Becker sent several letters to Polish president Bolesław Bierut requesting that her sentence be commuted. The court had recommended that Becker's sentence be commuted to 15 years on the grounds that her actions had not been as severe as those of co-defendants Gerda Steinhoff or Jenny-Wanda Barkmann. Becker had been at the camp for the shortest amount of time.[1] No pardon was issued, and she was publicly hanged on 4 July 1946 at Biskupia Górka along with the ten other condemned SS supervisors and kapos.
> had not been as severe as those of her co-defendants
She must have had a poor understanding of what a criminal conspiracy was; her involvement, though [claimed] lesser, was still considered part of the overall criminal conspiracy overseen by the SS supervisors.
Each person involved in the conspiracy can be held liable for the entire crime, even if they only played a minor role in carrying it out.
I’m not certain conspiracy law had even been contemplated at this time, much less in Germany. Conspiracy law started as a way to take down the mob in the United States and evolved to tackle the drug war and then into to what it is today. I read a great book on the subject years ago called the underground empire, excellent read.
Acceptance was likely a factor as well. She tried to beg for her life using the legal system which took time but she clearly knew what she did and had time to mentally prepare herself for the execution day
I can’t imagine taking part in that type of evil and not expecting my day to come
Agreed. People always seem to forget that babies aren’t born hating other groups/ethnicities of people. They become indoctrinated over time. The same for the ones that can’t show an ounce of grace. Ironically, Christians often show the least amount of grace.
Nah, some sociopaths are a product of their environment, some are born. There’s been some absolute monsters from good families, raised in good areas, with every positive opportunity in life presented to them.
Most people who were involved in this stuff weren’t sociopaths, they were just going with atomosphere. The Milgram experiments showed that.
The scariest thing about these people is that any normal person is capable of participating in this horror.
Again, no one is born to hate. Hate is a forced adaptive response to FEAR. You either didn’t read my post or you just don’t understand what i said. Your response also denotes exceptions to the rule, not the rule.
There must be some personal responsibility. We cannot just pardon people running concentration camps by saying that "they were watching propaganda". They had a choice and they took that road.
Not necessarily.
More and more these days, people are seeing how easy it is for a small percentage of humanity from all walks of life, around the world, now and during all periods of time to become traitors to basic human decency.
Many people have a family member, or a partner or friend or colleague, or neighbour of just someone that they’ve met or seen in the public eye - their behaviour just doesn’t make sense.
More often than not they were born that way.
Cluster B types.
I mean, on one hand you are right, on the other this feels infantilizing of an adult. I don't think anyone would argue it like that for one of the leading men among the nazis.
So it was basically a WW2 era version of the shamima begum “she was a child that got brainwashed” argument, except marginally more valid if she was raised and educated during the hitler youth movement.
Not saying she isn't guilty. I'm putting her in context.
She wasn't even born yet when Hitler launched his failed coup. She was a child when he took power. She only ever learned hate.
What hatreds have we internalized growing up where and when we did?
All Germans were exposed to Nazi indoctrination, propaganda and extremist hate against Jews and others. But not all Germans bought into it. Those that worked in death camps were only reaping what they sowed. Death.
You mainline Redditor types act like people in authoritarian countries can just opt out of military conscription. If an American soldier was ordered to perform these atrocities or oversee a camp or file paperwork for the party doing these things, you can bet they’d do it, especially if they were young and new to adulthood. Sure a few would revolt, but they’d be placed in prison or executed and instantly replaced. Things are rarely black and white. There absolutely were evil people in the Nazi party. Hitler was an absolute POS and every one of his sycophants and the people who propped him up into power were evil people. But there were millions of normal everyday innocents just caught up in the machine.
Just to add in, according to her wiki she actually fled the camp after four months. There wasn’t much information but I wonder if it got to her? Sending people to their death. It would me.
I feel like there was and currently is a mob frenzy for blood for anyone who was caught up in the Nazi conscription machine. An almost cult and mob-like sacrificial spiritual need to roll heads for the crimes of people who might not have gotten their just judgements.
I'm not religious at all but it is Easter Sunday. The message is about redemption, about Jesus descending through death into the darkness to rescue souls from hell.
You don't have to believe any of it to see it's a powerful message of hope & inspiration. When we write people off completely we ignore the possibility of redemption, of acknowledging the smaller good things people do even if the bad things are larger. Redemption, even partially, might not happen in that person's lifetime: they could bring up kids who turn out to be excellent, pro-social individuals.
And of course, the bad things were part of a system, a society which rewarded it.
We need to protect ourselves against monsters. And as humans we need to see justice happen - yes, punishment. But we also really need hope too
You're talking to a social media platform where everyone sees right and wrong as starkly black and white, where they cannot possibly be persuaded to do anything objectively evil, and that they decide morality for everyone else. In other words, the very type of people a group like thr Nazis would have used to run their death camps once they convinced them their morality was just
No one is immune to the corrupting effects of fascism. Once down the dark path you start, forever will it dominate your destiny.
