Nazis who should have been hanged

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Ononefoot39
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Nazis who should have been hanged

#1

Post by Ononefoot39 » 19 Oct 2015, 17:28

One of my primary interests is the prosecution of Nazi war criminals after the war as I like seeing evil be brought to justice. There are a few cases, however, where I do not think justice was served. Who are some Nazis you think should have been hanged and why? Here are a few of the ones on my list;

Erich von dem Bach-Zalewski- Organized numerous mass shootings and was responsible for countless deaths. He got a slap on the wrist.

Erich Koch- He was going to be hanged but was too sick....which is stupid if you ask me

Walther Schellenburg- Functionary in the RSHA that played a large role in organizing their deeds.

Hans Lammers. I'm a bit surprised he wasn't tried at the IMT. In Hitler's inner most circle and responsible for numerous orders regarding war crimes. (Unrelated but I'm surprised Daleuge wasn't tried at the IMT either given his position)

Many of those who had their sentence reduced at the Einsatzgruppen Trial i.e. Walter Blume, Adolf Ott, Ernst Biberstein, Martin Sandburger and a few others.- Obvious reasons, they ordered the mass killing of innocent civilians.

Otto Rasch- Wish he was tried sooner before Parkinson's too over.

Klaus Barbie- Butcher of Lyon

Carl Clauburg- Performed horrific, sadistic experiments on human beings.

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#2

Post by David Thompson » 20 Oct 2015, 00:17

Ononefoot39 -- You asked:
Who are some Nazis you think should have been hanged and why?
A discussion of the crimes of those individuals is appropriate, but we don't care much about the opinions of posters here. Our rules read:
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Since the purpose of this section of the forum is to exchange information and hold informed discussions about historical problems, posts which express unsolicited opinions without supporting facts and sources do not promote the purposes of the forum. Consequently, such posts are subject to deletion after a warning to the poster.

The same reasoning applies to opinion threads.
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Ononefoot39
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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#3

Post by Ononefoot39 » 20 Oct 2015, 04:21

My apologies. Let me rephrase that question. Who are some Nazis whose sentencing was too light? Based on similar cases and punishments, can one argue the aforementioned Nazis among others that the death penalty was the only suitable punishment?

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#4

Post by Paul Lantos » 21 Oct 2015, 18:40

I don't think anyone should have been hanged. There is no 'punishing' a crime like this in a way that befits its magnitude. Lock them up, throw away the key, it's all the same. The problem with execution is it's irrevocable.

If your question is restricted to people who 1) actually did survive to go on trial, and 2) were sentenced more lightly than seems to have been the standard for war criminals, your list is fine but it could go on forever.

Think about some of these -
ALL the defendents in the Treblinka trials -- Kurt Franz, Mentz, Matthes, Stangl, etc etc etc. The worst of them got life sentences. I've got less of an issue with that than the fact that so many of them were released early. Same is true for Oberhauser, the only person ever tried for crimes at Belzec.

We could make a long list of decorated and illustrious leaders of the Wermacht, even people like Manstein, who clearly were aware of atrocities and who led a scorched earth war that killed millions of noncombatants.

Even Albert Speer, knowing what we know now about him, was fully complicit in slave labor, had institutions of death like Nordhausen / Dora under his command, was responsible for producing terror weapons, and was totally full of s--- when he lapsed into vagaries about some camp in Poland.

So the question becomes really why bother talking about punishment. There is no fitting punishment -- none. How do we select from among thousands of people in a huge, multi-institutional infrastructure that produced these crimes? The SS was hardly the only criminal organization in the Nazi state -- the civil authorities in occupied states, the army, the foreign office, etc were all highly complicit.

Ononefoot39
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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#5

Post by Ononefoot39 » 24 Oct 2015, 16:23

That's a valid point about not being able to persecute every Nazi and institution involved. However, when you have proven war criminals in custody you can't not put them on trial. Yes trying a handful of Nazis who contributed to the murder of millions of innocent people does little for the well-being of the victims, but how can one ethically let someone like Ernst Kaltenbrunner walk free?

As far as the death penalty, I would argue the only fitting punishment for the attempted extermination of an entire race of people is hanging. I don't fall for the "just following orders" defense or and such variation. It annoys the heck out of me that someone like Bach-Zalewski and who personally ordered the shooting of countless human beings didn't plummet through the gallows. Slightly unrelated but it it drives me up the wall that Himmler and Goering just barely escaped the justice of the gallows (Goering more so than Himmler obviously)

I do have to say I disagreed with your Hannah Arenndt based argument of the Holocaust being too large to punish. Like I said before, it's impossible to punish every individual from every institution involved. Does it not at least give the victims some piece of mind that at least the top figure heads as well as others who ordered and carried out such a horrific atrocity were brought to justice?

