I always felt a bit of sympathy for the fellow. We both come from the Cleveland area and he spent a lifetime there as an auto worker. During the decades of prosecution it seemed many times as if it were persecution with the multiple trials, unacceptance of innocent verdicts at the end of one or more, and filing of new charges to keep him in court. I also am repulsed by "evidence" given by one when an old victim looks him in the eyes 40 years after the fact and says "I know those evil eyes, that is him!"
I can say I don't know what is justice for a mass murderer or participant on any level in mass murder. I am happy for us that it is now history.
Kai,
I absolutely agree with you that you are happy that it is now history. I am glad to that many other Nazi and (also) Stalinist war criminals died. Unfortunately I am sorry that in many other wars and civil wars, after the war, today and in the future, '
new' Kapo's, murderers and massmurderers will come and came to existance. They are living today, and comit(ted) their war crimes right at this moment, yesterday, a year ago, (a) decade(s) ago and tomorrow, and they will not be held accountable. I talk about Syria, Lybia, Iran, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Yemen, Oman, Algeria, former Yugoslavia, Chechenia, Georgia/Ossetia, Iraq, Burma, North-Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kosovo/Albania (
Enver Hoxa regime and civil war after the collapse of communism), South-Africa, Indonesia (the Maluku Islands; Ambon), Sri Lanka, Southern-America and etc.
After the Second world war the motto was "
Never Again", but the tragic fact and terrible truth is that the brutalities of war, genocide and mass murder of minorities or "
Undesirables" has continued ever since. Again, it is happening at this moment in Africa, the Middle east, Asia and Southern-America, and nobody stops it. And we are still focussed on things which happened 67, 68 years ago.
Demjanjuk probably collaborated with the Nazi's who commited mass murder in
Ukraine, not only against jews, Poles and Russians, but also against
Ukrainians, who were considered as
Slav Untermenschen, by *
the stupid Nazi's. He probably did it with a pragmatic, opportunistic and life-saving motivation. He had to save his own life, he could benefit from being a
kapo, and he was probably anti-semitic and anti-sovjet like many Ukrainians back then. A good tool for the Nazi's. But again, how can we prove that he was guilty?
Israel couldn't and released him. What sort of opportunistic reasons or motivations where behind the US and German authorities who herassed him? Look how political correct we are, we jugde an Ukrainian nazi beast? Why then let they walk so many German and Austrian higher SS, SD/SIPO, Gestapo and other war criminals in and outside
Germany and
Austria? SS officer
Josef Mengele (1911–1979),
Klaus Barbie,
Fritz Fischer,
Herta Oberheuser,
Helmut Poppendick,
Gerhard Rose,
Josef Altstötter,
August Frank,
Otto Strasser (ideologue of the far right NPD party in Germany),
Manfred Ewald (both Nazi and DDR communist official), Generaloberst
Lothar Rendulic (Austrian of Croatian descent),
Werner Lorenz (October 2, 1891 – March 13, 1974), SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS und Polizei ,
Otto Hofmann (March 16, 1896 – December 31, 1982), Austrian SS-Gruppenführer and an official of Nazi Germany's "
Race and Settlement Main Office",
Wolfgang Abel (13 May 1905 – 1 November 1997), Austrian anthropologist and one of Nazi Germany's racial biologists,
Ernst Achenbach (1909-1991), German lawyer and politician of the Nazi Party, and after World War II, the liberal Free Democratic Party,
Eberhard Achterberg (1910 - 1983), high-ranking Nazi official in the Rosenberg foreign affairs office,
Josef Ackermann (1905-1997),
Gunter d'Alquen (1910 - 1998),
Günther Altenburg (1894 – 1984),
Ludolf von Alvensleben ( (1901 – 1970)) (responsible for the killing of at least 4,247 people in Poland by units of the Selbstschutz under von Alvensleben's command in the autumn of 1939,
Artur Axmann (1913 – 1996) was the German Nazi leader of the Hitler Youth (Reichsjugendführer) from 1940 through war's end in 1945, and a wealthy West-German businessman after the war, the German philosopher
Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), and
Hanns-Martin Schleyer (May 1, 1915 – October 18, 1977), SS officer, a German business executive and employer and industry representative, serving as President of the two influential organizations Confederation of German Employers' Associations (BDA) and Federation of German Industries (BDI). ( While serving in both functions, he was kidnapped on September 5, 1977 by far left militant organisation Red Army Faction (RAF) and murdered one and a half months later after the German government did not give in to RAF's demands. The abduction and murder are commonly seen as the climax of the RAF campaign in 1977 (German Autumn).)
