No Excuse For It – EVER
B-17 Contrails at 25,000 feet
The effort track down and try guards at Nazi concentration camps has never stopped. The two incidents below involve men in their 90s who were in their teens when they were at the concentration camp in Stutthoff, which is now Gdansk, in Poland. The articles at the links give the full story on each of them. (Photo of the B-17 was supplied by The Other Whitey)
Former Nazi concentration camp guards at Stutthoff go on trial.
Dey is 93, was drafted into service at 17, and sent to Stutthoff (near Gdansk) to serve as a prison guard at that camp. He was recognized by an elderly woman who was sent there with her mother, when she was a child.
https://time.com/5703251/former-nazi-guard-trial-germany/
(HAMBURG, Germany) — From his post as a teenage SS private in a watchtower in Nazi Germany’s Stutthof concentration camp, Bruno Dey could hear the screams of Jews dying in the gas chamber. And, Dey later told investigators, the carting of their lifeless bodies to the camp’s crematorium was a daily sight.
More than seven decades later, Dey went on trial Thursday on 5,230 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court. Pushed into the courtroom in a wheelchair, accompanied by one of his daughters, the 93-year-old wore a wide-brimmed hat and held a red folder in front of his face to shield it from the cameras. – article
Johann Rehbogen is charged with being an accessory in the murders of several hundred Jewish and Polish prisoners at the Stutthoff camp just east of the Gdansk, Poland, in the early 1940s. “He admits to having worked at the camp but denies knowing about any murders there,” NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Berlin.
Taking into consideration that the so-called media mavens, who think their crap doesn’t stink, do not have real control of anything, it’s a good time to remind everyone that Hitler did fully control the published news and that ordinary people who were not involved did not know about the camps. That is how he got away with it.
Hitler targeted Jews first, and then anyone else in his way. Stalin targeted anyone who looked at him cross-eyed.
When we were kids, my dad used to serve Sunday dinner at the table and unfortunately, he put adult-sized portions on our plates. If we didn’t clean our plates, he’d get mad at us. That went on until he said “People are starving to death in China”. Our response was ‘Then send this to them. We can’t eat all that.” I thought it was some kind of stupid joke for the longest time until I found out the hard way that it was true. Mao had a population of over 1 billion, and just did not give a crap if any of them starved to death. As a result, 30,000,000 Chinese citizens did starve to death.
Never, ever take your freedom for granted.
Category: Historical
OK. What about the Armenians? Muslims rounded up Christian men, women, and children. Tattooed them, marked for death, murdered them, and yet we hear diddly squat about it. I didn’t hear about it till I met one of the survivors. Became a Dr. here in Chicago. As you can imagine, he’s got a pretty big hard on for Muslims. Seemed like so much B.S. till he rolled up the sleeve on the dated tattoo, and I did the research. Until all of them are treated equally, Uncle Joe Stalin’s cohort, Mao’s Cadre, Khmer Rouge, heck even Winnie Mandela’s crew of haters with the necklacing, how are you going to blame a 17 y.o. when these others are skating? Just asking. Are they equal? or not? BTW I’ve no problem with treating them all the same, I don’t think anyone should get away with it, but if you’re letting some get away, and others not. You ain’t doing it right.
Imma gonna lean a bit towards USAF E-5 myself. And this coming from someone who had Family Members (by Marriage) that survived the camps and whose father was witness to the liberation of one. I would feel differently I think, if either of these two men had been more directly involved in the murder of the prisoners. But a 17 year out tower guard that could of had absolutely no control over what was happening? And, again, why was there such a delay? Someone must have made a decision many years ago that these boys were not cupalable or they would have been tried and punished when it would have meant a little more. YMMV
If they’d locked up all the former Nazis after the war, there would have been nobody left to rebuild the country. So they absolutely ignored some of their history. We did too when it was expedient.
I can’t see how just being a guard at the camp should be accessory to all the murders that happened there. Where do you stop? Everyone in the SS? The whole Wehrmacht? Everyone had a role in the debacle, direct or indirect.
I forced myself to look into the mechanics of the “Final Solution” to refute idiots who deny it.
Some of those “camps” had no barracks for the folks arriving by trainload, multiple times a day. Day in and day out, month in and month out.
No one from the trains left.
The repeating cycle of mass screaming was audible across the entire camp, as was the silence 10 minutes later.
They burned the corpses. Mostly. Often this was in open burn-pits at the death camps. You can perhaps imagine the stench.
For someone there over a day not to know what was going on is simply impossible.
The work-to-death “Konzentrationslager” were not -quite- so blatant, but the bodies vastly outstripped the ovens, and piled up. You cannot imagine the stench.
