“It’s about the concrete responsibility she had in the daily functioning of the camp,” said Peter Müller-Rakow of the public prosecutor’s offices in Itzehoe, north of Hamburg....With the last people involved in carrying out atrocities for the Nazi regime close to death, German authorities have been pushing hard to bring as many of them as possible to justice....“It’s a real milestone in judicial accountability,” said Onur Özata, a lawyer representing survivors in the trial of the former camp secretary. “The fact that a secretary in this system, a bureaucratic cog, can be brought to justice is something new.”
Something so new, for someone so old, who was once someone so young.
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I’m just spitballing here, but I’d guess her lawyer’s strategy will be to delay.
1) She’s 95, leave her alone.
2) Prosecute her and the even worse old Nazis who got away will at least have to look over their shoulder.
I have to go with the second option. Some things are unforgivable.
She may have been under 21 when she committed her crimes, but when she committed her crimes, under 21 didn’t get you much leniency.
tim maguire said...
She may have been under 21 when she committed her crimes
how old is "Under 21"? She was working as a secretary which sure sounds like an adult job
let's see,
she's 95 now, 2021-95= born in 1926
so, she was 18 in 1944
How many Germans were 18 in 1944? How many were executed? Oh! Never Mind; they were men!
It could be that she was a younger teenager doing the job of secretary because older young women were moved into factories and other more demanding positions to support the effort. And how might a 15yo react to being put in that situation?
This effort does nothing.
well, That didn't take me long! From Last November
Friedrich Karl Berger 94, who served as SS guard in a Nazi concentration camp and lived undetected in the US for more than 60 years will be deported to Germany after losing immigration appeal
Her actions took place from 1943 to 1945. She says her windows faced away from the camp. The evidence against her has to do with papers that she would have seen and therefore her knowledge of the system that she did secretarial work for.
Wonder what she was thinking about the last 70 years or so.
The targeting that is happening now is based on survival to old age.
February, 2096: In the United States, they are trying a 95-year-old man for membership in the College Republicans while he was 18.
Before commenting in a "shoot from the hip" manner, I went to watch this again.
What would you do?
She was 15, and was six or seven when Hitler and the Nazis swept themselves into power. The Nazis were a pinnacle of evil we instinctively wish to eradicate from any possibility of duplication in the future.
Here's what my own contrarian keeps asking, though. Is there a point at which the effort to remove the stain becomes its own form of cruelty? How strong was your will when you were 15? Did you have the ability or moral strength to call out the Nazis who ran your world?
Inspector Javert nods and looks us knowingly in the eye. Thank God if you are lucky enough to never have to answer these questions in this manner. The shadow of evil is longest when its sun is about to set. It's hard to be human.
Yes Nazis suck but prosecuting a 95 y.o. Nazi secretary seems a bit much, is this really the best use of government resources?
I’d say Germany has lost its mind.
But I’d be throwing stones from America.
This looks like battle field Prep for Pelosi/Schiff
This creates constitutional precedent to try Donald Trump for his crimes when he was 17.
As a German Prosecutor, it probably doesn’t get better than trying Nazi concentration camp officials.
It more than makes up for the humiliation you feel bending down to use the little drinking fountains in Juvenile Court.
If they've taken five years to investigate her, it doesn't sound like they're "pushing hard" to get this done.
"How many Germans were 18 in 1944? How many were executed? Oh! Never Mind; they were men!"
So to make up for all the males killed, 1939-1945, Germany's post-war leaders reasoned that a Gast-Arbetier (guest workers) program would be just what the doctor ordered.
"Ja, that's it. We'll bring in people, mostly male, from a different culture with a different & belligerent religion. They'll easily fit in and become the New Germans."
So the Germans, allowing themselves to be tricked into installing an Austrian madman as their chancellor, smiled broadly as this madman began swallowing other European countries. Their smiles continuing until this path lead them to murder and devastation, both of others and of themselves. Then, to help pull the remnants of their people and country from the adverse consequences of that madman decision they import a bunch of moon worshipers who became the Guests Who Wouldn't Leave and are now taking over the place, especially after their chosen leader invited, in 2015, millions more moon worshipers. As welfare dependents = at the expense of the German taxpayer.
