Global Nazi investigations rise for a second year

[Gerald]

The number of ongoing investigations into Nazi war criminals increased last year, says a report by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC).From April 2009 to March 2010 there were 852 investigations being conducted worldwide, compared with 706 during the same period in 2008/09.The SWC also awarded Germany an A-grade for its efforts to prosecute ex-Nazis.

This is the first time its top grade has been given to any country other than the United States.The period 2009/10 is the second consecutive year that the number of investigations into suspected Nazis has risen - there were 608 in 2007/08.According to Efraim Zuroff, head of the SWC's Jerusalem branch which investigates suspected WWII Nazi criminals, two cases were under investigation in Britain during 2009-10, but Scotland Yard has not yet confirmed this.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12170461


Note: 13 January 2011 Last updated at 06:04 GMT

[Freiwillige]

There comes a time when one has to say alright enough. That time is now.

Pretty soon they will be prosecuting members of the Hitler youth cause that's all that will be left!

[Gerald]

They'll probably want to hunt down Hitler youth if they work enough for it, which some already do today..

[Feuer Frei!]

Most of these so-called people are in their 70's and 80's, if not older.
Old age and/or ill health will and has in the past slowed down if not cancelled out a trial all together.
On the one hand i absolutely believe in accountability for your actions, and ie these people should be held accountable for their involvement in these crimes against humanity.
HOWEVER, IF and i stress if these people actually end up being sentenced by the ruling courts, what then?
Jail? I am under the belief that jail is a institution that has one purpose in mind.
And that is rehabilitation!
It is generally considered that when sentencing a person to jail, that rehabilitation is first and foremost in the minds of the 'punishers'. Or is it?
So, sentencing a 80 year old to jail time, correct me if i'm wrong but, isn't that a little too late? For rehabilitation?
So, you investigate and investigate, and then finally there is a simple biological solution: they die.

Here is the report card in it's entirety, with the relevant scores and what they mean:

Category A: Highly Successful Investigation and Prosecution Program
Those countries, which have adopted a proactive stance on the issue, have taken all reasonable measures to identify the potential suspected Nazi war criminals in the country in order to maximize investigation and prosecution and have achieved notable results during the period under review.

Category B: Ongoing Investigation and Prosecution Program Which Has Achieved Practical Success
Those countries which have taken the necessary measures to enable the proper investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals and have registered at least one conviction and/or filed one indictment during the period under review.

Category C: Minimal Success That Could Have Been Greater, Additional Steps Urgently Required
Those countries which have failed to obtain any convictions or indictments during the period under review but have either advanced ongoing cases currently in litigation or have opened new investigations, which have serious potential for prosecution.

Category D: Insufficient and/or Unsuccessful Efforts
Those countries which have ostensibly made at least a minimal effort to investigate Nazi war criminals but which failed to achieve any practical results during the period under review. In many cases these countries have stopped or reduced their efforts to deal with this issue long before they could have and could achieve important results if they were to change their policy.

Category E: No known suspects
Those countries in which there are no known suspects and no practical steps have been taken to uncover new cases.
Category F-1: Failure in principle
Those countries which refuse in principle to investigate, let alone prosecute, suspected Nazi war criminals because of legal (statute of limitation) or ideological restrictions.

Category F-2: Failure in practice
Those countries in which there are no legal obstacles to the investigation and prosecution of suspected Nazi war criminals, but whose efforts (or lack thereof) have resulted in complete failure during the period under review, primarily due to the absence of political will to proceed and/or a lack of the requisite resources and/or expertise.

Category X: Failure to submit pertinent data
Those countries which did not respond to the questionnaire, but clearly did not take any action whatsoever to investigate suspected Nazi war criminals during the period under review.
---------------------------------

A: Germany, United States

B:, Serbia

C: Italy*, Poland*

D: Austria, Croatia*, Denmark, Great Britain, Netherlands

E: Argentina, Finland, Greece, Latvia*, Slovenia

F-1: Norway, Sweden, Syria

F-2: Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine

X: Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, France, Luxemburg, New Zealand, Paraguay, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Uruguay

* tentative grade pending receipt of official statistics

[Gerald]

Originally Posted by Feuer Frei!