Werner LorenzI have had my doubts about
John Demjanjuk too. I don't know if the name
Demjanjuk is a common name or a rare name in
Ukraine. There were hundreds of thousands of refugees from Central- and Eastern-Europe that came to the
USA,
Great-Britain,
Canada,
Australia,
New Zealand and
South-Africa after the war. Many were Sovjet prisoners of war that survived the mass murder, starvation and gas chambers of the Nazi-concentrationcamps. After the Jews the soldiers of the red army that were taken prisoner of war by the Wehrmacht or the Waffen SS were treated very badly by the Nazi's during their captivity. I know this from first hand, by reading the memoires of my Polish grandmother, who was held prisoner at
Mauthausen and witnessed how badly the Russian and Ukrainian Red army soldiers were treated by the Nazi's. Not sympathizing with the Stalinist Sovjets, the Polish women felt sorry for the Sovjet prisoners, sometimes young boys, sometimes men. They shared their food with them, because in the social hierarchy the Polish women were above the jews, gypsies and Sovjet prisoners of war. My grandmother also had contact with a German political prisoner, a communist, who was in
Mauthausen since the late thirtees. The time she was there was in autumn 1944. My grandmother witnessed a Russian soldier being killed by SS guards who unleashed their German sheppards on the poor man. The Russian soldier was torn appart by the dogs. That was the worst part of her memoires. The Russians and Ukrainians looked like ghosts or skelletons, because they were starved to death.
Mauthausen was one of the cruelest camps, like
Auschwitz,
Treblinka,
Sobibor,
Buchenwald,
Dachau and
Neuengamme.
The Nazi crimes against Soviet Prisoners of War relate to the deliberately genocidal policies taken towards the captured soldiers of
the Soviet Union by
Nazi Germany. These efforts resulted in some
3.3 to 3.5 million deaths, about
60% of all Soviet POWs. Some of them were arbitrarily executed in the field by the German forces, died under inhuman conditions in
German prisoner of war camps and during ruthless
death marches from the front lines, or were shipped to Nazi concentration camps for
extermination. Some of these men escaped their fate by becoming
Kapo's in the same Nazi concentration camps they were staying and determined to perish. For some of them becoming a
Kapo (Kameradschaftspolizei, [roughly, "
comrade police force"], prisoner functionary [German: Funktionshäftling]) meant saving their own life. The Kapo "
prisoner self-administration" system was also designed
to turn victim against victim, as the prisoner functionaries were pitted against their fellow prisoners in order to maintain the favor of their SS guards. If they were derelict, they would be returned to the status of ordinary prisoners and be subject to other kapos. Many prisoner functionaries were recruited from the ranks of violent criminal gangs rather than from the more numerous political, religious and racial prisoners; those were known for their brutality toward other prisoners. This brutality was tolerated by the SS and was an integral part of the camp system.
The camp rules, constant threat of beatings, humiliation, punishment and the practice of punishing whole groups for the actions of one prisoner were psychological and physical torments on top of the starvation, and physical exhaustion from back-breaking labor. Kapo's were used to push the prisoners to work harder, saving the need for paid SS supervision. Many kapos felt caught in the middle, being both victim and perpetrator. Though kapos generally had a bad reputation, many suffered guilt about their actions, both at the time and after the war, as revealed in a book about Jewish kapos.
Many kapo's could be quite brutal, especially when an SS guard was around, in order to justify their privileges. They also played an active role in the beatings, even killing fellow prisoners.
