Very true.

I don't really see what it's meant to achieve. He's practically dead already, it's not going to heal any wounds and he's not directly responsible for any of it :shrug: but I'm not going to lose sleep over his situation.

My Grandmother is also in her 90s. She's far from dead despite the start in life she had. She still ballroom dances, shops, enjoys her family... unlike 6 million who weren't so lucky. Her life is as valid as anyone else's. This man, although also in his 90s, has received justice at long last. He was an officer, not an ordinary solider, and was found guilty in a German court of law guilty of being accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews so all the supposition that he wasn't responsible and was only following orders is, in my opinion, apologetic hogwash. Never forget. Never forget. Never forget.

I do think he has some responsibility. Saying he was 'just following orders' takes away from the fact that he presumably did very much believe in the Nazi cause. There's nothing unusual about that: large swathes of the German population did. It goes beyond psychological defects and deference to authority - this was an ideology that enamoured millions of people and that they were utterly convinced of. He was a cog in the machine and so I do understand the argument in favour of jailing him. I think he does as well really - he has accepted all through the trial that he bears a moral responsibility for being swept along in the Nazi vision. My qualms are more just about whether this is really in the public interest and whether it's not just some attempt to make up for those who played a much bigger part and yet escaped justice.

But, like Shaun, I won't lose sleep over it.

Many war criminals have been jailed over the years as their deeds have been dragged into the light. Many were executed, and rightly in my opinion. And yes, you're right, the German people were swept along with it. The treatment of Jews by the ordinary German people even outside the camps was a blight on their history and one that Germany has gone to great lengths to try to put right.

Well exactly, and I have a suspicion that this is more about Germany doing some "final bits of putting things right" with the last few scrappy officers they can find alive in order to bookend the war and go forward with a laundered reputation once the war passes out of living memory. I get that there are still a few surviving people from that era but my original point was that, in a couple of decades time, there won't be. That means that Germany only has a few years to squeeze in a few final convictions for brownie points. This guy was barely out of his teens during the war and is now pushing 100... The fact is, there simply aren't any of the real ghouls of WW2 left to convict. They were either caught and tried long ago or they've already lived out their lives free and died.

This guy, if you read the articles, really can't be described as much more than a minor cog in the SS machine. Does that make him an innocent? No, it does sound like he was self-serving and at the very least took advantage of a "privileged" posting even if he is being truthful about not being 100% on board with it. But it does marginally make him little more than a scapegoat for the really awful ones who are long gone.

I understand that this cynical viewpoint is your own opinion TS. I disagree with it 100%. I've said all I have to say about it.

.....the absolute truth of it is that some people would do whatever was asked of them and some people wouldn't do it, which is why through history we have people reacting differently in extreme and extraordinary situations...and by your own reasoning then, you have no idea how you would feel yourself about his sentencing unless you were personally touched in your life by his being a 'small cog'...would you still think it was pointless after such a long time that he be answerable for his part...in as much certainty that I can ever have of anything in life, I know that a life of living and knowledge of being a part of that would be far worse for me than a nothingness of death...

...everyone in the Nazi regime was answerable to Hitler so if no one 'could help' what their role was, then no one was answerable to any war crime, even if they let the gas into gas chambers themselves, surely..?...but that's not the case is it because every part of that cog played a part in mass genocide...Oskar Gröning's part and what he was 'forced' to do/'had no choice' was only over for a few years of his life, he's had over 70yrs since then (and through his own free choice..)...to have made himself answerable and if he had done that, then maybe at 94yrs of age, he would be a free man and with his family...I've read up a little bit about him and after the war he took full advantage of his position in the Nazi Party to gain back his old job and to prosper from there, refusing to acknowledge anything he did even to his own family...he chose to 'hide' and to forget/his own free choice and all for his own self preservation...nothing 'given back' to a race of Jews in his conscience for anything he did in his war years....no signs of 'I'm sorry..'....


..I'd like to think that this sentencing is not just the court's final bits of putting things right but an acknowledgement that he could not be left unanswerable and he could not go without some punishment, regardless of his age because as I say, he very much had a choice through his life of accepting his accountability without it being forced on him...and of course he's not a monster, he's every bit a human being which is why also we should never forget, we should never forget what some humans are capable of and we should never forget that they feel they can escape accountability because they are old...

Hasn't he openly talked about his experiences in the last couple of decades though as a way to combat holocaust denial? That is something at least

Personally I fail to now see what imprisoning someone who is 94 is going to achieve rather than just vengeance,rather than justice.
I said earlier,my Grandfather who was in the war, said much the same to me about things like this as Toy Soldier was saying.
That most German soldiers were doing what they were told to do,had they not they would have been liekly killed and their families suffer too.
Just as,as my Grandfather said, all soldiers in the war were obeying orders for their Nations heads too.
My Grandfather said he never actually wanted to go and kill anyone but had to or be punished himself or killed himself.
That is the futility and price of so called 'glory'.
He was sickened for the rest of his life by what he came across and was unfurled as to what the Germans had done to so many people, Jews,disabled and gay people and Gypsies.

