Medic42 
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RE: 94-year-old Auschwitz bookkeeper gets a 4 year prison sentence
(07-16-2015 09:47 PM)TheWastelander Wrote: "Moral high ground" and 'might makes right' are incompatible concepts, but few people want to acknowledge that because it's politically inconvenient and extremely dangerous.
The truth of the matter is that no one in that war was innocent. Dresden, the betrayal of the Cossacks, the Soviets raping millions of German women, the invasion of Poland, the Katyn massacre, numerous battlefield murders on all sides, the Holocaust, Einsatzgruppen, etc. etc.
The only reason they're hunting down old men who were minor cogs in that system who couldn't do anything to stop what was going on and putting them on trial is because a country that currently behaves in similar ways to the regime that oppressed and killed some of their ancestors benefits from keeping the guilt-trip going. They admit as much when they think the microphones are off and they're surrounded by friends.
Funnily enough, it'd probably be taboo and possibly criminal to even mention that in parts of Europe.
Anyway, this is purely 'might makes right' at work and political revenge encouraged by a people that one poster in this thread previously mentioned never forgets and never forgives.
Compare this behavior with the attitude of reconciliation the West German government had toward East German functionaries. They wanted to leave the past behind and move on. Only a few have been prosecuted when many more probably should've been.
What the Nazis did during the holocaust was reprehensible but, the reality is that it wasn't just the Russians committing atrocities in the allied army. Any chance we plan to punish any of the American soldiers and marines guilty of war rape and the abuse/torture of POW's?
Quote:
It has been claimed that some U.S. military personnel raped Okinawan women during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.[22]
Based on several years of research, Okinawan historian Oshiro Masayasu (former director of the Okinawa Prefectural Historical Archives) writes:
Soon after the U.S. Marines landed, all the women of a village on Motobu Peninsula fell into the hands of American soldiers. At the time, there were only women, children, and old people in the village, as all the young men had been mobilized for the war. Soon after landing, the Marines "mopped up" the entire village, but found no signs of Japanese forces. Taking advantage of the situation, they started "hunting for women" in broad daylight, and women who were hiding in the village or nearby air raid shelters were dragged out one after another.[23]
According to interviews carried out by the New York Times and published by them in 2000, multiple elderly people from an Okinawan village confessed that after the United States had won the Battle of Okinawa, three armed marines kept coming to the village every week to force the villagers to gather all the local women, who were then carried off into the hills and raped. The article goes deeper into the matter and claims that the villagers' tale - true or not - is part of a 'dark, long-kept secret' the unraveling of which 'refocused attention on what historians say is one of the most widely ignored crimes of the war': "the widespread rape of Okinawan women by American servicemen."[24] Although Japanese reports of rape were largely ignored at the time, academic estimates have been that as many as 10,000 Okinawan women may have been raped. It has been claimed that the rape was so prevalent that most Okinawans over age 65 around the year 2000 either knew or had heard of a woman who was raped in the aftermath of the war.[25]
Professor of East Asian Studies and expert on Okinawa, Steve Rabson, said: "I have read many accounts of such rapes in Okinawan newspapers and books, but few people know about them or are willing to talk about them."[25] He notes that plenty of old local books, diaries, articles and other documents refer to rapes by American soldiers of various races and backgrounds. An explanation given for why the US military has no record of any rapes is that few Okinawan women reported abuse, mostly out of fear and embarrassment. According to an Okinawan police spokesman: "Victimized women feel too ashamed to make it public."[25] Those who did report them are believed by historians to have been ignored by the US military police. Many people wondered why it never came to light after the inevitable American-Japanese babies the many women must have given birth to. In interviews, historians and Okinawan elders said that some of those Okinawan women who were raped and did not commit suicide did give birth to biracial children, but that many of them were immediately killed or left behind out of shame, disgust or fearful trauma. More often, however, rape victims underwent crude abortions with the help of village midwives. A large scale effort to determine the possible extent of these crimes has never been conducted. Over five decades after the war had ended, in the late 90's, the women who were believed to have been raped still overwhelmingly refused to give public statements, instead speaking through relatives and a number of historians and scholars.[25]
There is substantial evidence that the US had at least some knowledge of what was going on. Samuel Saxton, a retired captain, explained that the American veterans and witnesses may have intentionally kept the rape a secret, largely out of shame: "It would be unfair for the public to get the impression that we were all a bunch of rapists after we worked so hard to serve our country."[25] Military officials formally denied the mass rapes, and all surviving related veterans refused the New York Times' request for an interview. Masaie Ishihara, a sociology professor, supports this: "There is a lot of historical amnesia out there, many people don't want to acknowledge what really happened."[25] Author George Feifer noted in his book Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb, that by 1946 there had been fewer than 10 reported cases of rape in Okinawa. He explained it was: "partly because of shame and disgrace, partly because Americans were victors and occupiers. In all there were probably thousands of incidents, but the victims' silence kept rape another dirty secret of the campaign."[26]
Some other authors have noted that Japanese civilians "were often surprised at the comparatively humane treatment they received from the American enemy."[27][28] According to Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power by Mark Selden, the Americans "did not pursue a policy of torture, rape, and murder of civilians as Japanese military officials had warned."[29]
There were also 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture after the Japanese surrender.[22]
...
