If he was a soldier in the wehrmacht, it sounded more plausible, but SS and a camp guard, and no knowledge? Come on.
"Had no knowledge and was never a Nazi," dude, you were in the SS. That alone disproves both of your claims.
You know how you punish these 90+ year old Nazis? Make them teach others about the dangers of fascism and teach people about the atrocities that took place in WW2, whether he 'knew it was happening' or not. Make a video, write a book, make a series of interviews. Better than jail time and it might actually do some good.
I do have to admit it's kind of funny to think of a 94 year old man in a wheelchair being tried as a juvenile though.
He sought to justify his presence at the camp by arguing he was forced into the situation: "Of course, I am ashamed to have been part of the SS but I do not know that I would have had the courage to act otherwise today."
You could always request a transfer and it would likely be granted and you would not get some sort of grievous punishment. And even then, the SS was a voluntary organization.
The SS had political officers whose job it was to make sure SS soldiers were ideologically pure; they didn't accept just anybody: you had to swear devotion to naziism
Funny how it owns up to this but not really, at the ripe old age of 94, he knows he hasn't got long left so he figures he'll talk about it, not like anything can be done.
It's probably better to volunteer for a guard or desk job at the SS than it is to be conscripted into the Wehrmacht to fight at the eastern front. In that sense, he could have been forced into it. Still, he had to have known what happened in the camps. I could understand a regular guard not knowing about the killings, but the SS would definitely be aware.
And yet, he's still trying to weasel out of it.
This man is a testament of the dangers of fascism: So convinced will you become that you're doing the right thing, that you can't possibly have been the villain.
The man's 94 years old, why would anyone at 94 years old actually give a flying fuck at admitting to the shit they've done and saying they're anything but a horrible person because of it, oh but I didn't know what I was doing or some bullshit, pfft.
I can see right through this guy's facade.
Apparently the German army were completely disgusted with how the SS treated Polish people during the invasion in September-October 1939, so much so that the leader of the Wermacht actually went to Hitler with the express purpose of asking him to stop, but I believe Himmler met him first and said it was a bad idea to bring it up. So, whilst there is some debate to be had in how complicit the regular German citizenry and army were in the torture, rape and execution of innocents, the SS can go die in an eternal fire for all I care. I find it impossible to believe that any of those bastards can feel shame, guilt or compassion after what they regularly did.
True and untrue. He's so close to having an argument, but it falls through the cracks. In Nazi Germany you couldn't get anywhere good without being a member of the Nazi Party, so a lot of Nazi Party members were not Nazis. On the other hand the Waffen-SS did conscript people, but only foreigners and only for specific foreign units; German Waffen-SS were all volunteer. If you wanted a military carreer, you could join the Nazi Party and the Wehrmacht, but being a German in the SS pretty much meant you were a Nazi. He would be better off arguing that he was brainwashed by propaganda as a lot of Nazis were, instead of feigning innocents.
It's not unheard of, I recall there was a Wehrmacht tank ace, Kurt Knispel, got into a physical altercation and threatened to shoot SS officers after witnessing their actions.
My grandfather was in the SS because he was put in there, he has never shared the Nazi ideology or committed any war crimes.
He only did as he was told and never did he or his squad shoot any civilians.
The German civilian populace actually found Kristallnacht incredibly disturbing, which is what led to the German authorities putting the concentration camp philosophy underground.
If the U.S. could keep the H-bomb program secret, with 100 thousand people contributing to it no less, I think it's possible this man may have not known of the mass genocide he was taking part in.
That was an experiment, its easy to conceal. This is a fucking genocide where people go in and never go out.
true i guess lol, good point
You don't just wake up one day and decide to volunteer for the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party to avoid the Wehrmacht.
If by fight you mean relentlessly slaughter civilians and "sub-humans", sure!
That's not even "in a sense", that's him making a willing choice to join the paramilitary wing of the nazi party.
What do you mean by "regular guard", btw? Because a "Regular guard" would certainly have some information about what was going on, as every level of the German military was complicit in warcrimes and actively carried them. Every arm of the German military in every theatre. Much of the Holocaust wasn't even in the camps anyway, it was done in various villages, towns, and cities across Eastern Europe.
Not entirely disagreeing with you that he 100% knew, but I think there are some important points to make here.
Can we not just start pushing the Clean Wehrmacht myth here. Not only is it actively harmful it's just silly and ignores most of actual historiography in favor of movies, video games and books written by the Germans themselves to try and cover their asses. The Wehrmacht was never against the invasion of Poland and openly were involved in just as many of the worst crimes as the SS. There were small numbers of German military who were against the killings which you can read about on the Wikipedia page for the Righteous Among Nations, but that's 616 total, including all the civilians and resistance members in Germany.
The SS being the evil ones and the Wehrmacht being much more nuanced is utter shit made up by former Wehrmacht generals in the post war in order to make sure they didn't get tried in Israel and in order to make sure NATO let them join the West German military and government-- which war criminals did in droves.
I think many people would prefer joining the SS over fighting on the Eastern front. Regardless of what you consider as fighting there, it's probably worse (not in a moral way) than guarding a camp.
And yeah, I know the majority of the Holocaust was performed by SS, once again largely on the Eastern Front.
I do have to agree the few good Samaritans in the wehrmacht were vastly outnumbered by the monsters. I find the actions of the Wehrmacht and the German populace during the war as a very interesting case study in human behavior and mob mentality, by and large they were people who would not openly state they agreed with the Nazi regime once it had met a well deserved end, but when it was ongoing they were all at the very least willing to keep their heads down and ignore the atrocities, a great many rationalized and profiteered from them, and plenty more were perfectly okay with joining in.
It's often said that after the war the spell was broken on Germany, as the American occupation troops forced Germans to look at the reality of what they'd been doing (and I do mean this quite literally, the US Army distributed pictures of the mass graves captioned "this was your fault" and organized mandatory guided tours through the camps for nearby towns), and even though most of them already knew plenty of what was going on under their noses, they no longer had the ability to look away from it, no longer had any deniability to hide behind. For a very select few people the spell broke sooner.
Where on Earth did I say they were clean or were against the invasion of Poland? I just said that it's a bit more complex than all Germans were bad. Ugh.
I didn't, but there is zero reason to make that argument. Nobody is trying to go hunt down all Germans for what happened, and hardly anyone blames all of them anymore. There are more people with vague ideas that Germans didn't know about the Holocaust than those who think all Germans did-- and only one of those is closer to being correct.
Even if your intention was not to whitewash the Wehrmacht and the Nazis, it's posts like that that do. And normally when bad history is repeated people can just shrug and keep going, but these myths are actively fucking awful and are an open door to Neo-Nazism for many. Even when it's just offhandedly said in such a way by somebody who has no ill intent with it. There's zero reason to wax about the plight of the three good men who were left in the German army when we still have people trying to claim all of that army was good.
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