Excerpt from todays Toronto Star:
MUNICH, Germany – An 89-year-old former Nazi officer was charged with murder today in the killing of 14 civilians in Italy during World War II, German officials said.
Josef Eduard Scheungraber will go on trial Sept. 15, the Munich state court said.
Prosecutors accuse Scheungraber, who was stationed in Italy as the commander of a mountain infantry batallion, of ordering his troops to kill the civilians at Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo, in June 1944 in reprisal for the killing of two German soldiers.
The troops shut 11 people in a farmhouse and blew up the building
Anton Winkler, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors, said the charges were based on documents and witness testimony, including that of a survivor of the massacre.
***********Is the cost of prosecuting WW2 war criminals that are 89 yrs old worth the time,money and effort?.I often wonder what society’s opinion on the topic is.??
As i know the War crimes have no expiry date.So even through the 60+ years the 89 war criminal can be formally judged.And executed.
The other matter is to investigate - who were the “14 civils”?
Simple inhabitans, or partisans and bandits?
Or they were the jews?
This was posted in the photo section of the this site:
This is the caption:
“An 89-year-old former German officer is to face a murder trial over the killing of 14 civilians in Italy during the Second World War. Josef Eduard Scheungraber will go on trial in Munich on September 15. Scheungraber, who was stationed in Italy as the commander of a mountain infantry battalion, is accused of ordering his troops to kill the civilians at Falzano di Cortona, near the Tuscan town of Arezzo, in June 1944. The killings were a reprisal for the killing of two German soldiers and had its most bloody episode when the troops shut 11 people in a farmhouse and then blew up the building. Anton Winkler, a spokesman for Munich prosecutors, said the charges were based on documents and witness testimony, including that of a survivor of the massacre.”
Flame:and they burned alive?
This man not have so long to go,I sorry the soldiers,but he’s an animal,if he do things like this,and he earned a injection. --(IIII)–I
One person survived as far as I know becoming the main witness in the trial. Inhuman actions of course, every soldier should pray not to get an order like this…
Flame,I wonder Your opinion:who is more than guilty,who execute the order,or who give the order?
I think the first was sinner because,if You don’t execute the order,another man do it.
Or 50%-50% ???
What is Your opinion?
That’s a tough one, imi. In modern german military law it is legal to refuse to obey an order if the order contains a felony. I am not sure but it had to be same with the Wehrmacht. All pure theoretical of course. Probably if the man in question wouldn’t have followed the order of the execution he’d certainly join those poor italians. All speculation though, maybe he was/is a bloody sadist and enjoyed the whole thing? Who knows, that’s why the court has to deal with it…
In the Wehrmacht in WWII, if you refused an order, you were shot. I have personal friends who were there and they said that as well as many other thngs not commonly known.
For instance, if you didn’t join the Nazi party when asked, you and you family didn’t eat. Documented.
I don’t know about you, but if someone had shot two of MY friends, and I was ordered to kill THEM, I would … I might even do it without being asked.
Killing innocent civilians not involved with the friendly death is another story entirely … unless not doing so would mean execution. Most people, not all by any means, will do almost anything to NOT be executed.
I’m in my 50’s and my friends are 80+. My friend’s wife was 16 years old when the war ended ( he was 19).
She was an aircraft spotter for the Luftwaffe, not out of choice, but because she was assigned to be a spotter. She had the choice of spotting airplanes with binoculars and reporting them or starving to death. She chose to spot airplanes.
When she saw them ,she identified type, number, direction, and approximate speed.
I agree with your statement. I also would like to addd that if you were known as a prominant person in the NAZI party after the war it had a reverse effect. Unlike the citizens in Iraq or Afghanistan who are afraid of the ex-rulers and receive death threats and intimidation, long after the Taliban and Sadam are gone; the German Nazi leaders or even people with strong Nazi dealings, were despised and not treated nicely by the population thereafter. If you disagree that is fine but this comes from stories my grandfather told my father after the war before coming to Canada. My grandfather had 7 children in hamburg and he was a air warden nazi and after the war there was food from the Marshal plan but none for my father or his children as the community made sure to black ball and osterize him. Anyways, such is the way of war endings.
I am not excusing any Nazi attrocities, nor any Nazi actions of any other sort. I merely believe strongly that not all Nazi party members were members out of devotion to Adolph Hitler or the Nazi party. Many were members because Germany was in the throes of poverty after the WWI War Reparations clause. Hunger was rampant and the citizenry was largely captured by the times; having no means to escape the poverty and hunger.
If being a party member meant better treatment and more food, most people would have become members, and most DID. By the time they realized that committing attrocities was involved, there was little or no way to say no without in turn becomming one of the victims.
German civilians were disarmed by the Nazis. So even if they had decided to resist the Nazis, they did not have any means to do so.
Hans Ulrich Rudell was an ardent Nazi. But most German Luftwaffe pilots, including Erich Hartmann, the greatest Ace of all times, were German Flight Officers who were pilots doing their duty for the Fatherland. Ditto for the average German soldier; he was a normal person serving in the military, and was probably mostly on the front lines fighting a conventional war in the regular manner.
