Ivan the Terrible - John Demjanjuk Extradited to Germany

jonniebgood1

Mahatma coat wrote: »

What has this man done to deserve this wrath, TWICE.

28,060 counts of accessory to murder

Morlar

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12321549

Prosecutors had argued he was recruited by the Germans to be an SS camp guard and that by working at a death camp he was a participant in the killings. No evidence was produced that he committed a specific crime.

It was the first time such a legal argument was made in a German court.

jonniebgood1

Very difficult to fathom the rights and wrongs of this now that the verdict is given. For the court to convict him then release him would suggest that he must be guilty given that there is a burden of proof on the prosecution under german law. His defense is plausible: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/12/john-demjanjuk-guilty-nazi-war-crimes

The prosecution has presented no evidence that Demjanjuk committed a specific crime, but claims his presence at Sobibór is enough to charge him with being an accessory to murder. It is the first time this legal argument has been tried in German courts.

The case against Demjanjuk was that he was one of the guards who forced Jewish prisoners into rooms, knowing that engine fumes were to be pumped in. Demjanjuk is then alleged to have dragged out the corpses and thrown them into a mass grave, where they were later burned in an attempt to leave no trace.

Demjanjuk said he was a victim, not a perpetrator, of Nazi crimes. His lawyer, Ulrich Busch, told the court on Wednesday that high-ranking Germans, such as the commander of the Trawniki SS camp where Demjanjuk allegedly trained, had been acquitted by German courts.

"Should foreigners pay for the crimes of the Germans … in order to acquit Germany of its responsibility alone for the Holocaust?" Busch said

It seems a reverse moralistic type of argument but is compelling.

The Judge: http://www.chandlerswatch.com/2011/05/12/91-year-old-john-demjanjuk-found-guilty/

Presiding Judge Ralph Alt said the 91-year-old was a piece of the Nazis’ “machinery of destruction.”

“The court is convinced that the defendant … served as a guard at Sobibor from 27 March 1943 to mid September 1943,” Alt said, closing a trial that has lasted nearly 18 months.

Demjanjuk sat in a wheelchair in front of the judges as they announced their verdict, but showed no reaction. He has denied the charges, but declined the opportunity to make a final statement to the court.

Demjanjuk’s son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said the defense would appeal. He asserted that “the Germans have built a house of cards and it will not stand for long.”

Did Demjanjuk deny that he was at Sobibor? Or did he explain his role there with the understanding that it was forced labour with his other option being death? If so had he volunteered to serve the Germans. It is often mentioned that he had been a red army soldier but this was due to conscription.

Fuinseog

Demjanjuk was apparently a prison guard. I do hope the Jewish kapos who worked so diligently for the Nazis are also being pursued.

jonniebgood1

Fuinseog wrote: »

Demjanjuk was apparently a prison guard. I do hope the Jewish kapos who worked so diligently for the Nazis are also being pursued.

I think it is misleading to compare him to a Kapo. There are certainly grounds for arguing against this judgement but I am pretty sure he was not a Kapo or on equal standing with a Kapo. It is hard to find proper detail in all the summaries of the case but I think he was a member of the SS at the camp which is different to being a Kapo, whether diligent or not.

Some of these grounds for being against the ruling of the German court are explained by Rebecca Wittmann, a specialist in this area:

CBC News: Demjanjuk has been found guilty by a German court of accessory to murder. Explain the significance of this verdict in the context of Nazi war crimes trials.

Rebecca Wittmann: Demjanjuk was tried under the regular German penal code, so in that sense he was not tried as a Nazi or as a war criminal, but as an accessory to murder. The German penal code is completely different from the charges used at Nuremberg or at the International Criminal Court today, in which defendants are charged with genocide, or war crimes, or crimes against humanity. The German courts chose (along with the Allies) already in the late 1940s not to incorporate these charges into their national criminal code — unlike France, for example, which did and tried defendants like Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon with crimes against humanity. So the prosecutors in Munich had to prove that he acted as an accessory to murder.

