The Glade 4.0

Counts of accessory to murder.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/former-h ... 2?mod=e2fb

If convicted, he will face a hojillion years in prison.

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Holy shitsnacks!

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I think its more important that we bring these things to light and remember what was done that he actually spend the rest of his probably short life in prison. Man's ability to "make him pay" is going to be very limited.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

This is spurred on by Germany's lingering guilt over the matter, more than anything this man did. He was small potatoes.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

He would have been 24 at the end of the war. Certainly old enough to know right from wrong, but hardly experienced enough to have been any significant decision maker. His is a case of keeping your head down and doing what you are told. While certainly involved and "following orders" is not an acceptable excuse, it does limit the amount of time and effort that going after him justifies.

He didn't commit any crimes in my opinion, because he was following orders that came straight from the top. What law did he break? It's not fair to retroactively punish someone after making new laws.

Soldiers are in a tough situation. We've established in modern society that "I was just following orders" does not excuse one from legal culpability for their actions. However, NOT following orders typically carries a much higher and immediate penalty.

It's unfair.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Governments makin the penalty for disobeying orders heavier than the penalty for the crimes they're being ordered to commit? Wow, it's almost like governments have no respect for the law.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil should be required reading in the first year of high school.

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Based on the fact that this former SS officer has lived a long, relatively peaceful life, I would posit that he likely made the correct decisions back in WW2. If he'd protested, he'd likely have been executed over 70 years ago, and wouldn't have saved a single life.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yes, that is the crux of the matter. A former nazi might get to die of old age, and that offends us. Killing him for being a nazi at the time the war came to a close is one thing. Pretending that being a nazi is against the law is entirely different, especially seventy years later.

This is just Germany throwing the man under a bus to earn brownie points with the rest of the E.U. Each and every German dances to the tune of the I Was Not a Nazi Polka.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You think maybe that has anything to do with the EU brandishing the "ZOMG NAZIS!!!" argument against them? Greece was pretty quick to equate "not getting a German bailout = Nazism all over again!" during their last debt crisis. Or how about that they really didn't even get the whole post-WWII thing fully resolved until the Berlin Wall fell and they reunified? At that time there were still people saying "uh, maybe reunification is... dangerous!"

Furthermore, they aren't "pretending" being a Nazi is against the law - it IS against the law in Germany.

We can't have any of that getting in the way of the cool and rebellious snarkfest though, can we?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The problem is, DE, that when Oskar Gröning was a Nazi, NOT being a Nazi was against the law in Germany.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Not to mention the nazis have been disbanded for most of the man's life.

I understand why Germany wants to prosecute him. It doesn't change the fact that it's wrong. They are throwing a man under a bus who hasn't been a nazi three times as long as he was one. The Holocaust is a black mark in Germany's history. That's the end of it. Prosecuting a 93 year old man for the deaths of Jews he didn't actually kill himself 70 years ago will not erase that stain from Germany's history. Hitler was a popular public figure in Germany at that time. Germany has to live with that.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I wasn't addressing this one way or the other. I was addressing the "hurf durf stupid germans oppressing people to prove they aren't nazis rarr government" stupidity. The Germans can "live with" having a nazi past when other countries quit using it for political leverage. It would be great if they did; then they could stop using it to duck other responsibilities.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."