So what prison did he VOLUNTIERED to serve at?
He could go to fight Russians on eastern front instead as such voluntary units existed but it wasn't so cozy there.

A normal prison guard, you imply? Your lack of historic understanding is scaring. Have schools become this bad in our times?

KZs were not "prisons", but death factories, their purpose was not to imprison people but to annihilate them without traces or remains, sometimes making their remains available as a ressoruce for industrial production processes (body fats were tried as grease surrogates for machinery, hair was used like horse hair is used to tighten pipe threads, and skin was experimentally tried to be used for lamp screens); and the deputy guards recruited from the prisoners there were no guards like in a prison.

So-called "Hilfskräfte" in the KZs were no members of the military, nor the police like oyu imply (not that it matters, you can be member of a military and still become guilty by what you do in a KZ). They were prisoners who volunteered to guard and terrorise the other prisoners, carry out commands by the SS staff, they forced victims into the showers after a German senior had selected them, they carried out penalties, restrengthened the regulasr German camp guards and SS, and elped as deputies wherever needed, and as spies. Sometimes, civilians of conquered areas also volunteered to become as deputy guard, although they were no prisoners themselves. They were both hated and feared very much by the inmates, because they tended to be very brutal in order to win sympathy by their SS masters to protect their priviliges, and so they easily behaved even more brutal than the German guards themselves. The numerical relation between SS staff and such "Hilfskräfte" ranged from 1:5 to 1:8, which means, so a historian's agument, that without them the KZs in their known shape would have been unable to be operated with the given German guard numbers.

Demjanjuk, so is my understanding is not proven guilty of being Iwan the Terrible, a feared mass sdlaughterer in one of these camps. The Israelis released him because they had doubts he is. However, the German court, as I understand it, has not sentenced him for being Iwan the Terrible and being a mass murder, but for his general role as being a deputy guard. That is the reason why he was just given 5 years.

That's what I have understood from the news snippets I came about regarding this story.

Oh jesus ----ing christ. He just followed orders - I see that you are an adolescent and an American, not a real excuse, but if you grew up in Germany and actually talked with people who lived during the 3d Reich you would be sick of these "I only did my duty" excuses. And: It was not always an excuse, sometimes also the bitter truth - many shades of grey involved.
However, what MH already wrote: people had options. A man of honour would prefer to be in a penalty unit and die by a bullet at the Eastern Front over helping to exterminate civilians.
And if you would have read the article or this thread you would know that this whole ---- is not about a trial about direct murder but the very support to commit this extermination.

But I am not here to help you with your failed education, when you do not know the difference between a prison and an extermination camp (Vernichtungslager), your local library can be your friend.
A good start to read would be Eugen Kogan's "Der SS-Staat", which goes in english by the dumb title of: "The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them"

Slightly off-topic but where letters "KZ" come from? I assume it means concentration camp but that abbreviation is not familiar to me.

The term used during the 3rd Reich was KL - the abbreviation for Konzentrationslager. KZ was used later, afaik only because this sounds more sharp in German, so this is also political, to make the word sound more evil.
Personally, I use KL when I discuss with people who are historical interested.
Don't know when the use of KZ started, the literature after the war used KL - like Kogen's standard work that I recommended in my previous post, which is from 1947.

Wikipedia:Note that this meaning of the term does not have much in common with what the efficient German tyranny turned KZs into. In German, they are often referred to as "Todesfabriken" (death factories), meanming both that the prionsers worked and suffered themselves to death, and produced death, with the context of the gas chambers not needing further explanation, I think.

So the traditional meaning of the Anglosaxon term "concentration camp" is somewhat misleading as a dewscription for the German camps.

The German concentration camps were no concentrated prisons, they were nothing like any of the camps listed in that article. They were designed to kill in masses, not to keep people as prisoners.

Let's cut it short. KZs were the closest imitation of hell man has ever created. While wars and revolutions, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung killed in even bigger scores, I think nothing comes close to the qualitative perfidity and cynism of the Nazi death factories.

