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Demjanjuk found guilty - and freed

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Evil ... Thy name is Orville Redenbacher!!, May 12, 2011.

  1. John Demjanjuk, the retired autoworker it took us years to kick out of the country, has been found guilty of more than 28,000 counts of accessory to murder as a Nazi guard.
    Yet the son-of-a-bitch has been freed pending appeals.
    I don't care the guy's 91. He's a Nazi who should be executed. Instead, he remains free after being convicted.
    No justice.
    http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/05/12/verdict-expected-demjanjuk-case/?test=latestnews
    I wish the Nazi Hunters would swoop in, grab him and let him spend the last few months of his life in a Israeli prison.
     
  2. Flying Headbutt

    Flying Headbutt Moderator Staff Member

    You ever read this?

    http://ow.ly/4T3V2
     
  3. Yes.
    My opinion is unchanged.
    He was a camp guard at Sobibor and hence a Nazi. He was complicate in the atrocities that were committed.
    He was again convicted in Munich. Convicted, but allowed to remain free.


     
  4. Smash Williams

    Smash Williams Well-Known Member

    His original conviction was on charges that appear to be patently false and is entirely irrelevant to this case. He's already been in an Israeli prison and freed by their supreme court.

    I couldn't tell you whether he is guilty or not. The evidence appears to be rather shoddy, honestly, but I obviously haven't seen it. But he gets the same right to appeal that anyone else does under that justice system, and to deny him that is to endorse a bloodthirsty quest for revenge, not justice.
     
  5. Bubbler

    Bubbler Well-Known Member

    Here's the nut graph from that story ...

    "I am a Jew, with family on both sides whose souls rose in that smoke — but I have little to say to those who can't tell justice from vengeance, who believe that ends justify means, or who would mistake laughter at this farcical Nazi hunt for dishonoring the dead or making lies of history."

    I am not Jewish, but that pretty much sums up my feelings on Demjanjuk. The whole thing has stuck me as a farce from jump, going all the way back to the 80s.
     
  6. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    I'm with him. Whoever Demjanjuk is, and whatever he did, making him the face of the Holocaust because of a need to hunt down perps until there are none left to hunt down, does nothing for anyone if we are doing it out of desperation and manufacturing evidence to create a case that doesn't exist on its own.

    When they went and fished out Adolf Eichmann, there was no doubt who he was, what he had done. When they spent all those years going after Joseph Mengele, they were going after someone specific, for whom there was no doubt about identity and crimes.

    This? It's not the same. The guy might be guilty of having done bad things. But no one can prove anything. His involvement in the Holocaust could run the range from "did nothing" to "low-level conscript" to a "horrible mass murderer." But there is nothing conclusively pointing to any of those things and in fact, this whole thing was drudged up so long after the fact that it smacks of trying to make a man's life fit an already-existing narrative. When you have to go out and manufacture the evidence and even then your stated evidence creates a mishmosh that leaves doubts in people's minds, it should send up warning signals. It's gone from finding justice to "getting this particular guy!" We have to get HIM.

    What's wild is that if anyone should be blood thirsty -- and potentially wrongly hanging accused Nazis -- it is the Israelis. Yet, they gave him the kind of due process any country should aspire to. They didn't just jump on the word Nazi, throw together a Kangaroo Court and commence with the hanging. If they had, you could have chalked it up to bitter memories (not that it would excuse them).

    It's the United States (and interests here that are pushing this), instead, that seems intent on manufacturing a case against this guy, whatever it takes. And if we couldn't do it here (we couldn't) we were going to find someone else to do it. The Germans were the easy way to go, because of how they have had to treat Nazi crimes since WWII.

    The whole thing just smacks me as screwed up. I'm not saying the guy is innocent. But we just don't have the evidence. Why there is this sense of vengeance among some that has needed to make this guy the face of the Holocaust to keep the hunt alive, and has tried to manufacture the evidence that didn't exist, is what worries me.
     
  7. I don't know that anyone is making him the face of the Holocaust. He's not even a mid-major player and certainly not Mengele or Eichmann.
    But it is seems pretty clear this guy was a guard at Sobibor. Period. That's all I need to know.
    He was complicate (at minimum) in the extermination of thousands of humans. That's plenty of reason for him to spend a lifetime in jail or at the end of a rope.
    I'm sure this man had some tough choices to make (if you believe Raab's story) in his life. But he made an incorrect one in volunteering and serving at Sobibor. And he should pay for it.
    Call it vengeance instead of justice I am OK with that.
    Nazis and those who served alongside them deserve nothing in the form of humane treatment for their crimes.

    And call it what you will but the fact remains he was convicted (found guilty) yet he remains free. So this isn't a case of innocent until proven guilty. It's a case of guilty, but free until all your appeals run out (and you hopefully die a free man) before we incarcerate you.

    I re watched the hunt for Mengele the other night and it made my blood boil all over again that he lived out his life in South America.
     
  8. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    It's fairly clear, to me at least, that he is "guilty" mostly because of the political pressure to find him guilty. The fact that he has already served more time than those officers who were truly in charge takes care of the question regarding the severity of the penalty. And as Raab writes, it's pretty easy to sit here and say "I would have never done that," but when your choices are to starve to death naked or to go over and work for the other side for food and clothing -- and we don't know what the work entailed -- applying your sense of morality to that set of circumstances is a dangerous thing.
     
  9. mustangj17

    mustangj17 Active Member

    Innocent unless they can prove otherwise...
     
  10. dreunc1542

    dreunc1542 Active Member

    Complicit. Not complicate.
     
  11. NoOneLikesUs

    NoOneLikesUs Active Member

    It doesn't matter that he was in the Red Army initially fighting against the Nazis? And that he was captured, sent to a concentration camp and trained by Nazis to do whatever it was he did at Sobibor?

    It seems to me that he had two choices, do the Nazis' bidding or die. And I would say he's garnered some significant level of punishment already. There was no sense in taking it to this extreme.
     
  12. Boom_70

    Boom_70 Well-Known Member

    Send in Seal Team 6 and put a bullet in his eye I say.

    I wonder if 40 years from now, when we finally locate Mullah Omar working at the Toyota plant in Kentucky, if we will feel the same.
     
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