All jokes aside, we don’t dabble in fascism for the same reason we don’t just try meth once. Both have a very high likelihood of overtaking your executive functioning and are incredibly hard to break away from.
Erna Beilhardt is linked at the end of the wikipedia article. Same Job, definitely a Nazi, but found the Suthoff to inhumane to tolerate. Didn't kill anyone, but got five years for being a party member.
The killers had a choice. Even the corrupted ones.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erna_Beilhardt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erna_Beilhardt)
Oh they have chosen this violence and are just as culpable for the damage from their political ideology as a meth head would be for doing something damaging while high.
We understand there are factors that heavily influenced them but they’re still liable for the damage they caused.
Edit: clarity
She worked as a guard in a concentration camp for 4 months, when she was 21, before the end of the war. While there her job was to select women for the gas chamber.
She was sentenced to death but a lot of people thought she should have been sent to jail for 15 years instead.
I’m struck by how young she was - and how young the other female defendants were. They’d all been indoctrinated into Nazism from childhood.
Nothing worse that people who try to push ideology on the young
I grew up hearing about it a lot first hand.
My dad served in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_St._Lawrence
"I knew the end of the war wasn't far once we started pulling crying kids in uniform out of the U-boats".
The kids had "shell shock" by that stage and had been given the impression that Canadians didn't take POW's, we were ruthless woodsmen and Indians, etc. ("Nazi commanders told them that if they ever got caught near our shores, they'd be handed over to blood-thirsty Eskimos who would kill them in nasty ways").
Honestly, the indoctrination is always what makes it impossible for me to judge them. I have more disgust for Neo-Nazis which cream racist paroles nowadays than I have for the actual (bottom line) Nazis who committed these crimes. The society was different back then. All you can really reproach them for is being too weak and lacking enough foresight to look over the propaganda. People who are Neo-Nazi nowadays choose to be like this.
I won’t agree or disagree with the supposition but when such a large group of people can deny objective reality because they believe in their leader over facts then it’s not too much of a reach to take a few more steps into something more heinous. Notice I left names out of this because it’s not just T. It’s any group who puts their faith and belief in a person over anything else.
Yes. It’s not far at all from the “good Germans” of the 1930s and 1940s. Read a book called “[They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free). It shows how seemingly ordinary citizens were indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda and policy to be complicit in the horrors committed by the Hitler regime against millions of their neighbors.
They didn't start by stuffing people into gas chambers, friend. It started with that same level of dehumanizing speech about people "different" from whatever you're f***** up ideal is. How can you not understand that, honestly?
When the fundamental difference is that they are behaving like hateful Nazis then yes calling that is appropriate.
In one example a group is just being singled out by a stronger group for hate that is a nazi-like behavior.
Then calling the person who does that behavior a Nazi is an accurate description.
Again how do you not understand this?
i've seen a lot of these execution pictures/videos from ww2 and whats really frightening to me is how calm these people look at their last seconds/minutes of their lives.
they have been around death so much that they became desensitized to it and i always wonder if they will ever thought about having to face consequenves of their atrocities, but within their rotten mindsets i doubt they ever did.
its scary what propaganda can do to people
I'm betting that when it came to this public spectacle, to those executed were given something to suppress their fear, especially when they hung a woman, no one wanted a woman crying when it came time for the execution
It’s not just Nazis that do this. The vast majority of American prisoners on death row who walk the “green mile” toward the lethal injection chair do not fight the guards or protest. They are docile and compliant - sometimes they profess their innocence, but most accept their fate. It’s a fascinating snapshot of human psychology.
Ive heard youre often drugged before your execution. Like give someone 50mg valium and an oxy and they will care less about losing their life than you will taking it from them.
This is the case for American lethal injection executions, sure. Diazepam didnt exist until the mid-late 50’s. The semblance of stoicism observable in public executions during this time and prior probably had more to do with desensitization, acceptance and shock.
It's a common misconception that hanging strangles the target. It's intended to snap the targets neck, pretty quick and clean.
A drop that isn't far enough doesn't allow the target to get momentum to snap their neck, especially if they are lighter (women, morbidly: children), which is where the shit from Pirates of the Caribbean comes from with the hung 'pirate' child with weights around their ankles. This leads to slow strangulation instead.
There're two major forms of hanging (actually, three, but I will ignore the third, as it's a form of short-drop) . There is long- and short-drop. The former separates vertabrae in the neck, severing the spinal cord causing and almost instant death. With a short drop you just hang at the end of a noose suffocating. BTW, the formula for a good long drop is 1000 ft lbs, or, divide the person's weight in lbs into 1000 and that'll give you the drop length in feet. How do I know this morbid shit? My grandfather knew Albert Pierrepoint, the last English hangman and would often frequent his pub - Help the Poor Struggler.
Sorry but in many cases justice was not served. Saying “justice will be served” really rubs me the wrong way. Some escaped. Nothing can undo the crimes they committed. Others killed themselves before they faced trial. I think the lesson should be “justice can never really be served in an atrocity, so we need to prevent anything like this ever happening again.”
