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Fugitive Nazis

Archive to open on 'Black Bishop'
Austrian prelate thought to have helped Nazis escape trial
(ANSA) - Vatican City, October 11 - An important Catholic seminary in Rome is to open its archives in order to shed light on an Austrian bishop widely accused of helping Nazi war criminals escape trial after World War II .

Monsignor Alois Hudal, who died in 1963, was head of the Teutonic College in Rome during and immediately after the war. The seminary is the most important centre for the training of German-speaking priests .

He was known for his pro-Nazi views and is alleged to have set up a 'ratline' after the war through which many Nazi war crimes suspects escaped trial. Much of the evidence against against Hudel has been collected by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Jewish organisation which hunts down war criminals. Its founder called the Austrian prelate the 'Black Bishop' .

Among those reportedly helped by Hudel was Franz Stangl, commander of the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland where 800,000 Jews were killed. Hudel is said to have given him a false passport .

The news that the Teutonic College is to open up its records was given by Monsignor Walter Brandmueller, head of the Pontifical Council for Historical Studies .

"At the moment we don't know whether the archive will show Msgr Hudal to be a relevant character or not. We'll only know when all the papers have been analysed. And there are a lot of them," he said .

'FRAGMENTARY PICTURE' .

Msgr Brandmueller cautioned that, although Hudel's Nazi sympathies were clear, a full picture of the man and his work had not yet been assembled .

"At the moment there is only a fragmentary image of this person because not all the documents have been seen," he said during a recent seminar at the Teutonic College .

Some Catholic historians at the seminar said it was possible that the documents in the archive would show Hudal to be a less important figure than has so far been believed .

After the war, Hudal became involved with processing displaced persons. According to some historians and writers, this allowed him to organise the escape of Stangl and other war criminals such as Gustav Wagner, Alois Brunner and, perhaps, Adolf Eichmann. Hudal's activities caused a press scandal in 1947 and in 1951 he resigned as rector of the Teutonic College. He remained in Rome until his death in 1963 .

Photo: Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, who was hanged in Israel in 1962 for organising the extermination of millions of Jews. After the war he escaped to Argentina, allegedly with Alois Hudal's help .


http://ansa.it/main/notizie/awnplus/eng ... 15433.html
 
theyithian said:
i had assumed the last Nazis on the run had either succumbed to hunters or age but it seems not

You have to understand that the Nazis were a YOUTH movement.

Even at the end of the War Adolf Hitler was the second-youngest leader on the world stage. (Only Charles De Gaulle was younger.)

Heinrich Himmler was a mere 25 years old when he assumed command of the SS and only 43 when he suicided after Hitler's death.

Many of the most brutal concentration camp guards were VERY young, having been born only in the early 1920s.
 
I have no problem at all with the death penalty convictions handed down at Nuremberg for genocide. If you can legitimately convict on capital crimes specifications for one murder or two why not for hundreds, thousands or even millions?

But I DO have problems with convictions for waging "Agressive War."

Is there any doubt that had the Nazis won we'd have seen Gen. Eisenhower, Field Marshal Montgomery and Sir Winston Churchill tried and convicted on those same charges?

And I've never been able to obtain any clear definition of what non-agressive war is actually supposed to be.

The nearest I've come is a suspicion that it's the form waged by the WINNING side.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
theyithian said:
i had assumed the last Nazis on the run had either succumbed to hunters or age but it seems not

You have to understand that the Nazis were a YOUTH movement.

Even at the end of the War Adolf Hitler was the second-youngest leader on the world stage. (Only Charles De Gaulle was younger.)

Heinrich Himmler was a mere 25 years old when he assumed command of the SS and only 43 when he suicided after Hitler's death.

Many of the most brutal concentration camp guards were VERY young, having been born only in the early 1920s.

You're quite right. I just had never considered it. My fault.
 
OldTimeRadio said:
And I've never been able to obtain any clear definition of what non-agressive war is actually supposed to be.

IIRC, it means that war is waged with the specific intent of destroying another country or poplace, usually for the implied puprpse of subjugation, using means which go beyond those of military necessity. Usually wars are waged as a means of neutralising or causing enough damage to another country's military capability, in order to force it to either stop it doing something or to force it to the take the diplomatic route. The expansionist policies of the Nazis were well-known and not hidden by the Nazi leadership - it was always very clear what their idea was and the purpose of their military capability WRT their political ideals. The Nazis made a point of creating wholesale destruction and terror as part of their war effort, alongside the destruction of other races and anyone they deemed undesirable. It was part of the way they chose to subjugate other countries and populations. The Allied war effort had a different intent, and a different approach to that intent, and so is not comparable Similarly, modern calls for GWB and Tony Blair to be acccused of waging agressive war are also baseless.
 