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MAMC
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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#6

Post by MAMC » 24 Oct 2015, 19:43

Well if we wish to talk about War criminals, I'm afraid the Germans were Boy Scouts compared to the Japanese during WWII.
Take Unit 731, at Harbin in north eastern China. Thousands and thousands of Chinese had the most heinous experiments performed on them over years of Japanese occupation. None survived.This unit with over a thousand monsters running it, led by the head monster Shiro Ishii, were taken by the Americans at the end of the war, and what happened, absolutely nothing.
Because of the information they had acquired over the years and with the soviets up the road, a deal was struck with the US (and GIVEN THE NOD by the American President) they all walked free including the inhuman mass killer Ishii. (who lived a comfortable life for many years..)
Justice.... The world does not know the meaning of the word.....
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rWu4te-55Ko
"My hat and scarf Nester"...

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#7

Post by David Thompson » 25 Oct 2015, 00:36

Please stay on the topic "Nazis who should have been hanged." We already have open threads on Unit "731," and readers who want to find out more about it probably wouldn't look for it in an unrelated topic.

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#8

Post by Paul Lantos » 25 Oct 2015, 02:26

Ononefoot39 wrote:I would argue the only fitting punishment for the attempted extermination of an entire race of people is hanging.
This begs the question of what is the purpose of punishment. Removal from society is a given, since we're talking about death vs life imprisonment. So is your goal justice? Justice I would argue lies in the process that produces a conviction, not the penalty. Is your goal eye-for-an-eye retribution? As in a murderer makes his life forfeit? There is nothing inscribed in existence that makes it inherently just for a punishment to match the crime. I would argue that execution is basically a catharsis on the part of the prosecutors and those they represent -- but it does nothing to teach lessons or better the world.
Ononefoot39 wrote:it it drives me up the wall that Himmler and Goering just barely escaped the justice of the gallows (Goering more so than Himmler obviously)
The only thing about Himmler's death that annoys me is that he never gave an account or narrative of his actions. His last opportunity to contribute something good to the world would have been to help the world understand. As much as Eichmann's and Hoess' testimonies are half self-exulpatory crap, at least they add to our understanding. Beyond that it doesn't matter to me how Himmler met his end. Killed himself, hung, died at age 90 in Spandau, who frickin' cares. You can't hang someone ten million times. I can guarantee you, by the way, that Rudolf Hess suffered a whole lot more than Hans Frank or Ernst Kaltenbrunner ever did.
Ononefoot39 wrote:I do have to say I disagreed with your Hannah Arenndt based argument of the Holocaust being too large to punish.
I'll thank you to never ever again compare one of my arguments to that of Hannah Arendt.

A question you might reflect on is whether we're punishing "the Holocaust" or rather punishing the actions of a participant. The latter can be punished. The former is not punishable in the body of one person. Arendt, who was a casual dilettante who barely even witnessed the trial she wrote about, was misled by the prosecutors who ascribed both a higher position and more expansive responsibilities to Eichmann than what he actually committed. So not having looked more deeply into the process she bit the prosecutors' idea that he really was responsible for nearly the whole thing.
Ononefoot39 wrote:Does it not at least give the victims some piece of mind that at least the top figure heads as well as others who ordered and carried out such a horrific atrocity were brought to justice?
1) "Brought to justice?" You really eat up that phrase as a euphemism for "killed"? Seriously? Justice is a process, not an end result.
2) I don't know, having grown up with a whole lot of victims in my family I don't think any of their nightmares went away just because Kaltenbrunner had been hung.

I'm not arguing against arrest, trial, and conviction. I'm saying that the catharsis in execution should not be confused with justice.

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#9

Post by michael mills » 05 Nov 2015, 13:05

Arendt, who was a casual dilettante who barely even witnessed the trial she wrote about, was misled by the prosecutors who ascribed both a higher position and more expansive responsibilities to Eichmann than what he actually committed. So not having looked more deeply into the process she bit the prosecutors' idea that he really was responsible for nearly the whole thing.
I think you are mistaken on that point.

In her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem", she specifically wrote that Eichmann was punished not so much for what he himself had done, as for what the Jewish people had suffered.

I remember seeing a television program about the Israeli police unit that carried out the investigation of Eichmann after his capture, and it made the point that those police officers wanted the trial to be limited to what Eichmann could be proved to have done himself, but they were overruled by Ben Gurion, who wanted more of a show trial in which the whole Final Solution would be publicly revealed, ie including the parts in which Eichmann personally played no role.

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#10

Post by Paul Lantos » 05 Nov 2015, 20:58

That's a somewhat different argument (and also a flawed one in that his argument that he was just a tiny little cog in a big machine was false). Debra Lipstadt and David Cesarani in their accounts of the trial have been pretty critical of Arendt, her writings, and the fact that she was present for very little of the trial, and that she based most of her writings on the trial transcript.