Most of these so-called people are in their 70's and 80's, if not older.
Old age and/or ill health will and has in the past slowed down if not cancelled out a trial all together.
On the one hand i absolutely believe in accountability for your actions, and ie these people should be held accountable for their involvement in these crimes against humanity.
HOWEVER, IF and i stress if these people actually end up being sentenced by the ruling courts, what then?
Jail? I am under the belief that jail is a institution that has one purpose in mind.
And that is rehabilitation!
It is generally considered that when sentencing a person to jail, that rehabilitation is first and foremost in the minds of the 'punishers'. Or is it?
So, sentencing a 80 year old to jail time, correct me if i'm wrong but, isn't that a little too late? For rehabilitation?
So, you investigate and investigate, and then finally there is a simple biological solution: they die.

Here is the report card in it's entirety, with the relevant scores and what they mean:

Category A: Highly Successful Investigation and Prosecution Program
Those countries, which have adopted a proactive stance on the issue, have taken all reasonable measures to identify the potential suspected Nazi war criminals in the country in order to maximize investigation and prosecution and have achieved notable results during the period under review.

Category B: Ongoing Investigation and Prosecution Program Which Has Achieved Practical Success
Those countries which have taken the necessary measures to enable the proper investigation and prosecution of Nazi war criminals and have registered at least one conviction and/or filed one indictment during the period under review.

Category C: Minimal Success That Could Have Been Greater, Additional Steps Urgently Required
Those countries which have failed to obtain any convictions or indictments during the period under review but have either advanced ongoing cases currently in litigation or have opened new investigations, which have serious potential for prosecution.

Category D: Insufficient and/or Unsuccessful Efforts
Those countries which have ostensibly made at least a minimal effort to investigate Nazi war criminals but which failed to achieve any practical results during the period under review. In many cases these countries have stopped or reduced their efforts to deal with this issue long before they could have and could achieve important results if they were to change their policy.

Category E: No known suspects
Those countries in which there are no known suspects and no practical steps have been taken to uncover new cases.
Category F-1: Failure in principle
Those countries which refuse in principle to investigate, let alone prosecute, suspected Nazi war criminals because of legal (statute of limitation) or ideological restrictions.

Category F-2: Failure in practice
Those countries in which there are no legal obstacles to the investigation and prosecution of suspected Nazi war criminals, but whose efforts (or lack thereof) have resulted in complete failure during the period under review, primarily due to the absence of political will to proceed and/or a lack of the requisite resources and/or expertise.

Category X: Failure to submit pertinent data
Those countries which did not respond to the questionnaire, but clearly did not take any action whatsoever to investigate suspected Nazi war criminals during the period under review.
---------------------------------

A: Germany, United States

B:, Serbia

C: Italy*, Poland*

D: Austria, Croatia*, Denmark, Great Britain, Netherlands

E: Argentina, Finland, Greece, Latvia*, Slovenia

F-1: Norway, Sweden, Syria

F-2: Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine

X: Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, France, Luxemburg, New Zealand, Paraguay, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Uruguay

* tentative grade pending receipt of official statistics

This content from this above list, where do you take the information source?. When the list contains some refractions in certain countries relative to the topic..

[Feuer Frei!]

Originally Posted by Vendor

This content from this above list, where do you take the information source?. When the list contains some refractions in certain countries relative to the topic..

Source is from the horse's mouth, so to speak:

http://www.wiesenthal.com/site/apps/...41&printmode=1

[Gerald]

No one unfamiliar site, but thanks for the up link

[Penguin]

The argument that the prosecuted persons are old now is void in my opinion. Their victims never had the chance to reach an old age.

