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Most despised woman of the war..you decide.

Discussion in 'Concentration, Death Camps and Crimes Against Huma' started by Class of '42, Jun 18, 2020.

  1. Class of '42

    Class of '42 Active Member

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    Meet Antonina Makarova.

    Antonina Parfenova.jpg
    She was born as Antonina Parfenova (Ginsburg by marriage) in 1921. However, in the USSR she became known as Тонька-пулемётчица (Ton’ka the machine gunner). NB - Ton’ka is one of the shortened versions of the name Antonina.
    She joined the Red Army after finishing school as a volunteer nurse and also took courses on the use of machine guns in Moscow.

    In Autumn 1941, during the WWII, she was separated from her troops. Three months later, in January 1942, she was recruited by the local authorities at the town of Lokot, which was then in collaboration with the Nazis. She was hired as a machine gun shooter. Her job was to execute Russian partisans including their families, in batches of 27 – the number which local prison could hold.

    According to the official data, she executed around 1,500 people in total.

    The Red Army entered Lokot on 5 September 1943. Makarova managed to escape to Poland with a German officer. However, the officer was killed on the way, and Germans sent Makarova to the Konigsberg concentration camp. When the Red Army reached Konigsberg in 1945, Makarova pretended to be a Soviet nurse, held as partisan by the Nazis, thanks to forged military documentation.

    The same year Makarova married a Russian war veteran named Viktor Ginsburg. They settled in Belarus, and had two daughters. They lived as respected citizens enjoying all the privileges granted to war veterans.
    The KGB, however, continued searching for war criminals, and since 1945 looked for Makarova, but only knowing her aliases (Ton’ka the machine gunner).

    She was finally discovered in 1976. Here’s the plot twist – she was actually discovered by a distant relative with the name Parfenov (Antonina’s birth name). He was filling out a visa application, noticing that out of all his family, Antonina was the only one not sharing the same surname. She was reported, recognized by several witnesses who knew her from before and during the War.

    The KGB arrested Makarova, sentencing her to capital punishment in 1978. She was executed on the 11 August 1979.
    When questioned about the countless murders, she showed no remorse – she considered the war deaths as an integral part of the conflict and almost a ‘survival of the fittest’ type contest.

    “I did not know anyone who I was shooting at. They did not know me. So to them I feel no remorse.”
    Safe to say, she is one of the most despised women not only of WWII, but in Russian history.

    She sounded like quite the traitor but really enjoyed her "work"..war brings out the worse in people they say.
     
  2. Christopher67

    Christopher67 Member

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    of course, it is only a matter of opinion as to whether this Russian traitor was any worse than female camp guards like Erma Grese and Ilsa Koch.

    The Nazis had a whole bevy of women executed at the various camps that they ran after the war. But, it is a matter of record that many camp persons got away with their crimes as well. I recall the trials of Ensatzgruppen bigwigs limited due to the incredible excuse that there were only a certain number of seats in the courtroom for them to sit at, so the trials were limited by such amazing trivia.....

    The recent trial of a Mr Demanjuk, accused of being the guard "Ivan The Terrible" from Treblinka, highlighted an amazing and very large hole in German law that had prevented many of these people from being brought to justice even when witnesses were available and the identities confirmed.

    Apparently, the Germans are scrambling to rectify this now that their laws have been changed, but have been met with indifference in some cases based on the very fact that most of the accused are now to old to stand trial. The Accountant of Aushwitz Case is a case in point. He admitted straight out and pleaded gfuilty to the charges laid, but did not spend even one day in prison. His troial made world headlines when a witness, one of Aushwitzes surviving "twins" from Mengeles experiments, (Eva Hart I think it was), publically went over to the accused man and hugged him in a gesture of forgiveness.
     
  3. Half Track

    Half Track Well-Known Member

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    She’s the kind of woman I’d enjoy executing.
     
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  4. A-58

    A-58 Cool Dude

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  5. Sheldrake

    Sheldrake Member

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    What was the large hole in German law? They charged him as an accomplice to murder of 27,000 people because he was there as a guard.
     
  6. Class of '42

    Class of '42 Active Member

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    Mr. Demjanjuk’s son, however, said that under German law, a conviction is not official until appeals are completed, and that his father’s death had the effect of “voiding” the Munich verdict.