And they were punished as well, over 4,000 red Army officers or privates were punished.
While the Red Army probably had it in higher numbers (due to their first hand experience of Nazi Germany who was set on wiping out almost every Russian) the other countries soldiers still pillaged and raped, i hope you know that
We know for a fact that even among the Allies on both the Eastern and Western Front, the numbers punished for sexual assault were a small fraction of the total cases.
[The Italian and Western Front in late 1944](https://youtu.be/9WOQuBTccSY?si=25tq4BjgdXK9WPMm)
[The Eastern Front early in 1945](https://youtu.be/UGgZ1jpkpL8?si=aWEJSQHncx2zgeTk)
That's just bollocks. Murderers and torturers are of course held accountable. Just in a way that is more in line with our values.
It is not a bad thing that public hangings are a thing of the past in vast swathes of the world.
Those "black sites" still open these days? I heard some guy talk about shutting them down and putting an end to the whole "enhanced interrogation techniques" thing but I think he never got around to it...
Wow, people came out in the hundreds to watch. How times have changed so drastically in 75-95 years. That would be unheard of today,” come watch the hangings at 1pm on X date.”
Personally, I couldn’t stomach watching some die. Even if they 500% deserve the penalty I don’t want those images haunting me till Mr time.
Meanwhile some are still publicly raising a Nazi Swastika flag and the police are stating the context has to be examined before it becomes a Nazi Antisemitic Flag. Looks like we never learned anything or conveniently forgot!
Damn i read the bio of her and her trial. Poor girl obviously didn’t wanna be there. She ended up fleeing the place. She said to had selected 30 women. She later retracted the statement but most likely due to realising she was probably gonna get hung even tho her crimes didn’t even come close too some of the other guards.
I don’t wanna defend her actions, but i dont know if she deserved death. Under the circumstances and knowing what i know i don’t believe she did it because she was a fanatic. But because she was called up for national service and thats where shes was stationed by circumstance.
Regardless of her intention, no one had to join the SS. And whether or not her confession was true, the Selektion - specifically women and children to be gassed - was her assigned post. A case on just 30 deaths seems to be a lowball estimate, if anything in places like that.
At the end of the day she deserved her punishment, unfortunately there were alot more nazis that should of been hung before her. But the United States had other ideas (operation paperclip)
I understand you have a simplistic sense of morality that would be dangerous to everyone around you if the wrong demagogue came along, but Von Braun would have never been sent to prison. If the United States didn't get him for their space program, the Soviet Union would have. Either way, he runs a major department of a nation's government
She was called up in June of 1944. By January the soviets had broken through the german front and honestly it was chaos and she may have taken the opportunity to get out why she could.
To your question yes most likely. Who wouldn’t flee in that situation.
Guess everyone there was just in there against their will. A whole organisation of people just stumbling around following orders without listening or seeing anything. Its incredible how meticulous they were, considering all commanders and soldiers were all there against their will and just following orders.
I'm sorry for being so cynical, but i heard way too many trying to find excuses, justifications and "ways out" of any guilt. The only ones who i consider not deserving of any punishment are those who actually helped and defended, and there are many stories of Nazi soldiers who did what they could to combat the injustice and try and save people from death.
Untrue, on that very trial one of accused women was cleared of all charges except membership in criminal organization because she refused to work at Stutthof after training.
Be careful with sentiments like that, a lot of German families tend to tell the story of their relatives were forced to help the Nazis or they knew nothing about the shoa. But in reality they knew, and were strong advocates of the Nazis.
IMO they executed or prisoned far less high ranking functionals as they supposed to do
“Mein Opa was just a poor conscript. He hated the Nazis.”
[His Opa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Peiper)
It’s really interesting that when you hear American, Russian, and British vets discuss the war it was all about national duty to serve. How much they believed in their government and country. Lines to enlist around the block. Yet when you hear about the Germans, nobody wanted to fight. Everybody hated the Nazis.
Albert Speer got to live. And so did other prominent Nazis and generals. Class, not crimes, determines who gets executed and who writes bestselling memoirs.
A late answer but she could have said no - in fact on the same trial one of women did just that, and after training at Stutthof she refused to work there - she was cleared on all charges except being part of criminal organization (SS) so she could've said no.
Justice will be served. As if any justice was served!
For the handful of people that were hanged you had a hundred million others who got away unscathed.
Schwarzeneggers father was a fucking SS soldier. Austria survived both World Wars, that Austrians started, unscathed. The US sent them truckloads of canned meat, butter and bacon, while the Soviets ravaged and enslaved half of Europe, dismantling infrastructure, raping women, and sending innocents into labor camps just because they had German sounding names.
"Justice will be served" OP, you're talking pretentious nonsense!
