Ex-Nazi bookeeper charged [Update: Convicted and sentenced]

[Simon_Jester]

To me, he will always be Stas Bush. Can't help it. I'm stubborn.

To me the main issue is that the state had plenty of opportunities to try him for many decades. While there is no statute of limitations for war crimes, it is reasonable to expect that the state will carry out war crimes prosecutions in a timely manner.

At this point, as far as I can tell, the only reason to single out Gröning is that all the Nazis senior to him or who were more directly responsible for the genocidal killings are dead. In which case... honestly, that's not a good reason to select him. If people who presumably were in possession of all the same facts about Auschwitz ten or twenty years ago decided not to try him, why would we reverse that decision now?

Even Nazis deserve justice, and one of the core principles of justice is that the decision whether to press charges should not be capricious.

[Terralthra]

My understanding is that the reason they're charging him now is that German law was changed recently to allow such prosecution.

[Borgholio]

My understanding is that the reason they're charging him now is that German law was changed recently to allow such prosecution.

That...sounds highly suspect to me. I can't imagine the chaos that would occur if people who did something perfectly legal can retroactively be charged with a crime decades later when the law changes.

[Terralthra]

My understanding is that the reason they're charging him now is that German law was changed recently to allow such prosecution.

That...sounds highly suspect to me. I can't imagine the chaos that would occur if people who did something perfectly legal can retroactively be charged with a crime decades later when the law changes.

I'm pretty sure the logic is that if you were working at Auschwitz, you were breaking moral law, even if the German laws at the time didn't think so.

The relevant is a ruling, not a change in law, so my memory is not entirely accurate:

The Gröning prosecution was set in motion following the conviction of the Ukrainian-born death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2012 who the judge ruled had been an accessory to murder simply by working at the camp. With a new zeal and based on evidence gathered by the Central Office for National Socialist Crime in Ludwigsburg, prosecutors last year launched a nationwide hunt for remaining camp guards, including cases opened and closed several times over the years due to a lack of political will.

They identified 30 former SS members. Deaths and ill health have prevented the prosecution of most of them, but three of them, including Gröning, are now being brought to justice.

[Simon_Jester]

It really does rub me the wrong way to have the same man's case opened and closed repeatedly because of politics.

Granted that honestly, any Auschwitz guard deserves much worse than just having to spend their whole life wondering if their country is finally going to muster the will to convict them of atrocities this time. Still, justice is not supposed to work that way.

[K. A. Pital]

Sometimes justice comes late. Reopening cases happened before.

Many cases that should have been opened, against major Nazis and Japanese criminals from unit 731, were dropped by the United States. Does this generous pardoning of hideous humans mean no one should seek to reopen the case? I think not.

[Xisiqomelir]

Roll out the AA guns. Tragedy that more of these scumbags were not hauled up before court. You could probably fill a small Weiler with escapees in Brazil.

[Simon_Jester]

An outright fugitive being punished is one thing. Having the same case be repeatedly re-evaluated time and time again by a government that has total ability to decide whether to prosecute, and does in fact prosecute others, at some point becomes an unjust act. At some point the government's decision that "you are innocent" or "you are not worth prosecuting" should become binding, especially in a case like this where we almost certainly knew exactly as much about the nature of the crime in 1995 as we do now.

There really ought to be some concept of 'double jeopardy' or something of that sort in the law.

[Thanas]

He has been sentenced to four years, which is quite harsh but most likely he will never face a single day in prison due to his age and health.

Still a very harsh judgement IMO.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/j ... ass-murder

A 94-year-old German who worked as a bookkeeper at the Auschwitz death camp has been convicted of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people and sentenced to four years in prison, in what could be one of the last big Holocaust trials.

Oskar Groening did not kill anyone himself while working at the camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the second world war, but prosecutors argued that by sorting the bank notes taken from the trainloads of arriving Jews he helped support a regime responsible for mass murder.

White-haired Groening, who has been on trial since April, has admitted moral guilt but said it was up to the court to decide whether he was legally guilty.

He said this month he could only ask God to forgive him as he was not entitled to ask this of victims of the Holocaust.

The trial went to the heart of the question of whether people who were small cogs in the Nazi machinery, but did not actively participate in the killing of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, were guilty of crimes. Until recently, the answer from the German justice system was no.

During his time at Auschwitz, Groening’s job was to collect the belongings of the deportees after they arrived at the camp by train and had been put through a selection process that resulted in many being sent directly to the gas chambers.

