http://nypost.com/2016/06/17/auschwitz-guard-94-sentenced-to-five-years-in-prison/
Later! I hope he gets a very social cell mate.
Let me state before I get started that the Nazi holocaust was a vile series of acts, without humanity. That the movers and shakers behind it mostly came to a bad end doesn't bother me in the slightest. They deserved what they got.
But ...
This is a trial of dubious merit. It is a political trial masquerading as a criminal one. There is no evidence submitted that this man commissioned any act of violence in the camp. If he had done so outside of it, he should be indicted for that (and as an SS man he probably did, but there are no such allegations in the instant case). He is properly contrite for his association, but normally in criminal trials you need to commit a crime to be convicted. Here we have a 'crime' being created by association with a regime. Frankly, if the man had refused to be present where he was ordered to go, he'd have been shot, or hung by the SS. There is ample evidence for that - especially in the latter days of the 3rd Reich. Interestingly, he doesn't appear to have raised this in his defence, and that duress while not a justification for the commission of murder (in English law anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Dudley_and_Stephens ), I'd argue it in this case as reasonably admissible, and at the very least in mitigation
I think the best that comes out of it is the magnaminity and practical good sense of the Auschwitz survivor; Leon Schwarzbaum, who said "he does not want Hanning to go to prison and is happy that he apologized, but had hoped that he would have provided more details about his time in Auschwitz for the sake of educating younger generations."
I really wonder what the point is, other than a political one, of trying to convict people very much at the periphery of something terrible if they weren't active players? Had this man been engaged in killing, torturing, stealing etc, then I'd say from the outset there were grounds to try him, but this guy has no such evidence adduced against him. On the basis that he was present is not enough as a matter of justice to convict. Why aren't the railway workers who transported the victims to the camps being indicted? Weren't they connected with the regime and its atrocities too? If you witness someone drown you don't get prosecuted because you didn't save them. Omission is not the commission of a crime. Stretching that principle you could say that anyone (connected with a state power like the army or police) who witnesses the shooting of someone by one of their own is guilty by association, if that killing was 'legal', if not moral at the time in question.
Criminalising morality after the event, is a very dangerous path to follow, and best kept to those who actually commission crimes. On the instant basis you might as well convict the entire German military of the time, as the military attacked and killed civilians in the course of their illegal war (using the finding of the Nuremburg trials as precedent). Even if an individual is innocent of any atrocity, they are associated by implication with it by being part of the regime that did do these awful things. And while we're at it - in the spirit of the law being equal for all - why not extend this beyond the German military, and go after all people who witnessed war crimes? With just WW2 for starters that should keep the courts busy!
Let's look a bit more at the "crime" of turning a blind eye. Should Oskar Schindler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler, or John Rabe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rabe have been indicted were they alive? After all they were both closely associated with the Nazi regimes, both profited from it, and both turned blind eyes at times to what was going on. Maybe, they felt at the time that they didn't like what they saw but felt powerless to prevent it. Certainly, Schindler changed his views and arguably, Schindler was more culpable than Rabe, as initially he was more involved with, and profited directly from camp slave labour. I'd add Siemens AG (for whom Rabe worked on his return to Germany) had a plant at Auschwitz that also used slave labour. Now I don't seriously suggest that either of these two men should be indicted, but I do use this as illustration as to the injustice of pursuing the instant case on the basis of turning a blind eye when you are powerless to prevent events, and when to do so could have lethal consequences.
Seriously, I have no problem with those who committed those horrible murders and abuse being brought to justice. However, this trial is just stretching things to a point where it sets a very dangerous precedent for the law. A political trial is a mockery of justice. I hope the court take Leon Schwarzbaum's good sense as their guide.
Admittedly I didn't know any of what you posted above Boggit.
Quote from: Gusington on June 17, 2016, 08:40:01 PM
Admittedly I didn't know any of what you posted above Boggit.
Don't worry I was reading, researching and writing long before I saw your post. :)
When you read about the case, look at my arguments you will see why the trial is most unfair, and suspiciously political in nature. I condemn the Nazi's for what they did, but this trial should be about the commission of wrongs, not the fact that this man turned a blind eye to something he had no hope of stopping. Now he might have been able to do more, as with Schindler and Rabe, but at the time he was a young man who in all probability had been indoctrinated from childhood. If his contrition was good enough for the Auschwitz survivor at the trial, then it is good enough for me.