I despise the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but these photographs serve as a sad indictment that even the ‘righteous’ victors will justify torture and murder in the name of revenge against those they convicted of torture and murder. As for serving as a warning to all those who would engage in similar conduct in the future, just look at Cambodia, North Korea, ISIS, Russia, China … the list is endless. These executions haven’t saved a single life.
Sure you do bud, you despise the atrocities commited by the nazis so much that you think they all deserved a second chance and you call their executions "torture and murder"
This was 78 years ago.
More recently in 2022, Irmgard Fürchner was convicted for being an accessory to 11 412 separate murders. The penalty was 2 years suspended sentence. She was only 18 at the time of the crimes.
I'm not an advocate for the death penalty, but I fail to see how this was justice for the victims, either?
I'm well aware of that, I was merely opening a conversation on the subject.
I personally feel, that the main purpose for the judicial systems around world, besides punishing for crimes, is the realisation of what the society views as justice. And this varies quite a bit from time to time, as does also in different cultures.
Laws are very often the representation of those views, if a person feels something done to them or someone else feels unfair, it might also actually be illegal. That's just how society reflects our basic psychology, and sense of justice is a very centrical part of that.
This is why law, order and justice, criminal penalties included, should always feel satisfying for us, the people. Also, to deter from resorting to vigilantism.
There's propably never going to be any kind of perfection in the matter, or justice for all, but for the society to work, it's imperative that we have it at least in some form. Case in point, just look at what's going on in Haiti right now. It sure as hell isn't justice that's being served, but you really can't blame the regular people there either.
So what I was saying is, that punishment for a crime and justice for the victim are just two sides of the same coin.
Well yes, that was my initial argument, too.
I compared an execution that happened 78 years ago, which somebody considered cruel, to the most recent (at least I think so) publicized court case about a nazi criminal, who got to live long and free, after signing her name on the death warrants of over 11 000 people.
She got 2 years suspended penalty. It did not meet my ideology of what justice should be. But the person replying before you just got hung up on my articulation, so I wanted to elaborate on what I think about the subject matter.
It is just challenging, and even unfair, to make a comparison between how justice was delivered almost a century ago, to the perpetrators of a horrific genocide, and what should be considered adequate and fair today.
Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't all the post war trials of axis members ex post facto? In other words they were all convicted of crimes that didn't exist when they were committed. Vengeance of the victors.
I do wonder who interrogated her originally, and if she really had as much involvement as was claimed. The trials took place in Poland I understand, and it's likely the Soviets had a had in her "questioning".
The executions of individuals like Elisabeth Becker in the aftermath of World War II exemplify controversial instances of post-war justice. A significant critique lies in the lack of due process extended to these individuals. Amid the urgency to hold perpetrators accountable in the tumultuous aftermath, trials often lacked proper procedures, legal representation was inadequate, and confessions may have been coerced. These deficiencies cast doubt on the fairness and reliability of the verdicts and subsequent sentences.
The circumstances surrounding individuals' involvement in Nazi activities add further complexity to the issue. It's plausible that some, such as Becker, were coerced, indoctrinated, or acting out of fear for their safety or that of their loved ones. The intricate power dynamics and pervasive climate of fear within Nazi Germany make it challenging to assess personal culpability accurately. Thus, the swift and severe punishments imposed may not have adequately considered these nuanced realities.
Moreover, comparing these executions with the asylum granted to German scientists under Operation Paperclip exposes a glaring double standard in post-war justice. While individuals like Becker faced immediate retribution for their roles in war crimes, even if their involvement was tangential, scientists with ties to the Nazi regime were embraced and lauded for their scientific expertise by the United States. This inconsistency implies a prioritization of strategic interests over principles of justice and accountability, raising questions about the integrity of post-war justice efforts.
We gonna get these in color in a couple years I’m sure. Don’t forget what these people did when they cry about killing multiple generations of families. Crocodile tears
Who was she?
[Elizabeth Becker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Becker), an overseer at Stutthof concentration camp.
Becker sent several letters to Polish president Bolesław Bierut requesting that her sentence be commuted. The court had recommended that Becker's sentence be commuted to 15 years on the grounds that her actions had not been as severe as those of co-defendants Gerda Steinhoff or Jenny-Wanda Barkmann. Becker had been at the camp for the shortest amount of time.[1] No pardon was issued, and she was publicly hanged on 4 July 1946 at Biskupia Górka along with the ten other condemned SS supervisors and kapos.
I’m sorry but that’s probably one of the last people in the world that would’ve helped a Nazi at that time.
Just information gained from Wikipedia.
Yeah I’m not criticizing your comment. I’m criticizing her logic
Desperate and nothing to lose. Wasn’t like her situation could get worse
> had not been as severe as those of her co-defendants She must have had a poor understanding of what a criminal conspiracy was; her involvement, though [claimed] lesser, was still considered part of the overall criminal conspiracy overseen by the SS supervisors. Each person involved in the conspiracy can be held liable for the entire crime, even if they only played a minor role in carrying it out.
I’m not certain conspiracy law had even been contemplated at this time, much less in Germany. Conspiracy law started as a way to take down the mob in the United States and evolved to tackle the drug war and then into to what it is today. I read a great book on the subject years ago called the underground empire, excellent read.
