 |
|
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Should old former Auschwitz guards be jailed? |
| Yes. They all contributed to the deaths of innocents and all deserve punishment. |
|
35% |
[ 5 ] |
| Yes, but only the ones who are found guilty of specific crimes as individuals. |
|
42% |
[ 6 ] |
| No. They're old men now, what's the point? |
|
7% |
[ 1 ] |
| I honestly don't know how I feel about this stuff. |
|
14% |
[ 2 ] |
|
| Total Votes : 14 |
|
| Author |
Message |
David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
|
| Post subject: |  |
|
| watt price tully wrote: | Should 90-year-old Nazi death camp guards be punished?
I didn't realize that the Nazis employed 90 year olds.
He did the crime as a young man. He finally got caught, do the time. |
He didn't 'get caught'. He wasn't hiding. They simply decided to lower the threshold of culpability from actually being responsible for war crimes to simply working at a death camp in pretty much any capacity. There's a degree of convenience here: had they decided to punish people like Hanning in the aftermath of WW2, many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Germans and European collaborators would have been serving jail time. It seems perhaps a little opportunistic to chase down such people now simply because so few are left.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
 |
Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| David wrote: | | Pies4shaw wrote: | It's a reasonably hilarious view of criminal justice that some of you seem to have adopted here. This fellow was guilty of 170,000 counts of accessory to murder but you think punishing him now is a little bit harsh! What he was involved in was, as Bruce would say, "just a little bit special".
Of course there is a political aspect to who gets tried and who doesn't and for what crimes against international law. That doesn't make this man "not guilty". A dozen or so of his victims were still alive to testify against him, so it's not yet a mere historical footnote. In any event, it has long been established as a matter of international law that there is no "limitations period" applicable to crimes against humanity.
Here, the punishment for the perpetrator will likely be trivial, in the scheme of things - it is the finding of guilt (and its applicability to future international criminal cases) and the expression of continuing disapproval of such conduct that matters. There are continuing conflicts, official and unofficial, all over the world to which these principles will matter. The "I didn't really kill anyone because I didn't actually pull the trigger myself" defence was always morally bankrupt - but good in law until the last decade, so people who were complicit in the way this man obviously was (and acknowledged at his trial that he was) can only be effectively tried since Demanjuk was dealt with a few years back. |
The concept of being an 'accessory' is reasonably slippery here as the camps were run with the implicit consent of a great number of German civilians. What moral difference is there, really, between the enthusiastic Nazi voter and the woman who cleans the commander's quarters at Auschwitz? Is merely being there a crime in itself? The analogy of wartime pilots charged with bombing civilians is a good one, and beyond your acknowledgement of the politics of judging war crime, I'd like to know whether you think the pilot in charge of the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima should have been charged by an international court.
Many people who are uncomfortable with these sentences would be perfectly fine with someone being convicted for, say, murdering a schoolgirl 70 years ago. I think the key difference is culpability such an act would have been against the law and seen as abhorrent by the dominant culture then as now, whereas a Nazi guard was acting within a system that not only tolerated atrocity but demanded it.
This is something bigger than just the Nuremberg Defence; it's the reason why it's considered unjust to punish soldiers for killing other soldiers during wartime. In Gallipoli, Vietnam and Iraq, Australian soldiers have gunned down men simply trying to protect their homeland. We won't punish them now or any time in the future because we understand that, whatever the morality of their actions, the army's authoritarian structure does absolve soldiers of certain responsibilities (so long as you stay within the 'rules of war'). This isn't mere self-defence; it goes equally for snipers or soldiers involved in targeted assassinations. When trying to assess whether an individual ought to be punished, the context matters a great deal. |
No, that just isn't how the jus bellum works. It isn't illegal per se to kill a hostile combatant in war-like conditions. There are complex laws relating to how you must treat hostile combatants but none of those are relevant here.