The key piece of evidence against him, his SS identification card, and some documents showing that he was enlisted as a guard at Sobibor, were enough to get him convicted. The sentence, five years maximum, may seem extraordinarily short in comparison with the magnitude of the crime — accessory in over 20,000 cases — but in fact it's much longer than many former Nazis were sentenced in the postwar period. Many of Demjanjuk's colleagues, and most of his superiors, were either acquitted or given "time-served" sentences. So to me, this sentence is yet another example in a long history of misguided trials, charges, and sentences, pointing to a much larger problem in the German justice system and the way jurists have chosen to prosecute Nazis there.

CBC News: His defense has always been that he was a Ukrainian Red Army soldier who was a Nazi prisoner of War and conscripted to work at the Sobibor concentration camp. Some argue he's a convenient target when so many German Nazis got off without any punishment at all. Explain this complicated and flawed history of war crimes prosecution.

Wittmann: Demjanjuk was charged with aiding and abetting the murder of 27,900 people. The state attorneys arrived at this number through a process of deduction: it is presumed that Demjanjuk was a guard at Sobibor in 1943 and during that time, as Nazi documents show, the same number of people were brought to Sobibor — mainly from the Netherlands — and murdered there.

Demjanjuk is a problematic case for many reasons. First, he is already (in)famous for his sensational trial in Israel two decades ago. He was extradited from the U.S. and put on trial there as "Ivan the Terrible" — a notoriously sadistic camp guard at Treblinka — and sentenced to death (the only other Nazi sentenced to death in Israel besides Adolf Eichmann). Demjanjuk spent six years on death row before it was discovered, through the unearthing of new documents after the fall of communism and because of a possible cover up by the OSI, that he was not Ivan the Terrible from Treblinka, but in all likelihood Ivan the less terrible from Sobibor.

Demjanjuk returned home to Cleveland Ohio while American investigators put together a new case against him. This time he was tried by the Germans, which brings us to the second problem.

John Demjanjuk was conscripted by the Red Army and fought for the Soviets until he was captured by the Germans in 1942. He was then imprisoned as a POW, where he faced a few bleak possibilities: murder at a concentration camp (the Nazis killed 15,000 Soviet POWs at Auschwitz alone in 1941), death through hard labour or starvation, or Trawniki, a training camp near the Ukraine border in Poland, set up by the Nazis for POWs like Demjanjuk to do the dirty work of murdering Jews at the Operation Reinhard death camps.

So Demjanjuk constitutes a more complex kind of perpetrator than those Germans who joined the SS and worked at camps in order to avoid serving on the front; and the vast majority of those Germans were not tried, or were tried and acquitted by German courts, Demjanjuk's superiors included.

To be sure, as a participant in the mass murder of thousands of innocent people in the Holocaust, Demjanjuk should be tried and punished accordingly. The problem lies in the fact that Demjanjuk has spent many more years in prison, as an involuntary guard against whom no concrete specific proofs of his actions exists, than many thousands of Germans who voluntarily went to work at death camps and against whom there is copious evidence of participation in crimes of mass murder.

CBC News: Tell us more about this flawed prosecution of those Nazis who willingly worked at deathcamps.

Wittmann: A good example of this is the case of SS Captain Kurt Streibel, the commander of the Trawniki training camp.

While over 5,000 new SS guards were trained at the camp, mainly Soviet prisoners of war but some civilians, there were also over 6,000 Jewish prisoners conscripted as forced laborers at the camp. These prisoners were treated much the same way as they were at other Nazi camps: starvation diets and murder through work were common, as well as shootings here and there to keep the population in fear.

In October of 1943, the grizzly "Aktion Erntefest" ("Harvest Action") was carried out. After attempted uprisings at Sobibor and other camps, the SS decided to act swiftly and violently as a deterrent: they shot all 6,000 Jewish prisoners at the camp in a single day, eradicating the entire work force. Kurt Streibel was indicted by the LG Hamburg in 1970 for his role as commander at the camp; after six long years, he along with five other guards was acquitted of mass murder of Jews.

How is it possible that someone like Streibel could be acquitted and someone like Demjanjuk is convicted as an accessory? The answer has to do with the German penal code and the way it was applied in Nazi trials.