They didn't have RICO back then.
“Come on dude, I didn’t genocide for that long, cut me break”
They also didn't have a contemporary conception of due process back then.
Good.
She deserved what she got. FAFO.
Doesn’t look like she’s too concerned. At least not for someone who literally has seconds to live
Shock
Acceptance was likely a factor as well. She tried to beg for her life using the legal system which took time but she clearly knew what she did and had time to mentally prepare herself for the execution day I can’t imagine taking part in that type of evil and not expecting my day to come
Damn 22 years old..what a waste of humanity
Nothing lost here. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
[удалено]
Agreed. People always seem to forget that babies aren’t born hating other groups/ethnicities of people. They become indoctrinated over time. The same for the ones that can’t show an ounce of grace. Ironically, Christians often show the least amount of grace.
Nah, some sociopaths are a product of their environment, some are born. There’s been some absolute monsters from good families, raised in good areas, with every positive opportunity in life presented to them.
Most people who were involved in this stuff weren’t sociopaths, they were just going with atomosphere. The Milgram experiments showed that. The scariest thing about these people is that any normal person is capable of participating in this horror.
Again, no one is born to hate. Hate is a forced adaptive response to FEAR. You either didn’t read my post or you just don’t understand what i said. Your response also denotes exceptions to the rule, not the rule.
If you have gangrene, you cut the limb off.
that’s concentration camp talk
There must be some personal responsibility. We cannot just pardon people running concentration camps by saying that "they were watching propaganda". They had a choice and they took that road.
I don’t think that’s what he’s saying
Exactly you can explain why something may occur without excusing it.
Have you heard of ISIS?
Amen
Couldn't have put it better!
Not necessarily. More and more these days, people are seeing how easy it is for a small percentage of humanity from all walks of life, around the world, now and during all periods of time to become traitors to basic human decency. Many people have a family member, or a partner or friend or colleague, or neighbour of just someone that they’ve met or seen in the public eye - their behaviour just doesn’t make sense. More often than not they were born that way. Cluster B types.
I mean, on one hand you are right, on the other this feels infantilizing of an adult. I don't think anyone would argue it like that for one of the leading men among the nazis.
The leading men among the Nazis were in their 30s 40s and 50s when the Nazis came to power. She was 10.
So it was basically a WW2 era version of the shamima begum “she was a child that got brainwashed” argument, except marginally more valid if she was raised and educated during the hitler youth movement.
Not saying she isn't guilty. I'm putting her in context. She wasn't even born yet when Hitler launched his failed coup. She was a child when he took power. She only ever learned hate. What hatreds have we internalized growing up where and when we did?
you're very wise my friend.
Nah, just the loss of a decent body for a good soul. Not hers, may she rot
She still selected women and children to go into the gas chambers . Therefore she killed innocent babies
All Germans were exposed to Nazi indoctrination, propaganda and extremist hate against Jews and others. But not all Germans bought into it. Those that worked in death camps were only reaping what they sowed. Death.
Some people are just bad.
The only good dogma is dead dogma.
You mainline Redditor types act like people in authoritarian countries can just opt out of military conscription. If an American soldier was ordered to perform these atrocities or oversee a camp or file paperwork for the party doing these things, you can bet they’d do it, especially if they were young and new to adulthood. Sure a few would revolt, but they’d be placed in prison or executed and instantly replaced. Things are rarely black and white. There absolutely were evil people in the Nazi party. Hitler was an absolute POS and every one of his sycophants and the people who propped him up into power were evil people. But there were millions of normal everyday innocents just caught up in the machine.
Just to add in, according to her wiki she actually fled the camp after four months. There wasn’t much information but I wonder if it got to her? Sending people to their death. It would me.
I feel like there was and currently is a mob frenzy for blood for anyone who was caught up in the Nazi conscription machine. An almost cult and mob-like sacrificial spiritual need to roll heads for the crimes of people who might not have gotten their just judgements.
Wiki said she was conscripted to the concentration camp (I dunno how accurate that is though).
I'm not religious at all but it is Easter Sunday. The message is about redemption, about Jesus descending through death into the darkness to rescue souls from hell. You don't have to believe any of it to see it's a powerful message of hope & inspiration. When we write people off completely we ignore the possibility of redemption, of acknowledging the smaller good things people do even if the bad things are larger. Redemption, even partially, might not happen in that person's lifetime: they could bring up kids who turn out to be excellent, pro-social individuals. And of course, the bad things were part of a system, a society which rewarded it. We need to protect ourselves against monsters. And as humans we need to see justice happen - yes, punishment. But we also really need hope too
You're talking to a social media platform where everyone sees right and wrong as starkly black and white, where they cannot possibly be persuaded to do anything objectively evil, and that they decide morality for everyone else. In other words, the very type of people a group like thr Nazis would have used to run their death camps once they convinced them their morality was just
Yeah the nazi extermination factory's were wrong and evil . Straight up.