Here what you had was a large, manifestly illegal, enterprise in which the defendant was complicit. Really, he is lucky that international law on this point (argued as it was in this case) makes him complicit as an accessory only - under our domestic law, he would likely be found guilty of murder (not just an accessorial liability) on the same facts - and would have been at the time. We routinely put people in gaol for murder where they are engaged in group criminal conduct (eg, a bank robbery) and someone else in their group commits the murder, even if the first person didn't realise that the other person was carrying a weapon and even if it was done directly against the first person's protestations. Those sorts of "degrees of responsibility" are factors for sentencing, not for determining criminal liability for the alleged (170,000) offence(s). He obviously got a reasonably large sentencing discount for his 170,000 counts of accessorial liability. Even so, I can't help but feel that 5 years, in total, for being complicit in the murder of 170,000 people is somewhat light on (at a quick calculation, that's about a day for every 93 people he helped to kill).
You will note that I said "argued as it was in this case" - that is because there may well have been a sound basis for trying this man for genocide, which is, of course, a far more serious offence than murder and more accurately describes the joint illegal enterprise in which he was engaged. He wasn't "having a go" at enemy combatants - he was complicit in a deliberate process of subjugation and annihilation of people who were no threat to him or his illegal government. His evidence to the Court in April was that he knew what was happening at Auschwitz and that he was ashamed for, roughly put, taking part.
The criminal law has not, since about the 15th century or so, allowed people to get away with a crime merely because they were ordered to commit it. Unsurprisingly, the law of international criminal liability recognizes that people can be guilty of crimes even though they committed the pertinent acts because they felt (or actually were) compelled to do illegal things to preserve their own safety or the safety of their loved ones. Thus, the so-called "Nuremberg defence" is specifically limited - one can be guilty of a criminal offence, even when directly ordered by a superior to commit it, unless one didn't know (at the time) the act was illegal and the act wasn't manifestly illegal. What occurred here was manifestly illegal and he knew what was occurring was, in fact, illegal - and there, frankly, is an end to it. |
|
|
|
|
watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| David wrote: | | watt price tully wrote: | Should 90-year-old Nazi death camp guards be punished?
I didn't realize that the Nazis employed 90 year olds.
He did the crime as a young man. He finally got caught, do the time. |
He didn't 'get caught'. He wasn't hiding. They simply decided to lower the threshold of culpability from actually being responsible for war crimes to simply working at a death camp in pretty much any capacity. There's a degree of convenience here: had they decided to punish people like Hanning in the aftermath of WW2, many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Germans and European collaborators would have been serving jail time. It seems perhaps a little opportunistic to chase down such people now simply because so few are left. |
I think you might be confusing me with someone who cares about a Nazi Guard at Auschwitz being lightly punished.
_________________
“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
|
|
|
|
Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
^^^ C'mon, WPT - it would be awful if someone infringed his human rights. We should all be offended, as one, at that appalling prospect.  |
|
|
|
|
Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
|
|
|
|
Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
He would equally have been a victim of Nazism if he'd refused to work in Auschwitz and had been executed on the spot for it - but at least he wouldn't have been guilty of a war crime (or, in his case, 170,000 war crimes).
These are not debating points, Wokko, and they are matters upon which not all views are equally open. |
|
|
|
|
Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
|
|
|
|
Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| I've seen the studies on humans and their tendency to unquestionably follow authority. It is an incredibly rare individual who will refuse to do as ordered in an hierarchical setting, even when the only sanction is shame. Everyone thinks that they'd nobly refuse to perform an immoral order in a time of war, but the fact is that almost nobody, when push comes to shove can do that. |
|
|
|
|
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Pies4shaw wrote: | | David wrote: | | Many people who are uncomfortable with these sentences would be perfectly fine with someone being convicted for, say, murdering a schoolgirl 70 years ago. I think the key difference is culpability such an act would have been against the law and seen as abhorrent by the dominant culture then as now, whereas a Nazi guard was acting within a system that not only tolerated atrocity but demanded it. |
No, that just isn't how the jus bellum works. It isn't illegal per se to kill a hostile combatant in war-like conditions. There are complex laws relating to how you must treat hostile combatants but none of those are relevant here.