Better late justice than never, this is btw one of the reasons that in german law murder never becomes time-barred (word?). For example the former Stasi-chief Erich Mielke got prosecuted in 1993 for the killing of two policemen in 1931.

There comes a time when one has to say alright enough. That time is now.

Is there a statue of limitations on those crimes?
If not then the time when one has to say "alright enough" is when the bastards are all dead and therefore beyond prosecution.

Pretty soon they will be prosecuting members of the Hitler youth cause that's all that will be left!

On what charges?

Jail? I am under the belief that jail is a institution that has one purpose in mind.
And that is rehabilitation!

Jail is part of penal system, rehabilitiation is only one purpose of that part of the penal system, it is certainly not the one purpose of the system.

[Skybird]

First, this:
Germany knew Eichmann's hiding place years before the Israelis caught him.

Second:
there will be a census in Germany this May. The Nazi NPD party has called its members to volunteer as interviewers and use the opporutnity to additonally collect information about the migration background and political opinions of the people they interview (which do not get asked for by the opfficial census formulas). One is wondering why.

Third, political extremism in egneral is on the rise in Germany, and it seems to me in most of Europe. It may be a natural countermovement to the rise of social dysbalances in societies, as well as a countermovement to the EU tryin g to slowly neutralsiee regional cultural identities of nations and people and to deconstruct the sovereignity of states. Last year, we have seen a small decline of Nazi violence and crime in Germany, but an almost doubnling of left-extreme crime and violence (with right-winged crime still being in the close lead). For example some days ago the party 2Die Linke" (uniting SED-sympathisers and white-washers of the DDR tyranny, communists, radical socialists, and sympathisers of left terror and crime groups in Latin America) had a public discussion meeting in one place. Former political prisoners of the GDR regime, now all older people, wanted to demonstrate in front of the house to call the party back to reason and to remind them of the crimes of the DDR dictatorship and the in justrice they had suffered from its hands. They got beaten up by black-dressed thugs, two needed to go to hospital, one almost lost his eye-sight. The thugs then withdrew into the building and got covered by sympathiosers of Die Linke and party members, and actively hindred the police to enter the building and investigate on the attacker'S identity. This was reported in just two blog-like internet places, one of which co-run by Henryk Broder whom I hold in high appreciation, the regular media, print and TV, did not lose a single word about it.

Truth is a majority of people and politici8ans act and behave as if left violence does not exiost and can be whitewashed and "understood" and "justified", while all political violence just is always right violence. And Muslim violence and crime - officially does not even seem to exist, gets minimised and ignored all the time!

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Penguin

The argument that the prosecuted persons are old now is void in my opinion. Their victims never had the chance to reach an old age.

Better late justice than never, this is btw one of the reasons that in german law murder never becomes time-barred (word?). For example the former Stasi-chief Erich Mielke got prosecuted in 1993 for the killing of two policemen in 1931.

While I cannot c onsider it to be justivce when a Nazi criminal has lived free for most of his life and the last 2 years of his life, maybe lives behind bars, I agree in principal - we owe it to the victims and to the scale of the Nazi disaster to prosecute those having actively particiapted in the crime for the full lifespan they have. Justice to me has little or nothing to do with it. The final one or two years of a crimnal'S 88 years oflife in prison - a compensation of some mass killing he participated in? Hardly.

But I think at some time, the generation behind these active criminals, we sooner or later - better sooner - need to let this kind of thing come to a historic stop,. and move on. It's not as if we do not have more present, urgent, urgent problems to solve in the world we wilve in right now.

A society that constantly lives with its mind in the past, has no future.