The "Canicattì massacre" involved the killing of Italian civilians by Lieutenant Colonel George Herbert McCaffrey. A confidential inquiry was made, but McCaffrey was never charged with an offense relating to the massacre. He died in 1954. This fact remained virtually unknown in the U.S. until 2005, when Joseph S. Salemi of New York University, whose father witnessed it, reported it.[30]
In the "Biscari massacre", which consisted of two instances of mass murder, U.S. troops of the 45th Infantry Division killed roughly 75 prisoners of war, most of whom were Italian.[31][32]
...
Near the French village of Audouville-la-Hubert, 30 German Wehrmacht prisoners were massacred by U.S. paratroopers.[34]
In the aftermath of the 1944 Malmedy massacre, in which 80 American POWs were murdered by their German captors, a written order from Headquarters of the 328th U.S. Army Infantry Regiment, dated 21 December 1944, stated: "No SS troops or paratroopers will be taken prisoner but [rather they] will be shot on sight."[35] Major-General Raymond Hufft (U.S. Army) gave instructions to his troops not to take prisoners when they crossed the Rhine in 1945. "After the war, when he reflected on the war crimes he authorized, he admitted, 'if the Germans had won, I would have been on trial at Nuremberg instead of them.'"[36] Stephen Ambrose related: "I've interviewed well over 1000 combat veterans. Only one of them said he shot a prisoner... Perhaps as many as one-third of the veterans...however, related incidents in which they saw other GIs shooting unarmed German prisoners who had their hands up."[37]
"Operation Teardrop" involved eight surviving captured crewmen from the sunken German submarine U-546 being tortured by U.S. military personnel. Historian Philip K. Lundeberg has written that the beating and torture of U-546's survivors was a singular atrocity motivated by the interrogators' need to quickly get information on what the U.S. believed were potential missile attacks on the continental U.S. by German submarines.[38]
The "Dachau massacre" involved the killing of German prisoners of war and surrendering SS soldiers at the Dachau concentration camp.[39]
Among the American WWII veterans who did admit to having committed war crimes was former Mafia hitman Frank Sheeran. In interviews with his biographer Charles Brandt, Sheeran recalled his war service with the Thunderbird Division as the time when he first developed a callousness to the taking of human life. By his own admission, Sheeran participated in numerous massacres and summary executions of German POWs, acts which violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs. In his interviews with Brandt, Sheeran divided such massacres into four different categories.
1. Revenge killings in the heat of battle. Sheeran told Brandt that, when a German soldier had just killed his close friends and then tried to surrender, he would often "send him to hell, too." He described often witnessing similar behavior by fellow GIs.[40]2. Orders from unit commanders during a mission. When describing his first murder for organized crime, Sheeran recalled: “It was just like when an officer would tell you to take a couple of German prisoners back behind the line and for you to ‘hurry back’. You did what you had to do.”[41]3. The Dachau massacre and other reprisal killings of concentration camp guards and trustee inmates.[42]4. Calculated attempts to dehumanize and degrade German POWs. While Sheeran's unit was climbing the Harz Mountains, they came upon a Wehrmacht mule train carrying food and drink up the mountainside. The female cooks were first allowed to leave unmolested, then Sheeran and his fellow GI's "ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste." Then the Wehrmacht mule drivers were given shovels and ordered to "dig their own shallow graves." Sheeran later joked that they did so without complaint, likely hoping that he and his buddies would change their minds. But the mule drivers were shot and buried in the holes they had dug. Sheeran explained that by then, "I had no hesitation in doing what I had to do."[43]
Rape[edit]
Main articles: Rape during the liberation of France and Rape during the occupation of Germany
Secret wartime files made public only in 2006 reveal that American GIs committed 400 sexual offenses in Europe, including 126 rapes in England, between 1942 and 1945.[44] A study by Robert J. Lilly estimates that a total of 14,000 civilian women in England, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II.[45][46] It is estimated that there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war and one historian has claimed that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common.[47]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Sta...rld_War_II
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94-year-old Auschwitz bookkeeper gets a 4 year prison sentence
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