Germany hunts down a 96 years old woman.

What is wrong with arresting old people, as long as they are mentally and physically fit to stand trial?

After a while, none will be. Few are now.

Society will soon have to think about how to deter future crimes against humanity in other ways.

What a load of crap...By that "logic", we should have monuments to commemorate the victims of murders and abortions. Those, too, would "keep these atrocities in the public eye". Being murdered by a thug is the same as by Gestapo; you are just as dead.


Nothing. Especially, if they were operating NAZI phones and typing NAZI memos on those evil NAZI typewriters.

Hmmm....that doesn't work here Rich.

The Nazis, once in power, made sure to be seen as a civilized society so they made laws allowing for the most atrocious crimes being totally lawful...the Nuremburg Race Laws for example.

The GDR made it lawful to shoot people trying to flee over the wall into the back....

I doubt he thinks much through. Just verbal incontinence and poor social skills.

OK. I will settle for the very un-NAZI laws of the United States that were in effect then.

When you show me that a phone operator who overheard the NAZI conversations on her NAZI phone (so she knew) can be charged criminally, I will go along with your line of reasoning.

As a German patriot, my best advice to you personally and every other German is to respond with "iilii" every time some a-hole wants to put you on another guilt trip. Enough.


I adjust my social skills to the situations as they develop. Now and here we are discussing laws, not feelings where niceness is a virtue.

@Novichok

What I found worst was that german soldiers where judged for following orders. The german army was the first and only army where that was made out to be a crime....and it was done by the allied victors....whose own soldiers of course were never allowed to deny orders either.

Now that hypocrisy is mind boggling!

Now, as they say, you and I are on the same page. Add to this that the Nuremberg trials had Soviet judges!
That is why the argument that the secretary "knew" is beyond stupid. So fu*cking what! Did she participate in the decisions? Did she have an opportunity to object and, if ignored, say, I quit?

The first, though doubtless not the last.

It was after all, the first 'modern' war.

Keep in mind that none of the soldiers were forced to participate in mass killings. They could (and some did) refuse to be involved without any consequences. You also had only volunteers working in KZs who received often privileges for working there.

What happened in KZs was illegal even by the laws of the Third Reich, hence the attempts of some brave judges to prosecute them during the war. The same goes for the murder of people at the Berlin Wall, which violated GDR law, hence the prosecution after 1990.

How many were prosecuted and what were the sentences? Also, how many years did they actually serve?

Yes. One reason the extermination camps were created is because they found it very hard to get people to join or remain in einsatzgruppen.

There is actually an article in Polish about this.

pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procesy_strzelc%C3%B3w_przy_Murze_Berli%C5%84skim

In total 246 people were prosecuted, half of them convicted, most of them received punishments between 12 and 24 months, the highest was 10 years. German courts were very, very lenient on the culprits, including high-ranking ones, who were only convicted for manslaughter and not murder. Still, some justice is better than none and at least those who got more than a year on parole also lost their pension rights.

If I stole a gallon of milk here I would get 12 months. If I pushed the checkout lady out of the way, I would get ten for assault.


No! Verdicts like those undermine respect for the justice system. Doing nothing seldom makes it to the front pages for all to see and laugh at.

The courts have to follow the law to the letter; they can't act on emotion. They also have to sentence according to the law and the sentencing guidelines at the time of the trial.

No, they don't. A jury can reject all evidence and set you free. It's called "jury nullification". Or find you guilty on bs evidence.

Prosecutors are free to charge you with anything - from capital murder down to manslaughter.

The problem in Germany was that chasing "fascists" was more popular than chasing "commies". Better payback on the way up the latter.

Not in Germany. They do not have a jury system.

