Price of conscience
27 January 2015, the world celebrated the 70 anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. He is Auschwitz-Birkenau. Symbol of the crimes of the Third Reich and the inhumanity of Nazism as a system. There was no Vladimir Putin at the ceremony - the head of the Polish Foreign Ministry did not find anything better than to say that President Poroshenko was invited there because the Ukrainians, not the Russians, liberated Auschwitz.
Grzegorz Shetina, however, forgot to clarify that the Ukrainians were in the protection of this concentration camp, and Poroshenko represented precisely those compatriots who fought for Hitler, and not those who defeated him. Otherwise, Kiev would hardly have started a fratricidal war in the southeast, and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, communicating with Chancellor Merkel, would not tell how the Soviet Union “invaded” Ukraine and Germany during the Second World War ...
On this day, Vladimir Putin visited an exposition dedicated to the destruction of Jews by the Nazis, the Holocaust, in the Jewish Museum in Moscow. In Auschwitz, he was already in the spring of 2005, when the heads of the leading states of the world gathered there to pay tribute to the dead prisoners of the death camp. Then relations between Russia, the European Union and the United States were still built on the principles of partnership.
No one could even imagine that the revision of the results of the Second World War and their falsification would go so far. However, today there are no illusions left. In Ukraine, Kiev’s troops, supported by NATO countries, are destroying the civilian population with the full support of the Western media. Sanctions for everything that happens there are being imposed on Russia.
It's time to recall the past - not the one that is described today in Berlin, Kiev and Brussels, but the present. Such as it was in fact in a “civilized” Europe, which to a great extent stands on this past, and not on the myths of tolerance and multiculturalism. European politicians do not like to remember him. Moreover, it deserves that future generations remember what Europe was like and appreciated what sprouted today from those still uprooted roots.
Fighter work
For a start - about the concentration camps. Their system went through several stages. The first was the prewar - 1933 – 1939 years. On the eve of the Second World War the number of prisoners of concentration camps was only 25 thousand. From 1939, they were subordinated to the RSHA. From the beginning of the war to March 1942, the number of concentration camp prisoners rose to 100 thousands. In 1944-m reached a million people. Of these, only five to ten percent were German subjects.
At the end of 1939, concentration camp management in Germany was tasked to create about one hundred concentration camps of all types, including for “internment” and “exchange”. Auschwitz and Goosen (1940 in May), Gross-Rosen (in August) appeared.
In 1940, working camps for Jews and non-Jews were created, and transit ones in accordance with the Himmlerian “resettlement” plan. At the beginning of 1942 in Poland - extermination camps. And even in 1944, special camps for Hungarian Jews were created in areas of Austria located near the border with Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
Since 1941, crematoriums have been used in several concentration camps. In the post-war period, concentration camps gained particular fame thanks to sadistic "medical" experiments on prisoners carried out on a massive scale by SS doctors.
In 1938, the SS command introduced regular operation of prisoners in construction companies. In accordance with this, the locations of the Flossenbürg and Mauthausen penal camps, created in the middle of the same 1938, were identified. Profit from prison labor, which amounted to hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks, was one of the main sources of income for the SS. The content of the prisoner, including food and clothing, did not exceed 0,70 Reichsmarks per day. The profit brought during the working day with the duration of 11 – 12 hours was six Reichsmarks. Given the average life span of a prisoner in concentration camps (about 9 months) and the robbery of his corpse, the SS earned on every prisoner an average 1631 Reichmark. This amount does not include the income from the industrial use of corpses and the value of property confiscated before being sent to a concentration camp.
Suppliers of military equipment - "I. G. Farbenindustry, Krupp, Thyssen, Flick, Siemens and other corporations have used concentration camps as a source of cheap labor that could be subjected to unlimited exploitation. Prisoners at these firms accounted for 40 percent of employment.
The camps were guarded mainly by SS “Dead Head” units. In 1944, for one million prisoners, there were 45 thousands of security guards, of whom 35 thousands were actually SS men, and the rest were employees of support units from the population of the occupied countries (Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others).