Why do Germans have a reputation for clear thinking?
And yet we treat the American men and women who, as adults, supported this evil regime, Nazi Germany, almost as saints, if they are on the left and they have Communist as one of their descriptors. (And especially if they are academics.) Now why is that?
I had family in the camps, and one was murdered at Auschwitz. I don't excuse what happened or diminish the suffering. But I don't know about this. I wonder what a teenager could have done in those circumstances.
Now do George Soros.
This seems a reach too far. She was not the Kommandant. She was an 18 year old secretary. The entirety of Germany would have to be held culpable if you're going after an 18 yo secretary. Of course she knew what was going on then. So did Franklin Delano Roosevelt So did the entire British, American, Russian, French, Polish, etc. governments. And most of the press, including the NYT, who was still admiring their Pulitzer for praising Joe Stalin's genocide of Ukrainians.
This is such balderdash. And, to me it only expands on our practice in Western culture now, to go after people daily for things they did or said decades earlier. Don't worry. If the Left continues to gain power, everyone will have to explain their past words or actions soon enough.
Now that the COVID pandemic has a vaccine, Germany has a found a new way to remove their non-productive pensioners. Assume if they are over 90, they most likely served for the Nazis and then launch an investigation. They are always looking for an angle to get rid of undesirables.
If Cuomo is someday held legally accountable for the nursing home deaths in New York, what charges will his secretary face?
My mind's ear can hear Sgt Schultz "I see nothing! I hear nothing! I know nothing, nothing!".
From the BBC: "Ex-commandant Paul Werner Hoppe was given a nine-year jail term in Bochum in 1957.
Last year Bruno Dey, 93, a former Stutthof guard, got a two-year suspended prison sentence in Hamburg for complicity in mass murder."
Okay, so the actual commandant of Stutthof got nine years in jail in 1957 and last year an actual guard got a two year suspended sentence. So, let's pull the 95 y/o commandant's former 18 year old "stenographer and secretary" out of the "care home" in which she currently resides and really lay the wood to her.
Pathetic! Now do George Soros.
I'm all for prosecuting Nazis who personally brutalized camp prisoners, or carried out reprisals against civilians, or held some policymaking role that materially stepped up the killings. Even if they're very near the end of a very long life.
But a teenage secretary? Come on. You've run out of real malefactors. Declare victory.
(And now I see jaydub's comment, which makes it worse.)
If convicted, what will be her penalty? Germany does not have the death penalty. Are they going to lock a geriatric patient in a prison (she’s probably “in prison” now in a single room care facility with COVID all around her). Leave her out on an ice floe?
What was her crime? She wasn’t a teenage instigator of the atrocities; she’s basically accused of turning a blind eye to what was going on in the camp. Is there evidence that she somehow encouraged those actions, and did that encouragement make any difference to what the leaders were doing? Or was she just a teenager swept up in what basically all Germans were doing at that time - implicitly turning a blind eye to the actions of their government? Should all Germans from that era who did not explicitly become resistance fighters be tried? You’ve got to draw a line somewhere, and trying to convict a 95 year old woman who for the last 70-some-odd years has been living peacefully (if not with some amount of guilt on her conscience as fitting to her level of compliance in the overall efforts of the Nazis) seems to be taking revenge a bit too far to me.
A “highly complicated case” indeed.
Germans have never really changed. I've lived there.
If they put her in jail, she'll be an old woman when she gets out.
I read the Manchester biography of MacArthur. The Japanese committed a great many war crimes. MacArthur was quite lenient. There were only nine Japanese who were tried and executed as war criminals. I read elsewhere that the Japanese physician who directed and performed experimental operations without anesthesia on American airmen was only given a prison term of a few years. That physician later went on to become director of the Japanese Red Cross. And, of course, the atrocities committed by the Japanese on Americans were nothing compared to what they did in China. Does anyone know if any of them were ever tried for the crimes committed there? ....This old lady may have done something very wrong in her youth, but to try her now just demonstrates how ineffective and fickle human beings are at meting out justice.
