Germany's response to Nazism on trial as man, 93, faces 300,000 charges

Discussion in 'Western Europe' started by Kiwi33, May 26, 2015.

  1. Kiwi33

    Kiwi33 New Member

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    Compensations to the victims of the Holocaust or descendants of the victims, Germany still pays?
     
  2. Caligula

    Caligula Well-Known Member

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  3. Ronstar

    Ronstar Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    convict him, and imprison him.

    anyone who willingly participated in the Final Solution deserves nothing less than life in prison or execution.
     
  4. Caligula

    Caligula Well-Known Member

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    We should probably also think about convicting those that participated in other (war) crimes and acted against international law.
    The list would be endless.
     
  5. notme

    notme Well-Known Member

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    FYI,... your source is a bit of a joke. In 1933 prior to the elections, Germany banned over 20 newspapers and had 4000 political prisoners in concentration camps, while the communists and social democrats were attacked on the streets, at their congress parties and even in their own homes. At that election, Hitler only got 33% of the votes. That is not choosing Hitler or doing that in a free and fair election at all.

    And when Hitler got chosen to be the leader of Germany,... that was when all other parties got banned.
    Free and fair my ass.
     
  6. Kiwi33

    Kiwi33 New Member

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    I 100% agree with you. But some write such articles. To continue to extend money from Germans my guess. I read recently some European Jews found the railway company which allegedly transported prisoners from concentration camps in France (definitely I don't remember, some European country)... now this company, Jews want to push the claim. How many will speculate on a Holocaust? Many Jews who live in Israel against a payment. They explain that this monetary compensation - is harmful that people remembered a Holocaust. Germans will simply tell, we are paid for a Holocaust, forget, and they will be right...
     
  7. notme

    notme Well-Known Member

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    Not really. Germany paid again to a handful of Jews in Israel 1 billion dollars even though Germany already paid for the Holocaust years ago. As for the trains. That is nothing new. It just them trying to get massive amounts of money for free. That claim to say the rail companies collaborated, is a joke. They collaborated as much as them Jews who hopped on the train in that "free and fair" country.
     
  8. Anders Hoveland

    Anders Hoveland Banned

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    How does that make him an "accessory to murder" ?
    That's the problem with open-ended interpretations of laws worded with potentially broad meanings. Those charges are not appropriate, and is unbecoming conduct for prosecutor.
    Unfortunately, in Germany's current political and social climate, I doubt the prosecutor will be reprimanded.
     
  9. Glücksritter

    Glücksritter Well-Known Member

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    Yes, as it is the German justice system which wants to rehabilitate with this silly symbolic act. They let many of the most horrific Nazi criminals go, continue their careers after the war. Now they wanna make an example with a 93 yearsold former accountant. Ridiculous.
     
  10. Fugazi

    Fugazi New Member Past Donor

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    The only question I ask is where is the line drawn?
     
  11. LiveUninhibited

    LiveUninhibited Well-Known Member

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    Apparently anybody who was alive in Nazi Germany at the time, were aware of the holocaust, and failed to heroically resist the holocaust. If there were many such people, they would likely have been executed by the Nazis. So I guess it's best not to be born in Germany during that time, or at least not to fail to flee. Otherwise, you're a murderer. Maybe they could dig up some corpses of the concentration camp janitors to make an example of them for great justice. :roll:
     
  12. Fugazi

    Fugazi New Member Past Donor

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    Agreed.
     
  13. lunecat

    lunecat Active Member

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    Tony Blair & George Bush should be taken to court & prosecuted for war crimes.
     
  14. Paksenarrion

    Paksenarrion New Member

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    And so should Winston Churchill for his actions during the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya
     
  15. Paksenarrion

    Paksenarrion New Member

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    I would like to point out this particular "accountant" joined the SS so that in it self indicates he was an active supporter of the Nazis regime albeit a small cog he was still part of the machine and therefore culpable.
     
  16. Caligula

    Caligula Well-Known Member

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    It's not quite that simple.
    From the outside it could look as if someone who joined the SS or the Waffen SS must have been an eager supporter of the Nazi regime.