Demjanjuks attitude is described. If he is a victim why not tell his story? :

CBC News: You attended some of the trial in Munich and you described in an earlier interview the emotional testimonies of relatives of victims who died at the Sobibor camp. Can you describe their reaction to this verdict and the significance of it for them?

Wittmann: The reactions I have seen from the families of Sobibor victims have generally been relief that the trial is over, satisfaction that there has been a sentence at all — and also frustration with Demjanjuk himself, who is unrepentant, refuses to acknowledge his presence at Sobibor, and has a generally off-putting demeanor in which he refuses to look at the family members or to take off his hat and sunglasses. I think there is frustration with his lack of remorse, but a general sense of satisfaction, because despite the fact that this is a short sentence, it is likely to be a life sentence for the 91 year old Demjanjuk.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/05/13/f-demjanjuk-wittmann-qa.html

Fuinseog

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

I think it is misleading to compare him to a Kapo. There are certainly grounds for arguing against this judgement but I am pretty sure he was not a Kapo or on equal standing with a Kapo. It is hard to find proper detail in all the summaries of the case but I think he was a member of the SS at the camp which is different to being a Kapo, whether diligent or not.

Some of these grounds for being against the ruling of the German court are explained by Rebecca Wittmann, a specialist in this area:


Demjanjuks attitude is described. If he is a victim why not tell his story? :

[l]

Whats the point in badgering an old man? We already have our view of the holocaust from hollywood movies. Its amusing that the Americans protected him for so long.

contrary to the images that are fed to us, not all the SS were bad people. Simon Wiesenthal himself claimed that only 2% of the organisation were criminals and he was friendly with a SS camp guard. It is interesting to note that he wanted nothing to do with the Simon Wiesenthal Center.


Kapos worked against their own people. They were teh lowest form of life.

Dr Strange

Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center...

“We’re hopeful that this verdict will pave the way for additional prosecutions in Germany.”

Shylock looking for his full pound of flesh. :rolleyes:

The people they are still looking for must be in their 90's at this stage. What's the bloody point? They made their point ever since the end of WWII.

jonniebgood1

Fuinseog wrote: »

Whats the point in badgering an old man? We already have our view of the holocaust from hollywood movies. Its amusing that the Americans protected him for so long.
.

Preusse wrote: »

The people they are still looking for must be in their 90's at this stage. What's the bloody point? They made their point ever since the end of WWII.

I understand clearly the point made but still have difficulty understanding what an appropriate statute of limitations time limit in these cases would be?

There is an explanation on statute of limitations here http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6852996.ece

The point is that prosecuting such crimes has a point and purpose now and for the future. It is a matter quite independent of how long ago the crimes were committed. We prosecute and punish in order to maintain our determination not to countenance such crimes. Part of the intention is to make permanent liability to prosecution a deterrent.

This applies to all serious crimes. Rape, murder, child abuse, genocide and crimes against humanity are too serious to allow the mere passage of time to weaken a society’s stand against them. It would be a mistake to see this as an austere refusal to be forgiving. We should indeed be far more forgiving as a society about many more things. We have too many categories of crime now, we have far too many people in prison, and society is far too unforgiving of things that should not be crimes at all: the example of using the criminal law to deal with drugs and prostitution is a glaring case in point.
....................................................
When it is unlikely that the perpetrator of a past crime will reoffend, when social attitudes have changed towards what was once regarded as a crime (such as homosexual practices), or when time has effaced or remedied whatever harm was done by a crime in the past, there is a case for forgiving and forgetting. An old man is unlikely to repeat the follies of youth; it would be wrong to pursue a seventy-year-old for a charge of assault and battery laid when he was aged 20. But if the seventy-year-old was found by DNA evidence to have committed a rape or a murder at age 20, he should most certainly be held to account.

it is the crime as much as the criminal that matters.

So tell me if people think that Demjanjuk is to old to charge now (accepting his conviction which is another days argument), at what stage did he become to old to make it worthwhile charging him?

Mahatma coat

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

28,060 counts of accessory to murder

So how many of the sonderkomando or Kapos from the same camp have been prosecuted for simmilar crimes????

jonniebgood1

Mahatma coat wrote: »

So how many of the sonderkomando or Kapos from the same camp have been prosecuted for simmilar crimes????