Yeah, but there were grounds to convict at least the higher ups for murder, which some of the lower courts did, but sadly it got revised later on. There was also one case where they bend the law (and a lot of experts since then have said actually broke it) when they convicted someone who shot an East border guard (he helped East Germans escape) for murder, yet only gave him one year on parole. It should be said that murder has a mandatory life-in prison sentence in Germany. The convicted person probably could have succesfully appealed, but decided not to risk it, in case the prosecution did the same. A very bizarre case.

Anyways, I have read some books on the prosecution of Nazi criminals, and have thus learned that there were many factors involved in the often unsatisfactory outcome. Among them the fact that defendents are at a natural advantage against the prosecution in any court of law: Their guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, which often meant they had to be tied to specific killings which was often difficult. Furthermore judges often pay great respect to midigating circumstances. Finally all countries struggle with convicting their own people for crimes comitted elsewhere, especially against foreigners. This is even the case with mature democracies and even in our day and age, you need not to look further than how many American criminals escaped justices for their crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both individuals in high places and significant parts of the public opinion tend to excuse crimes against the "enemy".


Thankfully not. We have sometimes "Schöffen" who assit judges in reaching a conclusion, but I doubt they would be called for those cases.

Did the prosecutors give rtheir justification for not doing that?


Presumably there would have to be a reason given in the appeal judgement. It would be interesting to know what they said.

I remember they were trying to get Erich Honeker back from South America. Margot too.

The judges were in charge of deciding to convict for manslaughter instead murder, and they gave several reasons for that, among them the specific circumstances under which they happened. It should also be said that convicting someone in Germany for murder instead of manslaughter requires the existence of specific criterias. Just from what I remember: Murder has to done because of malicious motives (greed, racism, hatred, sexual deviation), the culprit uses the unsuspecting nature of the victims and so on. Technically since it was common knowledge that guards would shoot at refugess and since those refugees were before not in immediate life-threatening danger, I believe it was argued that they were not unsuspecting of the danger they were facing. It is legally justifiable but personally unsatisfactory.

Furthermor the culprits had to be tried by GDR law (which was the one they broke) which often gave lesser sentences for manslaughter and murder.

Another crap talk from Tacitus and similar to "hate speech". Nobody knows what's in the head of the guy at the moment he pulls the trigger unless he confesses during or before trial. Mind reading should never be part of the prosecution.


GDR put those towers and the guards for the specific purpose of shooting the escapees. Therefore killing them during the act was legal according to the GDR laws.

On that basis, they should have never been charged.

Absolutely!

There was that kid from my 'hood Chris Gueffroy (20)...the last murdered "Republikflüchtling" only nine months before the wall fell....

His murderer got only probation..with this reasoning:

Google translation:

"....the court did not "take sufficient account of the fact that the shooter was at the bottom of the military hierarchy and in contrast to the officials who were not yet held accountable and, to a certain extent, also victims of the border regime"..."

n-tv.de/politik/Chris-Gueffroy-stirbt-als-Letzter-article12213586.html

They really made the border soldiers, an absolute elite unit of the GDR regime....volunteers only....out to be victims of the GDR too!

Maybe they should borrow that point of view for Irmgard F. also...just to keep it fair.....or it is like Rich said, they are harder on the ex-Nazis than on the ex-Commies!

The USA does punish hate crimes more severely as well and for good reason. The victims in the KZs were evidently killed for despicable motives, it is not like the Nazis made a secret of thar.


Actions of a government are not automatically legal just because they do them, what kind of thinking is that?


Except what happened at Stutthof is legally considered to be different from what happened at the Berlin Wall. She is an accessory to murder and genocide, not manshlaughter, and thus can expect an harsher punishment. No doubt they will apply similae midigating circumstances (her young age and brainwashing by the regime), but the crimes she helped commit were - as despicable as the SED-regime was - several degrees worse.

Does that mean a secretary who never killed somebody in her whole life is more guilty than the soldier who personally shot a refugee in the back?

And that such a border soldier is somehow NOT an accessory to murder and oppression? After all what was the wall build for in the first place again? And how many had been imprisoned and killed over the years by the regime?