    Firstly, it very much depends on when somebody joined. In 1933, for example, could anybody joining the SS ranks foresee Auschwitz and the Holocaust? I don't think so.

    Secondly, many younger guys joined the SS simply for opportunistic reasons. The Wehrmacht didn't accept officer candidates without the so-called "abitur" (highest secondary school degree), plus they had to be 18 years or older.
    The SS, on the other hand, being in competition with the Wehrmacht as the only armor - bearer in the Nazi Reich, accepted candidates under 18 and without said degree. So, naturally, thousands of young guys joined the SS in the mid / late 30s with the idea in mind to become a civil servant.

    Thirdly, as strange as it may sound, many people joined the SS because they couldn't find a job.
    A friend of mine from the Netherlands did some research for a number of years and found that thousands of Dutch men joined the SS after 1940 because there was absolutely no work in the back then occupied Netherlands. The Dutch were actually the biggest non-German group to join the SS in the early 40s, approximately 40,000 plus.
    During the later years of WW II, the SS forced thousands of prisoners into their ranks, especially poachers. It was considered a major crime, but these people usually knew how to use weapons. So, leave prison and join the SS or stay in prison for the next 20 years.

    This is not meant to be apologetic. I for one think that the majority of SS men were probably highly indoctrinated and ardent supporters of Hitler. However, it is impossible to say how many and it's definitely incorrect to say that all of them were.
     
  17. MaxxMurxx

    MaxxMurxx New Member

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    In German courts all postwar Polish communist and Soviet Russian Stalinist propaganda tales as well as all Nuremberg Court rulings are "offenkundig" (openly obvious), meaning, they have to be accepted as facts by all parties, Trying to bring evidence against those "facts" is regarded to be "Holocaust denial" and even brings lawyers behind bars, trying to make their job and defend the accused. It isnot only punishable by years of imprisonment to deny, but also to "relativate", "trivialize" or to "justify" the Holocaust. The major problem is: there is no official definition of the "Holocaust", not even an accepted authority which is able to do that. One of the highest courts years ago therefore said. "Holocaust ist the murder of 6 Million jews, 4 Million of them in Auschwitz". That lead to the punishment of a German tourist returning from Auschwitz and correctly reporting, that the official plate with "4 Million Jews having been murdered in Auschwitz" officially was replaced by one indicating 1.5 Million. That lead to the known problem that "telling the truth" is not an excuse to be punished for Holocaust denial in Germany (see link). In the trial above 93-year old man was indicted for "complicity in murder", simply because he was there. He was in the wrong place during the wrong time. There was not one single murder accounted to him personally. And that is the most interesting point: if the court would have followed the older ruling, which is an obligation to lower courts, the man would have been convicted for "assistance to murder" in 4 million cases. Instead he wasn't. He was convicted for "complicity in 300 000 murder cases". Because it is very unlikely that the court himself is a "Holocaust denier", the only alternative explanation is that using some kind of show trial, silently the Holocaust is re defined in German jurisprudence.

    http://is.gd/MwGlgd
     
  18. Steady Pie

    Steady Pie Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This is no justice - the victor judges the defeated. And how absurd - being an accountant counts as accessory to murder? They'd prosecute every German citizen born before 1945 if it wasn't a little too ridiculous.

    German anti-Nazism really irks me. In an effort to avoid Nazism they've become everything they were trying to avoid - they repress the political views of neo-nazis. They are in this respect no better than the Nazis themselves, and the German people (or really - their government) should be deeply ashamed.

    I'm sorry, this is just a topic which really gets me angry. I thought we were beyond all of this nonsense.
     
  19. parametheus

    parametheus Member

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    Who was convicted and for what?

    Again: Who was convicted and why?

    Quite a number of historical scholars in Germany held the position that 1.5 million peple were killed in Auschwitz. None of them was ever convicted for a crime.

    I'm afraid the link doesn't support any of your claims.

    The prosecution was limited to the time between May and July 1944, because it is evident that the convicted man worked at the ramp in Auschwitz during this time period. Between 16th of May and 11th of July (within two months), around 425,000 people arrived in Auschwitz; 300,000 of them were killed in the gas chambers.
     
