
The Life of an Auschwitz Guard - lermontov
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/oskar-groening-auschwitz-guard-120036_full.html#.VafzjBNVikp
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casparov
Interesting article indeed, but did he or did he not use the defense of
"acting under orders"?

As presented by 2 excerpts below:

"This is not to say that Groening attempts to hide behind the “acting under
orders” defense. He does not present himself as a mindless automaton who would
have followed any command given to him."

"Additionally, he felt he was—using the words of the infamous Nazi post-war
defense—acting under orders, and he attempts to defend himself with this
analogy: “The first time a company of soldiers gets a volley of machine gun
fire they don’t all get up and say, ‘We don’t agree with this—we’re going
home.’”

A little clarification would be nice.

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jayess
I also recommend a couple of books on this subject:

\- Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning

\- Into that Darkness by Gitta Sereny

 _Into that Darkness_ is the most depressing book I've ever read. It is
essentially an interview with Franz Stangl, one of the commandants of the
Treblinka camp which, if it's possible to believe, was far worse than
Auschwitz. He was an ordinary guy who simply went where things took him,
ultimately into a place I can't imagine existing.

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innguest
I don't mean to be down-voted so I ask honestly, how can we accept Treblinka
as an extermination camp in the face of all the Jewish testimonies attesting
to it being a transit camp?

Arad denies emphatically that Treblinka could have possibly been a transit
camp and says "all that arrived were killed within 15 minutes", but he has not
commented on the testimonies from Shoah Foundation's own tapes who describe
stopping at Treblinka for a few days on their way East.

This is a complicated field of study made all the more touchy by the fact it
is easily politicized so I'd be interested only if you have comments on how to
coalesce these two realities (extermination vs transit camp) in the face of
the evidence. We can avoid inflammatory discussion.

Video zlFCvQttOv8 on Youtube has the video testimonies. I won't link to it
here due to its inflammatory title.

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abritinthebay
Because there were multiple camps under the Treblinka banner.

Treblinka I was a forced work camp. They had transit stops, and people came in
and out of here. That's what most stories about it being a transit camp are.

Treblinka II was probably the largest extermination camp in terms of "output".
700,000--900,000 Jews were killed in its gas chambers and around 2,000 Romani
people.

There were so many corpses they had to exhume their mass graves and burn
bodies on pyres. In 2010 there were 3 previously unknown mass graves
discovered.

That there was a duality is not unknown, that it was an extermination camp is
not controversial. The evidence is clear.

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lifeisstillgood
Does anyone know if any guard at one of these camps ever committed what would
of course be termed terrorism, and shot their colleagues or even a couple of
generals.

Can everyone have quietly watched children brained against the side of a truck
and not thought "oh, I have a loaded gun!"

Or is complicity a terribly strong bond?

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meatysnapper
You'd march to your CO's office, and form a union, and then lobby the
politicians for stricter sentencing and a more broad classification of
gypsies, possibly. Anything to keep the paycheck.

We have plenty of for profit prisons in the US, and we have had judges go to
jail for accepting bribes from these prisons to send more people to jail.

While a jail isn't as evil as a death camp, I think you could definitely argue
the conditions in many American jails are horrible, and you are basically will
never be able to fit into society afterwards.

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lifeisstillgood
I rather heavily edited my parent post there - sorry.

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marak830
Interesting article, stay away from the comments. I think i lost a few iq.

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yellowapple
I should've heeded your warning. Holy hell.

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marak830
Indeed, its an eye opener, in not a good way.

