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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. Sorry, spell check.
     
  2. Except they did. He was found guilty!
     
  3. Tell that to the Jews he was guarding.

    Again, he had some tough choices to make in life but he made the wrong one and needs to pay for it.
     
  4. LongTimeListener

    LongTimeListener Well-Known Member

    Didn't that Raab article say he was initially found guilty in Israel until later evidence emerged that he couldn't possibly have been where they said he was?
     
  5. Smash Williams

    Smash Williams Well-Known Member

    LTL - exactly. And even the current evidence against him is not exactly rock solid. To use the American standard (and I'm not sure which the Germans use), there's no way the evidence proves he was there beyond a reasonable doubt.

    The American agency that pursued him and apparently collected the few pieces of evidence against him was cited by US courts for "reckless disregard for the truth." If that's not enough to introduce reasonable doubt, I don't know what is.

    Evil - it seems like he is free because of the appeal, which would be part of Germany's due process. In fact, the article you quote says releasing a guy pending appeal is not common. Given that, you have to let the process run its course.

    Hell, the Israelis said even if this guy was a low-level POW-guard at Sobibor, there is no way to prove it and they consider the matter closed. If it's good enough for the Israeli Supreme Court, why isn't it good enough for you?

    Finally, where do you stop with the "making the wrong choices?" Remember, a fair number of Jews were also integral parts of the operations of the death camps because they either did the jobs of the sonderkommando them or were sent to the gas chambers themselves. The POW-guards either faced probable starvation, death marches and gassing themselves in the POW camps if they did not cooperate - it wasn't like they said "Fuck it, I'm gonna be a Nazi because I like to goose step."
     
  6. YankeeFan

    YankeeFan Well-Known Member

    Dead:

    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-germany-demjanjukbre82g08y-20120317,0,5523438.story
     
  7. eiregi

    eiregi Member

    and Cheney avoids Canada because of 'security issues'... If what Demjanjuk did (and i believe he did)... he deserved the what that was brought upon him... As a Republican voter I find myself conflicted... one may say that 'I did what I had to do'.. While others say circa 2000's... (pause).... take them out...in the end 'no winners'... except for those who never look upon the past and neglect the lessons...
     
  8. Very conflicted on this, like anyone who's followed the case for a long time (and even I came in late...this story really goes back to the 1970s).

    The main source of my conflict is that they took him away to the home he had known for 30 years, tried him in a foreign court for the most heinous crime imaginable, told everyone that their was rock-solid evidence of his guilt and that he must be executed, had many many people swear beyond a reasonable doubt that he was Ivan the Terrible...and then guess what? They were stupendously, horribly wrong.

    No reasonable observer can watch that unfold and not be skeptical of future efforts to prosecute him, especially since he maintained his innocence unequivocally in the 1970s and 1980s, nobody believed him and yet he was telling the truth the whole time.

    Then there are other issues of WW2 -- the bizarre sight of Germany (!) prosecuting and trying to imprison an elderly Eastern European man for crimes against the Jews. If you know people whose grandparents grew up in those Eastern satellite nations, it's conflicting for them too, because imagine being a young man of that age and being caught between the murderous regimes of Stalin and Hitler...I don't know...war is a messy thing and as much as we love to see things in black and white (especially WW2, our "good war") there are often shades of gray, especially for people who experience war on their soil in a much more vivid way than any of us in the U.S. ever have.

    So, long story short, I don't know how to feel. Whether he was a monster or a victim or somewhere in between, I do have great sympathy for his family, as they've been through a lot. Hope they'll find some peace.
     
  9. Stitch

    Stitch Active Member

    No sympathy, especially for the fake illness crap he tried to pull during his deportation saga.
     
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