----

A short note on the rehabilitation thing Freiwillge has mentioned. While this is an ideal for European prisons, prisons also serve in the role of protecting the community against the evil-doers. Also, rehabilitation often fails or is not possible. Rehabilitation is something you define exclusively from the perspective of the community. If rehabilitation really were all what it is about, then I would recommend to enforce brain surgery and mandatory chemical supression of mind. Then you have the fully socialised and rehabilitated individual, from a communal standpoint. There is always a tensed balance link between rehabilitation, and conformism. I learned that the hard way when being in my training as psychologist and posyhcotherapist - the group pressure to make me (with my controversial and rebellious opinions, resisting against many psychotherapeutical holy cows) submitting to the wanted uniform ideal of the group and what a psycvhotherapist should be like, was immense and in the end aimed at just this: total conformity with the group's dogma and uniform ideal model.

Well, they failed. But i payed a price, isolation, and finally turning my back on the whole field.

[Takeda Shingen]

Originally Posted by Freiwillige

There comes a time when one has to say alright enough. That time is now.

Pretty soon they will be prosecuting members of the Hitler youth cause that's all that will be left!

I was also going to say that there couldn't be all that many of them left.

[Catfish]

Hello,
Germany was unwilling to prosecute Nazis because

a) a lot of them still sat at important positions be it administraive, industrially or in the jurisdiction - helped and assisted by the Allies, against communism. Which is why there almost was a german revolution, starting at the universities, in 1968.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...39390510898056

b) Does Gladio ring a bell ? This was and is active in Europe, especially in the Germany after the war already when the BND was still called Organisation Gehlen led by a top Nazi, and enforced by the US Green Berets. Nowadays state-terrorism often is directed against the own population, to push through certain laws against the left menace, terrorists or whatever is suited as a "threat". Not a conspiracy theory, but a practice as old as mankind.


So i would not say that the finding and prosecuting of a few minor Nazis is really such a great accomplishment ? Wiesenthal center should know better.

Greetings,
Catfish

[Feuer Frei!]

Originally Posted by Penguin

The argument that the prosecuted persons are old now is void in my opinion.

It, unfortunately is not void, it is a hard reality, and with old age comes ill health, and with that comes other things...deferrment of court proceedings, death before sentencing, many things.

Originally Posted by Skybird

A society that constantly lives with its mind in the past, has no future.

Indeed, but does it really? Or is it not 'allowed' to look forward with pride by ignorant groups, and there are many, who sterotype all day long, or the continuous dredging up of the past and waving it in front of the faces of people?
It may be a direct way of putting things, and i'm getting o.t. here...

[Matador.es]

If i may comment on this topic:

In the immediate post-war years, Boere spent two years in an Allied prisoner-of-war camp, where he was interrogated and admitted to the three killings. After release from the PoW camp, Boere initially went into hiding out of fear of being sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence, but managed to flee to Germany. In 1949, a Dutch court sentenced Boere to death in absentia for the three murders, for supporting the enemy, and for serving in the army of the enemy. According to Dutch law, the latter automatically leads to the loss of Dutch citizenship. Boere claimed German citizenship on the basis of a so-called Führererlass, a law promulgated by Hitler providing all SS-members with German citizenship. This law remained in force during the 1950s and 1960s in Germany, but was later annulled under pressure from the European Union. From that point on, Boere was stateless, which was confirmed during the trial against him that started in October 2009. The German government has refused to extradite him. West Germany was responsible for prosecuting war criminals, but Boere was never brought to trial there.[5]

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Boere

A Dutch man who collaborated in '40 was sentenced to death in '49. He (Boere) escaped and went to Germany. There, he was granted a German citizen ship since he was (hardcore) Waffen-SS and there is a law in Germany they cannot be extradited.

Late 2009 the Dutch state initiated a trail to to manage extradition from the German government (Dep of justice), who refused. Lately a request has been made in the European Union to force Germany to extradite this Boere so the sentence can be executed.

The Netherlands do not have a death penalty, except during war time, which Boere received. Off course this sentence will not take effect when the extradition would take place (would not mind if it would happen though).

It is a bit harsh though that after so many years Germany still protects former war criminal by law. Although various German politicians have publicly disapproved the protection of Boere, the law is still in effect.