The only function of the camps, officially called "special", was total extermination - first of all Jews. The Nazis informally called them extermination camps. The main elements of these camps were gas chambers and crematoriums. Gas chambers were applied at Chelmno camp in 1941 year. In 1942 – 1943, Jews were killed by gas in the Belzhets, Majdanek, Treblinka and Sobibor camps. In Auschwitz, up to 20 thousands of victims were killed daily.
The deportation of Jews from the rest of Europe to extermination camps began in March – April 1942 and continued until the end of 1944. After the 1943 uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor, both camps, along with the Belzec camp, were eliminated, the destruction center was relocated to Auschwitz and Stutthof.
The extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers continued until November 1944 and stopped by order of Himmler. At the beginning of 1945, more than 500 of thousands of prisoners on foot made “death marches” on foot, escaping from the advancing Soviet army. This “evacuation” cost 250 lives to thousands of prisoners.
The number of prisoners in the largest concentration camps was as follows: 132 thousands in the Dachau concentration camp (was created in 1933 year) 132), 1933 thousands in Mauthausen (1936), 240 thousands in Stutthof (1937, around 81 thousands of prisoners were killed), 1938 thousands in Bergen-Belsen (164), 1938 thousands in Natzweiler-Struthgof (120), 1939 70), 75 thousands in Gross-Rosen (Rogozhnitsa, 1940, approximately 45 thousands of prisoners were killed), 1940 thousands in Oswiecim-Brzezinka (Auschwitz Bi rkenau, 95, approximately 1940 thousands of prisoners were killed, not counting those killed in the death camp), 125 thousands in Majdanek (1940, approximately 50 thousands were killed, not counting the dead), 405 thousands in Dora (Nordhausen, 1940) ...
More terrible statistics camps of mass destruction. Approximate number of people killed in Chelmno (established in 1941 year) - 360 thousand Belzec (1942) - 600 thousand Brzezinka (Auschwitz-II, 1942) - 3,5 million, Treblinka (1942) - 750 thousand, Sobibor (1942) - 250 thousand , Majdanek (1942) - 200 thousand.
The ghettos created in Eastern Europe, occupied by Germany, represented a kind of concentration camps. Only in Transnistria, transferred to the jurisdiction of the Romanian authorities, the Jews, imprisoned in the ghetto, were not originally planned for mass destruction. The ghetto in Terezín, created at the end of 1941 for Jews from Bohemia and Moravia, and later from Germany and other Western countries, was designed to demonstrate the good treatment of Jews by the German authorities.
Incidentally, in spite of everything, the Jews were building up their intellectual life in the ghetto and even in the death camps. There were educational courses, clubs, performances, exhibitions, performances by actors, writers, children's ensembles. Not only in Terezin, where the Germans encouraged it - parade for high-ranking foreign guests, but also in the concentration camps it was possible to create theaters similar to the “Kacet” S. Feder in Bergen-Belsen. There were even orchestras there - in the largest of them, in Auschwitz there were up to 120 musicians. In Israel, they do not like to play Wagner, because he was often executed during executions ...
About executioners with a sense of duty
As for justice with regard to the executioners - the first trial of those who committed crimes against the civilian population was held on the liberated territory of the USSR, in Krasnodar 14 on July 1943. The second trial in the case of the destruction of civilians and prisoners of war took place in Ukraine, in Kharkov, in December 1943. From the materials of this court the world first learned about the use of gases to exterminate the civilian population. The courts were hot on the trail - there were more than enough witnesses for the crimes. And the war was still in full swing - not to politics.
By the end of the war, politics came into its own. However, at first it was necessary to neutralize Germany to the end - “the division of prey” and the cold war were still ahead. As a result of December 20, 1945 of the Allied governments introduced Law No. 10 of the Control Council on the territory of occupied Germany, which was of particular importance for the continuation of trials of Nazi criminals and the definition of crime against humanity.
It so happened that in order to consolidate control over Britain and the United States freed from the Nazi occupation of Western Europe, it was necessary to demonstrate the same thing that the USSR, in its own territory and in Eastern Europe, is justice. In 12, large-scale processes carried out in the American zone over the Nazis who were primarily responsible for the crimes committed, the 177 cases of Nazi criminals were considered. 12 of them were sentenced to death, 25 - to life imprisonment, the rest - to long prison terms.