The prisoner functionaries were in a precarious hierarchy between their fellow inmates and the SS. This situation was intentionally created, as revealed in a speech by
Himmler.
"
The moment he becomes a Kapo, he no longer sleeps with them. He is held accountable for the performance of the work, that they are clean, that the beds are well-built. [...] So, he must drive his men. The moment we become dissatisfied with him, he is no longer Kapo, he's back to sleeping with his men. And he knows that he will be beaten to death by them the first night."
—Heinrich Himmler, June 21, 1944
P.S.-
* Why stupid Nazi's? Lets look for a moment from the Nazi German perspecitve. They invaded the SovjetUnion. Due to Stalins opression in the thirtees 7 million Ukrainians starved to death in a deliberate cause famine, the Holodomor. Next to that the purges and other NKVD terror, by Russians and Ukrainian Stalinist also caused many deaths, suffering and opression. The Ukrainians of
the Western part of Ukraine in contrast to the
Poles and the
Czechs welcomed the Nazi's as liberators. If the Nazi's had treated the Ukrainians good, gave them the same rights and status as the Hungarians and the Rumanians, the war would have gone differantly. The Nazi-terror in the Ukraine cause many Ukrainians to choose the side of the Sovjet partisans/red army and the Ukrainian Nationalist UPA resistance army. The Nazi's could have had hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Wehrmacht and SS-soldiers. Instaid there were maybe thousands of Ukrainian collaborators in the Waffen-SS and as Kapo's in the Nazi concentrationcamps. The German SS and the Ukrainians were the most feared and loathed Nazi forces in Warsaw during the Warsaw uprising. German wehrmacht soldiers were spared by the resistance army, Armia Krajowa, and thus treated according to the Geneva conventions. Ukrainians in contrast got a black U painted on their naked human back and were emediately excecuted afterwards. The same with the German SS.
This photo was taken from a the body of a dead Germany officer killed in Russia, showing a German firing squad shooting Soviet civilians in the back as they sit beside their own mass grave in Babi Yar, an infamous ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, in 1942. Between 1941 and 1942, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 Jews, Soviet prisoners, communists, gypsies, Ukrainian nationalists and civilians were executed by the Germans in Babi Yar. (AP Photo)
Boys will be boys! SS troops welcomed by Ukrainian girls to their village. If only Hitler had played his cards better.....en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HolodomorUkraineAlongside
Belarus,
Ukraine was the first and hardest hit by
the Axis invasion of
the Soviet Union in the
summer and
autumn of
1941. The consequences for the area and for the population that remained under the occupation were devastating.
The Nazi regime made little effort to exploit the anti-Soviet sentiments among the Ukrainians that developed from the years of Stalinist rule. Despite the fact that
some Western Ukrainians initially welcomed the Germans, the Nazi leadership chose to take a
hard line, preserving
the collective-farm system, systematically
deporting the local population to Greater Germany as a
slave labour force and carrying out
the Holocaust on Ukrainian territory. Under these circumstances most of the population resisted the Nazi onslaught and
the partisan movement spread over the occupied territory.
The first Soviet partisan detachments in Ukraine appeared in the
Chernihiv and
Sumy regions. They developed out of Mykola Popudrenko's and Sydir Kovpak's underground groups, and became a formidable force in 1943. At this stage, they were controlled and supported by the Ukrainian Partisan Movement Headquarters in Moscow, operating throughout occupied Ukraine (especially in the northeastern part) and numbered over 150,000 fighters. In 1944, partisans led by
Kovpak and
Vershigora were even able to raid enemy
Axis forces in
Romania,
Slovakia and
Poland.
Although the Soviet partisan leadership was officially hostile to the independent
nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (
UPA), local partisan commanders sometimes established neutral relations with its groups. However, during 1941-1942 and after 1943 both sides set out to destroy the other. Soviet partisans also targeted families, assistants and supporters of the Ukrainian members of the
Waffen-SS Division Galizien (
Galicia).