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#11

Post by Gorque » 06 Nov 2015, 03:26

Hi Michael:

I think you may be referring to this passage in Arendt's analysis of the trial:
I have mentioned before the Nuremberg Charter’s definition of ‘crimes against humanity’ as ‘inhuman acts,’ which were translated into German as Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit – as though the Nazis had simply been lacking in human kindness, certainly the understatement of the century. … What had been mentioned at Nuremberg only occasionally and, as it were, marginally – that ‘the evidence shows that … the mass murders and cruelties were not committed solely for the purpose of stamping out opposition’ but were ‘part of a plan to get rid of whole native populations’ – was in the center of the Jerusalem proceedings, for the obvious reason that Eichmann stood accused of a crime against the Jewish people, a crime that could not be explained by any utilitarian purpose; Jews had been murdered all over Europe, not only in the East, and their annihilation was not due to any desire to gain territory that ‘could be used for colonization by Germans.’ It was the great advantage of a trial centered on the crime against the Jewish people that not only did the difference between war crimes, such as the shooting of partisans and killing of hostages, and ‘inhuman acts,’ such as expulsion and annihilation’ of native populations to permit colonization by an invader, emerge with sufficient clarity to become part of a future international penal code, but also that the difference between ‘inhuman acts’ (which were undertaken for some known, though criminal, purpose, such as expansion through colonization) and the ‘crime against humanity,’ whose intent and purpose were unprecedented, was clarified. At no point, however, either in the proceedings or in the judgment, did the Jerusalem trial ever mention even the possibility that extermination of whole ethnic groups – the Jews, or the Poles or the Gypsies- might be more than a crime against the Jewish or the Polish or the Gypsy people, that the international order, and mankind in its entirety, might have been grievously hurt and endangered.”
p. 252

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#12

Post by michael mills » 06 Nov 2015, 07:53

I would have to look at the book again to locate the exact passage.

But I remember that Arendt referred to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the witnesses at the trial had never met Eichmann, had never had any dealings with him, and in many cases had never known of his existence during the war. Those witnesses gave accounts of happenings at which Eichmann himself was not present, or to which he had no provable connection.

That is why Arendt made the statement that the Eichmann trial was more about what the Jewish people had suffered rather than what Eichmann himself did. The aim of the trial was to present a full picture of the various actions that made up the Judeocide, including those in which Eichmann himself had no involvement, or at least no controlling involvement, eg the mass executions in occupied Soviet territory, or the operations of the Globocnik extermination camps.

Another factor was that a large number of witnesses who had had direct dealings with Eichmann, particularly in Hungary, were excluded as witnesses, essentially because they might reveal the extent to which the Labour Zionist organisation in Hungary had collaborated with the deportations in exchange for being allowed to smuggle some 10,000 members of its youth groups out of the country. That is something that Ben Gurion wanted to avoid at all costs, since it would reignite the controversial Kasztner affair.

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#13

Post by Paul Lantos » 10 Nov 2015, 04:27

michael mills wrote:the overwhelming majority of the witnesses at the trial had never met Eichmann, had never had any dealings with him, and in many cases had never known of his existence during the war. Those witnesses gave accounts of happenings at which Eichmann himself was not present, or to which he had no provable connection.
The overwhelming number of participants and victims never met or had any dealings with Hitler either.

So it's a straw man to impugn the prosecution for this accusation, especially since many of the people who HAD direct dealings with Eichmann (Wisleceny, Hoess, etc) had been executed long before.

The problem is that the prosecution in its flamboyance ascribed to him responsibilities that he did not, in fact, have. They deposed Simon Srebnik, a survivor of Chelmno, where Eichmann had no jurisdiction at all. It connected Eichmann with the Eisatzgruppen, and with a role in the AR camps (to which he was partly connected via the tens of thousands of non-Polish Jews who died in Sobibor and Treblinka, but did not oversee the camp operations at all).
michael mills wrote:That is why Arendt made the statement that the Eichmann trial was more about what the Jewish people had suffered rather than what Eichmann himself did.
And I think the statement has equal parts truth and absurdity. What Eichmann himself actually did was plenty to justify the trial and the visibility.
michael mills wrote:The aim of the trial was to present a full picture of the various actions that made up the Judeocide
The primary aim was to convict him. I can't say whether the prosecution really believed he'd done as much as they'd accused him of. I do think they sincerely thought he was responsible for many things we now know historically were outside his control. I feel that Arendt bit on the bookish functionary persona that was probably a deliberate defense strategy on Eichmann's part.

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#14

Post by ML59 » 11 Nov 2015, 23:42

I would like to know not who should have been hanged but who was hanged. Can we work out a list of German war criminals (or supposed war criminal) that were hanged/executed during or after the war?
1. Adolf Eichmann
2. Alfred Jodl

and so on............

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Re: Nazis who should have been hanged

#15

Post by Paul Lantos » 12 Nov 2015, 03:43

ML59 wrote:I would like to know not who should have been hanged but who was hanged. Can we work out a list of German war criminals (or supposed war criminal) that were hanged/executed during or after the war?
1. Adolf Eichmann
2. Alfred Jodl

and so on............
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Executed_Nazis

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