However, as a result of the amnesty announced in January 1951 by the High Commissioner of the United States of America in Germany, the majority of those sentenced to imprisonment were released early. The Cold War began: we needed cadres - and who better than the Nazis could fight the “red ones”. The intelligence services, the army, and the government bodies of the Federal Republic of Germany were crammed with Nazis ...
Among the most important processes in the British occupation zone, mention should be made of the court of 17 of September - 17 of November of 1945 of the year over the SS of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In total, in the occupation zones of Germany, which were controlled by the Western powers, the 1945 cases of Nazi criminals were examined in 1949 – 5025. 806 of them were sentenced to death. However, only in 486 cases the sentence was carried out. That is, even in the case of top-class executioners, whose guilt was fully proven, the likelihood of evasion remained extremely high.
The UN Commission for War Crimes has prepared 80 lists containing 36 529 names. The USA, Great Britain, France, Greece, Holland, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia conducted 969 processes through which the Nazis 3470 and their most prominent accomplices passed. Death sentences were handed down to 952 defendants. 1905 were sentenced to different prison terms, and 613 was acquitted. Justice for the victims here and did not smell.
In addition, during the post-war period, war criminals' trials were conducted in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Norway and France. Tens of thousands of individuals were brought to trial, mostly local collaborators. There were death sentences, many received different terms of imprisonment, but a considerable number is justified. It was easier to pass such sentences because in many cases there were no witnesses: few people survived punitive actions against the local population, especially Jews and Gypsies.
Crimes against Jews were considered not as part of the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology and genocide policy, but as evidence of the accusation as a whole of actions against peace, laws on the conduct of war and humanity. The only process of war criminals that dealt with the question of the extermination of Jews as the main one was the trial of Eichmann held in Jerusalem in 1961 – 1962.
That is, the crimes of the Third Reich against the Jews, in terms of the courts held in Europe, were nothing special. What can be considered as a compliment to Nazi propaganda, the fruits of which survived the system that generated it. And to a large extent - implemented in the modern European Union in relation to Israel, and more recently to Russia.
However, during the war criminals' trials conducted in the USSR after 1961, the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews was sometimes mentioned. In all previous trials, the Jews were spoken of only as citizens of the Soviet Union, which was reflected in the memorial inscriptions on the monuments to the victims of mass executions — where such were put at all.
The only lawsuit in the Soviet Union, at which a significant place was occupied by the question of the destruction of the Jews and the participation of Latvian collaborators in it, was held in Riga in October 1965 of the year. Baltic and in the Soviet period stories I tried to demonstrate my special position to the “elder brother” in Moscow - even at the cost of acknowledging the unpleasant historical truth. Whatever Russian can annoy ...
German courts in post-war Germany began to function at the end of 1945. According to a report by the Federal Ministry of Justice in Bonn, the German authorities charged 1945 to 1 on January 1969 of the Nazi criminal with 9401. Of this number, 12 were sentenced to death (all before the year 1949), 98 - to life imprisonment, 6002 - to various terms of imprisonment, justified or not subjected to punishment. In total for this period in Germany the Nazi criminal was brought to responsibility 79 401.
In 1956, the Central Bureau of the Land Justice Ministries was established in West Germany to investigate Nazi crimes. In Austria, several war criminal proceedings were conducted in the 60s, but the sentences handed down by its courts became a real mockery of justice. Fortunately, this country - the birthplace of Adolf Hitler and the cradle of Nazi anti-Semitism - was considered a victim of the Third Reich because of the Anschluss.
In the conclusions of the West German and especially the Austrian courts, there is a tendency to mitigate the punishment or to justify the criminals on the grounds that they acted on the basis of an “erroneous understanding of a sense of duty.” Genocide as a manifestation of duty (!) Is perhaps the most accurate description of what constituted the Holocaust from the German or Austrian point of view.
Nazi war criminals can be divided into two main groups: those who instigated crimes, worked out plans and gave orders, and the perpetrators invested with varying degrees of power and initiative. The first group consists of hundreds of people. The second is hundreds of thousands. Its composition should also include those who collaborated with the Germans in the occupied territories: Romanians, Ukrainians, Croats, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Moldovans, Russians, and many others. These people not only carried out orders, but on their own initiative killed hundreds of thousands of Jews.