Jerry_B said:
OldTimeRadio said:
IIRC, it means that war is waged with the specific intent of destroying another country or poplace, usually for the implied puprpse of subjugation, using means which go beyond those of military necessity.

Yes, but during the last year of the War and even immediately thereafter there was a very strong sentiment in the United States, especially, to absolutely destroy all German cities, to pull down every German factory and university alike, and to reduce the entire nation to an AGRARIAN state, with the largest population centers permitted being small hamlets or villages. Education would be limited to reading and the calculation of sums, sufficent for the running of a small farm.

Even the name of the country was to be changed, and perhaps even the German language replaced.

Now had this seriously-considered plan actually been put into operation, would it have been considered a War Crime? Of course not, because it came from the WINNING side.
 
theyithian said:
You're quite right. I just had never considered it.

Next semester we'll cover whether the Nazis were Right-wing thugs....or Left. <g>
 
I think this fits here. Feel free to move, if not.
Ruins found in remote Argentinian jungle 'may be secret Nazi hideout'

Archaeologists believe ruins found in a remote jungle region may be the remains of a hideout built by Nazis to flee to in the event of defeat in the second world war.

Researchers are studying the remains of three buildings located in the Teyu Cuare park in northern Argentina near Paraguay, the Clarin newspaper reported.

University of Buenos Aires researchers found five German coins minted between 1938 and 1941 and a fragment of porcelain plate bearing the inscription Made in Germany.

[...]
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/23/nazis-secret-hideout-found-in-remote-argentinian-jungle

The 'evidence' doesn't seem that conclusive but I suppose they might find some more when they examine the ruins themselves. Of course, there were plenty of Nazis in Argentina after the war anyway, not making much use of this supposed secret hideout... ;)
 
93-year-old Oskar Groening going on trial in Germany. Known as the 'Bookkeeper of Auschwitz'.

Was a guard at the camp and seemingly tasked with counting/accounting the money of the inmates as they arrived.

No apparent evidence that he killed anyone and he has only been investigated after appearing a BBC documentary where he denounced the Holocaust deniers and gave accounts of what he had seen as a youthful soldier.

Hard to know what to think about this one. Easy in hindsight to say 'Why didn't you intervene? Why did you keep doing your job when you knew what was happening?' but on the other hand how can you know what it feels like to be in that scenario in Germany in the 1940s? What would have been the result of standing up to your superiors? Not sure you can really judge his actions in 1943 by the standards of 2015. But then I am not Jewish and had no loss in the Holocaust, I guess I would feel different if I had.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32392594
 
This wasn't the stone age. In 1943, people's standards of morality had generally evolved to say "hang on, death camps really are a no-no." I don't quite get the concept of not judging someone for what they did four years before my dad was born. That was five minutes ago.

Sometimes I do wonder, however, about prosecuting old, old men like this. Especially when so many other, nasty folks got off the hook for other types of atrocities.
 
Sometimes I do wonder, however, about prosecuting old, old men like this. Especially when so many other, nasty folks got off the hook for other types of atrocities.

Yes...very odd that they get around to prosecuting them when they're not far off death.
 
This wasn't the stone age. In 1943, people's standards of morality had generally evolved to say "hang on, death camps really are a no-no."
Yes, and... I lean towards what I think McAvennie was arguing: "how can you know what it feels like to be in that scenario in Germany in the 1940s? What would have been the result of standing up to your superiors?" Well, you'd have been the next against the wall. It takes a very strong person to be able to resist that kind of terminal pressure, even if you have no relatives to worry about. I'd like to think I would do the right thing in a situation like that. I hope I never have to find out...


edited, as one should be very careful about what one wishes for.
 
Yes, and... I lean towards what I think McAvennie was arguing: "how can you know what it feels like to be in that scenario in Germany in the 1940s? What would have been the result of standing up to your superiors?" Well, you'd have been the next against the wall. It takes a very strong person to be able to resist that kind of terminal pressure, even if you have no relatives to worry about. I'd like to think I would do the right thing in a situation like that. I hope I never have to find out...


edited, as one should be very careful about what one wishes for.

Saying it's easier said than done is one thing. Implying codes or morality were wildly different is another.

And I'm not condemning people who were in the party and did good (Claus Stauffenberg, Oscar Schindler). I am not condemning people forced into the Hitler Youth, or drafted into the Luftwaffe and Wehrmarcht. This guy is something different.
 
Saying it's easier said than done is one thing. Implying codes or morality were wildly different is another.

Except that, for the people instigating these horrors, their moral codes must have been different, otherwise they could not have brought themselves and others to commit them. The Nazis had spent years dehumanising and othering the various groups of people who fell victim to the Holocaust, to the extent that enough party members were able to participate in mass murder while maintaining - presumably - their own self-image as a decent human being. Naturally, they were horribly wrong in this, as plenty of people could have told them at the time, let alone with the benefit of hindsight. And yet they did it.
 