Don't know. My understanding is that they were diferent roles to the accused man in this case. I was answering your question "What has this man done to deserve this wrath, TWICE" The answer as stated is

28,060 counts of accessory to murder

Mahatma coat

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Don't know. My understanding is that they were diferent roles to the accused man in this case. I was answering your question "What has this man done to deserve this wrath, TWICE" The answer as stated is

Well can you explain to the rest of us what his role was, as 'NO specific evidence of a Crime has been presented'?????

Fuinseog

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Don't know. My understanding is that they were diferent roles to the accused man in this case. I was answering your question "What has this man done to deserve this wrath, TWICE" The answer as stated is

how as he an assessory to murder? Has it even been proven that he was a camp guard there?
The Jewish kapos were more brutal than the guards.

jonniebgood1

Mahatma coat wrote: »

Well can you explain to the rest of us what his role was, as 'NO specific evidence of a Crime has been presented'?????

28,060 counts of accessory to murder

Fuinseog wrote: »

how as he an assessory to murder? Has it even been proven that he was a camp guard there?
The Jewish kapos were more brutal than the guards.

I don't think he was a kapo though I point out that I make no defense here for kapo behaviour.

My understanding is that it was proven conclusively in the German court that he was a camp guard.

Accessory to murder means he assisted in murder but didnt carry out the killing himself- wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_(legal_term):

An accessory is a person who assists in the commission of a crime, but who does not actually participate in the commission of the crime as a joint principal.

So if he is proven to have been a guard at Sobibor death camp I guess in the eyes of a German court that equals assisting in the commissioning of a crime. I would agree with the court for the most part but I also take on board the point which I think is made by both Preuuse and Fuinseog that he is so old and feeble now that it doesnt achieve much, hence I asked genuinely:

"So tell me if people think that Demjanjuk is to old to charge now (accepting his conviction which is another days argument), at what stage did he become to old to make it worthwhile charging him?"

marcsignal

To me, his age is not really the issue here. Let's have a look at the probable choices John Demjanjuk would have been faced with, when German tanks rolled into his town/village.

For a start, this guy was a Ukrainian. Now, on one hand, some historians suggest that Lithunians, Latvians, Ukranians, Estonians etc. were recruited into, call them, Local (Pro-German) Malitia, or indeed the Waffen SS, with the understanding they would be fighting Communism. However, many other historians tell us that they were selected to guard concentration camps, mainly to allow the better trained and politically reliable former German guards, to fight at the front. The same historians press the point that this was, at the same time, a cynical act by the Nazis, to get the Eastern Europeans and Ukrainians to do their dirty work for them.

So John Demjanjuk is left with a choice, join up, or face a very uncertain future under Nazi rule.
Non compliance would have more than likely meant starvation, or being rounded up to work as a forced labourer somewhere, or worse. Compliance would have meant training, feeding, hospital care if necessary, and, in the medium term anyway, survival.

So he, like many others, join up. After swearing an oath, and getting whatever training they were given, he now finds himself a fully paid up member of the German armed forces. Then the day arrives where he is assigned to Sobibor, as a guard, of minimum rank and power.

Even taking into account, that most Ukrainians hated the Russians, and, if history is anything to go by, didn't have much love for Jews either. At what point could Demjanjuk say "Hang on a minute, I'm not shooting that woman in the head", and not pay the price with his own life ??

I believe, he, like so many others, were faced with Hobsons Choice, 'You're damned if you do, and your damned if you don't'. I'll even raise my own hands and admit, that if I, personally, was faced with similar choices, under similar circumstances, I would do whatever I had to to survive. That is not something I say with pride, but rather with an honest acknowledgement of my own limitations.

All that said, I find difficult to understand why a German, or any court, could find him guilty on the grounds that he was 'present' when these crimes were taking place, or that he was guilty, because he was part of the apparatus, purely on the basis of where he was sent to do 'his duty'

If he had the kind of authority of Joseph Mengele, or Eric Pribke who we discussed on here a number of months ago, or any other senior SS Officer, then fine, put him on trial and charge him. I just do not think he is in the same catagory at all, for a number of different reasons.