Does this mean they'll be hunting down former Trump supporters 80 years from now?
At 18 years old, in Nazi Germany, you did as you were told. The propaganda machine was in full swing, so was convinced that she was doing the right thing. When you are helpless to do anything you will rationalize what is happening just to stay sane - and alive.
Not all Germans were Nazis. It seems we have completely lost sight of how propaganda works.
One day, today's supporters of communism might be looked upon as being just as vile as Nazis. I hope. Would not the secretaries to Party Members in the Soviet Union be just as aware of the vile behavior of their bosses, as was this Nazi secretary?
Does this mean they'll be hunting down former Trump supporters 80 years from now?
It's unlikely that they'll wait.
Not all Germans were Nazis. It seems we have completely lost sight of how propaganda works.
“I myself [Shirer speaking] was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for the truth, said they were.”
Shirer’s Rise & Fall, pp. 247-248
I guess it's too late for Trump to pardon this war criminal. Deplorables hardest hit.... unexpectedly
And I suppose that were this legal tactic to be used in France, they'd be shaving the heads of 95 year old women who collaborated.
Does this mean they'll be hunting down former Trump supporters 80 years from now?
Nope. Former Trump supporters and descendants of Trump supporters will be hunting down Democrats.
Everybody look at how virtuous we are, that we prosecute this woman!
Everybody listen to our virtuous speeches during her trial!
What kind of culture prosecutes a 95 year old woman for being a secretary to a bad guy when she was 18?
The Reader had a stupid plot. Of course, if you were a concentration camp guard, you knew what was going whether you could read or not (Spoiler alert!). But it's harder to make the case that being a teenaged secretary in a camp should actually get someone jail time. Probably she'll make a deal and be dead soon enough.
Germans are certainly taking theSchriebtischtäter thing seriously - and literally - , but it was meant to apply more to Eichmann than to his cleaning lady. Traudl Junge, who briefly became famous for being Hitler's secretary before passing away, probably wasn't responsible for any of his major decisions.
All commanders and high-ranking officers in the SS, particularly those in the Einsatzgruppen and Ordnungpolizei should have been executed in the immediate aftermath of the war. High-ranking Wehrmacht and Waffen SS officers who were involved in the commission of war crimes and non-judicial killings of prisoners of war and civilians or who facilitated the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and Ordnungpolizei should have been executed. Lower-ranking soldiers down to the level of private soldier in the latter organizations, including death camp personnel directly involved in the murder of inmates via the gas chambers, beatings, shootings, or other means should have been identified and executed.
In the event, only a very few Germans involved in the commission of war crimes paid with their lives for their involvement. Postwar Germany was swarming with unpunished and unrepentant mass killers as a result.
It would seem difficult to make a case that she is a threat to participate in mass murder again.
In the event, only a very few Germans involved in the commission of war crimes paid with their lives for their involvement. Postwar Germany was swarming with unpunished and unrepentant mass killers as a result.
I get it, dead men (and women) kill no more.
But the risk in this situation seems acceptable.
It’s 2021. You have taken - at point of gun - $1M (or whatever, just let’s use a round number here) of taxpayer money to ensure that Justice reigns in the local district where this woman lives. Sure, there are murders, assault, theft, and people abusing children as recently as last month, but you want to take 5% of your budget to chase down and indict in court 95 yr old women who served as a typist in 1945 when they were 18, for what is in 2021 a universally condemned evil enterprise. Sure your time and the courts time is also a rare commodity, but I guess finding and prosecuting that guy who raped someone in 2020 can wait until after we build and get this other case before the judge.
I am wondering if Germany took that % of taxpayer-based funding, and instead of putting it towards whatever eager legal resources are being put in 2021 against one 95 yr old woman, maybe move that same % of funding towards other ways to (1) reduce present day antisemitism or (2) purposeful ways for Germany to demonstrably atone for the sins of their fathers.