Nazism reserves
Tens of thousands of collaborators did not suffer any punishment and lived a century in their homeland or found refuge in Latin America, Arab countries, Turkey, Iran, Australia, Canada, the United States and so on. Characteristically, it was not until the beginning of July 2008 that the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which was engaged in the search for Nazi criminals, stated that he was able to go on the trail of Aribert Haim, known under the nickname Dr. Death: there were reports that he was hiding in the south of Chile - in Patagonia. For information that can help find it, a 495 award of thousands of dollars was announced. In 2008, he topped the list of most wanted Nazi criminals. During World War II, Heim worked as a doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He is guilty of the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners. In 1945, Khaima was arrested by the Americans, but later released. In 1962, he was supposed to appear before a German court, but managed to escape.
A typical fate ... Similarly, Ivan Demyanyuk - Ivan the Terrible, whom the modern Israeli court did not want to convict, instead of justice for the victims trying to comply with Western jurisprudence theories for criminals, escaped deserved punishment.
In the post-war decades, the likelihood of finding someone from the executioners in a state that allows them to be judged became scanty. The more likely it is that the witnesses who would have supported the charges after the war could be found and their words would convince the courts who were not inclined to pass accusatory verdicts even in those times when the blood of the victims had not yet dried at the hands of the murderers.
As they say in the popular domestic television game: "Attention, the question." How much is justice? Not in general, theoretical - here everyone understands that it is priceless, but in relation to specific people? The same Jews after the Holocaust? The answer is zero. In the sense of nothing, it is not worth it. And not worth it. Compared to the life of their executioners - respectable members of society, each of which will have children and grandchildren, neighbors and colleagues, not to mention the lawyers.
It was not by chance that in January, 2015, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israeli office, Ephraim Zuroff, accused the Baltic republics, Ukraine, and Hungary of silencing the Nazi crimes and revising history. The question of whether someone other than the residents of Israel and Russia noticed this statement can be considered rhetorical ...
Grzegorz Shetina, however, forgot to clarify that the Ukrainians were in the protection of this concentration camp, and Poroshenko represented precisely those compatriots who fought for Hitler, and not those who defeated him. Otherwise, Kiev would hardly have started a fratricidal war in the southeast, and Prime Minister Yatsenyuk, communicating with Chancellor Merkel, would not tell how the Soviet Union “invaded” Ukraine and Germany during the Second World War ...
On this day, Vladimir Putin visited an exposition dedicated to the destruction of Jews by the Nazis, the Holocaust, in the Jewish Museum in Moscow. In Auschwitz, he was already in the spring of 2005, when the heads of the leading states of the world gathered there to pay tribute to the dead prisoners of the death camp. Then relations between Russia, the European Union and the United States were still built on the principles of partnership.
No one could even imagine that the revision of the results of the Second World War and their falsification would go so far. However, today there are no illusions left. In Ukraine, Kiev’s troops, supported by NATO countries, are destroying the civilian population with the full support of the Western media. Sanctions for everything that happens there are being imposed on Russia.
It's time to recall the past - not the one that is described today in Berlin, Kiev and Brussels, but the present. Such as it was in fact in a “civilized” Europe, which to a great extent stands on this past, and not on the myths of tolerance and multiculturalism. European politicians do not like to remember him. Moreover, it deserves that future generations remember what Europe was like and appreciated what sprouted today from those still uprooted roots.
Fighter work
For a start - about the concentration camps. Their system went through several stages. The first was the prewar - 1933 – 1939 years. On the eve of the Second World War the number of prisoners of concentration camps was only 25 thousand. From 1939, they were subordinated to the RSHA. From the beginning of the war to March 1942, the number of concentration camp prisoners rose to 100 thousands. In 1944-m reached a million people. Of these, only five to ten percent were German subjects.
At the end of 1939, concentration camp management in Germany was tasked to create about one hundred concentration camps of all types, including for “internment” and “exchange”. Auschwitz and Goosen (1940 in May), Gross-Rosen (in August) appeared.