I've nothing to add about the Wiesenthal Cntr, or any of its other sub organisations.

Mahatma coat

John Demjanjuk Started out the War in the Red Army, he was Captured by the Germans, some people are talking like he volunteered to be a amp guard, hew had little or No say in what happened to him or what duties he was asigned, if anything he is guilty of doing what was nescessary for his survival, a defence used by many a Kapo or sonderkomando after the fall of the Reich

jonniebgood1

Mahatma coat wrote: »

John Demjanjuk Started out the War in the Red Army,

Are you sure of this???
I thought he started the war as a civilian and was conscripted into the red army.

Mahatma coat wrote: »

some people are talking like he volunteered to be a amp guard, hew had little or No say in what happened to him or what duties he was asigned,

How do you think did he end up as a camp guard?

Mahatma coat wrote: »

, if anything he is guilty of doing what was nescessary for his survival, a defence used by many a Kapo or sonderkomando after the fall of the Reich

It is also a defense that is used in many other cases. Using this as a defense does not automatically exonerate the accused of a crime.

Manic Moran

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Are you sure of this???
It is also a defense that is used in many other cases. Using this as a defense does not automatically exonerate the accused of a crime.

Automatically, no. But it is certainly an argument. It worked for SNCF, for example.

NTM

Tony EH

marcsignal wrote: »

Just been on the news from Munich.



Article

.

"Demjanjuk was charged with 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, one for each person who died during the time he was accused of being a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. There was no evidence he committed a specific crime. The prosecution was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing — the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts."

I'm at a loss for words.

Morlar

Tony EH wrote: »

"Demjanjuk was charged with 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, one for each person who died during the time he was accused of being a guard at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. There was no evidence he committed a specific crime. The prosecution was based on the theory that if Demjanjuk was at the camp, he was a participant in the killing — the first time such a legal argument has been made in German courts."

I'm at a loss for words.

Couldn't agree more.

There is an interesting article about this by Patrick Buchanan (former senior advisor to US presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan) here:

http://buchanan.org/blog/the-persecution-of-john-demjanjuk-4743

By Patrick J. Buchanan

The Persecution of John Demjanjuk

“John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders,” ran the headline on the BBC. The lede began:

“A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland.”

Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: “No evidence was produced that he committed a specific crime.”

That is correct. No evidence was produced, no witness came forward to testify he ever saw Demjanjuk injure anyone. And the critical evidence that put Demjanjuk at Sobibor came — from the KGB.

First was a KGB summary of an alleged interview with one Ignat Danilchenko, who claimed he was a guard at Sobibor and knew Demjanjuk. Second was the Soviet-supplied ID card from the Trawniki camp that trained guards.

There are major problems with both pieces of “evidence.”

First, Danilchenko has been dead for a quarter of a century, no one in the West ever interviewed him, and Moscow stonewalled defense requests for access to the full Danilchenko file. His very existence raises a question.

How could a Red Army soldier who turned collaborator and Nazi camp guard survive Operation Keelhaul, which sent all Soviet POWs back to Joseph Stalin, where they were either murdered or sent to the Gulag?

As for the ID card from Trawniki, just last month there was unearthed at the National Archives in College Park, Md., a 1985 report from the Cleveland office of the FBI, which, after studying the card, concluded it was “quite likely” a KGB forgery.

“Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB.”

This FBI report, never made public, was done just as Demjanjuk was being deported to Israel to stand trial as “Ivan the Terrible,” the murderer of Treblinka. In a sensational trial covered by the world’s press, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to hang.

But after five years on death row, new evidence turned up when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia opened up. That evidence wholly validated the claims of Demjanjuk’s defenders.

Not only had Demjanjuk never even been at Treblinka, the Soviet files contained a photograph of the real “Ivan” — a larger and older man.

To its eternal credit, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed the conviction, rejected a request to retry Demjanjuk as a camp guard elsewhere in Poland, freed him and sent him home to America.

Exposed as a laughing stock, and denounced for fraud by Ohio district and appellate courts, the Office of Special Investigations began crafting a new case, John Demjanjuk of Sobibor, to deport and try again the old man whose defense attorneys had made fools of them.

