Unfinished Business?
The Times reports on a member of the Waffen-SS who escaped justice by living in Germany after WW2:
“There was nothing simple about Boere’s evasion of justice, which allowed him to go unpunished for crimes that he freely boasted about. The inability of German courts to convict him irritated Dutch-German relations – Boere had been sentenced to death in absentia by an Amsterdam court in 1949 but was able to live freely in Germany, working as a coal miner until 1976, drawing a German pension and then living in a German nursing home.
Boere’s ducking and weaving within the German judicial system illustrated how much unfinished business was left after the post-war Nuremberg trials. More than 25,000 cases of Nazi crimes were investigated by West German authorities after the post-war trials of surviving Nazi leaders, but the prosecution was often half-hearted and many cases were dropped.”
ModernityBlog 
Sadly the vast majority of this business will remain unfinished now
jams O'Donnell
24/03/2010 at 19:01
Sixty-five years following the fall of the Reich, I reckon the Lord will have to finish the business.
mesquito
24/03/2010 at 23:07
Pursuing those supposed guilty 70 years ago but considered too unimportant to prosecute seems morally dodgy. No-one can sensibly or justly be tried after so great a period of time. Hitler is dead. Goering is dead. Harassing the most minor of their underlings decades later will not punish the guilty, who were all hanged then.
Meanwhile the guards at the Gulag archipelago walk free, unchallenged. Which casts an interesting light on the whole exercise, surely?
Roger Pearse
26/03/2010 at 22:31
This man committed murder, he is not supposedly guilty. he is guilty.
As for the guilty in postwar Germany there were millions, that colluded, that participated that went along with the Nazi murder machine, but postwar German governments, particularly under Konrad Adenauer were not terribly interested in justice for the victims of Nazi mass murder, so it is entirely appropriate to remind people that there is no statute of limitations on murder and bring these murderers to justice, be it 10 years, 20, 40, 50 or 70 years ago.
The crime of murder is still murder, and those who truly oppose Nazis should remember that.
modernityblog
27/03/2010 at 00:19
I read recently that during the Dirlewanger Brigade’ s stay at the Lublin Ghetto, the commander Oskar Dirlewanger and his officers amused themselves by watching young pre-teen girls from the Ghetto die of strychnine poisoning as a post dinner jape, LORD or no lord. “Well their too old now”, “It was a long time ago”, “It’s satire/I’m just kiddin'”………
This is the project they, the Waffen SS, the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine, the Arbeit Front, the Reich were involved in. Pardon my basque, mod, but Roger P is a fascist ball cupping cunt
socialrepublican
27/03/2010 at 05:40
Very true – just being an old man doesn’t absolve one of murder committed in one’s youth. And on another miscarriage of justice – the victims of Catholic priests who sexually abused them have tried for decades to get some kind of justice. Should they just drop it because the priests who abused them are old men?
Rebecca
27/03/2010 at 23:17
Being an old man does absolve one of murder, tho; so long as one did it in the Gulag archipelago.
Roger Pearse
01/04/2010 at 13:08