Unusually, perhaps, for one of these cases, Groening admits that he was absolutely morally complicit in the murders at Auschwitz. The question that's being hammered out in court, it seems to me, is whether this moral guilt is equivalent to actual guilt for crimes physically committed by others. This is, of course, more subject to interpretation. I think Speer made a similar argument at his trial, which saved him from the death penalty, but after his death more information came out about exactly what he knew and, crucially, the power he had to potentially alter events.

I agree, it would be a whole lot better if these issues had been addressed closer to the events rather than leaving it to muddy for 70 years.
 
Paris (AFP) - Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 130,000 Jews, died in 2001 at the age of 89, locked up in a squalid Damascus basement, a French magazine reported Wednesday.

Its investigation -- described as "highly credible" by veteran Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld -- aimed at discovering the fate of one of the most notorious figures of the Holocaust.

Three ex-members of the Syrian secret service interviewed by the magazine XXI said Adolf Eichmann's former assistant spent his last years in miserable conditions underneath an apartment block in the Syrian capital.

The Austrian-born SS commander was in charge of the Drancy camp north of Paris from which Jews in occupied France were sent to the gas chambers.

He remained to the end an unrepentant Nazi and anti-Semite, the sources told XXI.

One of his guards said Brunner, who went by the name of Abu Hussein, "suffered and cried a lot in his final years, everyone heard him".

The man, identified only as Omar, said he "couldn't even wash".

All he had to eat were "army rations -- awful stuff -- and an egg or a potato. He had to choose one or the other."


Continued:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nazi-war-criminal-alois-brunner-died-syria-basement-061723926.html

----------------------------------------------------

Not with a bang but a whimper
 
Paris (AFP) - Nazi war criminal Alois Brunner, responsible for the deaths of an estimated 130,000 Jews, died in 2001 at the age of 89, locked up in a squalid Damascus basement, a French magazine reported Wednesday.

Its investigation -- described as "highly credible" by veteran Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld -- aimed at discovering the fate of one of the most notorious figures of the Holocaust.

Three ex-members of the Syrian secret service interviewed by the magazine XXI said Adolf Eichmann's former assistant spent his last years in miserable conditions underneath an apartment block in the Syrian capital.

The Austrian-born SS commander was in charge of the Drancy camp north of Paris from which Jews in occupied France were sent to the gas chambers.

He remained to the end an unrepentant Nazi and anti-Semite, the sources told XXI.

One of his guards said Brunner, who went by the name of Abu Hussein, "suffered and cried a lot in his final years, everyone heard him".

The man, identified only as Omar, said he "couldn't even wash".

All he had to eat were "army rations -- awful stuff -- and an egg or a potato. He had to choose one or the other."


Continued:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/nazi-war-criminal-alois-brunner-died-syria-basement-061723926.html

----------------------------------------------------

Not with a bang but a whimper

I dunno but it always makes me feel sad/sickened when we treat evil people as badly as they treated others.
 
Interesting that there were other aspects of the situation ref. liberated prison camps that the allies were not in as hurry to poblicise. Stalin was in no rush to release anybody until they'd been "screened" for political reliability, not even surviving Communists: his logic was that people who'd aroused the wrath of one totalitarian regime, especially "dissidents", would be dangerous if released into another soon-to-be totalitarian regime. Anyone ornery enough to challenge the Nazis might have the distressing independence of mind to challenge him. Indeed, some formerly German prison camps that fell into Soviet controlled zones simply swapped the swastika over the gate for a red star and, more or less, carried on as normal, being incorporated into the wider Gulag under new management. (Why waste a ready-made facility?) I'm betting a lot of formerly Nazi camp guards were "re-educated", issued new uniforms, and got fresh contracts for the new owners. So how many ex-Nazis got away with it in the East because their trade skills were useful to the Russians... (just as we head-hunted peopel like Werner von Braun, who had very dirty hands).

Meanwhile in the West, it was known a substantial number of "ordinary" prisoners on the camps were there for generally accepted criminal offences and the Germans had a perfect right to do this. How did you tell robbers, murderers, rapists, et c, from political and racial prisoners? And there was the consequent problem of identifying and continuing to incarcerate this substantial number of inmates who the Allied administration agreed must be kept in captivity. (how many "ordinary criminals", in the chaos of the last months, got hold of, for example, yellow stars, sensing this would get them instant parole on liberation of the camps? As I recall the system, those imprisoned for regular criminality were given black triangles as an ID marker on their uniforms: it wouldn't have taken too much ingenuity to change into one with a yellow or green or red triangle, figuring this meant the Allies would allow them to walk out... ) So the Allies had to screen and precisely identify camp inmates too. Not easy, if a lot of the records got burnt. So that's interesting too. Where did the "regular" and "non-political" German police and prison service end, and Nazi administration and concentration camp facilities begin? There was a lot of overlap. German uniformed criminal police and prison warders were largely allowed to continue doing their accepted duty, under allied supervision, as part of the post-war arrangements. So it's entirely possible a few Nazis were nodded through the process here as an expedient. (most people's knowledge of the WW2 period tends to run out after May 1945. I want to read up on more of how Germany was administered in the occupation years - there's a lot of interesting and possibly fortean-relevant material here, and I don't pretend to have more than a basic general knowledge of it)
 