Would the great nephew of people murdered in the camps, now living in Israel, think Germany might spend its taxpayer money on a single court case against a 95yr old or would the resources be better used if they got sent to Jerusalem to help find the guys who are willing to kill a 18yr old Jew (for being a Jew) tomorrow in the markets?
Which act would suggest you have learned the lessons from that war? Which act would suggest you care about a future where the Jewish people are freed from the persecutions they faced in the past?
I think the word is kabuki.
If you want to both (1) express contrition for your nations past act and (2) show to the world that you are no longer anti-Semitic, you would use the resources available to you in a way which would be more productive.
I mean, this women may again sign up to serve for a new revamped SS like she did 78 years ago.
But I betcha if you were more concerned with actual results rather than performance, hmmm there might be ways you can try to deter an 18yr old woman in 2021 from helping to kill Jews today more than does this act.
The people who are still alive who committed or facilitated the myriad war crimes of the Nazi regime are very few in number and very old. They should be left alone. The time is well past for bringing them to justice. That should have been done in the immediate aftermath of the war. Soon they will meet God face-to-face and, one would hope, be compelled to account for their actions.
This is absurd.
It's true. There is no avoiding her being placed in the dock before the judge to face justice.
It is also true that each and every one of us will also be in the dock before the judge to face justice.
Don't think that we or this country are so innocent.
It was suggested that it should be policy to kill all of the enemy's leadership and even many private soldiers.
You realize what effect such a practice would have on the next enemy and whether he agrees to surrender or fight to the bitter end with millions more being slaughtered?
The reason that the world has not seen World War III is precisely because it did not insist upon such retribution at the end of World War II. And the reason it DID see World War II was because at Versailles it did impose harsh retribution.
I recall the song:
Ven der rockets go up
Who cares where they go down.
Dats not my department
Says Verner Von Braun.
Von Braun built war rockets that targeted civilians with slave labor yet is a heroic figure in the US. In fiction the 95 year old would sneak a knife into the court and when called, would say “you want a show trial? “. Then cut her own throat and bleed on the judges.
I got your Kafka right here...
Of course, in the United States, it is the prosecution, which must never end, for the crime of slavery and benefiting from slavery.
A crime so great and demanding such justice that even those who say, "With malice toward none, with charity for all," must be put on trial and condemned 155 years later as ultimately being collaborators in slavery.
This is from NPR's telling of the charge:
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/05/964426537/german-woman-95-charged-with-complicity-in-more-than-10-000-murders-during-wwii
"In an interview with public broadcaster NDR in late 2019, the woman, who was identified as "Irmgard F.," said she has repeatedly given witness accounts to authorities about what she saw and did at the Stutthof camp.
Speaking at her home in a retirement community, the woman also said that she wasn't aware of mass poisonings or other acts of genocide — in part because her office window faced outward from the camp. It wasn't until after the war, she said, that she learned of the horrific acts that took place inside. Before that revelation, she said she had assumed that anyone who was executed in the camp had done something to deserve it.
Irmgard F. said she testified about the camp in the 1950s; a few years later, Stutthof's commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe was sentenced to prison. Hoppe dictated letters to his secretary, who also handled correspondence and radio traffic, according to NDR."
So she cooperated with prosecutors -- or "ratted out" her "colleagues" -- over the decades, and now the "enlightened" German prosecutors go after her.
Considering we're still early in 2021, and we don't know when her birthday is, I'd guess she was likely born in 1925. She probably was 19 when the war ended. The Germans are just going out of their way to make an example of her.
"Why do Germans have a reputation for clear thinking?"
Odd that they lost two incredibly destructive world wars in the 20th century, and they're still the dominant power in the EU.
Impeach and try Lincoln. By not burning to the ground and salting all of the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line, he incited the subsequent KKK violence, Jim Crow, and segregation. Impeach him and put him on trial in the Senate.
She legally changed her name to 'Sgt. Schultz' and was immediately acquitted.
