or should I ?

Now tell us please when is Israel going to hand over it's Bolshevik war criminals?

[Saddle Bronc 124]

Barbecue the unspeakably evil bastards, fully and now.

That will happen to the lumpen-majority of them--when they find themselves shoveling coal.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

Glad it is German taxpayers paying for this. About all that is left is a few low level camp guards that were 17 year old conscripts at the time.

[mawilson 2,133]

Israel harbors Bolshevik war criminals and refuses to hand them over.

Bolshevik war criminals? Wow, they must be 120 years old now.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

As a German, I'm troubled with the waste of taxpayers' money to hunt down people who are long dead, "only" dead, or about to die of a very old age.

As an American I'm trouble with how much influence the Jews not only have on U.S. policy, but German politics as well.

But it is German taxpayer money so who really cares?

The Nazis killed 3 times as many people in the Russia/Ukraine/Belarus because they were Slavs that they did Jews, so maybe there are others not too happy about it. Visit Moscow or Kiev or Minsk on May 9th and see if I am right.

On the other hand, it is a huge waste at this point but nothing new for governments. This is what happens when governments are allowed to confiscate your earnings and decide what to do with it

[mawilson 2,133]

The Nazis killed 3 times as many people in the Russia/Ukraine/Belarus because they were Slavs that they did Jews, so maybe there are others not too happy about it. Visit Moscow or Kiev or Minsk on May 9th and see if I am right.

They didn't systematically exterminate Slavs.

[Bad_Daddy 2,209]

Bolshevik war criminals? Wow, they must be 120 years old now.

Those are just a two of many down below. Russia hides a bunch of them also. Not one Bolshevik commie butcher has been brought to justice even when they are responsible for twice as many deaths as the Germans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Morel

Salomon Morel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachman_Dushanski

Nachman Dushanski

On the flip side the US, Canada, UK, and especially GERMANY gave false passports/ID's to thousands of NAZI animals. Adolph Eichmann got to South America with the help of the US government even though he was one of the biggest animals of them all. And Werner Von Braun the German rocket scientist was another NAZI war criminal. He used slave labor while making V-2 rockets. Did he get a bullet in the back of the head like he had coming? H*ll no, the US handed him everything he could ask for and then some.

[Gary and Alla 3,694]

They didn't systematically exterminate Slavs.

So they killed three times as many by ...accident?

I suggest you take a tour of Ukraine, Belarus, or western Russia...St Petersburg (Leningrad)or Volgagrad (Stalingrad) Sevastapol, Odessa even Donetsk (Stalino) and walk in some of the parks and memorials.

Maybe it wasn't systematic that they pounded Sevastapol for 400 days with the largest artillery piece ever made? Perhaps it was bad weather that killed 1 million + people in Leningrad? Maybe it was a mistake that 400 women and children were led to a bomb crater in Donetsk and shot?

To me, one of the most profound things I take from having lived there, having relatives there and owning property there is that I am very glad we do not see memorials and plaques in this country that read what theirs do.

[mawilson 2,133]

So they killed three times as many by ...accident?

No, they were killed in a war.