Some SS-Shutze out in the woods shooting at the allies is one thing. The same junior enlisted manning an MG tower at a KZ of either type is another.
-Quite- another thing.
Yes, many mass murderers escape earthly justice. Too many. By far, too many.
But not that one, I think. And I think it good that some criminals are pursued to the grave’s edge if need be.
Lest we forget and allow such appalling evil to repeat. The lesson is also for us, the living.
I don’t for a second believe any of these guards when they claim to not know what was going on, just for the reasons you outline. It was obvious to everyone what was happening.
I got absolutely no love for the Nazis, especially at the death camps, but a 17 year old kid posted in a guard tower had little to do with it.
He ensured none escaped being murdered. He stood there, weapon in hand, and -helped- murder thousands.
Every day. Thousands.
He had a choice. He had means and opportunity to resist, however futile it may have seemed. He made that choice. He very well gets the consequences.
Active participant in the mass murder of helpless civilians.
Active. Participant.
He -chose- to go along.
Go study the Sobibor uprising, and tell me he was merely a helpless witness, an SS armed guard, loaded weapon ready to hand.
Active participant.
11B, I get what you are saying but you are wrong. His choice was to do what he was told or be executed himself. In short, he really had no practicable choice. And the SS was seriously brainwashed to do what they were told unquestioningly. There was NO questioning or rebellion. Kind of like the modern socialist democrats in our country now.
He wore the uniform. He could have deserted, he could have turned that MG on the bastard.
He went along. He helped murder thousands by standing there guarding a camp. Maybe tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands.
Some orders you -dont- obey. Period.
17 year old draftee near the end of war…
Like he had any choice in the matter.
He did have a choice. As we all do.
Updated 3 April 2019 story on the 6 November 2018 story on Johann Rehbogen.
Common sense prevails.
“Unfit For Trial’: German Court Ends Case Against Former Nazi Camp Guard, 95”
https://www.thelocal.de/20190403/german-court-drops-case-against-ailing-former-nazi-camp-guard
“German court said Wednesday it had dropped a case against a former Nazi concentration camp guard, finding the seriously ill 95-year-old unfit for trial.”
With the exception of a few philosophers, and the ability to make great cars and sausages, it sometimes strikes me that the German zeitgeist can often lack common sense.
Both examples of the geriatrics being prosecuted are similar, but the one about Bruno Dey is the real standout. Here was a kid who in 1944 tried to join the Wehrmacht but flunked the physical. He was then drafted at age 17 into an SS unit to serve as a prison guard at Stutthof. There’s no evidence he was a member of the Nazi Party, or was directly involved in the execution of any prisoners.
Dey is now being tried as a juvenile in Hamburg State Court, because of his age at the time, for a crime that happened in Poland. What’s also evident is that the only reason prosecutors have brought charges is because of the precedent set by the case against former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening in Lüneburg Regional Court. Groening had joined the SS voluntarily in 1940.
Speaking as the son of a paratrooper who served in World War II, I have no problem with those who dropped the hammer on Adolph Hitler and his gang of monsters. On the other hand, the legal aspect of the posted stories tends to bother me. Following the defeat of Germany in 1945, the Allied powers cast a very big net to drag in those who needed to face justice based on the times and circumstances. Casting a new net now to catch aging small fish such as Dey seems like changing the rules after the fact.
Without stretching an analogy too much, this seems like a U.S. prosecutor charging a former draftee with arson because in 1968 he burned down a village hootch outside Danang.
In light of Soros funding the campaigns of Porgressive Prosecutors, don’t give ‘em any ideas
If they want to go after a REAL self confessed war criminal, Soros is all that and a bag of chips. Grab the prick and ship him off to Israel and let them do the world a favor.
Speaking of Soros…
I hope AOC has read this….
Sorry, GT, but the words would be too hard for her to understand, and the consequences would mean nothing to her.
My father helped liberate prisoners in a concentration camp, and I have his copy of the 103rd ID After Action Report with pictures of the inmates of the camps.
I have an aunt who was a child in Germany (now Poland) during WWII, who saw Hilter numerous times as he would visit their town to view the latest developments in, as I recall, their aircraft built there. I have a video of her talking about growing up in Nazi Germany, and what they knew and didn’t know.
If Bruno Dey is 93, he was born in 1926, growing up under the indoctrination of the National Socialist Party and the cult of Hitler. He was drafted in 1943, then. People who objected to what the Nazis were doing were at that time most often executed or sent to the camps themselves.
If his experience was like my aunt’s (who is younger) and her mother’s, they were terrified to object to the atrocities or too young to understand.
