Most-Wanted Nazi War Criminal Located in Hungary

Wibbs wrote: »

What's really scary about reading about that time period is how easily ordinary people went along and enabled some of the most repugnant acts in human history. Very very few were forced to do it.

Read of a police chief in Germany ordered from on high to find collect and transport Jews from his area. He had moral issues with this, so he gathered his men together and told them of his misgivings. He also told them that he would go along with the orders, but didn't expect his men to do so if they felt it was wrong and that no sanctions would befall them if they refused. Turned out a fair number did refuse. At first. Within a couple of weeks the vast majority had returned to the ranks and were happily fulfilling the orders. Of the group there were one or two sadistic savages that came to the fore. Traits that had been hidden in the past, but most were normal everyday men with families, upstanding citizens and all that. It seems the Nazi command knew how this kinda thing would go. The police chief made official his misgivings but contrary to what you might expect, didn't get much hassle over it at all. They knew in the end people will go along with that stuff.

They also realised people have limits. Hence the final solution involving mechanisation and dehumanisation of the killing process. Mass shootings were causing issues with the troops on the ground, even dissent. Himmler himself had a weak stomach for such things. Himmler, a truly evil individual, but the perfect boss according to those who worked for him.

We see that in every area the Nazi's went into. Most people just go along with it, some certainly out of fear, but mostly to "fit in", with a rare enough few becoming complete monsters and an even rarer few that resist. The ones that do resist tend to be the "oddballs" the dissenters, the outliers in normal life. It seems that if history is anything to go by, if AH was a society in such circumstances, it would be more likely the trolls, troublemakers and oddballs, rather than the good posters that would hide you in the attic if you were on the run.

The banality of evil and all that. Very few of us are very far removed from sliding into the type of barbarity that sickens us when we see it perpetrated by the Japanese or Naziz or whoever. Even now, there are horrific atrocities being carried out in Syria by people who, up to recently, were ordinary, respected citizens. It's what's truly scary about the rise of such neo-Nazi groups as New Dawn in Greece.

I think the MIlgram experiements gives a shocking indication of just how susceptible we are to herd mentality, and sublimating morality to obedience. Eye-opening stuff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

DEFTLEFTHAND wrote: »

There was Conscription though, Many were involved in active combat and not in the other atrocities.

While probably the vast majority was done by minority groups like the SS rather than regular soldiers, imagine a conscripted Irish army including our skanger population, who knew they could stab, shoot and rape without fear of prosecution. Transfer that to Germany and I am sure they had a large underclass of scumbags doing the same, many of whom are likely still alive today.

Not to generalise, but in my time I have met god knows how many Germans, and a larger proportion of them than, say, the Irish, are not mentally on the same level. Not in an evil sense on the surface, just plain odd and extremely anal more than anything, but given the power over life and death, who knows. Not all of them obviously, or even the majority, but in the same way every small village or Dublin estate has its resident weirdo, every year in school has those one or two kids who you suspect would do a Columbine if they had the motivation, in the same way every workplace has that one oddball, about 10% of German men, from my experience, seem to be that guy. Gerany certainly would have a lower level of skangers than we have, but in terms of weirdos and probable perverts, way off our scale.

SafeSurfer wrote: »

Why would anyone consider the Irish good fighters? Unless your talking about drunken brawls amongst ourselves.

Where is the Irish empire?

800 years to "liberate" the island?

Come on, the Irish are terrible fighters.

The problem we had, much liek the Scots is that we were never truly united and we always had enough people who could be easily bought off by the English/British.
The way Collins got around this is by having higher level of secrecy and shooting those that were snitches.

Wibbs wrote: »

I agree massive profits were made from the war, especially in the US. What people often forget is the same massive profits made in Germany by numerous companies and businessmen that helped Hitler to power and helped him prosecute the war. Companies and businessmen who continued on after the war down to today and very very few were brought to task.

If you want to see who did best out of WWII go visit an Alpine country noted for it's clocks.
They even supplied war materials directly to Germany and it wasn't like steel/iron ore from Sweden.
They supplied finished articles.


Yep, though to be fair to the current Japanese they know very very little of their wartime history. Your average Japanese wouldn't have much of a clue about the atrocities perpetrated by their great grandfathers in Manchuria. Those questions have been avoided like the plague. They certainly never had the historical exposition and guilt educated into them that Germans had.

There was some muppet on here the other day arguing they are right in not teaching the younger generation, because it would make them feel they are somehow responsible. :rolleyes:

The Japs have never owned up to what they really did.