Groening, who was 21 and by his own admission an enthusiastic Nazi when he was sent to work at the camp in 1942, inspected people’s luggage, removing and counting any bank notes that were inside and sending them on to SS offices in Berlin, where they helped to fund the Nazi war effort.

The charges against him related to the period between May and July 1944 when 137 trains carrying roughly 425,000 Jews from Hungary arrived in Auschwitz. At least 300,000 of them were sent straight to the gas chambers, the indictment said.

Many Germans are keen to draw a line under the Holocaust and seal the postwar democratic identity of their nation. Some find distasteful the pursuit of old men, often in poor health, for crimes committed nearly 70 years ago.

Groening, who uses a walking frame, is frail and in May the court decided to limit the time he spent in the courtroom to three hours a day in view of his health problems, which had led to delays.

In past years, prosecutors in Frankfurt decided not to pursue the case against Groening and other concentration camp workers, saying there was no causal link between their actions and the killings that occurred around them.

Prosecutors in Hanover disagreed, emboldened by the case of Ivan Demjanjuk, who in 2011 was convicted of being an accessory to mass murder despite no evidence that he had committed a specific crime while a guard at the Sobibór death camp, also in Poland. Demjanjuk died in a German care home in 2012.

[K. A. Pital]

Nothing harsh for someone who took part in the biggest racial massacre of modern days IMHO. If the Allies were really, say, giving the Germans their own medicine, they should have put on trial pretty much everyone who voluntarily joined the SS, plain and simple. It is only by the gratitude of the winning powers and their reluctance to go after every single Nazi that people like him escaped trial at an earlier stage.

My personal opinion on the Nazis, especially SS volunteers, remains unchanged. Good Nazi dead Nazi.

[Thanas]

Yours is certainly a legitimate opinion, but I would have preferred to see mercy here considering his past actions and that unlike many other Nazis, who got off scot-free or are even venerated today, he did not hide his past misdeeds but faced them.

[Alyrium Denryle]

He has been sentenced to four years, which is quite harsh but most likely he will never face a single day in prison due to his age and health.

Still a very harsh judgement IMO.

Seems pretty even-handed to me, but I am accustomed to US prison sentences, where a 90 year old man would end up in an actual prison for the length of his (very short) life. As pointless as that may be.

I get it as a matter of public display, closure for holocaust survivors, and procedural justice, but it seems functionally pointless to me.

The retributive aims of justice wont be served because he is just too damned old to actually punish him humanely, and the rehabilitative aims are pointless because he did that himself decades ago. Public protection? At this point he is a kind-hearted old man who isn't a threat to a field mouse.

[Flagg]

Wonder how many 90 year old men his comrades sent right to the "showers" assuming they survived the cattle car. 4 years might as well be pissing on their graves.

That said, with some months to think on it off and on, had I been the judge I'd have given him a suspended life sentence. You get the mercy for this one man, yet the no nonsense harsh sentence that says what he did was that severe.

[Flagg]

He has been sentenced to four years, which is quite harsh but most likely he will never face a single day in prison due to his age and health.

Still a very harsh judgement IMO.

Seems pretty even-handed to me, but I am accustomed to US prison sentences, where a 90 year old man would end up in an actual prison for the length of his (very short) life. As pointless as that may be.

I get it as a matter of public display, closure for holocaust survivors, and procedural justice, but it seems functionally pointless to me.

The retributive aims of justice wont be served because he is just too damned old to actually punish him humanely, and the rehabilitative aims are pointless because he did that himself decades ago. Public protection? At this point he is a kind-hearted old man who isn't a threat to a field mouse.

Fixed

Sorry, he may be old and unable to hurt field mice (without poison), but personally, and I respect your right to feel differently, no one who helped send people to the ovens can ever be described as "kind-hearted" to me afterwards.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Fixed

Sorry, he may be old and unable to hurt field mice (without poison), but personally, and I respect your right to feel differently, no one who helped send people to the ovens can ever be described as "kind-hearted" to me afterwards.

You came into this thread with a lot of preconceptions about this person that, from the start, have not been based on reality. This was a guy who was propagandized from a young age and was an enthusiastic nazi during the early war (he was not by the end of it). All that is true. But a situation like that is not dissimilar from being in a cult. The behavior one displays while in the cult often dont bear much resemblance to one's actual personality, and literally everyone is psychologically vulnerable to the techniques the Nazis used to raise a generation of jack-booted fascists. No one is immune. Not me. Not you. Not Thanas. No One. Had you been a 12 year old Austrian during the Anschluss, you very likely would have been a Nazi. I would have been sent to a death camp.

