06-06-2019, 04:56 PM
In the book "Germany 1945-1990" by Jurgen Weber, the author sheds some better light on exactly how the Nazis were let off the hook by West Germany and why all of the post World War II unfinished business fell into the lap of JFK.
Weber makes the following points:
1. The WWII Nazis were not confronted in West Germany from 1945 to 1958 because the Christian Democratic Party depended on their votes to get elected.
2. The prosecutions of Nazi's only really began in West Germany in 1958 when the Central Office of Regional Judicial Administration was opened in Ludwigsburg. This was the office of prosecutor Fritz Bauer.
3. The Auschwitz Trial and the abduction of Adolf Eichmann took place centering in 1961 (the peak of this activity).
4. Another little-known attempted kidnapping happened in 1961 which was the attempt in Spain to kidnap Belgian Nazi Leon Degrelle, attempted by Israel.
https://books.google.com/books?id=tM9UDQ...in&f=false
I have still not come across ANY INFORMATION ABOUT HOW JFK WAS REACTING TO OR APPROVING OF THIS ANTI-NAZI CRACKDOWN IN 1961. Maybe Mr. Jim DiEugenio has some knowledge of the JFK policy on WWII Nazis during his administration. The silence on this issue is deafening.
I am sure that IG Farben (which ran the Auschwitz slave factories) and prominent Nazis like Hans Globke in West Germany were on extremely thin ice at the time that JFK was sworn in in 1961. As is well-known, my belief is that these desperate World War II ex-Nazis were the backbone of the plot to kill JFK.
Below is the passage from the book by Jurgen Weber cited above.
page 46 - Germany 1945-1990
However, the incorporation of such people, who had been part of the Nazi leadership and who now suddenly discovered their loyalty to the Bonn democracy, while it helped to stabilise the young Federal Republic, was morally dubious and above all completely unacceptable from the point of view of the Nazi victims. On the other hand no politically relevant potential of diehard reactionaries emerged from the former Nazis which could be said to endanger democracy.
Any overall judgement has to recognise the consequences of the halfhearted attempt to deal with the past that was characteristic of the fifties. Against this should be set the parallel laws for compensation, that were energetically pushed through, and designed to compensate Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime, producing a fund which is now calculated to be worth some 100 billion DM. Nevertheless, it has lasted until 2000 and beyond before the millions of Eastern Europeans used as forced labour as part of the Nazi war machine were considered for compensation. Over half a century after the end of the war, the German state and German industry (the latter not quite voluntarily) declared themselves ready to pay several thousand DM in compensation for the victims who were still alive, a total payment of about 10 billion DM.
LATE INVESTIGATIONS AND TRIALS
The systematic investigation and pursuit of Nazi criminals really began with the founding of the Central Office of Regional Judicial Administrations (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen) in Ludwigsburg in 1958, which was devoted to the uncovering of Nazi criminality. The result of this was that the public could witness several major trials against SS functionaries, such as those who had administered Auschwitz and other extermination camps, who went before the jury court in Frankfurt am Mai 963-65), or such prosecutions as the Majdanek trial held in Düsseldorf (175-81). Suddenly the Third Reich did not seem to lie so far in the past as had appeared to be the case in the 1950's. By using judicial procedure, an attempt was now made to punish the worst crimes of the Nazi regime. It often required years of investigation to discover the culprits, to interview witnesses and to retrieve and evaluate documents. In one of the last large-scale Nazi trials in Stuttgart in 1992, a former SS camp commander was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and complicity in murder. Between the 8th of May 1945 and 1999 a total of 6495 former Nazis were prosecuted and convicted by the West German courts, of
The Federal Republic Orientates to the West page 47
which 750 were convicted after 1958. This is a small number in view of the 106,496 investigations, but a lot if one considers the actual difficulties involved, which were unparalleled given the complexity of the task. Nor should one forget that the servants of dictatorship and genocide now profited from the protection of their civil and legal rights as guaranteed by the rule of law, whereby an individual is only convicted in the event that his or her individual guilt can be proved beyond reasonable doubt. It was precisely this that was often lacking when witresses could be shown to have faulty memories of events. Another highly unsatisfactory outcome was that, with a very few exceptions, no Nazi judges were brought to justice for abuse of their position, not even Freisler's bloodstained assistants of the People's Court (Vol/csgerichishof) in Berlin. Likewise most of the "desk criminals" (Schreibtischtäter) of the main office of Reich security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) in Berlin, the central organ of Nazi terror got off scot-free, with the exception of Adolf Eichmann, the former head of its Jewish Department, who was abducted by the Israeli secret service from Argentina in 1960 and condemned to death by a court in Jerusalem in 1962. It is only since the seventies, and even more in the eighties, that the memory of the massacre of European Jewry has become common knowledge to the majority of German citizens, not least because they themselves were not personally involved in this dark epoch of German history, which still casts such a long shadow. This generation had access to the results of historical research, as well as the opportunities provided by political education within and beyond the school system, and finally also to highly effective film representations of the Nazi past, for example the American TV series "Holocaust" (1979), which attracted over 16 million viewers in West Germany.