Thus the Sobibor story and Demjanjuk’s supposed complicity in the murder of 28,000 Jews — though, as the BBC notes, no one testified at the trial that they ever saw John Demjanjuk injure anyone.

Consider the life this tormented American has lived.

Born in Ukraine in 1920, as a boy he endured the Holodomor — the famine imposed on his people in 1932 and 1933 by Stalin and his hated henchman Lazar Kaganovich, which resulted in the starvation and death of somewhere between 5 million and 9 million Ukrainians.

It has been called by historians the “forgotten Holocaust.”

Conscripted into the Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured in the German blitzkrieg. Unlike American and British POWs, whom Germans regarded as racial equals, Ukrainians were untermensch who could be used for medical experiments.

Not only did Demjanjuk survive, he managed to evade the Allied order, under Keelhaul, for all Red Army POWs to be repatriated to Stalin, which was the Soviet dictator’s demand before he would return the U.S. and British POWs his troops liberated in the march to Berlin.

In the war’s aftermath, Demjanjuk married his wife Vera, who had been conscripted in the Ukraine and brought forcibly west to work in the German economy.

Thence he moved to Cleveland, became an autoworker, raised a family and practiced his Christian faith. But he made a mistake.

He sent his wife to Ukraine to tell his aged mother that he had survived the war and was living in the great United States of America.

Word got around the village. The KGB came calling. Swiftly, the payments his mother had been receiving for her war hero son were halted, and suddenly, there turned up an ID card that said John Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki to be a Nazi camp guard.

The KGB began feeding OSI from its “files,” as OSI began a manic persecution of Demjanjuk that has lasted 30 years.

Stalin died in bed in 1953. Kaganovich died with his family around him in Moscow in 1991. And John Demjanjuk, 91, after spending five years on death row for a crime he did not commit in a place he never was, is stateless and homeless in a Germany where veterans of the SS walk free.

That is justice — in our world.

marcsignal

Tony EH wrote: »

I'm at a loss for words.

It certainly is a bizarre legal precedent alright

By the logic they are using, that would give them grounds to string up every waiter who served dinner at the Wannsee Conference, or to nobble someone like 'Rochus Mich' the Berlin Bunker telephone operator. It's like claiming that he's complicit in some way, because he was present in the bunker with Hitler when decisions were being made, and that he had not passed on messages/orders they couldn't have been carried out.

The Germans have gone way ott on this one.

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

Couldn't agree more.

There is an interesting article about this by Patrick Buchanan (former senior advisor to US presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan) here:

http://buchanan.org/blog/the-persecution-of-john-demjanjuk-4743

American senior advisor criticises Russians and KGB!!!!!! I don't believe it. Was it not KGB information that proved Demjanjuk was not 'Ivan the Terrible'.

What kind of a source is he anyway- next thing you'll be introducing piece by David Irving as factual! There are many ways to look at Demjanjuks trial but you should'nt try and introduce the likes of Buchanan as any kind of neutral source. Particularly given your criticism previously of educated historians.

Did Buchanan not previously describe adolf hitler as a man of great courage with extraordinary gifts?

Buchanan wrote that it was impossible for 850,000 Jews to be killed by diesel exhaust fed into the gas chamber at Treblinka. When George Will challenged him about it last week on TV (it is, alas, all too possible), he ducked. Buchanan's long battle with Nazi-hunters is shy of loony but still conspicuous. In 1983 he criticized the U.S. government for expressing regret over its postwar protection of Klaus Barbie. In 1985, he advocated restoring the citizenship of Arthur Rudolph, an ex-Nazi rocket scientist accused of employing slave labor at a V-2 plant.

from a piece about the quoted Buchanan http://www.newsweek.com/1991/12/23/is-pat-buchanan-anti-semitic.html

Morlar

There are several key differences between my quoting of an article by Patrick Buchanan and your demanding acceptance of the wikipedia jpeg of ferg-stats (which is what you are referring to here).


First of all the P.B. article is not a statistics JPEG, nor does he purport to be the source of the world's first global pow mortality statistics.