Think about a 17-year-old kid today who has grown up in the public education system thinking that abortion is just a matter of the mother’s preference, not the killing of a human being. But add that if he or she objects, they might be subject to a, shall we say, “late abortion.”
At this point in history, I think that such prosecutions are more persecutions by self-righteous people who want to see themselves as ‘good guys’.
YMMV
China still has its XX children per policy law in place. A family may now have two, but only two will be allowed to go to school and earn a living. If the numbers get too serious, women are subject to forced abortions and/or hysterectomies by the government.
LeBron says lay off, my shoe money in mo impotant. Causes I is edumacated.
I wish we would go full Idiocracy and ‘King James’ becomes President.
It would make this timeline the lit-est!
It’s not about justice being served 70 years after the fact. Its about letting the world know that there isn’t a statute of limitations on participating in genocide.
Caveat is you better fucking win the war and make the rules.
I am so distraught that this dude got away for so many years…
We all got a fuckin choice, and if you choose to follow the group and support genocide, you have to pay.
I was fuckin 14 when I rebelled against the dictatorship in my old country, and 2 months over 15 when they got me and put me in jail, which in time, unknown to me, it opened the doors for the United States of America to grant me a political refuge visa, which saved my life.
So FUCK YOU, Bruno Dey. I would rip your heart out and feed it to the worms if I could. You ARE responsible for your actions.
Yef, I give you a lot of shit sometimes, but you’re a damn good man.
I’m still gonna give you shit, but in a big-brotherly way.
Yef, you’re always welcome at the table here, and you know it.
Spot on. Bravo.
And very glad you joined our team. Welcome.
Folks, there are Evils one must resist, no matter the personal cost. Resist. Defy. Sabotage. Even if all you can do is head-butt the hangman. Do so.
Or you are part of it.
Choose.
There is admittedly little a private in a watchtower could do, especially if facing execution for disobedience. Now say he DID resist as best he could, maybe sabotaging weapons, causing a few equipment failures. What can you expect from a green kid? But say he did do, and managed to avoid detection. 75 years later… HOW DO YOU KNOW?
I ain’t gassin helpless civilians in a “shower”. Not gonna stand around ignoring it either.
I have an MG in my hands. The monsters die. They kill me, so be it.
No. Fucking. Way.
You don’t resist? They win.
Some orders must not be obeyed.
At the risk of getting hammered by my fellow veterans here, here it goes…
About 15 years ago I got into living history. I was a cop at the time so I kept it on the down low. I re-enacted WW II Russian and German (GD, aka.Panzer Grenadier Grossdeutschland).
I was privileged to meet all kinds of veterans, US, Russian, German,….
The German veterans I met were mostly wehrmacht from all fronts. The GD vets I met loved us and would drink beer with us and talk about their time in the war on the eastern front. One day a German vet showed up that I had never met before. I got a real bad vibe from him and my Police sense told me to avoid him. I learned later that he was 12th SS. I am telling you honestly, this guy oozed a really indescribable feeling…
I don’t re-enact anymore as I am too beat up now. Besides being a biologist now eats a lot of my time. My point is I felt the difference between these kinds of vets. It was palatable.
Respectfully,
Jeff
When your gut tells you something is wrong, listen to it.
PH 2
Thank you Ma’am! I think my last word should have been palpable…..
It really freaked me out.
The Russian vets were crazy. I met a bus load of them (literally they came in a tour bus) at Fort Mifflin in Philly! There got there at 0700 and immediately began kissing us. Drinking vodka and eating black bread. I was re-enacting a Russian sailor/ Marine. Several former Russian sailors/ Marines got me drunk as a Lord by 0830!!!
Anyone interested in the period should get ahold of Raoul Hilberg’s “Destruction of the European Jews”. Well researched and very thorough. Nazis kept meticulous records because it was all about money. As people were being scooped up and sent to be murdered, the good people of Germany looked the other way. They bought the Jews confiscated property. Furnishings, art, children’s toys, even their underwear was resold. A man’s business was confiscated and run by some political climber. Roads were lined with corpses as the bills for transport made it cheaper for the people to be walked to death rather than killed by the machinery of the camps. Every single German civilian knew about the murders and went along with it. Nah! The dead deserve their cold revenge. Ya can’t get ’em all but you can try.
There may come a time, perhaps soon, when you face a choice: go along with malevolent evil, and maybe survive, or resist and defy it, and maybe die. Horribly even.
If you go along with it, you are part of it.
Choose wisely.
Fuck him…..hang his ass. Truth is, nothing much has changed in Europe, particularly places like Germany, Austria, Lithuania, etc.
Jew-hatred (fuck “anti-Semitism”, way too sterile) is still imbibed at momma’s teat, and those that escape it in adulthood deserve credit for their efforts.