Here what you had was a large, manifestly illegal, enterprise in which the defendant was complicit. Really, he is lucky that international law on this point (argued as it was in this case) makes him complicit as an accessory only - under our domestic law, he would likely be found guilty of murder (not just an accessorial liability) on the same facts - and would have been at the time. We routinely put people in gaol for murder where they are engaged in group criminal conduct (eg, a bank robbery) and someone else in their group commits the murder, even if the first person didn't realise that the other person was carrying a weapon and even if it was done directly against the first person's protestations. Those sorts of "degrees of responsibility" are factors for sentencing, not for determining criminal liability for the alleged (170,000) offence(s). He obviously got a reasonably large sentencing discount for his 170,000 counts of accessorial liability. Even so, I can't help but feel that 5 years, in total, for being complicit in the murder of 170,000 people is somewhat light on (at a quick calculation, that's about a day for every 93 people he helped to kill).
You will note that I said "argued as it was in this case" - that is because there may well have been a sound basis for trying this man for genocide, which is, of course, a far more serious offence than murder and more accurately describes the joint illegal enterprise in which he was engaged. He wasn't "having a go" at enemy combatants - he was complicit in a deliberate process of subjugation and annihilation of people who were no threat to him or his illegal government. His evidence to the Court in April was that he knew what was happening at Auschwitz and that he was ashamed for, roughly put, taking part.
The criminal law has not, since about the 15th century or so, allowed people to get away with a crime merely because they were ordered to commit it. Unsurprisingly, the law of international criminal liability recognizes that people can be guilty of crimes even though they committed the pertinent acts because they felt (or actually were) compelled to do illegal things to preserve their own safety or the safety of their loved ones. Thus, the so-called "Nuremberg defence" is specifically limited - one can be guilty of a criminal offence, even when directly ordered by a superior to commit it, unless one didn't know (at the time) the act was illegal and the act wasn't manifestly illegal. What occurred here was manifestly illegal and he knew what was occurring was, in fact, illegal - and there, frankly, is an end to it. |
Should slave-owners, or, for that matter, the women who married slave-owners, or the servants that worked for slave-owning families, have been punished in retrospect after the Civil War and emancipation?
If you'd say yes to that, one can only wonder what future laws you and I are breaking right now. Participating in the slaughter and consumption of animals might be a start. Should a vegan government of the future pass a law against such practices and decide to crack down on accessories to those crimes, and if so will you be turning yourself in?
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
|
Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| Wokko wrote: | | I've seen the studies on humans and their tendency to unquestionably follow authority. It is an incredibly rare individual who will refuse to do as ordered in an hierarchical setting, even when the only sanction is shame. Everyone thinks that they'd nobly refuse to perform an immoral order in a time of war, but the fact is that almost nobody, when push comes to shove can do that. |
That is, of course, entirely correct. It doesn't mean, however, that unquestioningly following authority is a good excuse for committing (or being an accessory to) an atrocity. In fact, it is very likely that in all such cases a person will be presented with an entirely unreasonable "choice" - if you don't do what is ordered, you might be summarily executed (and someone else who will do what you wouldn't will just be brought in to do the "bad" thing anyway) and if you do that which is ordered, you will have committed an international crime (albeit not necessarily a crime under domestic law) and there is some prospect (let's not be over-enthusiastic about the will of governments to bring foreign international criminals to justice) that you may be tried for a war crime, some time in the future. Faced with that ridiculous "choice", the rational response in pursuit of self-preservation is to do what is ordered - it is, after all, almost certainly going to be done anyway, so why should one die for the principle?
Unhappily for the person who makes the "rational choice" for self-preservation, the rational response is not the one recognised as the correct "moral" response by international law. However, if you start from the proposition that people do appreciate or ought to appreciate that it is not quite the right thing (and that no sane person who wasn't a psychopath could ever had thought it was the right thing) to gas hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people, there is no genuine dilemma, at all.
The bottom line is that the relevant international criminal law pays no attention to people's inherent propensities to do the right thing or the wrong thing - rather, there is just a wrong thing and, if you do it, you will be liable to prosecution, irrespective of whether you had any genuinely viable alternative.