In 1940, working camps for Jews and non-Jews were created, and transit ones in accordance with the Himmlerian “resettlement” plan. At the beginning of 1942 in Poland - extermination camps. And even in 1944, special camps for Hungarian Jews were created in areas of Austria located near the border with Czechoslovakia and Hungary.Since 1941, crematoriums have been used in several concentration camps. In the post-war period, concentration camps gained particular fame thanks to sadistic "medical" experiments on prisoners carried out on a massive scale by SS doctors.
In 1938, the SS command introduced regular operation of prisoners in construction companies. In accordance with this, the locations of the Flossenbürg and Mauthausen penal camps, created in the middle of the same 1938, were identified. Profit from prison labor, which amounted to hundreds of millions of Reichsmarks, was one of the main sources of income for the SS. The content of the prisoner, including food and clothing, did not exceed 0,70 Reichsmarks per day. The profit brought during the working day with the duration of 11 – 12 hours was six Reichsmarks. Given the average life span of a prisoner in concentration camps (about 9 months) and the robbery of his corpse, the SS earned on every prisoner an average 1631 Reichmark. This amount does not include the income from the industrial use of corpses and the value of property confiscated before being sent to a concentration camp.
Suppliers of military equipment - "I. G. Farbenindustry, Krupp, Thyssen, Flick, Siemens and other corporations have used concentration camps as a source of cheap labor that could be subjected to unlimited exploitation. Prisoners at these firms accounted for 40 percent of employment.
The camps were guarded mainly by SS “Dead Head” units. In 1944, for one million prisoners, there were 45 thousands of security guards, of whom 35 thousands were actually SS men, and the rest were employees of support units from the population of the occupied countries (Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others).
The only function of the camps, officially called "special", was total extermination - first of all Jews. The Nazis informally called them extermination camps. The main elements of these camps were gas chambers and crematoriums. Gas chambers were applied at Chelmno camp in 1941 year. In 1942 – 1943, Jews were killed by gas in the Belzhets, Majdanek, Treblinka and Sobibor camps. In Auschwitz, up to 20 thousands of victims were killed daily.
The deportation of Jews from the rest of Europe to extermination camps began in March – April 1942 and continued until the end of 1944. After the 1943 uprisings in Treblinka and Sobibor, both camps, along with the Belzec camp, were eliminated, the destruction center was relocated to Auschwitz and Stutthof.
The extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers continued until November 1944 and stopped by order of Himmler. At the beginning of 1945, more than 500 of thousands of prisoners on foot made “death marches” on foot, escaping from the advancing Soviet army. This “evacuation” cost 250 lives to thousands of prisoners.
The number of prisoners in the largest concentration camps was as follows: 132 thousands in the Dachau concentration camp (was created in 1933 year) 132), 1933 thousands in Mauthausen (1936), 240 thousands in Stutthof (1937, around 81 thousands of prisoners were killed), 1938 thousands in Bergen-Belsen (164), 1938 thousands in Natzweiler-Struthgof (120), 1939 70), 75 thousands in Gross-Rosen (Rogozhnitsa, 1940, approximately 45 thousands of prisoners were killed), 1940 thousands in Oswiecim-Brzezinka (Auschwitz Bi rkenau, 95, approximately 1940 thousands of prisoners were killed, not counting those killed in the death camp), 125 thousands in Majdanek (1940, approximately 50 thousands were killed, not counting the dead), 405 thousands in Dora (Nordhausen, 1940) ...
More terrible statistics camps of mass destruction. Approximate number of people killed in Chelmno (established in 1941 year) - 360 thousand Belzec (1942) - 600 thousand Brzezinka (Auschwitz-II, 1942) - 3,5 million, Treblinka (1942) - 750 thousand, Sobibor (1942) - 250 thousand , Majdanek (1942) - 200 thousand.
The ghettos created in Eastern Europe, occupied by Germany, represented a kind of concentration camps. Only in Transnistria, transferred to the jurisdiction of the Romanian authorities, the Jews, imprisoned in the ghetto, were not originally planned for mass destruction. The ghetto in Terezín, created at the end of 1941 for Jews from Bohemia and Moravia, and later from Germany and other Western countries, was designed to demonstrate the good treatment of Jews by the German authorities.
