Yes, at this point, you can't have a trial.
Yes, at this point, you can't have a trial. The thing that gets me, though, is that this says that he had at some point in the past, when he finally admitted to having ever been at Auschwitz, said he was unaware of the crematoria. And this is common, that people claimed they didn't know anything, whether they were civilians or military or whatever.
Here's why I would never, ever believe that for a second. There's a funeral home company around here that built a cremation facility at their original funeral home location before the area around it got overdeveloped. People complained about the smell, so they tried to move it somewhere else not as close to homes. And people complained about the smell if they were within a given distance and down wind. So they have had a hard time finding a location for a new crematorium that was not ridiculously inconvenient and costly because it had to be far away enough that nobody complained and it could meet legal requirements and so on. And this is with modern standards that I'm sure include rules about controlling the burning and odor and so on.
The Nazis didn't give a damn about who saw the smoke or smelled it. And they didn't have just one or two bodies being cremated, they were doing industrial scale cremation, with multiple ovens, and thousands of bodies. All day, every day. So bullshit nobody knew. Not only must it have been visible for some distance, it had to smell for some distance. And if you worked at Auschwitz, no matter what your job was, there's no possible way you didn't smell or see the smoke from the ovens.
That's different than whether or not this individual committed specific acts, but bullshit he was unaware of the crematoria.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41113613
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41113613
Here's why I would never, ever believe that for a second. There's a funeral home company around here that built a cremation facility at their original funeral home location before the area around it got overdeveloped. People complained about the smell, so they tried to move it somewhere else not as close to homes. And people complained about the smell if they were within a given distance and down wind. So they have had a hard time finding a location for a new crematorium that was not ridiculously inconvenient and costly because it had to be far away enough that nobody complained and it could meet legal requirements and so on. And this is with modern standards that I'm sure include rules about controlling the burning and odor and so on.
The Nazis didn't give a damn about who saw the smoke or smelled it. And they didn't have just one or two bodies being cremated, they were doing industrial scale cremation, with multiple ovens, and thousands of bodies. All day, every day. So bullshit nobody knew. Not only must it have been visible for some distance, it had to smell for some distance. And if you worked at Auschwitz, no matter what your job was, there's no possible way you didn't smell or see the smoke from the ovens.
That's different than whether or not this individual committed specific acts, but bullshit he was unaware of the crematoria.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41113613
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-41113613
Wait, he's already been convicted and served for this in Poland? Must have found something new to hang on him, I guess.
ReplyDeleteHypothetically I suppose he could've convinced himself they were just burning the trash, and the occasional person who died of "natural causes", where 'natural' is of course defined as being starved and beaten to death. Might have convinced himself he was at a "normal" Konzentrationslager instead of a Vernichtungslager. Charitably, maybe he left after those few weeks because he finally convinced himself to believe his senses.
But I've seen the buildings there at Birkenau, as they are today. And I've seen the images of what it would have looked like in operation, in Schindler's List (TTBOMK, an accurate representation in that regard). And I've seen the collections of stuff in the Auschwitz I museum — cubic meters of shoes. Shorn hair. Eyeglasses. Children's dolls. All just samples of the total.
"Wir haben es nicht gewußt" in general has always sounded much more like denial to me (what did you think he meant by endlösung, when they were all taken away and the streets of the ghettos became silent?) — either during perhaps even just after the fact — but for someone who was there to claim he didn't know.. he may believe it himself (denial is a powerful thing), but I doubt anyone else will.
PS: Birkenau is far enough from the cities of Krakow and Katowice that they probably wouldn't have smelled it except when the wind was wrong. Katowice at the time was (hell, still is, really) an industrial hellhole, that would have smelled of burning as standard (although perhaps not quite of burning flesh). The village of Oswieçim (in German, Auschwitz), though.. not so much.
ReplyDeleteBut then again, that is why they put these things in Poland and not in Germany. Poles were potential victims of the machine almost as much as Jews were, so they kept their heads down. Germans who were around were the adventurer middle-upper class coming for cheap labor and cheap acquisition of industrial concerns. And they were committed Nazis. That's how Oskar Schindler got there, after all.