If you scratch the surface of most of our domestic criminal law, you will find the same basic underpinning. So, eg, people know, or ought to know, that they're not supposed to steal and if they do, they may be convicted for it, although their particular reason for stealing (eg, to obtain money to buy medicine for a sick infant) might lead to a reduced penalty in a particular case.
So, here, the penalty might be different for a person who "pitched in willingly" and a person who "didn't really have their heart in it" but they are both accomplices and the appropriate expression of disapproval of their conduct is a criminal conviction. As I've already observed, this particular chap doesn't seem to have been given a very significant sentence in the overall scheme of things - being an accessory to 170,000 murders in a normal universe is arguably worth a little more than 5 years, irrespective of how modest one's accessorial role was (by way of comparison, the maximum penalty for telling a lie in court is, of course, 10 years under our law), presumably in this case the penalty was moderated because they took his age and degree of personal culpability into consideration when sentencing.
It should, of course, go without saying that this fellow was an accessory to these murders on the ordinary principles of criminal liability but I mention that indisputable fact out of completeness. |
|
|
|
|
Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| David wrote: | | Pies4shaw wrote: | | David wrote: | | Many people who are uncomfortable with these sentences would be perfectly fine with someone being convicted for, say, murdering a schoolgirl 70 years ago. I think the key difference is culpability such an act would have been against the law and seen as abhorrent by the dominant culture then as now, whereas a Nazi guard was acting within a system that not only tolerated atrocity but demanded it. |
No, that just isn't how the jus bellum works. It isn't illegal per se to kill a hostile combatant in war-like conditions. There are complex laws relating to how you must treat hostile combatants but none of those are relevant here.
Here what you had was a large, manifestly illegal, enterprise in which the defendant was complicit. Really, he is lucky that international law on this point (argued as it was in this case) makes him complicit as an accessory only - under our domestic law, he would likely be found guilty of murder (not just an accessorial liability) on the same facts - and would have been at the time. We routinely put people in gaol for murder where they are engaged in group criminal conduct (eg, a bank robbery) and someone else in their group commits the murder, even if the first person didn't realise that the other person was carrying a weapon and even if it was done directly against the first person's protestations. Those sorts of "degrees of responsibility" are factors for sentencing, not for determining criminal liability for the alleged (170,000) offence(s). He obviously got a reasonably large sentencing discount for his 170,000 counts of accessorial liability. Even so, I can't help but feel that 5 years, in total, for being complicit in the murder of 170,000 people is somewhat light on (at a quick calculation, that's about a day for every 93 people he helped to kill).
You will note that I said "argued as it was in this case" - that is because there may well have been a sound basis for trying this man for genocide, which is, of course, a far more serious offence than murder and more accurately describes the joint illegal enterprise in which he was engaged. He wasn't "having a go" at enemy combatants - he was complicit in a deliberate process of subjugation and annihilation of people who were no threat to him or his illegal government. His evidence to the Court in April was that he knew what was happening at Auschwitz and that he was ashamed for, roughly put, taking part.
The criminal law has not, since about the 15th century or so, allowed people to get away with a crime merely because they were ordered to commit it. Unsurprisingly, the law of international criminal liability recognizes that people can be guilty of crimes even though they committed the pertinent acts because they felt (or actually were) compelled to do illegal things to preserve their own safety or the safety of their loved ones. Thus, the so-called "Nuremberg defence" is specifically limited - one can be guilty of a criminal offence, even when directly ordered by a superior to commit it, unless one didn't know (at the time) the act was illegal and the act wasn't manifestly illegal. What occurred here was manifestly illegal and he knew what was occurring was, in fact, illegal - and there, frankly, is an end to it. |
Should slave-owners, or, for that matter, the women who married slave-owners, or the servants that worked for slave-owning families, have been punished in retrospect after the Civil War and emancipation?
If you'd say yes to that, one can only wonder what future laws you and I are breaking right now. Participating in the slaughter and consumption of animals might be a start. Should a vegan government of the future pass a law against such practices and decide to crack down on accessories to those crimes, and if so will you be turning yourself in? |
It all depends upon that which people knew or ought to have known at the time of their acts. They would likely have accessorial liability if there were relevant acts of slavery, now (since everybody now "knows that slavery is wrong") but one would have to enquire into the position at the time of the Civil War.