    Mr. Demjanjuk died a “a victim and a survivor of Soviet and German brutality,” his son said, adding, “History will show Germany used him as a scapegoat to blame helpless Ukrainian P.O.W.’s for the deeds of Nazi Germans.”
     
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  7. CAC

    CAC Ace of Spades

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    That's Putin in a wig...or his grandmother....
     
  8. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    Source? I recall other reasons; lack of money(the Army is footing the bill), lack of personnel(they also cost money), declining public interest(with spend all this money when hardly anyone cares), and souring relations with the Russians(no more IMT - The Russians don't want them, even though the crimes took place in Russia & places now occupied by Russia).
     
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  9. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    And

    No offence my friend, but you really do not get what has/is going on here.

    To the best of my knowledge, the German laws have not changed one iota. Not one.

    What has changed is that before Demjanjuk, these such crimes were treated as "Murder"...You needed witnesses - not only to place the defendant at the scene, but also that he committed actual murder. You also needed evidence to the same. Now...Even if a prosecutor was able to find all these people & evidence, the defendant could say "I did it under orders." Now, it is no longer "Murder", but a lesser charge. Thus, the German conviction rate of Nazis charged with "murder" was quite low.

    Now, it's the 90's, and letting old Nazis be is no longer considered "fashionable". So, what to do?
    Hey, rather than charge them with murder, we will charge them with crimes against humanities. Witnesses - Don't need them, Evidence - Don't need that either. Just prove that they were there, and you have a guilty conviction.

    The laws were not changed, the prosecution's tactics were.

    Work smarter, not harder.
     
  10. Christopher67

    Christopher67 Member

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    BENJAMIN FERENCZ:(Chief Prosecutor, War Crimes Investigator (The very first, he believes)
    …………………...……....(Einsatzgruppen Trials, Nuremburg, 1947-48.)


    "The problem I faced as the chief Prosecutor at Nuremburg was "What do I ask for?"

    Here were 3,000 men, who every day went out and murdered thousands of people in cold blood, including children shot, one shot at a time, and I felt...that I...could not possibly do justice to the million people that had been killed....but if I could establish a rule of law which would protect humankind in the future, that would make this trial more meaningful than whatever I would do with these handful of murderers.
    This document, which I haven't had in my hands since 1948 maybe, it's a list of my defendants in the Einsatzgruppe Trial at Nuremburg, and I had prepared this list showing the names of the defendants and the position that they occupied, for example Ohldendorf, commanding officer of the Einsatzgruppe "D" killed 90,000....and all of them pleaded "not guilty"......nobody came in and said they did anything.....my goodness no...they said "This was necessary to carry out Hitler's orders, there was a war going on, what do you want us to do?"

    I had 22 defendants selected by me out of 3,000 mass murderers who murdered over 1 million people, and I could prove it......I had all the Top Secret contemporaneous documents....no question about the facts.

    I wanted top people, planners, people who had high command, responsible positions....their specific assignment was to murder in cold blood every single Jewish man woman and child they could lay their hands on...and I knew that picking 22 defendants out of 3,000 men was only a poor sampling, for the ridiculous reason that we had only 22 seats in the dock.

    Did we seek to do justice?
    Of course not, because we'd still be there trying Nazis to this day.

    So you try to make a statement of principle; the principle is "Don't do this, it's a crime against humanity, stop doing it, if you insist upon doing it we'll try to catch you, If you are a leader, and put you away so that you won't do it again, and others will be deterred from doing it".
    So, when the presiding judge, Justice Micheal Mismano opens the trial, he said, "We are now ready to hear the opening statement from the prosecution...and I went on to say....(September 29, 1947)

    "Vengeance is not our goal nor do we seek merely a just retribution.
    We ask this court to affirm by International Penal Action, man's right to live in peace and dignity, regardless of his race or creed.
    The case we present is a plea....of humanity to law"

    Because really, that's what I was trying to accomplish...

    ELI ROSENBAUM: (Former Director, Office of Special Investigation)
    Nuremburg was a trial that marked the beginning of International criminal law as we know it.
    Nazi criminals tried at Nuremburg included Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and many many others.
    But the trials themselves were not well received by the German public; they were perceived to be "victor's justice".