After the war, he spent decades fighting holocaust denial and neo-nazi scum. These are not Albert Speer crocodile tears. He has repented as much as it is possible to repent from that shit. Nothing will expunge the moral guilt for what he did. That does not mean we have to commit the fundamental attribution error by assuming he is indelibly evil, and toss aside the notion that a person can be rehabilitated into a better person. Even if they were SS.

If you want to argue that he still deserves to die or be in prison for life, fine. But dont justify that by pretending he is some sort of monster in his present state.

[K. A. Pital]

Is it really a good idea to imply members of a genocidal cult are just victims? The line between victim and perpetrator in case of the Third Reich and more narrowly the SS was very clear. And saying this guy was in a victim position is not fair to the real victims: those that could withstand the Nazi ideology, repulse it and suffer for it. The German resistance was probably the tiniest: a few defectors, very few lone rebels who risked their lives fighting against the Nazis. And yet these people existed - they were the real victims, who could really be counted as such with the other races that the Nazis simply killed.

I find it hard to think even of the passive-supportive population as of victims, but it is outright impossible for me to imagine any pre-draft SS-man who is in even the tiniest bit absolved from responsibility just because cult techniques were used on him.

Saying no one is immune is unfair to the few people who actually were.

[Channel72]

This whole thing comes down to the philosophy and ethics of forgiveness, which is basically a subjective notion. Functionally speaking, sending this guy to prison is utterly pointless - he doesn't need to be rehabilitated and he isn't a threat to anyone. So it really comes down to an individual judgment call based on whether you find the mitigating circumstances in this man's life to qualify him for moral (and/or legal) forgiveness. Personally, I think he should be forgiven, even though I'm well aware he would have likely happily tallied my personal belongings after his colleagues sent me off to die.

I agree with Alyrium though - it's really silly to imagine that the average human/young adult would be somehow immune to decades of Nazi propaganda. The alternative is to suppose that all Germans in the 1930s/40s were somehow genetically inclined to be violent sociopaths or murderous racists - which is really unlikely.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Is it really a good idea to imply members of a genocidal cult are just victims? The line between victim and perpetrator in case of the Third Reich and more narrowly the SS was very clear.

It is entirely possible to be both a perpetrator and a victim. I would certainly agree that there are differences in the magnitude (for lack of a better term) and type of victimhood.

And saying this guy was in a victim position is not fair to the real victims: those that could withstand the Nazi ideology, repulse it and suffer for it. The German resistance was probably the tiniest: a few defectors, very few lone rebels who risked their lives fighting against the Nazis. And yet these people existed - they were the real victims, who could really be counted as such with the other races that the Nazis simply killed.

I have zero sympathy for someone who accepted Nazism as an adult. Founding members of the SS etc. But people who were kids in the mid 1930s, who were educated in Nazi schools, with mandatory membership in the Hitlerjugend? What realistic chance does someone like that have to resist Nazi ideology, if it is all they ever know? When the Conspiracy of World Jewry is taught to them as fact in their history class, and racialist/eugenicist madness is taught to them in biology as fact, with no to very-limited exposure to counter-argumentation of any kind. Someone who can resist indoctrination like that from childhood is going to be an outlier.

What they did to others does not invalidate what was done to them. Nor do I find that acknowledging this reduces in any way their moral culpability, or for that matter reduces in any way the legitimacy of the victims of Nazi crimes. It simply is.

What it does do is give me the information I need to calibrate my Clemency director. It analogous to a homicide case in every day life. There are mitigating (and aggravating) factors that affect sentencing and the prospect for rehabilitation that have no bearing on the question of guilt, or the charge levied.

Saying no one is immune is unfair to the few people who actually were.

Every study ever done has indicated that no one is immune to indoctrination/brainwashing tactics. Or at least, there are no factors that are relevant to moral praise and blameworthiness that make someone immune. Certain personality traits and outside factors can make someone resistant. Training in adulthood can make someone resistant. The vast majority of 12 year olds dont possess them. Those who do are not morally better than those who dont. They just possess personality traits that make them harder to brainwash, no matter how the brainwashing is directed.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Ghetto Edit

Every study ever done has indicated that no one is immune to indoctrination/brainwashing tactics. Or at least, there are no factors that are relevant to moral praise and blameworthiness that make someone immune. Certain personality traits and outside factors can make someone resistant. Training in adulthood can make someone resistant. The vast majority of 12 year olds dont possess them. Those who do are not morally better than those who dont. They just possess personality traits that make them harder to brainwash, no matter how the brainwashing is directed.