A relative few were held back to command prison camps, labor camps, SS units, or other deeply Nazi units. People who commanded the “death camps” and commanded the SS ORDERED the attrocities and saw to it their orders were carried out. That is NOT innocent particpation.
Germans of WW2 had many admirable qualities such as duty, discipline, courage, and loyalty. Men and women of other nationalities had these qualities in abundabce, too. The Nazis, unfortunately, also had the quality of believing that anyone other than a natural born Aryan (a non-Jewish Caucasian usually with Nordic features) was subhuman.
That particular quality, while not particularly admirable, justifies wiping them out only because they engaged in exactly that … they tried to wipe out non-Aryans in Germany and succeeded in the case of millions of people. Suffering the same fate in reverse is poetic justice.
Today, many people feel as Nazis did, just not about non-Aryans. They want to kill anyone who is not of their race, religion, or anyone who is not “with” them. There is little difference in my mind between a ruthless WW2 Nazi, a modern ruthless terrorist, or a modern day ruthless pirate who kills people on a ship.
I’ve been trying to locate a book or paper on it that I read a long, long time ago and don’t have and can’t recall the title of, but Google can’t find it. You’d think that by now the internet would have published everything printed since Gutenberg’s minor invention, wouldn’t you?
A few serious studies had already been done on this issue when I read about it.
There were many instances of disobedience of varying degrees which were tolerated, and I don’t mean by stars such as Rommel and Guderian.
My recollection is that various instances were detailed of OR’s, NCO’s, subalterns and field officers refusing to carry out questionable orders without any adverse consequences.
My recollection is that the harshness of the response to refusing orders related very much to the type of unit and the circumstances it was in, and also to the attitude of the commanders which influenced their subordinates.
My recollection also is that there were some significant incidents where German soldiers (Heer rather than Waffen SS) refused orders to harm civilians (I can’t recall if these were executions or circumstances where civilian deaths would be less direct) and possibly POWs in Western Europe without consqequences. I think there might also have been lesser incidents elsewhere, perhaps Greece or Crete, although the fighting on Crete was pretty vicious.
My recollection also is that things were much harsher on the Eastern Front.
Even there, the sentiments shown by von Paulus in surrendering to save his remaining men shows a willingness to disobey orders to protect his men. Not there was much risk of anyone outranking him on his recent promotion to Field Marshal with the authority to shoot him.
I’m sure there’s a soldier interviewed in “The World at War” who refused to serve in the camps and all that happened was he missed out on promotion for the whole war. I don’t think it’s the universal death sentence some would have you believe.
I don’t really care how old, sick or decrepit these war criminals are at this point. I think that they must answer for what they did. There is no statute of limitations on murder in any western country that I know of, nor is there one on war crimes. I’m very glad they caught this guy.
Not sure if I’d go as far as Goldhagen who says that ordinary Germans not only knew about, but also supported, the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent “eliminationist” antisemitism in the German identity, which had developed in the preceding centuries, but I don’t think it was just a relatively few sick people, like the S.S. camp guards, and the Einzatgruppen, who were responsible for all the crimes, and that ordinary Germans, the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS.S were above most of that, when in reality the Einzatgruppen couldn’t function without the assistance of the Wehrmacht, the whole Nazi organization was intertwined, O.K.W, O.K.H, Wehrmacht, Waffen S.S., Einzatgruppen, S.S.camp guards, Gestapo, Hitler youth etc ect.
From Wiki…
Compliance of Germany’s institutions in the Holocaust…
Michael Berenbaum writes that Germany became a "genocidal state."Every arm of the country’s sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process.
Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish;
The Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property;
German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics;
Government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps;
German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners;
German physicians carried out experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler concentration camps
Companies bid for the contracts to build the ovens;
Detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company’s punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings.
As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled.
And it wasn’t just the the Einsatzgruppen and their subgroups, the Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos, or Waffin SS that were guilty of the atrocities in the East.
On May 13, 1941, the Wehrmacht High Command issued an order that became known as the Barbarossa Jurisdictional Decree. It was virtually a license to kill Russians of any age or gender and the Wehrmacht were a part of it, a war of extermination.
And the commissar-order provided for the immediate execution of political commissars of the Red Army, by the Wehrmacht, a definite war crime. The order was formulated on Hitler’s behalf by the Wehrmacht command and distributed to units among usual command channels.
Several field commanders, who valued their honor as officers higher than the Nazi ideology, instructed their units not to follow the Commissar Order, but others like Manstein supported it.
Hitler’s high command carefully planned the extermination campaign on the eastern front, drawing up directives for mass killings, and distributing them to Wehrmacht and SS commanders. They established special SS teams devoted exclusively to mass murder, the Einsatzgruppen and their subgroups, the Sonderkommandos and Einsatzkommandos, and set up liaison between the killing teams and the army commanders at the front to ensure that the killing teams received the necessary intelligence and logistical support.
Many Wehrmacht commanders willingly helped the Einsatzgruppen find the best sites, and transported and guarded the prisoners, at times even helping with the exterminations.
The invading German armies killed an estimated 2.8 million Soviet prisoners-of-war through starvation, exposure, and summary execution.
Although many POWs from the eastern fronts ended up in death camps run by the SS, the P.O.W. camps were run by the Wehrmacht.