Having said that and it is my position still to be slightly more with Toy Soldier on this one,there is of course the other side of it that I can equally see and therein Livia makes really strong points too.
Livia speaks, and with authority, for all who lost many in the holocaust and those who almost did lose friends and families too.
Whether some did get freed eventually and could be considered the lucky ones from this horrific nightmare,those people freed will have certainly lost friends and family at some point during the barbaric and inhuman actions of Germany.
It is then understandable the strong line from Livia, especially as to her own Grandmother too.

So while we can look at this and for some of us, see no point in these trials or imprisonments,it has to be equally taken on board that those who lost so many are fully entitled to some recognition of a fact than such inhuman and heartless actions against other human beings can never be reconciled or indeed forgiven really.
Also as Livia says, the World should never,never ever forget.
I hope we don't ever forget.

It should never be forgotten but equally important is that the truth of it should never be forgotten. There is a real danger in remembering "bogeymen" in place of people when it comes to the horrors of the past. It is important to remember but also important to understand - and the latter is something that many, understandably I suppose, instinctual pull away from.

We must remember what happened, yes.

We must also remember how easy it was for normal people to be indoctrinated into regarding other humans as less than human.

We must also acknowledge that many people did many horrific things under order, in order to protect themselves and those around them.

We must acknowledge and remember these things because failing to do so edges us closer to believing that the same thing couldn't happen again, at any time, anywhere. That there was something inherently different about people in Nazi Germany that means it "couldn't happen now" or "couldn't be us or our governments".

100% agree with that statement too.

This is a complex issue that I could debate endlessly... and never come to the same conclusion. He was there, on the right side of the fence. Regardless of his attitude or why he was there, whether he enjoyed it, whether he pulled a trigger or not; he knew what was going on there.

I've been to Sachsenhausen. We walked the route from the train station that any of the transported prisoners would have walked to the camp. The townspeople in Oranienburg feigned ignorance and said they had no idea what was going on in a camp that was on the edge of their town - it would have been impossible to not know. German guilt has translated into convictions for war crimes and while I think that's a good thing, the world at large can only lament that it took so long for them to start doing so.

While I think it's ultimately a bit fruitless to be prosecuting a 90-something Nazi bookkeeper for war crimes, I think it's symbolic of the fact that justice has eventually been dealt - it might not be much and it will certainly never be enough to make up for what happened but it's the best anyone can do at this stage and I'm sure that for anyone who lost someone they loved to the Nazi concentration camps, this is still an important conviction.

Yes, he was probably swept up in what he had to do to survive - it wasn't his fault personally that concentration camps came to be... but he was there. He was a witness, an accessory, a cog in a machine and he had to make the tough choice between surviving by any means or being killed himself. He made his choice and lived to be in his 90s. All choices have consequences.

If you are a member of the armed forces are you an accessory any more than the civilians, is it not true that not duped into believing what they did was for the greater good, everyone is conditioned by their respective leaders that what they do is against a malevolent force.
This man is a scapegoat, he followed orders as all servicemen and women and as at risk as anyone he processed. It's strange how things work, our war criminals get state funerals.

It should serve as a warning for everyone even our own troops today in the Middle East that even though they think they are just doing their job today they are infact murdering people at the request of their superiors and history might not be on their side in the future. Murder is Murder however you paint it.

:worship::clap1: No sympathy for the old bastard at all,he is old now and looks harmless,his deeds were abhorrent,and he needs punishing even if it is a bit lame.

Very true.

They're viewed as a hero now but who knows what in 50 years time, could be facing a similar fate.

A similar fate? You think our troops are building concentration camps? When my husband served in Afghanistan the only thing he participated in building was a school. The Taliban bombed it twice and they built it back up again. Everything the British Army does is in line with the Geneva Convention The UN Charter on War and other laws. If they're broken the troops are brought to account. You either have a deep misunderstanding of the Nazis or of the British Army, or both.

That's all true Livia, however blairs illegal bombing which killed a million innocent people is one of the worst atrocities in human history and should be viewed as such. Blair and bush should be treated as war criminals and brought before the international criminal court in the hague. These pathetic multi million pound 10 year whitewash investigations are an insult

A similar fate I said, not a similar crime. Not from our perspective at least.

Is Tony Blair not accused of starting an illegal war in Iraq?

Yes, Tony Blair. That's a whole different thread.

To be pragmatic, though, there is no difference between the pilots who dropped bombs under orders in Bush and Blair's illegal war and the German soldiers who invaded the bulk of Europe in WW2.

I can, however, appreciate that there is a difference between the actions of a boots-on-the-ground soldier and an officer in a prison camp, so whilst it would be fair to compare the British armed forces to the general German army in WW2, you can't really compare them to the man that this thread is about.

Some people seem to have a strange perception over what is legal and what is not. It is not illegal to bomb another country and Blair did get parliaments approval for taking the action. He did not authorise or participate in war crimes.