    REBECCA WITTMAN:( Chair of Dept. of Historical Studies, University of Toronto)
    Nobody feels like sitting and thinking about their war crimes, they want to move on, and some of that is legitimate.
    This is a country that has been turned into rubble, and it becomes a question of rebuilding brick by brick....so the last thing people want to do is sit around and talk about their crimes, and their guilt, and how they devastated Europe.

    ELI ROSENBAUM:
    The outcome was that most of the defendants were convicted. There were a few aquittals....some of the defendants were sentenced to die, and they were executed.
    The new German government as it was formed lobbyed intensively to bring the trials to an end, and lobbyed to have the people who were convicted at Nuremburg, even people who were sentenced to death...released....

    And most of them were.

    ALAN DERSHOWITZ: (Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard University)
    After the Second World War, the German system didn't fail to prosecute Nazi war criminals, it deliberately decided NOT to prosecute, and then because many of the judges, particularly West German judges, between 1945 and 1967, were Nazis. And I don't say FORMER Nazis, I say NAZIS, people who sympathized with the Nazis.
    Note:
    (Sample of prominent Nazi Judges....
    RICHARD JAGER
    JOSEF SCHATHUETCE
    WILLI GIEGER
    ERNST KANTTER
    MAX MERTEN
    EDUARD DREUER

    REBECCA WITTMAN:
    The Ministry of Justice are like 99% Nazis, and they're the ones that are creating and defining the new legal system.

    ALAN DERSCHOWITZ:
    They were sitting in judgement of themselves, and obviously the result was terrible, terrible injustice.
    Note:
    (Sample of Cases.....

    ULM EINSATZKOMMANDO TRIAL, 1958
    10 DEFENDANTS
    SENTENCES RANGED 3-15 YEARS

    TREBLINKA TRIAL, 1964
    11 DEFENDANTS
    4 SENTENCED TO LIFE IMPRISONMENT
    3 RELEASED EARLY

    SOBIBOR TRIAL, 1965
    12 DEFENDANTS
    6 AQUITTALS

    FRANKFURT AUSCHWITZ TRIAL, 1965
    22 DEFENDANTS
    16 RELEASED FROM PRISON WITHIN 5 YEARS.

    HANS STARK
    POURED ZYKLON B INTO GAS CHAMBERS
    RELEASED AFTER 3 YEARS IN PRISON

    KLAUS DYLEWSKI
    PARTICIPATED IN SHOOTINGS, GASSINGS AND TORTURE
    RELEASED AFTER 3 YEARS IN PRISON

    VICTOR CAPESIUS
    IN CHARGE OF CHEMICALS USED IN EXTERMINATION
    RELEASED AFTER 3 YEARS IN PRISON

    REBECCA WITTMAN:
    So it's a terrible terrible record where almost nobody is convicted, and again their is no political will for it, with the vast majority of Germans finding these trials as kind of 'carthartic' and 'perfect', because they show the horrors of places like Auschwitz, they nail a few bad apples to the wall, and the rest of them look like innocent people that didn't deserve to be punished anyway because they are not really dangerous outside of the camp setting, and this is where, for me, these trials are such a disaster.

    ELI ROSENBAUM:
    Just about every country has different parts of it's past that it struggles to come to grips with. That's true in the case of the United States, I would say, still, in relation to slavery.
    It was certainly true of Germany with respect to Nazi war crimes, and genocide crimes against humanity.
    Imagine a population in which a significant percentage of the fathers, the sons, and brothers, took part in these crimes. Later on, in the ensueing decades, grandfathers....all over Germany, who had done this.
    It was very difficult for the German public to accept large scale prosecutions, and I don't think their was great enthusiasm amongst prosecutors either.

    REBECCA WITTMAN:
    I'd say in 1945 there were 800,000 who were members of the SS, and that's what we're dealing with.
    The Germans, between 1947 and to the present day, investigate over 100,000 of these people.
    Of those, they bring about 6,200 to trial...
    And of that, convictions for perpetrating is......124
    124 life sentences for over 6,000 people tried.

    ELI ROSENBAUM:
    I still have nightmares of that famous photo of the German shooting the mother and her baby, and imagine this man living a complete and full life, surrounded by his grandchildren and children, all of them thinking that he was a wonderful man.