One might think the hunt for people who could be indicted for Holocaust crimes is a thing of the past, but it isn't. Here is the case of a 95-year-old woman who worked as a teenaged secretary at Stutthof camp in Poland. She's now been formally indicted on 10,000 counts of being an accessory to murder and complicity in attempted murders.
Germany charges 95-year-old woman with complicity in 10,000 Nazi camp deaths

German prosecutors on Friday charged a 95-year-old woman with being complicit in the murders of 10,000 people at a Nazi concentration camp in Poland.

The woman, whose name was not released according to German privacy laws, worked as a typist and secretary at the Stutthof camp between June 1943 and April 1945 during World War II. ...

She's "accused of having assisted those responsible at the camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war in her function as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander," the prosecutors in Itzehoe said.

Because she was a minor at the time of the alleged crimes, she's being charged in juvenile court.

During the woman's time working at the camp, the Nazis used Zyklon B gas chambers to exterminate prisoners. All told, the Nazis killed about 65,000 at Stutthof and transferred another 22,000 to other camps. ...

SOURCE: https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-...city-in-10000-Nazi-camp-deaths/8381612561945/

See Also:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/05/europe/nazi-camp-secretary-charged-stutthof-grm-intl/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/world/europe/germany-nazi-secretary-Irmgard.html
 
Here's another remarkably late action. A 95-year-old former concentration camp guard has been deported from the USA.
The US deported a 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard

A Tennessee resident who was a guard at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II has been deported to Germany, the US Justice Department said in a statement Friday.

Friedrich Karl Berger, a 95-year-old German citizen, was ordered removed from the US in February 2020, when a US immigration judge determined his "willing service" as a guard of concentration camp prisoners "constituted assistance in Nazi-sponsored persecution," the Justice Department said.

Berger was eligible for removal from the US under the Holtzman Amendment, which prohibits anyone who participated in Nazi persecution from living in the US. The Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the ruling in November 2020. ...

Berger's trial found he had worked as an armed guard at a Neuengamme sub-camp near Meppen, Germany, in 1945. Most of the prisoners there were Russian, Dutch and Polish civilians, but there were also Jews, Danes, Latvians, French, Italians and Nazi "political opponents," the Justice Department's statement said.

The court found Berger admitted he guarded the prisoners to prevent their escape and that he didn't request a transfer from the camp guard service, according to the Justice Department. Additionally, Berger still gets a pension from Germany for his employment there, including for his "wartime service." ...

FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/20/us/nazi-guard-deported-trnd/index.html
 
I still do not understand why it takes 75 years to arrest and deport a suspected camp guard - new evidence come to light ? I'm not commenting on the merits of a prosecution, just wondering why everyone waits for the witnesses to die off before acting.
 
I still do not understand why it takes 75 years to arrest and deport a suspected camp guard - new evidence come to light ? I'm not commenting on the merits of a prosecution, just wondering why everyone waits for the witnesses to die off before acting.
I am not typically a "conspiracy theorist" but I strongly suspect that this sort of sudden arrest and deportation, decades after the event, is gesture politics, news management, and a quid pro quo in the great game of international diplomacy.

I do not want to comment on the possible reasons behind the timing of individual cases because that way lies politics, and abandon hope all ye who enter there!

WW2 in Europe was almost unique in that even the losers agree which side was the Bad Guys. Of course, there were instances of fault on both sides, and the Allies did some terrible things, but the Nazi regime was founded on racism, fear, and aggressive expansionism.

Everyone agrees Nazis were bad. Punishing one individual 75 years after the war for things they did at the age of 20, reminds me of the way that the most violent thugs in prison enjoy the moral high ground over those who are in there for sex crimes.
 
Here's another remarkably late action. A 95-year-old former concentration camp guard has been deported from the USA.


FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/20/us/nazi-guard-deported-trnd/index.html
The oddest part about this case is that the German authorities have dropped the charges against him due to lack of evidence, so does this men he can return to the US where he has lived since 1959.

"German prosecutors have dropped their case against him for lack of evidence."

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56140903
 
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aold aven if Germany drops the charges, that Holzmann Amendment will likely mean he can't return.

I saw someone else is also being tried now, despite having only been 15 years old at the time.
 
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