Not at all, he was PM and he allegedly started a war without any of the safeguards in place you mentioned, how was that possible?

The focus of the issue is this. If someone is an accomplice in breaking peoples fundamental human rights, it is a personal responsibility that cannot be passed on to a more senior ranking person. The same principles apply now in many walks of life. If the person was coerced into doing it, then of course it puts a different slant on it, but that's what courts are there for.

I don't think there is any suggestion that there is any impropriety in the court coming to its conclusion, and the accused does still have the right to appeal, so in my opinion, whatever the final conclusion is, it will be the correct judgement.

''So few of those responsible for the genocide of Europe’s Jews have been held to account in postwar Germany that the German writer and Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano described it as a “second guilt”.
But in 2011 a German court found John Demjanjuk, a Soviet prisoner-of-war who volunteered as an SS guard, guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp.
When Thomas Walther, a government official tasked with investigating Nazi crimes, sought to bring charges against Demjanjuk, his colleagues laughed.
But the case overturned years of legal precedent in the German courts that only the senior Nazi leadership could be held responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust. For the first time, anyone who had been a guard at a death camp could be held guilty.''

So it seems that Germany only decided to try any SS officer from 2011, wonder what prompted the change.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...to-murder.html

Because time marches on and the millions of people who lost their families to the genocide carried out by the Nazi regime deserve justice, even if it's down to the dregs of the Nazi party. There is a difference between what the Nazis did to Jews, gays, gypsies, the disabled and anyone else they saw fit to put into their government sanctioned slaughter houses; and what happens in the usual horrors of war. This was something extraordinary in the literal meaning of the word - the world had never seen anything quite like it and I hope will never see it again... I'd hope that the same justice would be dished out to any perpetrators in the Rwandan genocide or if/when the North Korean regime falls and the extent of what happens in the gulags over there ever comes to light... but what we have is a German government that has accepted the burden of the past and done its best to try and right the few wrongs they are able to... nothing will change what happened, nothing will change that this particular man went on to lead a full life afterwards... the past cannot be undone, but the future can still be written. Well done to the German legal system for pursuing this line of action - it'll be controversial long after this man dies and the last of those who can remember World War II are gone but at least it was something.

There's a difference between justice and vengeance.

Because he lied about weapons of mass destruction, went so far as to "sex up" a document in order to get Parliament to give him to go ahead. Which they did. It wasn't that long ago, I'm surprised you don't remember it. And it's got little to do with this debate.

There is a difference. Justice happens in a court of law.

Poland since the war have managed to prosecute 700, this was ensuring there were nobody of any real importance left as a scapegoat for the atrocity. This isn't justice frankly it could never be, all this is is too little too late.

It wouldn't take much to confuse parliament would it, Did he also bamboozle the Geneva convention and NATO that he ticked all the boxes on the UN charter?
It has everything to do with the debate, it goes to show when a power is hellbent on a course of action little gets in the way.

Not always, and not exclusively.

a sentence well deserved, but he should feel truly lucky he got to enjoy the best years of his life free. but he should never be free again.

Too little, yes; too late, no. It's a symbolic measure. Everyone can see that. Nothing will repent for what happened but this is better than doing nothing and holding hands up and going :shrug:. This is justice. Vengeance would be capital punishment.

I can't see it, wait until there only not even as many as the fingers on one hand and they are less than a couple of years from death anyway? It's an insult.

It has nothing to do with this. We're discussing someone who was actively involved in the mass slaughter of people in a concentration camp. Some people think he should get away with it scot free after living a long life, others think he should pay, no matter how much time has elapsed. All the diversionary talk about Blair is a separate issue. And we didn't go into that "illegal" war alone. I'm not sure what you mean about "bamboozling the Geneva Convention". The Geneva Convention is a series of four treaties, not a body of people.

I disagree, the fact that there is a question mark over it at all is bad enough, it's irrelevant who else was or was not involved.
Far from being diversionary it's simply to illustrate that however many safeguards, treaties and or bodies of people there may be it happened.
I also disagree with the term actively involved the officer was a book keeper I read he had no say in issuing orders to kill or killing, I can't see how his incarceration in his 90s stands for anything in the grand scheme of things.

The court of law in which he was tried and found guilty had more information than you or I on what he did and didn't do. The term 'bookkeeper' seems a little innocuous for what he was actually doing. So whether or not you think it stands for anything is neither here nor there. I have faith that they came to the right decision.

They have no reason to hold back information as to his level of involvement, the others had their duties exposed in the same way. Had they come to this decision 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50yrs ago it would have been the right one, now there's only those so far down the pecking order left it seems suspect (to me anyway).

I never said they held back information, I said neither you nor I are privy to all the information from the trial. There should be no time cut-off if you've committed a crime (and he has committed a crime because he's been jailed for it) because of advanced age. He is just as guilty today as he was 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years ago. To a lot of the survivors of Auschwitz it feels like it happened yesterday.

I have nothing more to say on this.