James Lateer
Weber makes the following points:
1. The WWII Nazis were not confronted in West Germany from 1945 to 1958 because the Christian Democratic Party depended on their votes to get elected.
2. The prosecutions of Nazi's only really began in West Germany in 1958 when the Central Office of Regional Judicial Administration was opened in Ludwigsburg. This was the office of prosecutor Fritz Bauer.
3. The Auschwitz Trial and the abduction of Adolf Eichmann took place centering in 1961 (the peak of this activity).
4. Another little-known attempted kidnapping happened in 1961 which was the attempt in Spain to kidnap Belgian Nazi Leon Degrelle, attempted by Israel.
https://books.google.com/books?id=tM9UDQ...in&f=false
I have still not come across ANY INFORMATION ABOUT HOW JFK WAS REACTING TO OR APPROVING OF THIS ANTI-NAZI CRACKDOWN IN 1961. Maybe Mr. Jim DiEugenio has some knowledge of the JFK policy on WWII Nazis during his administration. The silence on this issue is deafening.
I am sure that IG Farben (which ran the Auschwitz slave factories) and prominent Nazis like Hans Globke in West Germany were on extremely thin ice at the time that JFK was sworn in in 1961. As is well-known, my belief is that these desperate World War II ex-Nazis were the backbone of the plot to kill JFK.
Below is the passage from the book by Jurgen Weber cited above.
page 46 - Germany 1945-1990
However, the incorporation of such people, who had been part of the Nazi leadership and who now suddenly discovered their loyalty to the Bonn democracy, while it helped to stabilise the young Federal Republic, was morally dubious and above all completely unacceptable from the point of view of the Nazi victims. On the other hand no politically relevant potential of diehard reactionaries emerged from the former Nazis which could be said to endanger democracy.
Any overall judgement has to recognise the consequences of the halfhearted attempt to deal with the past that was characteristic of the fifties. Against this should be set the parallel laws for compensation, that were energetically pushed through, and designed to compensate Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazi regime, producing a fund which is now calculated to be worth some 100 billion DM. Nevertheless, it has lasted until 2000 and beyond before the millions of Eastern Europeans used as forced labour as part of the Nazi war machine were considered for compensation. Over half a century after the end of the war, the German state and German industry (the latter not quite voluntarily) declared themselves ready to pay several thousand DM in compensation for the victims who were still alive, a total payment of about 10 billion DM.
LATE INVESTIGATIONS AND TRIALS
The systematic investigation and pursuit of Nazi criminals really began with the founding of the Central Office of Regional Judicial Administrations (Zentrale Stelle der Landesjustizverwaltungen) in Ludwigsburg in 1958, which was devoted to the uncovering of Nazi criminality. The result of this was that the public could witness several major trials against SS functionaries, such as those who had administered Auschwitz and other extermination camps, who went before the jury court in Frankfurt am Mai 963-65), or such prosecutions as the Majdanek trial held in Düsseldorf (175-81). Suddenly the Third Reich did not seem to lie so far in the past as had appeared to be the case in the 1950's. By using judicial procedure, an attempt was now made to punish the worst crimes of the Nazi regime. It often required years of investigation to discover the culprits, to interview witnesses and to retrieve and evaluate documents. In one of the last large-scale Nazi trials in Stuttgart in 1992, a former SS camp commander was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and complicity in murder. Between the 8th of May 1945 and 1999 a total of 6495 former Nazis were prosecuted and convicted by the West German courts, of
The Federal Republic Orientates to the West page 47
which 750 were convicted after 1958. This is a small number in view of the 106,496 investigations, but a lot if one considers the actual difficulties involved, which were unparalleled given the complexity of the task. Nor should one forget that the servants of dictatorship and genocide now profited from the protection of their civil and legal rights as guaranteed by the rule of law, whereby an individual is only convicted in the event that his or her individual guilt can be proved beyond reasonable doubt. It was precisely this that was often lacking when witresses could be shown to have faulty memories of events. Another highly unsatisfactory outcome was that, with a very few exceptions, no Nazi judges were brought to justice for abuse of their position, not even Freisler's bloodstained assistants of the People's Court (Vol/csgerichishof) in Berlin. Likewise most of the "desk criminals" (Schreibtischtäter) of the main office of Reich security (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) in Berlin, the central organ of Nazi terror got off scot-free, with the exception of Adolf Eichmann, the former head of its Jewish Department, who was abducted by the Israeli secret service from Argentina in 1960 and condemned to death by a court in Jerusalem in 1962. It is only since the seventies, and even more in the eighties, that the memory of the massacre of European Jewry has become common knowledge to the majority of German citizens, not least because they themselves were not personally involved in this dark epoch of German history, which still casts such a long shadow. This generation had access to the results of historical research, as well as the opportunities provided by political education within and beyond the school system, and finally also to highly effective film representations of the Nazi past, for example the American TV series "Holocaust" (1979), which attracted over 16 million viewers in West Germany.
James Lateer