  20. parametheus

    parametheus Member

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    They certainly would not.

    I can totally see the point of being against laws which restrict freedom of speech.

    What I do not see, though, is the point of seeing freedom of speech endangered only in laws which persecute holocaust denial. Slander is illegal in many countries. If you invent a story about your boss and tell that she is a prostitute, you break the law. In most countries, you can even go to jail when you talk about state secrets or if you lie under oath. Yet the same defenders of 'personal liberty' and 'freedom of speech' make little noise against these laws but keep complaining about their liberty being restrained because they aren't allowed to deny the holocaust, which is one of the - if not the - best documented and researched event(s) in human history.

    I don't have much of another word for this than bigotry.
     
  21. parametheus

    parametheus Member

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    I want to make another comment on this passage, because you refer to the absurdity of punishing an accountant for accessory to murder.

    First of all, I want to remind that the convicted person was not only an accountant but that he was also engaged in works at the ramp, i.e. in sorting out the individuals for elimination, taking their posessions, etc. It is true that his main occupation was that of an accountant. This is one of the reasons why the prosecution was limited to the time between May and July 1944. In my opinion, the line between those who indirectly but knowingly participated in the execution of the attempted genocide and those who merely failed to resist is very clear here. Even more so, the question is not: "If we convict someone who worked at the Auschwitz ramp for accessory to murder, who can we actually acquit?" but rather: "If we do not convict someone who worked at the Auschwitz ramp, then who can we count liable for the support of the crime at all?", since it is one of its characteristics that every little step, from the planning to the fulfillment, was executed by different individuals.

    Secondly, I want to show that even today, we apply an even broader collectivization when we are dealing with our enemies. As indicated by the flag in your profile, I assume you are from Australia, so I will use a law from the Criminal Code of Australia to demonstrate how we deal with people involved in terrorism.

    The Australian Criminal Code Act of 1995 states in Section 102.3, that

    (1) A person commits an offence if:

    (a) the person intentionally is a member of an organisation; and

    (b) the organisation is a terrorist organisation; and

    (c) the person knows the organisation is a terrorist organisation.

    Penalty: Imprisonment for 10 years.

    (2) Subsection (1) does not apply if the person proves that he or she took all reasonable steps to cease to be a member of the organisation as soon as practicable after the person knew that the organisation was a terrorist organisation.

    According to Section 102.1, a "terrorist organisation" is:

    (a) an organisation that is directly or indirectly engaged in, preparing, planning, assisting in or fostering the doing of a terrorist act; or
    (b) an organisation that is specified by the regulations for the purposes of this paragraph (see subsections (2), (3) and (4)).

    In Germany, we have similar laws concerning the membership of terrorist organizations, even though the punishments are not as harsh as they are in Australia.

    Under acknowledgement of the matter that we could see the Holocaust as a terrorist act, we can assert that:

    (1) Even in his mere function as an accountant, Oskar Groening was intentionally a member of the organization which was directly involved in the Holocaust (namely the Waffen SS) and
    (2) He knew that this organization was directly engaged in this terrorist act. According to his own words, he even saw the gas chambers himself.

    This shows that under Australian, German - and de facto under the jurisdiction of almost any criminal code of Western countries, Oscar Groening could be convicted indeed for being only an accountant of the Waffen SS, if the crime was committed, today.

    Nowadays, people are liable for imprisonment only by joining Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, despite the fact that, like the Waffen-SS, they are often highly hierarchical organizations. Only very few people are complaining about this generalization and/or collectivization of guilt - and even fewer try to put them into the sphere of absurdities, though those who worked for terrorist organizations might have not done any harm to anyone.

    As you can see, even with today's legislation, we - the whole Western hemisphere - are not "beyond all of this nonsense", but we apply the collectivization of our enemies even with much greater diligence than the persecution of those who were directly involved in Nazi war crimes.

    It may be, and it has been argued that the time of the Third Reich was a different time, that those who lived at that time had a different relationship to their deeds. I think, however, that the perception is valid which asserts that in the case of the Holocaust, the nature of the atrocity itself puts aside the moral relativism though which we usually look at historical events.