I would take what Sky has to say concerning this and run with it!

+ 1

Another important thing to point out is that being a "regular prison guard" or "military prison guard" is grossly inaccurate for camps which, even when not designed to exterminate, contained thousands upon thousands of civilians who did not commit any crimes nor participated in any combat. So even if deaths were not a factor, I would consider being accessory to their imprisonment to be a very severe crime indeed.

And when I brought up the "8 years in Israel", I didn't really mean anything. Just stating an additional qualifier to your 'he's been in prison already'.

For myself, I think that as long as an opportunity exists to find any perpetrators, regardless of their age or the danger they present to society, it's worthwhile. Better they be held to responsibility directly than having people who weren't alive at the time debate which country is more guilty....

guys, im not saying the SS was good at all. Im just more in favor of holding the officers and administrators guilty instead of the people carrying out orders.

Ive also heard that this person was originally captured by the Germans and he is in fact Ukrainian. and then became a part of the prison system. Not saying what the man did is right.. but looking at thigns from more than one point of view can be helpfull ya kno?

Bloody hell:doh:
Then again Seth, you did just say without realising it that you supported the conviction which you were trying to condemn

Not sure it applies to WW2 standards.
Certainly there is a law of illegal orders which is based partly on principles and partly on common sense.

The best arguement would be that due to the nature of the crimes the declarations in 1915 would come in even without the war crimes rules of the British tribunal.

I don't doubt that circumstances may well have weighed heavily on Demjanjuk's choice to enlist rather than share the fate of millions of Soviet POWs executed in the very camps. However no matter how hard, it was still a choice, and one doesn't simply end up in that very specific type of SS unit by circumstances alone. So the fact is, there are repercussions to any choice one consciously makes. And he has to face up to them just like everyone else. A mild prison sentence handed to you at the end of your life is a far cry from what he might've faced if he actually was caught on the spot, and would've still deserved.

Complaints about the supposed inhumanity of the sentence from his family here ring about as empty as Bin Laden's sons' complaints about supposed "disrespect" caused to their family by the treatment of his body.

That sums it up:salute:

He who orders murder is as guilty as the one carrying out the murder. It's even in modern criminal law codes like thjis. Surely in Germany, and I guess it is not different in the US.

That you are given an order to commit injustice or even barbaric acts, is no excuse at all. War tribunals also repeatedly said that and sentenced people on basis of this.

Means what? In what regard is that precious different perspective relativising his guilt?

I think in this case its just an empty phrase, this different perspective thing. Mass murder remains to be mass murder, no matter how you turn it. Torture and sadism remain to be torture and sadism, no matter how you turn it.

P.S. I told this story before, and I tell it again here. Early in the war, the brother of my mum'S father waqs in the army, like her father himself was, too. My grandpa spoke of this only once, and indicated, that his brother - both were servinbf in the Wehrmacht - was approached by the SS for one of those special service jobs the SS did behind the front once a territory was conquered. The SS was picky about personnel for these dirty jobs, they did not want the news to become known to the poublic. Catching Jews, and all that. My grandfather indicated that his brother refused to follow that order or request or approach or whatever it was, and that for that he got shot.

Cowards and courageous guys alike: we always have a choice, even when being confronted with the choice between death and evil only.

A simple but demanding motto from maybe my most favourite book series of my teen years, by Nikolay von Michalewski, in those books the hero of the stories got told by his wife:

Woran Du glaubst, dafür sollst du leben und sterben.

Very good points. I was kind of wishy washy on my feelings on this when I first heard about this event. You've convinced me.

"What do you think, but you shall live and die."

I hope my translation is up to par :-?

I really have nothing to add that hasn't already been, said, disproved, reproved, or otherwise.

Sorry, no, way off target. :haha:

For what you believe in, for that you shall live, and die.

"For that which you believe in, you must be prepared to live or die"

Is that more close? :03:
Oh I just see you already put a translation there. Well I got close.