    THAT is the l;egacy of the Holocaust in Germany, not the war crime trials.

    EDITH RAIM: (Author of "Nazi Crimes Against Jews And Postwar German Justice")
    I think whats happening now is that the judges and the prosecutors want to make good for the mistakes that were made in the past in the 1960s to late 1970s, and I think coming to terms with the past can be done in a different way.

    PETER SINGER: (Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University).
    Its difficult to say what good can be done from punishing someone for a crime they committed 70 years ago.
    The further question that I think has to be raised is of the time period, and that if you punish a man of 93 years of age for something that he did when he was 23, are you still punishing the person that did the crime?
    Everything about Oscar Groening (the Accountant of Auschwitz) in terms of what makes him a criminal in the first place HAS changed.
    He had grown up in a family that was very nationalist, absorbed the ideology of the Nazis as a teenager, then as a young man joined the Hitler Youth, then volunteered for the SS.
    So are we, in a way, punishing someone for what a different person, a different personality, somebody with different characteristic....did?

    REBECCA WITTMAN:
    It is too little, too late, and these prosecutions needed to be done a long time ago. But how ridiculous is it that they are doing it now, when all these people are in their nineties?

    BENJAMIN FERENCZ: (Nur
    If I commit an illegal act I can expect to go to jail.

    EFRAIM ZUROFF: (Director, The Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalum)
    All this, (the trials) is happening now because it is DO-ABLE NOW.
    40 years ago, 50 years ago, oit was very far from do-able.

    LAWRENCE DOUGLAS- (Professor of Law, Amherst College)

    For many many years, the German Judicial system used the wrong frame to try to digest the crimes of the Holocaust,

    EFRAIM ZUROFF:
    They had to prove that the3 suspect had committed a specific crime against a specific victim, and had done so motivated by racial hatred.
    As you can imagine, that is not easy to prove

    LAWRENCE DOUGLAS:

    If you couldn't prove that someone engaged in some kind of illegal act, then you simply couldn't convict.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
  11. Christopher67

    Christopher67 Member

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    Demjanuk case actually did set a legalmprecedent in Germany, saying that support persons at death camps that bhad no blood on their hands couild still be convicted.

    Convicting guards and other workers had been thought impossible. But suddenly there were whole lists of people that were prosecutable, of which Oscar Groening was one of.

    That is clearly a loophole in the law being changed by precedent. The law had existed this way in the 50s 60s and 70s due to corruption by German legals unwilling to change it.
     
  12. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    In fact, 24 were tried, not 22.

    Further, these men were never going to be tried at all. The Pentagon had already OK'd the number to be tried, when the treasure trove of Einsatzgruppen documents was found. These gentlemen had to fight to get these addition 24 tried.


    Again, no German laws were changed.

    What changed was the crimes the defendants were charged with. Crimes that have a much lower burden of proof to meet, as opposed to say Murder.
     
  13. Poppy

    Poppy grasshopper

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    admin- we used to be able to rate threads. guys who do good work should have posts elevated.
    can we get a thread rating back?
     
  14. belasar

    belasar Court Jester

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    Periodically we must move to new platforms or servers either because a better one becomes available, a current one degrades or because they significantly raise their fees. We try to make these moves seamless to forum members but sometimes they do not offer the same options or sometimes we find a option is not popular with a larger segment of our members.

    Hope this helps.
     
  15. Christopher67

    Christopher67 Member

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    Its also interesting to look at some of the excuses put forth in the "not guilty" pleas. Apologies that my information is not more complete...

    DEFENDANT...……………...POSITION & CRIMES...……………………….DEFENSE

    Ohlender…………………….C.O of Einsatzgruppe "D", 90,000 killed...…….Superior orders. Necessity.

    Jost…………………………...C.O. of Enisatgruppe "A" for 5 months, ……… Repudiated Hitlers Order. Did only admin work.
    ………………………………...executed over 1,000, ordered more gas vans.....

    Naumann...………………….C.O. of Einsatzgruppe "B". Thousands killed...….Never ordered executions. Superior orders.

    Rasch...……………………...C.O. of Einsatzgruppe "B" & "C"
    ……………………………… for 4 and one half months. 80,000 killed...………..No testimony.