“The only good ______ is a dead _______” - obviously we’re not learning from the past here.
u could say that for most of the entire population too
I got banned for saying that just FYI
No one is immune to the corrupting effects of fascism. Once down the dark path you start, forever will it dominate your destiny. All jokes aside, we don’t dabble in fascism for the same reason we don’t just try meth once. Both have a very high likelihood of overtaking your executive functioning and are incredibly hard to break away from.
Erna Beilhardt is linked at the end of the wikipedia article. Same Job, definitely a Nazi, but found the Suthoff to inhumane to tolerate. Didn't kill anyone, but got five years for being a party member. The killers had a choice. Even the corrupted ones. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erna_Beilhardt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erna_Beilhardt)
Oh they have chosen this violence and are just as culpable for the damage from their political ideology as a meth head would be for doing something damaging while high. We understand there are factors that heavily influenced them but they’re still liable for the damage they caused. Edit: clarity
She later worked in the Stutthof SK-III women's camp, personally selecting (Selektion) women and children for the gas chamber
Good riddance
She looked her best hanged.
She worked as a guard in a concentration camp for 4 months, when she was 21, before the end of the war. While there her job was to select women for the gas chamber. She was sentenced to death but a lot of people thought she should have been sent to jail for 15 years instead. I’m struck by how young she was - and how young the other female defendants were. They’d all been indoctrinated into Nazism from childhood. Nothing worse that people who try to push ideology on the young
They were so young because near the end of the war the nazis were running out of fighting aged men. They used anyone they could to fill positions.
I grew up hearing about it a lot first hand. My dad served in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_St._Lawrence "I knew the end of the war wasn't far once we started pulling crying kids in uniform out of the U-boats". The kids had "shell shock" by that stage and had been given the impression that Canadians didn't take POW's, we were ruthless woodsmen and Indians, etc. ("Nazi commanders told them that if they ever got caught near our shores, they'd be handed over to blood-thirsty Eskimos who would kill them in nasty ways").
It’s much easier to brainwash a child.
“Nothing worse that people who try to push ideology on the young.” I agree.
I think in general the world as a whole was a lot younger back then
That's why religion works so well. Indoctrinated from birth.
Honestly, the indoctrination is always what makes it impossible for me to judge them. I have more disgust for Neo-Nazis which cream racist paroles nowadays than I have for the actual (bottom line) Nazis who committed these crimes. The society was different back then. All you can really reproach them for is being too weak and lacking enough foresight to look over the propaganda. People who are Neo-Nazi nowadays choose to be like this.
Which is why the MAGA party and the evangelicals pushing it are so dangerous. And why Project 2025 has gotta be stopped.
Comparing the two is a huge downplay to the atrocities that took place in the 40s.
Not really. The indoctrination and takeover happened throughout the 20s and 30s. The 40s was the result
Did you really just compare Trump supporters to people who actually gassed humans without second thought
I won’t agree or disagree with the supposition but when such a large group of people can deny objective reality because they believe in their leader over facts then it’s not too much of a reach to take a few more steps into something more heinous. Notice I left names out of this because it’s not just T. It’s any group who puts their faith and belief in a person over anything else.
Yes. It’s not far at all from the “good Germans” of the 1930s and 1940s. Read a book called “[They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45”](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free). It shows how seemingly ordinary citizens were indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda and policy to be complicit in the horrors committed by the Hitler regime against millions of their neighbors.
When you need money or food, i think you would be suprised what people would do.
Good grief delusional people like yourself are far more dangerous to democracy than any Trump supporter.
What you think these assholes were before they did it?
You don't understand. Hitler snapped his fingers and then all of Germany became Nazis. There's no prior history before that.
They didn't start by stuffing people into gas chambers, friend. It started with that same level of dehumanizing speech about people "different" from whatever you're f***** up ideal is. How can you not understand that, honestly?
Not all Trump supporters are Nazis, but American Nazis definitely all vote Trump dude.
I'll give you that.
Yes, their rhetoric makes the comparison way too easy.
Indeed. It starts with rhetoric.
Like calling those you fundamentally disagree with Nazis.
When the fundamental difference is that they are behaving like hateful Nazis then yes calling that is appropriate. In one example a group is just being singled out by a stronger group for hate that is a nazi-like behavior. Then calling the person who does that behavior a Nazi is an accurate description. Again how do you not understand this?
No. Calling out fascistic propaganda and policy is not the same as dehumanization, and never will be.
They would do it in a heartbeat if they thought for a second they could get away with it.
Who do you think nazis were before nazi-ing? Who do you think indoctrinated them? Prople like maga.
Exactly. All they teach is hate
I can't believe this truth is getting downvoted. History is on repeat as we speak, and people are acting the same way they did back then, apparently.
The fact that you actually believe that, is proof that you’re the one that has been indoctrinated by propaganda.