Had the guard done something vicious at the camp, I would not defend him. But no one has suggested he participated in any murder or cruelty. I know you lost relatives in the camps, and there is no real answer to that tragedy, other than to empathise. But this guy did not kill, nor hurt any of your family, nor any other according to the evidence submitted. I can empathise in a sense. It's not the same but some of my family (civilians in this case) were bombed out by the Luftwaffe who were trying to kill them, and these included children. My mother in law who was a child still has vivid memories of her father only just escaping from their destroyed house, everything burning and dead bodies here and there wherever she looked. She's in her mid seventies now but can describe it like it was yesterday. This was when Hitler tried to destroy Coventry, which was a war crime against the civilians it hurt, and the big raid wasn't the last by a long shot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHknZf4AXKc http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/15/newsid_3522000/3522785.stm
Then again, it was war and bad things were done on both sides. The camps were a bestial thing of industrial murder, but it should be the people who did the crimes who should be brought to book - and in respect of the Nazis most have been. There were plenty of post-war crimes too against German, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and captured Russian citizens too by all the Allied powers. There was no monopoly on evil, and very few, if any of those Allied war criminals were ever brought to book. Some like the NKVD officer Salomon Morel was allowed to behave in exactly the same fashion as the Nazi's at the Zgoda camp after the war, killing German and Polish civilians in the same vile ways that the Nazi's had done. He was never brought to book, and to Israel's shame he was never allowed to be extradited to Poland for trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salomon_Morel The behaviour of many Czechs towards any ethnic Germans left in Czechoslovakia after the war was notorious too. I don't say this to draw any favourable comparison with the Nazi's only that when the boot was on the other foot the Allies also turned a blind eye, and even collaborated in mass murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Cossacks_after_World_War_II
Injustice remains injustice. From all the years I've known you, I know you are a good man who won't want that to happen either. There has to be a line at which revenge is drawn in the interest of justice, and I think Schwarzbaum had decided it had been crossed in this case. Given what he had gone through, I think his wisdom and sense of fairness was outstanding.
I don't know. He was definitely part of the Nazi machine. For me that may be enough. But as you said above I am biased. My family never had the chance for a trial.
Quote from: Gusington on June 18, 2016, 10:46:23 AM
I don't know. He was definitely part of the Nazi machine. For me that may be enough. But as you said above I am biased. My family never had the chance for a trial.
Please re-read my previous post. I didn't ever say you were biased. I said there really was no answer I could give to what your family suffered other to empathise. You are the one saying you are biased, perhaps because you think I thought it?
Given what you've said, I'll tell you what I think (and with no intention to patronise, so please don't think that either).
For what it's worth, I don't think any bias, nor anger on your part at what happened is wrong. If you are biased, then it's a natural and normal reaction to being a victim of atrocity. It would not surprise me if you felt that, especially given the lack of comprehensive justice for the victims of the Holocaust, the survivors, and the families growing up without family members. Nuremburg and subsequent trials might have brought an end to some of the big players, but many of the smaller but equally guilty fry got away. I totally get the sense of the lack of justice. So please, don't feel any need to defend yourself. You really don't. I really am not seeking to make a point at your expense. You can take it as given that I condemn the Nazi's for what they did, and make no apology for them.
However, do you want the people who hurt your family to see justice, or will anyone - even a bystander do to satisfy the natural desire for revenge to provide closure? For me this is the issue.
Convicting bystanders is a potentially dangerous precedent, having its roots in common law jurisprudence (which holds for most Commonwealth countries, and the United States [save IIRC, for Louisiana]) on complicity in crime. http://definitions.uslegal.com/c/complicity/ The usual start point in common law (at any rate) is that unless there is a legal duty to act, a bystander is under no obligation to act, nor will any legal consequence flow from the failure to act. Simply put, if there is no conspiracy, nor actual complicity to the crime committed, then no crime is committed.
However, there is a strong moral issue in favour of intervening to save others, and in many common law jurisdictions there is also a "Good Samaritan rule", to protect rescuers from legal action in the event of unintended injury/wrongful death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Samaritan_law In a growing number of cases this is being extended to increase the circumstances, placing a positive duty to act, which include matters from whistle blowing, to money laundering reporting. However, unlike the German law these obligations are not retrospective... more later.
The principles underpinning these approaches to law regarding both views has been argued at length. Even where there appears good reasons to follow a stricter legal approach to the moral obligation to act in the knowledge of a crime being committed, there are not surprisingly exceptions, which can have a great effect on the general principle of the requirement to act.
To illustrate the point I include an excellent paper here on Jewish legal jurisprudence to illustrate the long line of thinking that as a matter of law you should act to save others. The thinking behind the Jewish principles are not far different from that of the German court, but recognise the limits and practicality of being a positively obligated "Good Samaritan" as a matter of law, far more than the German law does in this case:
"... the Maimonidean formulation of the Jewish law of the Good Samaritan does not restrict the duty to rescue to outsiders witnessing or finding a person in distress. It extends the duty to anyone informed or aware of the danger to another's life. The essential criterion is "if one person is able to save another." Ability is determined by a combination of factors: geographic proximity, mental awareness, know-how and physical disposition. Nor does Jewish law distinguish between a natural danger and a man-made one. An innocent bystander is required to go to great personal effort, even to suffer hardships and to incur serious financial loss, in order to save the life of his fellow. On the other hand, he is not duty-bound to give his own life or limb to save his fellow." http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/kitveyet/assia_english/kirschenbaum.htm
I have no doubt that Mr Hanning, if he had tried to stop the atrocities at Auschwitz (and for practical purposes, I doubt he could have), he would have been killed for disobedience, or sedition. With that in mind, he satisfies the exception in Jewish law that "
he is not duty-bound to give his own life or limb to save his fellow".