    Moske………………………..C.O. of Einsatzcommando 12. 249 killed...………...Reprisals, investigations and independent acts by his units.
    ………………………………..by his command...………………………..

    Shulz………………………….C.O. of KK 15, 12,000 killed...……………………...Never heard of Fuhrer Order.

    Ott...…………………………...C.O. of EK 17. 80 to 100 executions...……………..Superior Orders. Consistency.

    D.T. Rausch...………………...C.O. of FKZ. 50,000 killed...………………………...Denies reports.

    Klinleokfer……………………..C.O. of VK N Staff.
    ………………………………….Staff of Einsatzgruppe "B" and 73...………………..Interpretor and collected documents.

    Rudesky…………………………………………………………………………………..War interpretor and liason officer only. Wrote reports.

    Humel……………………………………………………………………………………...Merely admits routine work.

    OTHER PLEAS...………...

    Never heard of Fuhrer Order. Persons killed were all guilty.

    Knew nothing about killings. Wrote reports on economics. Was liason officer.

    Routine office work.
     
  16. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    Loophole? Corruption?
    Proof please!

    The "corrupt" Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, from 1958-1974, investigated 3,000 cases, with 9,000 individuals charged, and 108 life sentences carried out. 1.2 million records & 300,000 evidentiary documents were sifted through. As of 1974, 4,000 individuals accused of Nazi crimes were awaiting trial in West Germany.

    That just for those who were accused of "real" crimes, not pencilpushers whose only "crime" was being "there."

    Perhaps, now, you might have a better understanding as to the amount of work the West Germans had to do against "real" criminals accused of "real" crimes...Before they could even consider the tens of thousands of "little fish", whose only "crime" was being "there."
     
  17. Class of '42

    Class of '42 Active Member

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    Wasn't the basic plea was "I was simply following orders"..so if you refuse to follow a direct order you would of been shot..is that correct??..most likely and most likely dumped in with the rest of them...so you continued the mass executions to save your life..is that correct???..yes was the common answer.

    Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent
     
  18. Christopher67

    Christopher67 Member

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    When I read "Hitler Willing Executioners" a while back, it was made very clear to me that anybody involved at any level in an Einsatzgruppe merely had to request transfer out of the "work". Transfers were granted mostly without question..

    The "Accountant of Auschwitz" makes it very clear also that prosecution of Oscar Groening was only possible because of the very existence of the Demanyuk case. So it must have changed something.

    What was also brought up was the very motivation of charging somebody for crimes 70 plus years later, and whether this achieved anything at all.

    If you were just a penpusher, you still had a lot to be ashamed of. Also, photos of many executioins show many people in uniform standing and gawping. Real entertainment eh?

    And judges with known Nazi sympaathies writing and passing legal legislation in the new Germany is a very fine example of corruption, not to mention only 124 convictions from 100,000 investigations.

    Still, as the Prosecutor says,, they would still be there if the aim of Nurenburg was justice. He wasn't aiming for justice, but to establish a principle for other courts to follow.

    I'm certain if the U.S. Army carried on in this fashion, people sometime somewhere would want them to face a court of law to explain their actions. Whether it's worth pursueing every last case I'll leave up to you, I have no opinion that matters.

    Christopher
     
  19. von Poop

    von Poop Waspish

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    Isn't this 'most despised after the war as history was written'?

    Lady Astor not a bad candidate for actually during, though there doesn't seem to be any proof she said what was alleged.

    This is half an hour, but is brilliant.
    Imlach version of the song from 29:50:

    'Despised' maybe not quite the right word for such gents, though. "We were just so amused".
     
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  20. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    Ashamed of, yes. Criminally liable. No.

    If a pencilpushers is criminally liable, so is the train crews running the trains, the people running the power plants providing electricity, the farmers growing food to feed the camps, the construction workers that built them, any German that paid taxes(the money funded the camps), etc. Heck, any German of voting age that put & kept the government in place. Basically every German was somehow, someway complicit & an accessory to the camps.

    But, the Germans are not trying each and every German that was alive back then.

    This is a bald-faced lie. There were 100,000+ investigations, that resulted in about 6,900 convictions.

    You either need a new source, or else, your source says something other than what you typed.
     

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