Incidentally, in spite of everything, the Jews were building up their intellectual life in the ghetto and even in the death camps. There were educational courses, clubs, performances, exhibitions, performances by actors, writers, children's ensembles. Not only in Terezin, where the Germans encouraged it - parade for high-ranking foreign guests, but also in the concentration camps it was possible to create theaters similar to the “Kacet” S. Feder in Bergen-Belsen. There were even orchestras there - in the largest of them, in Auschwitz there were up to 120 musicians. In Israel, they do not like to play Wagner, because he was often executed during executions ...
About executioners with a sense of duty
As for justice with regard to the executioners - the first trial of those who committed crimes against the civilian population was held on the liberated territory of the USSR, in Krasnodar 14 on July 1943. The second trial in the case of the destruction of civilians and prisoners of war took place in Ukraine, in Kharkov, in December 1943. From the materials of this court the world first learned about the use of gases to exterminate the civilian population. The courts were hot on the trail - there were more than enough witnesses for the crimes. And the war was still in full swing - not to politics.
By the end of the war, politics came into its own. However, at first it was necessary to neutralize Germany to the end - “the division of prey” and the cold war were still ahead. As a result of December 20, 1945 of the Allied governments introduced Law No. 10 of the Control Council on the territory of occupied Germany, which was of particular importance for the continuation of trials of Nazi criminals and the definition of crime against humanity.
It so happened that in order to consolidate control over Britain and the United States freed from the Nazi occupation of Western Europe, it was necessary to demonstrate the same thing that the USSR, in its own territory and in Eastern Europe, is justice. In 12, large-scale processes carried out in the American zone over the Nazis who were primarily responsible for the crimes committed, the 177 cases of Nazi criminals were considered. 12 of them were sentenced to death, 25 - to life imprisonment, the rest - to long prison terms.
However, as a result of the amnesty announced in January 1951 by the High Commissioner of the United States of America in Germany, the majority of those sentenced to imprisonment were released early. The Cold War began: we needed cadres - and who better than the Nazis could fight the “red ones”. The intelligence services, the army, and the government bodies of the Federal Republic of Germany were crammed with Nazis ...
Among the most important processes in the British occupation zone, mention should be made of the court of 17 of September - 17 of November of 1945 of the year over the SS of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In total, in the occupation zones of Germany, which were controlled by the Western powers, the 1945 cases of Nazi criminals were examined in 1949 – 5025. 806 of them were sentenced to death. However, only in 486 cases the sentence was carried out. That is, even in the case of top-class executioners, whose guilt was fully proven, the likelihood of evasion remained extremely high.
The UN Commission for War Crimes has prepared 80 lists containing 36 529 names. The USA, Great Britain, France, Greece, Holland, Norway, Poland and Yugoslavia conducted 969 processes through which the Nazis 3470 and their most prominent accomplices passed. Death sentences were handed down to 952 defendants. 1905 were sentenced to different prison terms, and 613 was acquitted. Justice for the victims here and did not smell.
In addition, during the post-war period, war criminals' trials were conducted in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Norway and France. Tens of thousands of individuals were brought to trial, mostly local collaborators. There were death sentences, many received different terms of imprisonment, but a considerable number is justified. It was easier to pass such sentences because in many cases there were no witnesses: few people survived punitive actions against the local population, especially Jews and Gypsies.
Crimes against Jews were considered not as part of the Nazi anti-Semitic ideology and genocide policy, but as evidence of the accusation as a whole of actions against peace, laws on the conduct of war and humanity. The only process of war criminals that dealt with the question of the extermination of Jews as the main one was the trial of Eichmann held in Jerusalem in 1961 – 1962.
That is, the crimes of the Third Reich against the Jews, in terms of the courts held in Europe, were nothing special. What can be considered as a compliment to Nazi propaganda, the fruits of which survived the system that generated it. And to a large extent - implemented in the modern European Union in relation to Israel, and more recently to Russia.