    If the way in which Germany treats people who were part of the Auschwitz machinery gets you angry, then how angry do you get knowing about the criminalization of thousands of members of terrorist organizations who have always been nothing but part of the machinery? Why not go ahead and demand an amnesty for repentant homecomers who were part of the Islamic State?
     
  22. MaxxMurxx

    MaxxMurxx New Member

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    1. Going from the picture, we're looking at Sylvia Scholz (not Schultz), who represented the famous holocaust revisionist Ernst Zuendl. Zuendl was facing charges related to "holocaust denial" in a (travesty of a) German criminal court. As a result of Stolz's defense strategy, for the attempt to prove in a German court the holocaust didn't happen as it is widely claimed, Stolz was subsequently tried disbarred and sent to prison. She was released a few years ago.
    http://abundanthope.net/pages/Polit...osecution-for-denying-Holocaust_printer.shtml

    2. Quote from the link I gave, page 17: The Framework Decision, like most hate speech statutes, does not allow truth to be a defense. If such a prosecution is a possibility, wouldn’t this end or at least chill such research and thereby undermine a primary justification for freedom of expression—the discovery of truth?

    3. Handbooks of mass atrocity forensics always quote the German Katyn investigation from 1943 as a milestone. From the concentration camp atrocities not one single similar investigation is available. Knowledge comes from survivor memories. In 1943 however the German army psychiatrist Walter Ritter von Baeyer wrote an article about horrific hallucinations in 100% of typhus patients 14 days after recovery. Those were stored in the memory of the "reality", not like dreams or hallucinations retrospectively recognized as such. 100% of concentration camp inmates suffered from typhus. How their memories have been influenced by those (typical) hallucinations has not even been considered one moment. it means in fact that those people are not liars. That however makes their memories not true.

    http://www.katyn-books.ru/archive/amtliches/amtliches_material.html

    Walter Ritter von Baeyer: Geistige Störungen bei Fleckfieber.
     
  23. parametheus

    parametheus Member

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    Sylvia Stolz was not only convicted for Holocaust denial. The story went as follows: For her 'defense' in court, she gave the judges a Hitler salute and told them that they deserve the death penalty for treason against the German people.

    Stolz was convicted for:
    - Insult (§ 185 StGB)
    - Defamation of the state and its symbols (§ 90a StGB)
    - Using threats or force to cause a person to do, suffer or omit an act (Nötigung, § 240 StGB)
    - Using symbols of unconstitutional organisations (§ 89 StGB)
    - Incitement to hatred (§ 130 StGB)

    § 130 StGB is also the paragraph under which we find the alleged "Holocaust denial ban".

    I mention this, because of two reasons.

    First of all, the so called "Holocaust denial ban" is, de jure, not a ban on the denial of the holocaust itself but protects a legal good. This legal good is not (as some people and even some lawyers believe) the 'truth' or the 'dignity of the victims' (as even implicitly suggested in BVerfGE 90, 241) but the 'public peace'. Holocaust denial itself is, in contrast to what the public debate on the issue suggests, not illegal in Germany. Illegal is the Holocaust denial which occurs "in a manner capable of disturbing the public peace" (§ 130 StGB, Section 3). There are several other laws in Germany, by the way, which protect public peace as a legal good and some of them are equally controveral. These are, for example:

    - Breach of the public peace by threatening to commit offences (§ 126 StGB)
    - Rewarding and approving of offences (§ 140 StGB)
    - Defamation of religions, religious and ideological associations (§ 166 StGB)

    Especially § 166 StGB is in very controversal discussion.

    The second reason why I mention this is that it has never occured to me that a person was convicted for holocaust denial in a case where holocaust denial was the main intent. In none of the cases I know, the holocaust denial was an isolated phenomenon of a person who was interested in history and wanted to do research on the holocaust. In every of the cases I know, that made the way to the court, the holocaust denial was deeply embedded in hate speech, anti-semitism and glorification of the Nazi Regime. The same it is in Sylvia Stolz's case.

    The holocaust is under constant investigation by historians, loads of books have been written and an almost uncoubtable number of publications on even the smallest aspects of the holocaust have been made.

