Nazi war crimes suspect Laszlo Csatary dies

[Eugene]

Source: BBC

12 August 2013 Last updated at 10:10 GMT

A 98-year-old Hungarian Nazi war crimes suspect, Laszlo Csatary, has died while awaiting trial, his lawyer has said.

Csatary died in hospital in Hungary after suffering from a number of medical problems, said Gabor Horvath.

He at one time topped the list of most wanted Nazi war crimes suspects and is alleged to have helped deport 15,700 Jews to death camps in World War II.

He faced charges relating to his wartime activities in both Hungary and in neighbouring Slovakia.

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Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23664226

[COLGATE4]

1. May he rot in hell. nt

[branford]

4. +1

[MarkLaw]

2. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Pol-pot, Du beers.

Murder is useless. When are we going to learn?

[alcibiades_mystery]

8. Boutros-Ghali? Huh?

What did Boutros-Ghali do to get lumped in with that group?

[MarkLaw]

9. He played a key role in supplying the Hutu's with Arms facilitating the genocide in Rwanda.

[iamthebandfanman]

3. these assholes

cant leave the planet fast enough.

they should have never gotten away in the first place..

unfortunately the planning for directly following the war concerning administration of the newly occupied territory was lacking and they kept a bunch of these sick fuckers in their old positions to make the transition smoother...

part of the reason the soviets were claiming they were building the wall...
to keep out all the fascists and Nazis we left in west Germany :p

[AtomicKitten]

5. He took the easy way out. /nt

[happyslug]

6. He has to be one of the last OFFICIERS involved in the Holocausts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Csizsik-Csat%C3%A1ry

Most of the other people accused of being involved in the Holocaust during the last 10-20 years have tended to be low level officials, i.e privates or other enlistees who were teenagers or young 20 year olds during WWII and ended up guarding victims of the Holocaust.

Sorry, most of the people involved in planning and making sure the holocaust occurred are long dead. The surviving holocaust suspects tends to be teenagers (sometime mid teens not even late teens) who had, at best, minor roles in the Holocaust.

Now, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has a list of Germans who were involved in PLANNING and making sure the Holocaust took place (as opposed to foot soldiers who did as they were told). Most as suspected to be dead, but a few survive. The list also include low level people who did "cxtras" against the victims, as oppose to being mere guards. I have no problem going after such people, but I do have a problem going against people who were nothing but privates in the low ranks and who did nothing else but stand guard and followed orders. Remember those orders were LEGAL at that time, and to disobey them was to be shot. Thus the defense of "Obeying Orders" is perfectly applicable to such low level types, as opposed to officers who had the option to said NO, resign, or protest the order.

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

[COLGATE4]

7. You're way overgeneralizing.

Depends very much on what type of military service these 'youngsters' were in. For any that were in the SS, especially those in the Totenkopf (Death's Head) divisions who were charged with taking care of the concentration camps and doing away with all the 'undesirables' there is absolutely no argument that any who served in these units, enlisted or officer are not all guilty as hell and deserve to swing from a very long rope. In addition regular Wermacht enlisted also efficiently performed up close and personal genocide by shooting Jews in mass executions when Hitler invaded Russia. And, finally we have the other 'youngsters', 18 and 19 year olds who enthusiastically joined the Nazi paramilitary organizations once Germany took over in their homeland. These Lithuanian, Pole, Hungarian and especially Ukrainian 'kids' were particularly savage as they carried out their 'orders'. It wasn't a question of them 'saying No' but rather a question of 'How many Jews can we kill today?'.

[happyslug]

10. ???? The chief reason the death camps were set up was the harm the SOLDIERS were suffering from

First, the the units sent into Russia to kill Jews (and other victims, including communists) were SS units NOT regular army units. Himmler received reports that such mass killings were causing all types of psychological harms to the men doing the shooting that he had to end it. To replace these murder units, Himmler came up with the idea of the death camps. The actual meeting setting up the death camps was in December 1941, long after the Waffen SS stop exchanging troops with the Camp Guards around the concentration camps. Thus very few Waffen SS were involved in the Death Camps (as oppose to the Concentration camps run by the SS throughout the 1930s and till the end of WWII).

You must understand that these were two different camps systems. One to hold political enemies of the Third Reich, the other to just kill people. In the later you entered the camp and went straight to the gas chambers and then either cremated or buried (unless, you were "lucky" to be picked to help other victims run the gas chambers and the processing of the bodies)

The actual killings in the death camps would to be done by the victims themselves (picked to do so, mostly based on the fear of death). The officers directed these killings (and avoiding doing it themselves) while giving very limited privileges to the people doing the actual killing and disposing of the bodies (i.e. the victim would live another month and maybe even have sex and even get some food).

Now, I do not want to clean up the record of the Waffen SS, the Nuremberg trial justly defined the Waffen SS as being war criminals and any member being a war criminal (This was the ruling on all Nazi groups except the SA). On the other hand, they had limited contact with the Death Camps. The Waffen SS was known to kill prisoners of war and anyone else they wanted and thus deserve they condemnation, but they had little or no relation with the death camps.