Every study ever done has indicated that no one is immune to indoctrination/brainwashing tactics. Or at least, there are no factors that are relevant to moral praise and blameworthiness that make someone immune. Certain personality traits and outside factors (like home life stability and the availability of counteracting social influences) can make someone resistant (but not immune). Training or experience in adulthood can make someone resistant. The vast majority of 12 year olds dont possess the relevant factors. Those who do are not morally better than those who dont. They just possess personality traits that make them harder to brainwash, no matter how the brainwashing is directed.

[Flagg]

Fixed

Sorry, he may be old and unable to hurt field mice (without poison), but personally, and I respect your right to feel differently, no one who helped send people to the ovens can ever be described as "kind-hearted" to me afterwards.

You came into this thread with a lot of preconceptions about this person that, from the start, have not been based on reality. This was a guy who was propagandized from a young age and was an enthusiastic nazi during the early war (he was not by the end of it). All that is true. But a situation like that is not dissimilar from being in a cult. The behavior one displays while in the cult often dont bear much resemblance to one's actual personality, and literally everyone is psychologically vulnerable to the techniques the Nazis used to raise a generation of jack-booted fascists. No one is immune. Not me. Not you. Not Thanas. No One. Had you been a 12 year old Austrian during the Anschluss, you very likely would have been a Nazi. I would have been sent to a death camp.

After the war, he spent decades fighting holocaust denial and neo-nazi scum. These are not Albert Speer crocodile tears. He has repented as much as it is possible to repent from that shit. Nothing will expunge the moral guilt for what he did. That does not mean we have to commit the fundamental attribution error by assuming he is indelibly evil, and toss aside the notion that a person can be rehabilitated into a better person. Even if they were SS.

If you want to argue that he still deserves to die or be in prison for life, fine. But dont justify that by pretending he is some sort of monster in his present state.

I'm sorry if I don't buy into your delusions, but the highest status this person can attain as far as I'm concerned is "Reformed Nazi SS Auschwitz Bookeeper", not "kind hearted old man". He chose to join the SS which wasn't easy to do. He worked at a fucking death camp knowing full well what was going on. Kind hearted people don't take part in genocide and keep a kind heart unless they blow their brains out when they realize what they've taken part in.

But that's not to say that I don't applaud him for taking responsibility for his actions and for his work fighting neo-nazism. But it changes nothing that he did. There are people who have been executed for less than what he did. Should he be in prison? Yes, but he should have been put there right after the war, I agree at this point it's senseless which is why I changed my mind about throwing him in a cell.

But frankly, I find your minimizing and excuse making disgusting. And I'd have been "euthanized" for mental illness if we're going to get into a "what the Nazis would've done to me" pissing match.

[Flagg]

This whole thing comes down to the philosophy and ethics of forgiveness, which is basically a subjective notion. Functionally speaking, sending this guy to prison is utterly pointless - he doesn't need to be rehabilitated and he isn't a threat to anyone. So it really comes down to an individual judgment call based on whether you find the mitigating circumstances in this man's life to qualify him for moral (and/or legal) forgiveness. Personally, I think he should be forgiven, even though I'm well aware he would have likely happily tallied my personal belongings after his colleagues sent me off to die.

I agree with Alyrium though - it's really silly to imagine that the average human/young adult would be somehow immune to decades of Nazi propaganda. The alternative is to suppose that all Germans in the 1930s/40s were somehow genetically inclined to be violent sociopaths or murderous racists - which is really unlikely.

Decades of Nazi propaganda? They were in power for 12 years and were losing popularity when Hitler came to power legally without anyone actually voting for him. Were there decades of Nazi propaganda? Yes, just like any other political party, but it wasn't all pervasive until Hitler took complete power. At that time I think only 1/3 of Germans were Nazi's. And then once Germany was a one party state, everyone was a Nazi that could be if they knew what was good for them.

But the SS? You had to be a true believer. You had to get family records proving your status as as pure an Aryan as an Aryan could be. And it was voluntary. So minimizing the guilt of this man to me is not just disgusting, it's hilariously ill conceived.