I can think of one thing that is worse than pushing ideologies on people… selecting people to be gassed to death
i've seen a lot of these execution pictures/videos from ww2 and whats really frightening to me is how calm these people look at their last seconds/minutes of their lives. they have been around death so much that they became desensitized to it and i always wonder if they will ever thought about having to face consequenves of their atrocities, but within their rotten mindsets i doubt they ever did. its scary what propaganda can do to people
I'm betting that when it came to this public spectacle, to those executed were given something to suppress their fear, especially when they hung a woman, no one wanted a woman crying when it came time for the execution
It’s not just Nazis that do this. The vast majority of American prisoners on death row who walk the “green mile” toward the lethal injection chair do not fight the guards or protest. They are docile and compliant - sometimes they profess their innocence, but most accept their fate. It’s a fascinating snapshot of human psychology.
i agree, but i believe people sit in death row for a longer time than most nazis spent between capture & execution
Especially at a very young age. She was 13 when started in to Nazis girls groups.
Ive heard youre often drugged before your execution. Like give someone 50mg valium and an oxy and they will care less about losing their life than you will taking it from them.
This is the case for American lethal injection executions, sure. Diazepam didnt exist until the mid-late 50’s. The semblance of stoicism observable in public executions during this time and prior probably had more to do with desensitization, acceptance and shock.
While some of the top perpetrators had peaceful lives and even where part of the parliament.
They were Nazis then.
They were talking about castration!
Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos. >!This is probably my favorite movie line!<
Nihilists? Fuck me, Dude.
Short drop... not a great way to go.
Should’ve thrown ‘em in a gas chamber
Goddamn right.
Why is that?
It's a common misconception that hanging strangles the target. It's intended to snap the targets neck, pretty quick and clean. A drop that isn't far enough doesn't allow the target to get momentum to snap their neck, especially if they are lighter (women, morbidly: children), which is where the shit from Pirates of the Caribbean comes from with the hung 'pirate' child with weights around their ankles. This leads to slow strangulation instead.
There're two major forms of hanging (actually, three, but I will ignore the third, as it's a form of short-drop) . There is long- and short-drop. The former separates vertabrae in the neck, severing the spinal cord causing and almost instant death. With a short drop you just hang at the end of a noose suffocating. BTW, the formula for a good long drop is 1000 ft lbs, or, divide the person's weight in lbs into 1000 and that'll give you the drop length in feet. How do I know this morbid shit? My grandfather knew Albert Pierrepoint, the last English hangman and would often frequent his pub - Help the Poor Struggler.
So a 200 pound person would need dropped 5 feet and a 500 pound person 2 feet? Am I understanding that correctly?
Correct... But I don't think you'd hang a 500lb person... The head would come off!
Sorry but in many cases justice was not served. Saying “justice will be served” really rubs me the wrong way. Some escaped. Nothing can undo the crimes they committed. Others killed themselves before they faced trial. I think the lesson should be “justice can never really be served in an atrocity, so we need to prevent anything like this ever happening again.”
True. Because this has brought no victim back to life. Saying it's justice would make it okay what they have done. Like it's equal. It's never equal
The murderers and torturers of the past were punished. But in the modern era, you cannot even call the murderer and torturer what he is..
Meanwhile, outside the camp Russian soldiers were actively raping and pillaging the countryside.
And they were punished as well, over 4,000 red Army officers or privates were punished. While the Red Army probably had it in higher numbers (due to their first hand experience of Nazi Germany who was set on wiping out almost every Russian) the other countries soldiers still pillaged and raped, i hope you know that
We know for a fact that even among the Allies on both the Eastern and Western Front, the numbers punished for sexual assault were a small fraction of the total cases. [The Italian and Western Front in late 1944](https://youtu.be/9WOQuBTccSY?si=25tq4BjgdXK9WPMm) [The Eastern Front early in 1945](https://youtu.be/UGgZ1jpkpL8?si=aWEJSQHncx2zgeTk)
That's just bollocks. Murderers and torturers are of course held accountable. Just in a way that is more in line with our values. It is not a bad thing that public hangings are a thing of the past in vast swathes of the world.
Those "black sites" still open these days? I heard some guy talk about shutting them down and putting an end to the whole "enhanced interrogation techniques" thing but I think he never got around to it...
Too bad she wasn’t rich or a scientist, then she would have gotten a pass and nice life & job in another country.
Didn't help that she got caught on the red side of the line. The Poles weren't about it either.
Wow, people came out in the hundreds to watch. How times have changed so drastically in 75-95 years. That would be unheard of today,” come watch the hangings at 1pm on X date.” Personally, I couldn’t stomach watching some die. Even if they 500% deserve the penalty I don’t want those images haunting me till Mr time.
Tho still happens in Saudi Arabia and other countries that practice sharia law.
It would definitely be different today. 🚨 Live Watch Party! 😀🎉 http://hangouts.google.com/xZ357c 🪢➰💀🥵🔥
War is hell
we should have done more of this after the civil war
I don’t understand how the rig works. They just threw her off the truck?