Your second proposition about veganism is just another debating point. All we know now is that some people think that people shouldn't eat animals. We don't personally "know" that we shouldn't eat animals and it could not be sensibly said that we "ought to know" that. Eating animals is something many cultures routinely do. Gassing hundreds of thousands of people for no particular reason is not something that cultures routinely do and the prosecution of Nazi war criminals like Eichmann who were involved in the administration of the "death camps" depends upon acceptance of the view that if he had been given a questionnaire to answer in 1933, he'd have ticked (or known that he ought to have ticked) the "I mustn't gas Jews" box. It might become law that one isn't to eat an animal but the principle against retrospective criminal conduct will prevent you being charged with one count of ingesting beef rendang last night in 20 years time. Unless, of course, the then-prevailing political hegemony accepts that we ought "always to have known" that we shouldn't eat animals, in which case let's just hope that we aren't prosecuted in an international criminal court and that, if we are, the beef rendang isn't a capital crime. |
|
|
|
|
David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
|
| Post subject: | |
|
In that case the distinction depends upon precedent i.e. the fact that no forerunner to our society has criminalised consumption of meat, whereas German societies prior to 1933 had generally criminalised mass murder without regard for ethnicity. I don't find that overly satisfying for who is to say that a different cultural view in a different time and place is morally superior? but let's apply that principle to the following hypothetical:
In ten years' time, an international criminal court finds that Australia's treatment of refugees has been unlawful and that the perpetrators ought to be held to account. Certainly, most of us would expect key figures like Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison and Dutton to be punished, and perhaps culpability could extend to encompass whoever at Transfield or Wilson was in charge of the facilities. But would even the most ardent refugee advocate call for the prosecution of the security guards, cooks, cleaners and office workers at those detention centres? Personally, I can't see why that would be useful or necessary. Surely punishing the architects and administrators would be sufficient. Yet, here, too, there is precedent for us not subjecting innocent people to such treatment. Does that fundamentally alter the culpability (or otherwise) of mere functionaries in this instance?
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
|
|
|
|
think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| David wrote: | | watt price tully wrote: | Should 90-year-old Nazi death camp guards be punished?
I didn't realize that the Nazis employed 90 year olds.
He did the crime as a young man. He finally got caught, do the time. |
He didn't 'get caught'. He wasn't hiding. They simply decided to lower the threshold of culpability from actually being responsible for war crimes to simply working at a death camp in pretty much any capacity. There's a degree of convenience here: had they decided to punish people like Hanning in the aftermath of WW2, many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Germans and European collaborators would have been serving jail time. It seems perhaps a little opportunistic to chase down such people now simply because so few are left. |
I don't like agreeing with you so much.
Seriously, locking this guy up now will achieve what?
Do you want to lock up everyone who turned a blind eye for fear of their own life? How about the cooks that fed the guards?
If there is direct evidence that this guy even so much as led prisoners to their deaths in the chambers, OK, but where does it say that? And still, he would have been killed if he refused the order.
No win situation.
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
|
|
|
|
stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| David wrote: | | watt price tully wrote: | Should 90-year-old Nazi death camp guards be punished?
I didn't realize that the Nazis employed 90 year olds.
He did the crime as a young man. He finally got caught, do the time. |
He didn't 'get caught'. He wasn't hiding. They simply decided to lower the threshold of culpability from actually being responsible for war crimes to simply working at a death camp in pretty much any capacity. There's a degree of convenience here: had they decided to punish people like Hanning in the aftermath of WW2, many hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Germans and European collaborators would have been serving jail time. It seems perhaps a little opportunistic to chase down such people now simply because so few are left. |
I'm still struggling with the bolded bit.
How does something become criminal in retrospect like that?
And I've read P4S's very good responses, but I must have missed that bit.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
|
|
|
|
HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
|
| Post subject: | |
|
| How should I know how something become criminal in retrospect like that does. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum
|
|
The Rules
FAQ
Usergroups
Calendar
Search
Log in
Register