I suppose it is ironic that the German bureaucratic state, whose peak in the early 20th century enabled the atrocities, is now going after a girl born just as the atrocities of the Soviets were overcoming inhibitions Germans might have had after generations of inculcation by the German professors. The passage below gives context, but to get a sense of fascism prior to Hitler, I recommend Mises' 'Liberalism' (1927), which is a leap over the later Soviet and WWII propaganda we were all steeped in. Not an advocacy, just a pragmatic account in time.
"For more than seventy years the German professors of political science, history, law, geography and philosophy eagerly imbued their disciples with a hysterical hatred of capitalism, and preached the war of “liberation” against the capitalistic West. The German “socialists of the chair,” much admired in all foreign countries, were the pacemakers of the two World Wars. At the turn of the century the immense majority of the Germans were already radical supporters of socialism and aggressive nationalism. They were then already firmly committed to the principles of Nazism. What was lacking and was added later was only a new term to signify their doctrine.
"When the Soviet policies of mass extermination of all dissenters and of ruthless violence removed the inhibitions against wholesale murder, which still troubled some of the Germans, nothing could any longer stop the advance of Nazism. "
--von Mises, Ludwig (1947). Planned Chaos
In the United States, criminal offences require a criminal act ("actus reus") and a criminal intention ("mens rea"). In these trials of former Nazi officials, we see an extraordinary loosening of basic legal terms. No specific acts are ever alleged. Just participating in the Holocaust was enough.
Anyways, after WW2, denazification (never fully completed) took place within all layers of German society. The Nazis were routed out of government and administration, including in the economic sphere, culture, judiciary and government. Then the Cold War came and people sort of forget about the Nazis. I think we will go through a similar detrumpification of our society. Say goodbye to Lou Dobbs, Kelly Ann Conway and her slutty daughter, etc.
alt-German History would be what if Hitler had co-opted Jews also in Sozialismus
I am sure there were good Jews as well as good Germans = accepting of statism
anti-fascism is essentially virtue signaling to be on side of communists
If you can't do the time don't do the crime.
It will be a ghastly postscript to all those crimes committed in WWII that they end with the prosecution of a teen aged typist.....There were a lot of Germans complicit in great crimes during that era who went to lead pleasant, comfortable lives. That's true, but you can also argue that there were more Germans prosecuted for war their war crimes than the criminals in other land.....As noted above, MacArthur gave most of the Japanese a pass for their crimes. The Russian who supervised the Katyn massacre died an honored man with a chest full of medals....The human race is not very good at dispensing equitable justice. I recently watched the trial scene in Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare presents it as a model of Christian mercy and justice. It's not. It's appalling. Everyone looks bad: Shylock, Portia, the good citizens of Venice, poetry lovers. Everybody.
and how many Ost Deutcher are Stasi?
"and how many Ost Deutcher are Stasi?"
Merkel for a start...
The Russian who supervised the Katyn massacre died an honored man with a chest full of medals.
Not true, if you're referring to Vasily Blokhin, who personally executed, with a pistol, some 7,000 Polish POWs in the Katyn action. According to Wikipedia (and other corroborating sources), "Blokhin was forcibly retired in 1953 following Stalin's death that March. . . . After Beria's fall from power in June of the same year, Blokhin's rank was stripped from him in the de-Stalinization campaigns of Nikita Khrushchev. He reportedly sank into alcoholism and serious mental illness, and died on 3 February 1955, with the official cause of death listed as "suicide."
It is equally possible that he was murdered at Khrushchev's behest.
The reason that the world has not seen World War III is precisely because it did not insist upon such retribution at the end of World War II. And the reason it DID see World War II was because at Versailles it did impose harsh retribution.
You're wrong on both counts.
The communist-socialist-fascist axis. The democratic/dictatorial duality. An ostensibly "secular" Pro-Choice quasi-religious philosophy (e.g. "ethics"). Diversity [dogma] only serves to accelerate its progress.
I would think threatening prosecution of a teenage clerical worker is a prosecutorial tactic to get her to "flip" on her superiors.