And why can this GDR soldier be excused for "following orders (for being so low in the hierarchy)" but the Wehrmacht soldier couldn't?

Many of those who participated in the Holocaust and other crimes never personally killed someone, yet helped to make sure that the killing happened as efficient as possible. I made it clear that I would have prefered it if - at least the higher ups who ordered the shooting of refugees - had been charged with murder, but that is not for me to decide. We live under the rule of law. The courts decided that what happened at Stutthof is murder and genocide, while the guards at the Berlin Wall are guilty of manslaughter. If you are guilty of assisting of the former, you will be judged more severely.


You are comparing cases that are not really comparable. One, it is not like the ones killing refugees got "excused" for following orders. It was acknowledged that they lived under conditions that made it more difficult to disobey (we know that border guards were threatened with punishments if refugees escaped, while Wehrmacht soldiers had nothing to fear when they refused participating in war crimes), but they nevertheless received some sort of punishment. Serving in the Wehrmacht itself is not a punisheable offence since drafted soldiers had no choice in the matter, but if someone living today could be proven to have participated in specific crimes, he could be charged for them. But since this is difficult to prove, the courts have decided to charge those who specifically worked at KZs where work was voluntary and the killing intent obvious. If you worked there, you knew what the purpose and your role was. Someone like Oskar Groening freely admitted this.

Imagine for example, that 70 years ago two men abducted children. One of them guards the children while the other gives the orders and organizes the whole kidnapping and murders. A third one, a woman, is writting down the orders and sends them to the guy who guards the children. The contents is explicite, she knows children are dying, she witnessed the abuse of the children herself and she has written letters in which the man in charge talks about the tools they need to kill children and make the bodiesdisappear. She writes down letters in which the murder of children is even ordered. She does this "work" for years. Would you hesitate to charge her for assistance to murder, even many years later?

The US "hate" crimes are the result of the same sick movement that declared gays normal, not mentally ill.
Protecting special classes is good politics.
When A kills B, and it's not mercy killing or robbery, usually A hates B and, when A stabs B 50 times, it's with extreme hate and far exceeding lynching, for example.

Yet, if A and B are women that compete for the same guy, nobody would suggest invoking "hate" crime laws because "hate" crime laws are legal bs.

If I killed somebody in the park for no reason but with a smile and "I love you", should I get less?

If that's the case she is as guilty!

Still....that they let the wall murderer go off so lightly sits not well with me....that Chris Gueffroy, that could have been me....

I doubt that is meant with hate crime....

In my opinion its about that someone becomes a victim ONLY for being what he is....a black guy get's killed only for being black for example...actually a woman being raped is for me a hate crime too by a man hating women....that this doesn't count as hate crime too is puzzling!

Not a robbery for money or such "more common" crimes with other goals...no...someone is hurt for being what he or she is....otherwise he or she would still be alive and unhurt....

It can also mean a white male being killed by a black guy....or a man being raped by a woman.....only that such things happen much more rarely...

You have a point in defining hate crime. The problem is with the politics of hate crimes and the total absence of black-on-white prosecutions as hate crimes. I am a crime show addict and I have yet to see one case. The victim has to be in one of the protected classes for a crime to be classified as a hate crime. Whites are not one of them - under law or in practice.

Under the rules of evidence here, prosecutors are not required to show motives and for a good reason. It would require crawling into the perp's head. Juries like to know it but that is a different matter and optional.

Based on your definition, when a scorned lover A kills B, is this a hate crime?

Me neither, but the decision of the courts is what it is. They at least received some punishment. In the case of the old woman, I believe it is right that she stands trial. She probably won't go to jail even if she receives a prison sentence, but it is just that she is forced to confront what she once did before she dies. That she feels uncomfortable by this is evident by her attempt to evade the law.


No, but murder by jealousy is a motiv that can be used for a murder conviction.