Accused Nazi released from deportation
 

This is just wrong!!! This guy spent time in Israelie prisons where they figured out he wasn't this terrible Nazi guy, yet Germany still wants this done to this old man who is innocent? This is Governmental abuse! Both by the US, AND by Germany! Shame on Germany and the US!

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Co...med-12p.h2.jpg

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30210535/

-S

I don't know where your sympathies for a Concentration Camp watchman come from, but you can wipe the foam off your mouth: His deportation was stopped by a court of appeal it seems.

This is already much more than the people he guarded received ...

It seems to be be best to let people decide over all this who have full access to all documents.

Lurchi, I take it you are not aware of that fact that he was held in a camp, not posted as a guard there.
I dont agree with SUBMAN1 too often, and am not terribly fond of him, but this time I am in complete agreement, this is a travesty.

IIRC there has been some new evidence come to light which indicates he was indeed a camp guard, though not the one the Israelis thought he was.

You have proof of that? I think you are wrong.

-S

Maybe so. I read about it a few weeks ago and it didn't rate all that high on my "give a hoot" meter at the time.

On the other hand can you supply a valid reason why the German government might suddenly declare war on an old man?

I am aware that he was most likely a Kapo who was cooperating with the guards to fight for his own survival. Sadly those guys where often the most brutal to prove their "usefulness" to the SS. I am not in a moral position to judge about this.

As August said the israeli court couldn't prove that he was the one that was known as "Ivan the terrible" although it was clear that he served as guard (or Kapo) in a concentration camp.

I don't know about the judiciary system in the U.S. but here it is not about "the government" declaring "war" on someone but about an independent court which seemingly has enough evidence for a trial. And some U.S. authorities seem to be of the same opinion ...

From what i have seen on the news this morning Demjanjuk is accused of supporting murder in 29.000 cases.

Jup, proof for that independence should be the arrest warrants for 11 CIA agents who were playing a role in the kidnapping of german nationals in their fight against terrorism. The government tried to play that down and hinder the courts in doing so as much as they could. Luckily, for justice sake, they did not get their will.

Didn't the US court find that he was completely unable to account for his time during WWII ? If he was a prisoner in a nazi camp then surely he should be able to account for those years .

Not necessarily, the Nazis towards the end of the war tried to erase as much evidence of the "final solution" as they possibly could. Prisoners were often just numbers at best in the records.

As such its difficult to prove who you were or where you were during that period of time. Even the traditions of tattooing prisoners (and SS men) is not fool proof. Most prisoners (particularly those chosen to die on arrival) were never tattooed with a number, and many survivors had those numbers removed as soon as they could. An SS blood type tattoo also proves nothing beyond you having been a member of the SS, and the SS had many branches, several which had little if anything to do with genocide or other atrocities.

One thing that always concerns me about Nazi war criminal trials, is that they often turn into witch hunts/burnings, where it is near impossible for the person to get a fair trial as most presume the person guilty until proven innocent. Most of the Neuremburg and other trials at the end of the war for example were little more then a farce with a shaky legal basis that was primarily intended to dish out vengeance rather then justice.

This is not to say that I don't believe that the Nazi's did some unbelievably horrific things, or that the Holocaust did not happen. I have in fact done an extensive amount of personal research on the Holocaust, and am quite convinced that it did happen (and roughly in the range of the estimated numbers), particularly after some of the more recent archeological evaluations of some of the death camps (defiantly not pleasant reading material).

Sorry, I was remembering wrong. My mistake.

Personally, i doubt that he was doing much more than following orders, and therefore i believe that he should be innocent, because he didn't have much of a choice. I highly doubt that towards the end of Hitlers Germany it was in your best interest to disobey orders, no matter how grotesque they may or may not be.
IF you were stationed as a prison guard what would you have done? do you think you would deserve to have your father country's goverment hunting you down, in a despicable attempt to improve its image by distancing itself from the nazi's?

Any ways it was 60 somthing years ago..