However, during the war criminals' trials conducted in the USSR after 1961, the Nazi policy of exterminating the Jews was sometimes mentioned. In all previous trials, the Jews were spoken of only as citizens of the Soviet Union, which was reflected in the memorial inscriptions on the monuments to the victims of mass executions — where such were put at all.
The only lawsuit in the Soviet Union, at which a significant place was occupied by the question of the destruction of the Jews and the participation of Latvian collaborators in it, was held in Riga in October 1965 of the year. Baltic and in the Soviet period stories I tried to demonstrate my special position to the “elder brother” in Moscow - even at the cost of acknowledging the unpleasant historical truth. Whatever Russian can annoy ...
German courts in post-war Germany began to function at the end of 1945. According to a report by the Federal Ministry of Justice in Bonn, the German authorities charged 1945 to 1 on January 1969 of the Nazi criminal with 9401. Of this number, 12 were sentenced to death (all before the year 1949), 98 - to life imprisonment, 6002 - to various terms of imprisonment, justified or not subjected to punishment. In total for this period in Germany the Nazi criminal was brought to responsibility 79 401.
In 1956, the Central Bureau of the Land Justice Ministries was established in West Germany to investigate Nazi crimes. In Austria, several war criminal proceedings were conducted in the 60s, but the sentences handed down by its courts became a real mockery of justice. Fortunately, this country - the birthplace of Adolf Hitler and the cradle of Nazi anti-Semitism - was considered a victim of the Third Reich because of the Anschluss.
In the conclusions of the West German and especially the Austrian courts, there is a tendency to mitigate the punishment or to justify the criminals on the grounds that they acted on the basis of an “erroneous understanding of a sense of duty.” Genocide as a manifestation of duty (!) Is perhaps the most accurate description of what constituted the Holocaust from the German or Austrian point of view.
Nazi war criminals can be divided into two main groups: those who instigated crimes, worked out plans and gave orders, and the perpetrators invested with varying degrees of power and initiative. The first group consists of hundreds of people. The second is hundreds of thousands. Its composition should also include those who collaborated with the Germans in the occupied territories: Romanians, Ukrainians, Croats, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Moldovans, Russians, and many others. These people not only carried out orders, but on their own initiative killed hundreds of thousands of Jews.
Nazism reserves
Tens of thousands of collaborators did not suffer any punishment and lived a century in their homeland or found refuge in Latin America, Arab countries, Turkey, Iran, Australia, Canada, the United States and so on. Characteristically, it was not until the beginning of July 2008 that the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which was engaged in the search for Nazi criminals, stated that he was able to go on the trail of Aribert Haim, known under the nickname Dr. Death: there were reports that he was hiding in the south of Chile - in Patagonia. For information that can help find it, a 495 award of thousands of dollars was announced. In 2008, he topped the list of most wanted Nazi criminals. During World War II, Heim worked as a doctor at the Mauthausen concentration camp. He is guilty of the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of prisoners. In 1945, Khaima was arrested by the Americans, but later released. In 1962, he was supposed to appear before a German court, but managed to escape.
A typical fate ... Similarly, Ivan Demyanyuk - Ivan the Terrible, whom the modern Israeli court did not want to convict, instead of justice for the victims trying to comply with Western jurisprudence theories for criminals, escaped deserved punishment.
In the post-war decades, the likelihood of finding someone from the executioners in a state that allows them to be judged became scanty. The more likely it is that the witnesses who would have supported the charges after the war could be found and their words would convince the courts who were not inclined to pass accusatory verdicts even in those times when the blood of the victims had not yet dried at the hands of the murderers.
As they say in the popular domestic television game: "Attention, the question." How much is justice? Not in general, theoretical - here everyone understands that it is priceless, but in relation to specific people? The same Jews after the Holocaust? The answer is zero. In the sense of nothing, it is not worth it. And not worth it. Compared to the life of their executioners - respectable members of society, each of which will have children and grandchildren, neighbors and colleagues, not to mention the lawyers.
It was not by chance that in January, 2015, the head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israeli office, Ephraim Zuroff, accused the Baltic republics, Ukraine, and Hungary of silencing the Nazi crimes and revising history. The question of whether someone other than the residents of Israel and Russia noticed this statement can be considered rhetorical ...
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