Unlike you I am not saying 'discussion is impossible' without all parties agreeing to the sourceless statistics, nor am I alleging a bias on the part of people who are not convinced. etc, etc,

If you could point out any factual inaccuracies in the P.B. article above I am guessing you would have done so already in your defence of this ridiculous judicial outcome.

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

If you could point out any factual inaccuracies in the P.B. article above I am guessing you would have done so already in your defence of this ridiculous judicial outcome.

Im afraid you have no understanding of the opinion I have clearly expressed on this subject. To clarify your statement above I am not defending the 'judicial outcome' in any way. On the contrary I would have doubts about many aspects of this case. I just dont see the problems the same as you and some other posters here as I can see that a valid charge of accessory can be made against the man. In any case you don't need to take my word for it as it was acceptable in the German court. When somebody asks something ridiculous and irrelevant to this case such as

So how many of the sonderkomando or Kapos from the same camp have been prosecuted for simmilar crimes????

I may appear to be answering in defence of the verdict but the situation is far to complicated to be simply for or against the verdict in the case. Such a comment would seem to be taking the case away from its facts as he was'nt a Kapo.

As I see it a more pertinent doubt would be why this case is in Germany while the crime was committed in Poland. If the crime had been in France I don't think he would be in court in Germany, so why in this case? Perhaps there is a legal justification?

There is also a problem with finding proper reporting of the case as most of the reports are generalised rubbish and don't contain detail. The nature of this type of case makes most analysis biased.

Morlar

I take it you accept the differences between my quoting of the P.B article and your insistence on agreement to the unsourced ferg-stats then ?

Also, that you could find no factual errors in the P.B article on this story ?

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

I take it you accept the differences between my quoting of the P.B article and your insistence on agreement to the unsourced ferg-stats then ?

Also, that you could find no factual errors in the P.B article on this story ?

I did not focus attention on your quoting of a known anti-semite as I felt you may not have been aware of his previous utterances. I agree that there is a massive difference between posting historical data in tablature format and posting the opinionated ravings of an anti-semite such as Buchanan. Should I post links to Buchanan being taken apart by the intellectual genius that is Ali G to further this point? I did not seek facts from the article any more than I would if you posted a David Irving opinion- it would be a strange starting point. Diverging opinion is welcomed but I would prefer a more neutral starting point than being a known anti-semite and professor of pro-Nazi opinion as PB would seem to many people to be.

Buchanan is bright, erudite, personable, and a first-rate political analyst. He is also a reactionary who has publicly expressed blatantly anti-Semitic sentiments again and again. No less a conservative icon than the late William F. Buckley wrote in his book, In Search of anti-Semitism, that "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination, the military build-up for the Gulf War, amounted to anti-Semitism."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/menachem-rosensaft/patrick-buchanan-quacks-l_b_123755.html

Before you take 'facts' from such sources you should clarify the source itself. Was that not your point regarding wiki and Niall Ferguson? Did you clarify this source and were you happy with his starting point?

Morlar

Originally Posted by Morlar View Post
I take it you accept the differences between my quoting of the P.B article and your insistence on agreement to the unsourced ferg-stats then ?

Also, that you could find no factual errors in the P.B article on this story ?

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

I did not focus attention on your quoting of a known anti-semite as I felt you may not have been aware of his previous utterances. I agree that there is a massive difference between posting historical data in tablature format and posting the opinionated ravings of an anti-semite such as Buchanan. Should I post links to Buchanan being taken apart by the intellectual genius that is Ali G to further this point? I did not seek facts from the article any more than I would if you posted a David Irving opinion- it would be a strange starting point. Diverging opinion is welcomed but I would prefer a more neutral starting point than being a known anti-semite and professor of pro-Nazi opinion as PB would seem to many people to be.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/menachem-rosensaft/patrick-buchanan-quacks-l_b_123755.html

Before you take 'facts' from such sources you should clarify the source itself. Was that not your point regarding wiki and Niall Ferguson? Did you clarify this source and were you happy with his starting point?

I will take that as ;

a)
No you can not find any factual errors in the P.B article, and also that.

b)
yes you agree there is no comparison whatsoever to my quoting of the P.B. article and your insistence on acceptance of a wiki jpeg as being the global definitive ww2 mortality stats.