Now the German law on complicity seems to me an artificial legal construct that offends the usual common law jurisprudence of criminal law (although to be fair, the German court in this instance, does not follow the common law but the arguably more restrictive civil code derived from Napoleon's, and further back to Roman edicts). With the German law, it seems that you indict people for complicity in the wrongful commission of acts, irrespective of actual involvement, on the basis that they did nothing to stop them and also were part of the Nazi regime. So even in the capacity of witness they are still legally deemed an accomplice, regardless of their actual role when the commission of said crimes took place, providing they were part of the organs of state. From a common law perspective, unless there is a legal requirement at the time to act, this is a moral, not a legal requirement.
Moreover, this law acts retrospectively, which is open to criticism on many levels as a method of bad law. Basically, perfectly legal behaviour at the time of the event, can be reinterpreted as criminal in the future. Of course, we act within the current law, and don't expect to come into conflict because of that. Just think of the issues treating tax law retrospectively would cause! :o
At the time of the said offenses, Mr Hanning by doing nothing to intervene was not breaking the law. In fact the laws of the Nazi jurisdiction even permitted the wholesale murder of people in the camps. Morally repugnant, but as far as the Nazi regime was concerned it was perfectly legal. While Nuremburg created a jurisdiction of law which concerns crimes against humanity, it, and subsequent courts dealt with offenders who had been involved to the extent of commissioning these crimes, actual conspiracy to do so, and actual accomplices (in that they had actual complicity, rather than deemed complicity by association with the commission of the actual crimes). The law used to convict Mr Hanning is an artificial construct extending the meaning of complicity far beyond its normal meaning. Given that it is being applied retrospectively, any conviction secured has more to do with the trial being in the interest of a political point, and vengeance, rather than justice. Mr Schwarzbaum I think saw that, which is why he was more interested in the contrition of association, the message of the wrong committed by the Nazi's being emphasised being passed down, but not the imprisonment of Mr Hanning.
Practically everyone who was a citizen in the Nazi state, including all members of the armed forces, labour organisations, civil administration were part of the Nazi regime. As a matter of both practicality and justice, do you convict every bystander of that regime simply because, in a perfect world, they might have done something to save the victims of Nazi crime? Personally, I think the trial is more motivated by politics and revenge, rather than in the interest of seeing justice be done.
It is also a Pandora's box. Should the German state, and other former Axis nations be seeking to extradite survivors of the Allied nations who had not committed, but falling under the same criteria are guilty of complicity by association of war crimes against German and German allied nationals?
Lastly, I am asking myself why on earth I am defending Mr Hanning's position? Like you say he was part of the Nazi machine. There is no evidence to show that he was a particularly 'good' nor a moral man, nor do we know that he did anything subsequently to atone for his being part of that regime to help survivors of the Holocaust after the event. He does not attract my support for that.
I think the real reason is that I consider the law and judgment in the instant case to be unfair for the reasons I mention. If it is unfair, then it is unjust. I agree with the guiding principle of Jewish law mentioned earlier, that to stand by when a wrong is being done is immoral. So I must speak in his defence in the interest of justice alone, whatever I think of the man as a person, in the hope that justice will eventually be done.
You make a good point...he may have been good and moral. I don't know. I also don't know what my family members were like...they could have been total schmucks!
I also don't consider myself a victim...my immediate family was safe here in the US and both my grandfathers fought honorably for the US.
All that said...I automatically consider anyone who was part of the Nazi regime the most natural of enemies. And whatever happens to them is justice, karma even. Getting into the weeds about the justice here is beyond my understanding.
I am a simple guy.
Quote from: Gusington on June 18, 2016, 08:17:53 PM
You make a good point...he may have been good and moral. I don't know. I also don't know what my family members were like...they could have been total schmucks!
I also don't consider myself a victim...my immediate family was safe here in the US and both my grandfathers fought honorably for the US.
All that said...I automatically consider anyone who was part of the Nazi regime the most natural of enemies. And whatever happens to them is justice, karma even. Getting into the weeds about the justice here is beyond my understanding.
I am a simple guy.
No worries mate. :)
None of this is criticism of you, nor making out that Hanning was a good man. It is just about the way a law was implemented, the justification and wider implications of it. At no time am I saying the Nazi's were good, so please don't take that from this post.
I'm envious that you can be just a simple guy. O0 As a former lawyer this is just a red flag to a bull with me! >:D It's complicated! ;)