Feds release accused Nazi prison guard Demjanjuk

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Although the facts of the case are not clear I don't see much point in finding some way to submit a crippled old man to the brutalities of the penal system. The many people convicted during the post WWII Nuremberg trials could not defend themselves by declaring that they were merely following orders. The few lower echelon military people in the prisons in Iraq that were convicted could not use that defense. The people at the top all the way to Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld who were the origin of the brutality have escaped entirely unscathed and Obama seems to have no appetite for seeing to it that the obvious Constitutional violations are investigated and justice done.

But to get to the basics, no military organization could function if individual soldiers could decide that their orders violated international law and thereby safely refuse to act on them. Aside from official difficulties their fellow soldiers would not permit it since they all would be considered in violation of international law.

Paul Kagame should be hunted down for his role in killing millions in central Africa...

As for Demjanjuk, they should leave him alone. He already was sentenced to death earlier on and spent a lot of time in prison for a crime he did not commit.

If Demjanjuk was a Nazi Colonel, that would have been one thing, but he wasn't. He was a private. Everybody could give him orders and his only options were to follow them or get shot. To prosecute him would be to put him in a position where he would be shot if he disobeyed orders or spend the rest of his life in prison for obeying orders.

It is commonly accepted that the people who GIVE orders are the ones responsible for the outcomes, especially in time of war. In almost every army that has existed since man began making war on other men, not following orders was grounds for immediate, on the spot execution. We're talking the low end guys like privates and sergeants here, not the architects of policy.

Adolf Eichmann, who is the most commonly cited case of "following orders is no excuse", was not a lowly camp guard like Demjanjuk but one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. He was the bureaucrat in charge of the Department of Jewish Affairs. It was rather disingenuous for him to claim that he was just doing as he was told. After the Nazi hunting machine ran out of top guys to prosecute-Eichmann was really the last big Nazi war criminal trial, in 1961-Israel turned on guys farther down the ladder, putting middle management NCO's on trial. That was iffy. By the 1980s, they'd run out of them, so they went after the privates like Demjanjuk, the guards and the shower operators and the train drivers.

Demjanjuk has been fighting this battle for some 25 years at least. He is now an old, tired, crippled, worn out man. He likely has very little time left before he dies, and possibly goes to meet the Final Judge. Even there he has an out-in the Bible a Roman soldier asks Jesus if he will go to hell for killing Jews as part of his duties, and Jesus replies that since the soldier had no choice (Rome had a draft) that God would punish Augustus Caesar, Rome's emperor, for the soldier's sins. I think it's time to let this guy die in peace.

We can't keep reliving the Holocaust until Doomsday. There was recently an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that seriously argued that Americans would soon be building ovens for American Jews. The guy's rationale? Jews are still blamed by everyone for everything that goes wrong, and in Vienna in 1900 the Jews were very prominent and powerful too, and look what happened to THEM!

If the majority of Jews really think like this, then one can see the logic behind the supposed attempt by Jews to exterminate whites. People with such a worldview are likely to take an it's-us-or-them stance, which makes it a zero sum game, to protect Us They must die. It's like a man cast into the ocean who kicks away those who try to grab for a life ring-if the other guy gets it, the loser will die. If Jews will never feel safe until the rest of humanity is destroyed, then they need to back off before Israel starts WW3 to achieve the desired result. In which case, we all lose.

Of course those Liberal/Marxist people at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals

I had thought that the Israeli's were unable to identify him as having served in a concentration camp back when they had him on trial in the late 80's. They determined that he had been in the SS but not at a camp.
Being a member of the SS in itself isn't enough so they let him go, fair enough.

You'd think that verdict would be allowed to stand unchallenged since it's pretty certain that the Israeli's were very thorough in the investigations that led to their findings.
I guess it's just a matter of some people being determined to get their pound of flesh one way or the other, right or wrong.
They seem bent on avenging the last holocaust and don't give a damn about any future ones.