Einhard wrote: »

People might find it odd, but while I don't consider Hiroshima or Nagasaki to be war crimes because they hastened the end of the war, and thus saved countless lives, I don't feel the same about Dresden, or say, the firebombing of Tokyo. They seemed much more like revenge to me, and that, IMO, puts them in a different sphere than the dropping of Little Boy and Fat Man.

Ahhh....
Dresden was just a prime example of a raid going perfectly.
That could have happened to some other city, but it just happened to be Dresden.
And I don't believe Dresden was just some university town.
The firebombing of Hamburg would have been another that went particularly well.
It was partially down to luck.
It is like the fact that lucky weather for Kokura meant Nagaski was bombed instead.


BTW I think the Germans and Japanese got everything they deserved.
The cr** they did to other nations and peoples means they deserved no quarter.
They were all. or as good as all to make no difference, more than happy to tow the party line when the war was going their way.

I hate the cr** spouted by a lot of the ones that survived about how they didn't know about anything.
For instance in Germany they had already seen and condoned for the most part the mistreatment of Jews even before war ever broke out.
A fair few of them worked in industry in Germany which used slave labour with no qualms.
A fair amount of cr** was spouted by normal Wehrmacht soldiers who would often claim after the war all the bad sh** was done by SS, SD, Gestapo, etc.
There is no way in hell the normal Wehrmacht soldiers, especially on the Eastern front or in the Balkans did not have an idea about the massacres being perpetrated.

Wibbs wrote: »

The basic training the Japanese soldier went through was about the most dehumanising of all the conflicts forces. Shít like beatings, even live bayonet practice and the like. Very few ordinary infantrymen in China say would have not been involved. Rapes and murder were a daily thing, even quite a number of cases of cannibalism.

Actually they had engaged in cannibalism in Papua New Guinea in 1942 and it wasn't a case like Burma where they were starving to death due to no resupplies arriving.

Wibbs wrote: »

They had "rapehouses" where Chinese women were raped to death as a form of R and R for the troops. They even built special rape chairs to secure these women. They had special scientific units who tested biological and chemical agents on civilians. Many Japanese doctors trained in surgical techniques with live and often fully conscious civilians. Unreal shít went on.

And some of those doctors became highly thought of scientists working in hospitals and universities after the war.

Father Damo wrote: »

While probably the vast majority was done by minority groups like the SS rather than regular soldiers, imagine a conscripted Irish army including our skanger population, who knew they could stab, shoot and rape without fear of prosecution. Transfer that to Germany and I am sure they had a large underclass of scumbags doing the same, many of whom are likely still alive today.

Accept here is the problem with your argument.

The Einsatzgruppen leaders and their subordinate officers were carefully selected by Heydrich from among the best-educated and dedicated Nazis.
Three of the four commanders held doctorates; Franz Walter Stahlecker (EG A), Otto Rasch (EG C – a double PhD), and Otto Ohlendorf (EG D). The commander of Einsatzgruppe B was Arthur Nebe, then head of the Kripo (Kriminalpolizei – Criminal Police). Of the 17 initial SK, EK, and Vorkommando leaders, a further 7 held a doctorate. Subsequent leaders included an ex-pastor (Ernst Szymanowski alias Biberstein), a physician (Weinmann), and a professional opera singer (Klingelhöfer). These were clearly no gangsters. They represented those who, in a different time and a different culture, might have been considered among the brightest and the best of their generation.

So the guys in charge weren't scumbags form the under classes but highly educated and supposedly civilised people.

This is what made the Nazists so damm scary.

jmayo wrote: »

Accept here is the problem with your argument.



So the guys in charge weren't scumbags form the under classes but highly educated and supposedly civilised people.

This is what made the Nazists so damm scary.

Not a problem at all if you see my following post. Most of the weird, strange Germans I have met were educated and eloquent. I have no doubt alot of these blokes, given an opportunity without fear of prosecution (as the SS as the tike reckoned they had), would not be averse to what the Nazis did. I have met more nationalities than the average Joe in my time and the Germans have without a shadow of a doubt the largest proportion of oddballs.

Can we not just take his shower mat away?

marcsignal wrote: »

Totally agree, I don't know how scumbags like these sleep at night, with the blood they have on their hands.

It shouldn't take Dr Efraim Zuroff too long to find them either, since they're living openly in his own back yard.

Good point. There are likely more war criminals living within a half hour drive of the Wisenthal HQ than there are in the whole of Europe and the Americas. The ones living in West Bank settlements are really doing nothing more than a replica of the German lebensraum policy anyway.

The Sun decides to go after convenient bogeymen. Not too likely they will be knocking on the doors of ex paras demanding answers regarding their conduct on Bloody Sunday. Nazis are more fair game for some reason.