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

I will take that as ;

a)
No you can not find any factual errors in the P.B article, and also that.

b)
yes you agree there is no comparison whatsoever to my quoting of the P.B. article and your insistence on acceptance of a wiki jpeg as being the global definitive ww2 mortality stats.

Failure to communicate Morlar- Are you in denial of reality!

Morlar

You are making your usual level of sense here I see. First you refuse to provide a yes or no answer to a yes or no question then accuse me of :

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

Failure to communicate Morlar- Are you in denial of reality!

Here again are the questions you have avoided answering over the preceding page of this thread :

Morlar wrote: »

I take it you accept the differences between my quoting of the P.B article and your insistence on agreement to the unsourced ferg-stats then ?

Also, that you could find no factual errors in the P.B article on this story ?

I think every regular on this forum would be mightily surprised if you did actually answer those 'yes or no' questions with either a 'yes or a no' or any kind of straight answer for that matter.

jonniebgood1

Morlar wrote: »

You are making your usual level of sense here I see. First you refuse to provide a yes or no answer to a yes or no question then accuse me of :



Here again are the questions you have avoided answering over the preceding page of this thread :



I think every regular on this forum would be mightily surprised if you did actually answer those 'yes or no' questions with either a 'yes or a no' or any kind of straight answer for that matter.

You flatter yourself and myself if you think regulars would bother reading the clap trap arguments between you and I. I did miss this level of discussion though with the forum so quiet for the last month!

The answers you (and all your regular readers!) seek are
1. No.

and

2. Yes.

Now can you explain why you think the opinion of a man who is known to be pro Nazi in many of his views is relevent in this case. His view is entirely predictable and add nothing to the debate on the German courts verdict.

Morlar

jonniebgood1 wrote: »

The answers you (and all your regular readers!) seek are
1. No.

and

2. Yes.

There is no comparison whatsoever between your ridiculous posting of the ferg stats jpeg from wiki, demanding people agree with them etc etc and my quoting an article above.

Its another ridiculous claim in a long line coming from you. Let's recap the highlights of your record on here since you began posting not that long ago

A)

The time you insisted that it was not ;

'The crimes of the soviet regime'

but that it was

'the 'crimes' of the soviet regime'

A ridiculous position to take.



That time you said that when the author longerich explicitly referred to 'Police battalion 102' as being in a location they were not at, doing something they did not do (at a time when they were somehwere else doing something else), you insisted the author did not make a mistake.

Instead he just meant something completely different. But you continously refused to accept this was a mistake on his part. He just meant a completely different group. Ridiculous position to take.

C)
The time you posted a jpeg from wiki purporting to be the worlds first global definitive pow mortality rates and then demanded everyone had to accept your completely unverified, context-less statistics. Also that if people did not accept them they needed to provide alternative data & that discussion was impossible without acceptance, also that refusal to accept the jpeg meant a bias. Yet another ridiculous position to take.

I am sorry but for a relatively new poster you have a high record for posting complete and utter clangers. Then refusing to accept the fact & becoming argumentative. I'd say your credibility on this forum is minimal at best in my view.

Which brings us to today, criticising a source without claiming any substantive factual error on their part. Using slur, and innuendo and intellectually dishonest claims of anti-semitism against the author rather than discuss any factual inaccuracies in their work.

Particularly when you have been repeatedly asked to illustrate any factual inaccuracies or errors in the P. B. article I quoted above.

Mary Robinson, Orla Guerin and Former USA President Carter, (among a long, long, list of others) have all been accused of anti-semitism at one point or another. Any public figure (particularly in the America) runs the risk of that intellectually dishonest slur if they take a public stand on an issue which is not inline with the position taken by pro-israel advocacy groups. This is not america. I simply don't accept that allegation as a criteria for discounting sources. I'd say the prevasive threat of this allegation and the constant use of it is intended to stifle debate and open discussion.

So firstly I do not accept the accusation in this instance. Anyone can allege or accuse a public figure of anything. He has not been convicted of anything whatsoever in that direction to the best of my knowledge.

Secondly - even if and that is a huge IF it were true, it would not relate to, or diminish the factual accuracy of the article I posted.