Scott Smith wrote:witness wrote:an attempt by superpower governments to christen a historical orthodoxy in tune with Allied propaganda.
So the Nuremberg trials were just execise in Allied propaganda.
In my opinion, yes.
An opinion for which Smith has nothing to show and which is therefore irrelevant.
Scott Smith wrote:And such people as Goering ,Kaltenbrunner etc. had nothing to be indicted for..?
They were leaders of a sovereign State. They may or may not have acted morally. But that is besides the point.
They were not judged for having acted immorally, but for having acted criminally, violating international law, fundamental rules of conduct codified or customary agreed upon among civilized nations. Although this was not the subject of the trial, those of them found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity also violated the contemporary provisions of German law against murder, manslaughter and other attacks on the physical integrity of human beings.
Scott Smith wrote:Rudolf Hoess had nothing to be indicted for ?
SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höß (former commandant of Auschwitz) testified at Nuremberg but he was not tried at Nuremberg. He was tortured by the British and hanged by the Poles.
Was his testimony at Nuremberg (as opposed to his initial statements upon arrest) extracted by torture, Smith ?
And is there any indication that the Poles may have influenced what he wrote in his autobiography ?
I'd say his writings contain strong indications to the contrary.
Scott Smith wrote:I never said that he wasn't a mass-murderer.
No, Smith just maintains that he wasn't responsible for the systematic killing of ca. one million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which despite all evidence he would like to believe never occurred. Ain't that so, Smith ?
Scott Smith wrote:If you mean Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy-Führer prior to his defection in 1941, then the answer is unequivocally, yes. Hess should not have even been tried of War Crimes,
He was acquitted of the charge of war crimes, as you may read under
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/judhess.htm
So why the fuss ?
Scott Smith wrote:but he was and died in Spandau prison (murdered?) in 1987. (Hess was acquitted of War Crimes but convicted of political-crimes and sentenced to Life imprisonment, btw.)
Hess was convicted of violations of international law. His crimes were "political" only in the mind of propagandists with a political agenda.
Scott Smith wrote:Now perhaps you can show us that these trials can somehow be equated with the Soviet show trials ?
Yes, for reasons previously mentioned on other threads.
What other threads, Smith ? I must have missed something.
Scott Smith wrote:The trials were held by the Victors not neutral courts or courts of jurisdiction,
Big deal. Criminal trials are usually held by the "victorious" state which apprehended the defendant.
Scott Smith wrote:the Soviets supplied "evidence,"
I don't understand those silly quote marks, especially as the evidence provided by the Soviets largely coincided with German documentary and eyewitness evidence.
Scott Smith wrote:the tu quoque defense was not generally allowed (so these "legal standards" did not apply to the Allies themselves in the context of fighting a bitter world war),
If I remember correctly, none of the defendants was convicted on account of unrestricted submarine warfare or unrestricted air bombing, methods of warfare regarding which the Allies had no clean hands themselves. As to the systematic starvation and slaughter of prisoners of war and innocent civilians unrelated to any military actions, allowing
tu quoque would have amounted to giving any murdering tyrant
carte blanche for slaughtering its citizens, and those of other countries, outside the scope of anything that may be considered an act of war. Smith conveniently forgets that
tu quoque, a defense argument out of the very international law the existence of which he denies, can be applied only to the conduct of warfare by either side, not to acts of violence outside the scope of combat actions.
Scott Smith wrote:there were no rules-of-evidence,
There are no such rules in the legal systems of Germany, France and other European countries either, which doesn't exactly mean that the criminal justice of these countries is not in accordance with the principles of a constitutional state committed to the rights of the defendant. As Mr. Kaschner once explained, the absence of technical rules of evidence, as they are known but not always applied in US criminal law, even favored the defense, made up as it mostly was of continental European lawyers unfamiliar with such rules.
Scott Smith wrote:and ex post facto "law" was employed.
Assuming Mr. Smith can convince us that the defendants were entitled to consider their acts of aggression and mass murder legal at the time they engaged in them. Statements like this one from his beloved Führer on 22.08.1939:
[...]Auslösung: Mittel gleichgültig. Der Sieger wird nie
interpelliert, ob seine Gründe berechtigt waren. Es handelt
sich nicht darum, das Recht auf unserer Seite zu haben,
sondern ausschließlich um den Sieg.[...]
Source of quote:
http://www.ns-archiv.de/krieg/22-08-1939-halder.shtml
My translation:
[...]Unleashing: means make no difference. The victor is never asked if his reasons were justified. This is not about having right on our side, but exclusively about victory.[...]
clearly show that his heroes were well aware of being in violation of existing legal provisions.
Scott Smith wrote:Furthermore, Unconditional Surrender and Victor's Justice sets back the peace-process to the Middle Ages.
Baloney. The demand for unconditional surrender and the trials that, however often Smith calls them "Victor's Justice", were remarkably fair, must be seen as a consequence of Nazi aggression and mass murder, which took an enormous leap after the attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. And for which Smith, while strongly condemning the policies of his Allied black beasts, has shown nothing but very illustrative condescension.
Scott Smith wrote:For example that the accused didn't have adequate defence at their disposal ?