I mean I get it, he's admitted he was wrong and did evil things and has fought against Nazism since and done other good things to try to salvage his worthless life and wash the infinite buckets of blood off of his hands. I also know that when some people see a frail 90 year old man any animosity they may hold towards him evaporates. But like I asked, how many little old men did he see get off a train car packed in with as many other people as possible and get sent directly to the "showers" along with the other elderly men, women, and the small children that the camp guards deemed too weak for slave labor?

[K. A. Pital]

In the case of this guy his family failed him, as they were pretty much fascists even before Hitler came to power and Germany became a totally Nazi state. But there were other young men in history who will be remembered differently, and who chose a different path. Anteo Zamboni, for example.

[Thanas]

Decades of Nazi propaganda? They were in power for 12 years and were losing popularity when Hitler came to power legally without anyone actually voting for him. Were there decades of Nazi propaganda? Yes, just like any other political party, but it wasn't all pervasive until Hitler took complete power. At that time I think only 1/3 of Germans were Nazi's. And then once Germany was a one party state, everyone was a Nazi that could be if they knew what was good for them.

Nevertheless, ever since 1933 the Nazi propaganda was very pervasive, especially in the formative children years.

But the SS? You had to be a true believer. You had to get family records proving your status as as pure an Aryan as an Aryan could be.

Everybody had to get these.

But like I asked, how many little old men did he see get off a train car packed in with as many other people as possible and get sent directly to the "showers" along with the other elderly men, women, and the small children that the camp guards deemed too weak for slave labor?

To his credit, he tried to get out of there ASAP.

[Flagg]

Decades of Nazi propaganda? They were in power for 12 years and were losing popularity when Hitler came to power legally without anyone actually voting for him. Were there decades of Nazi propaganda? Yes, just like any other political party, but it wasn't all pervasive until Hitler took complete power. At that time I think only 1/3 of Germans were Nazi's. And then once Germany was a one party state, everyone was a Nazi that could be if they knew what was good for them.

Nevertheless, ever since 1933 the Nazi propaganda was very pervasive, especially in the formative children years.

But the SS? You had to be a true believer. You had to get family records proving your status as as pure an Aryan as an Aryan could be.

Everybody had to get these.

But like I asked, how many little old men did he see get off a train car packed in with as many other people as possible and get sent directly to the "showers" along with the other elderly men, women, and the small children that the camp guards deemed too weak for slave labor?

To his credit, he tried to get out of there ASAP.

We're just going around in circles on the facts when we all essentially agree with the end result. I think we're all in agreement that this guy is no Josef Mengele and are just in a circlejerk over his degree of moral responsibility which is too subjective for an agreement. So he's been sentenced, case closed.

[Alyrium Denryle]

We're just going around in circles on the facts when we all essentially agree with the end result. I think we're all in agreement that this guy is no Josef Mengele and are just in a circlejerk over his degree of moral responsibility which is too subjective for an agreement. So he's been sentenced, case closed.

Maybe you should lead with that, rather than call someone delusional?

But the SS? You had to be a true believer. You had to get family records proving your status as as pure an Aryan as an Aryan could be.

1) It is not hard to be a true believer when you are groomed to be one since childhood
2) Everyone had to have those records.

And it was voluntary.

Nitpick: Until the late war.

So minimizing the guilt of this man to me is not just disgusting, it's hilariously ill conceived.

Where have I minimized his guilt? I am a philosophical naturalist, and a consistent one. There is no un-caused behavior, and outside sociopathy and certain other genetic conditions (which this guy does not have) no one is intrinsically evil. They are made evil, by a collection of (potentially lifelong) circumstance and/or external influence/ agency. For every evil act someone might commit, and for every evil motivation one might have.

Recognizing and admitting the logical and ethical consequences of that is not minimization. Just as someone can be made evil, they can be made non-evil. If that is not the case, you might as well take people back behind the chemical shed and shoot them, and give up on rehabilitation programs in prisons.

Was Oskar Groening evil in 1941? Yes. Absolutely. Was he as evil in 1945? All signs point to no (but he was still probably somewhat evil). Was he evil in 2001? No. Does any of that change what he is guilty of doing? No. On the opposite token, can someone go from stone-cold evil bastard to a decent human being? Yes. Does that change what they are guilty of doing while a stone cold evil bastard? No.

Unless you believe Evil is a metaphysical category from which there is no escape. If you do there is no point in talking to you. If you dont, and still hold the position you do, you have an inconsistency in your thinking you need to address.