    If it satisfies you in any way, write your own conclusive investigation report. The evidence is widely available. More evidence on the holocaust has been released after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990.

    The knowledge about the Holocaust is not limited to survivor memories.

    Among those who were working in Auschwitz, we have, for example, the witness records of Hans Wilhelm Münch, Helmut Bartsch, Friedrich Ontl, Karl Hölblinger, Henry Storch, Kurt Leischow, Hildegard Bischoff, Richard Böck, Herbert Günther Kramer. And those are just a few names, since their testimonies are easily available in electronic form. High-ranked Nazi-officials like Rudolf Höß and Adolf Eichmann who testified about the existence of the gas chambers on their own trials would be further examples. And then we have Oskar Groening, the guy who this very topic is about.

    Then we have thousands of documents regarding the Holocaust, from the resolutions of the Wannsee Conference up to the repeated orders of high performance furnances at J. A. Topf & Söhne, not even mentioning the NSDAP newspaper "Danziger Vorposten", which reported in May 1944 to a broad audience that five Million Jews were neutralized.

    As far as I can see from the article, von Beayer doesn't make that statement, but, in fact, describes different levels of severeness of which some can lead to coordination problems or hallucinations.

    Neither do I find reliable sources that 100% of the inmates in concentration camps suffered from typhus. In fact, a lot of inmates were even vaccinated against typhus.

    It is rather unlikely (to avoid using the word absurd) that thousands of Holocaust survivors have the same hallucinations about gas chambers in Auschwitz, and I see no reasonable ground for someone who doesn't believe in supernatural forces involved to even consider that possibility. Having reconstructed the witness reports with regard to their consistency towards each other and towards other historical records, we can easily distinguish between hitorical facts (e.g. the existence of gas chambers) and urban legends (such as the alleged industrial use of human corpses to produce soap).
     
  24. Anders Hoveland

    Anders Hoveland Banned

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    Sounds a lot like another case I read about that happened in America. A man was falsely accused of rape. The woman in question had made numerous rape allegations in the past against several different men, including against her own brother on one occasion, but under the State of Oregon's rape shield laws (whose intended purpose is to protect a woman's privacy in rape trials) the judge refused to allow evidence to be presented in front of the jury of the woman's past history of false rape accusations.

    Man falsely accused of rape
     
  25. MaxxMurxx

    MaxxMurxx New Member

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    The Wannsee Conference is a good example. The protocl says on page 3: the organisational leaderships of the final solution of the Jewish question lies centrally in the hands of the Reichsführer SS and Chief of German police (Chief of Security Police and SD). Unfortunately those are 2 different persons. chief of Security police and SD. Reinhard Heydrich, the alleged organizer of the conference, Reichsführer SS and Chief of German Police: Heinrich Himmler, Heydrich's chief. That would never have been kept in a protocol this way.
    2. in 1933 the Third Reich and the Zionist World Association signed the Haava'ra or "Transfer Agreement", allowing German Jews to emigrate to Paöestine taking with them all their property. The agreement never officially was abandonned, although it became more and more difficuklt to bypass the British sea blockade. Nevertheless Haavara led to 140 Million Reichsmark to be transferred to Jewish Palestine and invested there.
    All German competent authorities participating in the Haavara Agreement also were present in the alleged Wannsee Conference. During the time of the conference, the agreemnt was in full swing under the personal protection of Adolf Hitler against the German Foreign Office, fearing the founding of a Jewish State in Palestine. It is therfore highly likely, that any conference dealing with the future of thew Jews in Germany would contain at least one single word about Haavara. Not so the Wannsee Protocol. In addition, it says that "landing fees" of emigrants jad been collected by foreign Jewish organizations in a total of 9.500.000 US $, equivalent to 38 000 000 Reichsmark at the time given. Not ONE single word about the 140 000 000 which were already there from German assets. Sorry. I don't discuss the Holocaust. I will start the day the world is free of forgeries like the Wannsee Protocol. I have ten others but not the place and the time to explain them. Truth doesn't need such "enhancements".

    http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/Eng...many/World-War-2/Pages/Haavara-Agreement.aspx

    Everything about Haavara: http://transferagreement.com/
     

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