No, the defense, in the initial IMT Show-Trials at least, were German lawyers and Germany was a captive-nation at the time.
Smith's repetition of this junk reminds me that he hasn't yet provided any evidence whatsoever that the Nuremberg defense attorneys had anything to fear from the Allies due to the spirited and skillful defense performance of at least some of them.
Scott Smith wrote:In later trials torture was routinely used until uncovered by American critics of the process.
Again, evidence in support of these allegations has never been provided. On the contrary, I have shown that the allegations of torture at the so-called Dachau trials resulted from the manipulations of a skillful and unscrupulous German defense attorney by the name of Rudolf Aschenauer, who doesn't seem to have suffered any disadvantages due to these below-the-waist tactics of his.
Scott Smith wrote:In postwar West German trials the Bundestablishment obviously has an investment in the status quo; they have generally been lenient with perpetrators but have been focused on not rocking the boat--if not actively reinforcing the general mythology with wispy evidence like the testimony of SS-Scharführer Erich Fuchs.
Can Smith demonstrate that any West German criminal justice authority violated its legal duties regarding the obtaining and assessment of evidence for the sake of "reinforcing the general mythology" (thereby also violating defendants' rights under German procedural law, which call for a guilty verdict being supported by evidence not "wispy" but leaving no room for reasonable doubt), or is that just one of those articles of faith he may uphold in a "Revisionist" sewer, but not on a critical discussion forum ?
Scott Smith wrote:And defense attorneys cannot challenge "facts" that have been recognized by the Court from previous trials.
Smith seems to know pretty little about criminal justice in general and German criminal justice in particular. Otherwise he would know that, at every one of the numerous trials against Nazi defendants, West German criminal justice authorities established the relevant facts, both against and in favor of the defendants (contrary to what is the case in Anglo-Saxon law, in Germany the prosecution is also bound to look for evidence favoring the defendant, not only for incriminating evidence) on the basis of their own assessment of eyewitness and/or documentary evidence including the defendants' own depositions, and not on the basis of the findings of fact from previous trials.
Scott Smith wrote:That the evidence against them was fabricated ?
Some of it was.
Really? Show us an example of fabricated evidence from a West German trial against Nazi criminals. Definitely curious.
Scott Smith wrote:Historical orthodoxy requires a canonical belief-system from somewhere, and the Nuremberg trials (collectively) provide that,
Why, and I thought that a "canonical belief system" would be something unsupported by historical or forensic evidence. Which is not what can be said of the findings of the Nuremberg trials.
Scott Smith wrote:which is illegal to doubt in many countries today such as France and Germany.
Making nonsense illegal is wrong, but it doesn't make the outlawed nonsense any less nonsensical.
Scott Smith wrote:This means that establishment-historians will necessarily operate according to certain parameters, like a baby tethered to his crib; their jobs and sinecures are at stake.
What are "establishment historians", Smith? Those who base their contentions on evidence, as opposed to the "Revisionist" gurus, who base them on what they would like to believe?
And how does Smith know that "establishment historians" are guided by fear for "their jobs and sinecures", rather than by peer control and their own professionalism ?
Scott Smith wrote:Since Germar Rudolf is forced to live in the USA in exile from Germany for his Thoughtcrimes,
Read: "for his anti-Semitic and Nazi-apologetic propaganda lies".
Scott Smith wrote:I am willing to write reviews of books that interest me for his new Revisionist (large-R) journal, called The Revisionist. I may or may not agree with his views.
Smith seems to believe that a lying propagandist's having run afoul of the misguided laws against hate speech applied in some countries make that fellow any less of a lying propagandist. Interesting attitude. A liar is a liar even if the "Bundesestablishment" has busted him on account of the hate-speech context of his lies.
Scott Smith wrote:But I believe that he has the right to free-speech like any other human being.
So we all do, I dare say. Stop making a fool of yourself by crashing into open doors.
Scott Smith wrote:If he can get a diversity of revisionist/Revisionist viewpoints, then his journal will be a success, intellectually or otherwise.
A pious dream as long as a "diversity" of "Revisionist" viewpoints is only to be observed within this box outside which the "truth-seekers" are unable to think, the one that Smith's favorite guru once brilliantly summed up as follows:
Keep the Faith fellow revisionists. The Nazis and the SS were the good guys--but the anti-Nazis and the anti-revisionists dare not admit it for fear of losing their fabulous, ill gotten gains from the war.
“Hoaxbuster” Friedrich Paul Berg on the Codoh discussion forum.
http://www.codoh.org/dcforum/DCForumID9/143.html#10
Scott Smith wrote:Some may already be planning damage-control, but that is their problem.
What exactly is "damage-control", Smith?
Exposing Nazi-apologetic propaganda nonsense as what it is ?
And why "damage" ? Does Smith really believe that the crap his gurus produce can do any "damage" to a historical record based on solid evidence ?
Scott Smith wrote:If Rudolf is a Holocaust Denier, then deal with his ideas, and why you think they are in error, and not his Thoughtcrimes.
Why, I thought that's what we're doing on this forum all the time: exposing the fallacy of the contentions and arguments of Rudolf et al, as they are dished up by faithful and uncritical followers of theirs such as the "skeptical" Mr. Smith.