Now the German Army was known to shoot Civilians (including Jews and other people who would have ended up in the Death Camps) but most such killings were ignored by the officer corp for the Nazi Government encouraged it. Partisans, if captured were subject to summary execution by German Troops, regular or SS (a war crime by itself) thus the German Army is not blameless in this area.

On the other hand, how much blame do we put on 18-22 years old who enlisted into the SS? After 1944, drafted into the SS? Furthermore, by 1944 about 10-20% of the German Army was made up of non-Germans (with most of these serving in the SS, in the exchange for food and pay, two things in short supply in Europe from 1942 onward).

I am sorry, given what most people were facing in Europe in 1942-1945, enlisting in the SS may have been the best of several bad options (one Jewish person actually enlisted in the SS after France fell to the Germans, to avoid being found out to be a German Jew. He explained being circumcised due to an infection when he was young and the SS accepted him. He had tried to enlist in the German Regular Army but was told the German Army did not take in enlistees, you had to be drafted into the German Army, but was told the SS was taking in recruits).

As I said in my previous post, I have no problems going after one of these 18-22 year old enlistees between 1940 and 1945 IF IT CAN BE SHOWN THEY DID MORE THEN THEY WERE ORDERED TO DO. My concern is those former enlistees who enlisted and then did as they were told, nothing more. Officers and NCOs are a different matter as are enlistees who made an extra effort to harm other people (the legend of Ivan the Terrible, if he was still alive, would be included in this list). Officers were in a position to stop, or minimize such harm. NCOs could undermine such orders and get away with it. Enlistees are a different matter entirely. They exist to obey orders and that is drilled into them. If that is all the enlistees did, that is a crime of the people who issued the orders OR drilled into them that all orders were to be obeyed NOT a crime of the enlistees.

In fact if you look over the list of people actually sentence, mere membership in the Army or the SS was NOT enough, something more had to occur for them to be found guilty of a war crime. It had to be some positive action on part of the war criminal, not just obeying orders (please note this applies to enlistees only, the court in Nuremberg correctly ruled that obeying orders was NOT a defense for officers, but implication that also applies to enlistees but the Court was not actually called on to rule if the defense was NOT possible for enlistees, thus it is an open question). Officers are expected to disobey orders when it is clear the order is unlawful, thus the Court at Nuremberg had no problem convicting officers of war crimes even as they claim they were following orders.

Court subsequent to Nuremberg have been hesitate to convict someone of a war crime UNLESS that person did something POSITIVE beside obeyed orders. Most of these accusations have been on officers, so the defense of obeying orders was not permitted, but in the few cases involving enlistees the courts have bent over to avoid ruling that obeying orders is NOT a defense for enlistees (one was to avoid that issue is to look for positive acts that exceed any orders, thus the defense of obeying orders does not come into play).

Just a comment, most of these people who were in a position to stop the Holocaust were protected by the German and US governments (and other Governments) in the 1950s, 1960s and while into the 1970s. As they died off, the urge to go after lower ranking people (who had no political friends still in the government) became possible (i.e. no political harm to existing politicians if one of these lower level criminals were convicted, while the same government had left their leaders die of old age). Thus the search to go after low level war criminals (in the 1970s they were some still living that had gone the extra step above orders and were convicted, by the 1980s most of these had been convicted and what was left were enlistees who just enlisted in the wrong unit at the wrong time).

My favorite cases involved several who had immigrated to the US. In the 1980s and later is was found they had lied on their immigration papers and were stripped of their US Citizenship. Then the US had a problem, no one wanted them, thus they ended up living out their lives in the US. This is the level we have reached when it comes to these criminals, sooner or later it has to stop. I have no problem going after people who had been in a leadership position OR did something beyond what they had been ordered to do, but low level enlistees who just obeyed orders? My issue is why? At this point going after such people is not justice but vengeance, and while vengeance is a factor when considering justice, other factors come into play, including mercy.

[COLGATE4]

11. An interesting attempt at an apology for killers.

"The chief reason the death camps were set us was the harm the soldiers were suffering from". No. The Wermacht enthusiastically participated in the wholesale slaughter of Jews in Russia. The Wermacht began the task of executing undesirables in Russia until the mass shootings began to take their inevitable toll on soldier morale. The SS also provided some 'technical 'support' with the Einsatzgruppen but in the beginning and for a significant time thereafter regular Wermacht soldiers carried out many of the mass executions. Because of this effect on Army morale (but mainly because this method of exterminating the Jews was just too slow) Himmler was forced to find more 'efficient' ways to handle his Jewish 'problem', leading first to gas vans and later to the gas chambers at specialized extermination camps. That in no way exonerates the German army enlisted men who did their utmost to rid Russia of all the untermenschen prior to Himmler speeding the process up.

"How much blame do we put on 18-22 year olds who enlisted in the SS"? Why would we NOT blame them? The SS as an organization has absolutely nothing to redeem it. The fact they drafted after 1944 is irrelevant. Prior to that you were only accepted if you were the idealized young Nazi, believing wholeheartedly in all their horrific beliefs. The Russians had the right idea, executing any SS soldier they captured.

Feel free to keep believing that only officers and high officals bear any responsibility for the Holocaust. The only thing that saved many of these killers was the sheer numbers of them which made it impossible to deal with all of them coupled with the general fatigue at war's end, thus leaving only the higher ups for eventual prosecution.