Perpetual war, eye for eye, continual demanding of justice for the latest outrage by the other side, is hardly the way. Again, we broke that cycle in 1945. Bad idea to resurrect it today -- although the culture is certainly trying to do so.
bonkti - she already flipped. Years ago. That is the evidence that they are now using against her.
Sank into "mental illness" -- ha, ha, ha. EVERYONE (save one apparently) knows what that means.
And "it is equally [certain] that he was murdered."
Meanwhile, did everyone hear that the Russian doctor who treated Alexey Navalny has suddenly and mysteriously died?
Like a lot of Russian journalists who have mysteriously fallen from the top of buildings to their deaths.
From Vox --
Why are Russian coronavirus doctors mysteriously falling out of windows?
The three main theories, explained.
THREE theories????
Did I say it was from Vox?
Sank into "mental illness" -- ha, ha, ha. EVERYONE (save one apparently) knows what that means.
Presumably your "save one" refers to the author of the article -- and even he, it bears noting, qualified this judgment by enclosing "suicide" within quotes.
Strike one.
Try again.
I wrote to express disagreement with William when he said that "the Russian who supervised the Katyn massacre died an honored man with a chest full of medals." He did not die honored with a chest full of medals -- far from it. The manner of his passing is irrelevant to my pointing this out. I am agnostic on that issue. As it happens, however, I think he was murdered; I also believe he did sink into depression and suicide before his demise at the hands of Soviet executioners. But that's irrelevant to my point, which was to observe, contra William's statement, that he escaped negative consequences for his actions.
Which part of this don't you understand?
"that he did NOT escape"
No matter what angle I choose to examine this it strikes me as wrong.
Of course, in the United States, it is the prosecution, which must never end, for the crime of slavery and benefiting from slavery.
A crime so great and demanding such justice that even those who say, "With malice toward none, with charity for all," must be put on trial and condemned 155 years later as ultimately being collaborators in slavery.
The irony is that the only reason we even have a memory of slavery in the United States is that we are proud of our past. We are practically the only nation to have fought a war to end slavery in the last several hundred years. And the sole other nation would be the British Empire, which is what we came from, and which after benefitting from slavery for many hundreds of years, had a change of heart, and ended up hunting down slave traders around the world.
It might seem implausible to the reader that the United States could have easily pulled off this feat of forgetting its history of slavery except that the list is so amazingly long of all the many, many nations that have done exactly that.
And this forgetting has been so amazingly successful that likely well over 98% of the world population can't even begin to list all the nations and peoples that have had slaves within the last 250 years.
Why do Germans have a reputation for clear thinking?
They don't. From Hegel to Heidegger Germans indulged in a lot of woolly, unclear thinking. Germany's reputation was more for deep thinking, but only a small percent of any country's population comes close to thinking deeply.
The Germans also have a reputation for good engineering and precision work. But there was a grandiose, overdramatic strain in the country, a longing for glory even if it meant risking self-destruction. The French had it too, back in the days of Louis XIV and Napoleon. The German problem was that they had it when the weapons were much more deadly.
Well, if everyone's still here . . .
For all the foot-dragging, finger-pointing, half-hearted efforts, light sentences, whataboutism and excusism, consider that the country that has prosecuted the largest number of war criminals and meted out the most punishment to them is Germany. World beaters at that, anyway, considering that they have to do it legally now.
One of the more interesting genres of Whatiffery is on display on this thread, the one in which a big problem with a great cataclysm like WWII or the Holocaust is that not enough people were executed.
Narr
Uncle Joe seemed of that mind
"Not true, if you're referring to Vasily Blokhin, who personally executed, with a pistol, some 7,000 Polish POWs in the Katyn action."
Wow that would have taken more than 150 hours, not counting time to let the pistol cool down. An evil man, but what dedication!
If 18-year-old secretaries are now liable to prosecution, I suppose we'll have to start prosecuting everyone who served with the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib, including Iraqi civilian employees, not just those who committed atrocities on the prisoners there.
If convicted, what will be her penalty? Germany does not have the death penalty.
She should be sent away to reform school until she turns 21.
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