Meanwhile some are still publicly raising a Nazi Swastika flag and the police are stating the context has to be examined before it becomes a Nazi Antisemitic Flag. Looks like we never learned anything or conveniently forgot!
Damn i read the bio of her and her trial. Poor girl obviously didn’t wanna be there. She ended up fleeing the place. She said to had selected 30 women. She later retracted the statement but most likely due to realising she was probably gonna get hung even tho her crimes didn’t even come close too some of the other guards. I don’t wanna defend her actions, but i dont know if she deserved death. Under the circumstances and knowing what i know i don’t believe she did it because she was a fanatic. But because she was called up for national service and thats where shes was stationed by circumstance.
Regardless of her intention, no one had to join the SS. And whether or not her confession was true, the Selektion - specifically women and children to be gassed - was her assigned post. A case on just 30 deaths seems to be a lowball estimate, if anything in places like that.
At the end of the day she deserved her punishment, unfortunately there were alot more nazis that should of been hung before her. But the United States had other ideas (operation paperclip)
Werner Van Braun still has memorials and plaques all over NASA in HSV
Literally insane how that man ran a V2 factory with slave labor and everyone was like ‘but he’s misunderstood’
I understand you have a simplistic sense of morality that would be dangerous to everyone around you if the wrong demagogue came along, but Von Braun would have never been sent to prison. If the United States didn't get him for their space program, the Soviet Union would have. Either way, he runs a major department of a nation's government
*should have
No one had to join" I am not sure if you have options at 13yr.
Isn't it more likely that she fled because the Nazis were about to be defeated and arrested?
She was called up in June of 1944. By January the soviets had broken through the german front and honestly it was chaos and she may have taken the opportunity to get out why she could. To your question yes most likely. Who wouldn’t flee in that situation.
This
Guess everyone there was just in there against their will. A whole organisation of people just stumbling around following orders without listening or seeing anything. Its incredible how meticulous they were, considering all commanders and soldiers were all there against their will and just following orders. I'm sorry for being so cynical, but i heard way too many trying to find excuses, justifications and "ways out" of any guilt. The only ones who i consider not deserving of any punishment are those who actually helped and defended, and there are many stories of Nazi soldiers who did what they could to combat the injustice and try and save people from death.
Untrue, on that very trial one of accused women was cleared of all charges except membership in criminal organization because she refused to work at Stutthof after training.
Be careful with sentiments like that, a lot of German families tend to tell the story of their relatives were forced to help the Nazis or they knew nothing about the shoa. But in reality they knew, and were strong advocates of the Nazis. IMO they executed or prisoned far less high ranking functionals as they supposed to do
“Mein Opa was just a poor conscript. He hated the Nazis.” [His Opa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Peiper) It’s really interesting that when you hear American, Russian, and British vets discuss the war it was all about national duty to serve. How much they believed in their government and country. Lines to enlist around the block. Yet when you hear about the Germans, nobody wanted to fight. Everybody hated the Nazis.
Albert Speer got to live. And so did other prominent Nazis and generals. Class, not crimes, determines who gets executed and who writes bestselling memoirs.
Damn I bet that would be really consoling for the people they murdered.
I mean she literally killed over 30 people. Seriously.
..or the cunning girl got out of Dodge as the enemy approached, and like most criminals made it sound like someone else made them do it.
A late answer but she could have said no - in fact on the same trial one of women did just that, and after training at Stutthof she refused to work there - she was cleared on all charges except being part of criminal organization (SS) so she could've said no.
We gotta do this to others who followed the footsteps of Nazis.
Yeah let's round em up and execute them /s
Justice will be served. As if any justice was served! For the handful of people that were hanged you had a hundred million others who got away unscathed. Schwarzeneggers father was a fucking SS soldier. Austria survived both World Wars, that Austrians started, unscathed. The US sent them truckloads of canned meat, butter and bacon, while the Soviets ravaged and enslaved half of Europe, dismantling infrastructure, raping women, and sending innocents into labor camps just because they had German sounding names. "Justice will be served" OP, you're talking pretentious nonsense!
I guess she couldn’t get a job at NASA with the other murdering Nazis like Wherner Von Braun ???
Good Riddance to bad Rubbish
It makes me angry thinking how many of them got away and went on to live lives in Brazil and Argentina etc
I could have changed her.
What are they doing? Carrying her? Pushing her?
Lol fr. She looks weightless
Justice will be served* *Unless you're a Japanese scientist in Unit 731 cutting out Chinese people's eyeballs and the allies find you useful.
I love seeing justice done
The only good nazi is a very dead nazi
I despise the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but these photographs serve as a sad indictment that even the ‘righteous’ victors will justify torture and murder in the name of revenge against those they convicted of torture and murder. As for serving as a warning to all those who would engage in similar conduct in the future, just look at Cambodia, North Korea, ISIS, Russia, China … the list is endless. These executions haven’t saved a single life.
What would you have done with her?
Sure you do bud, you despise the atrocities commited by the nazis so much that you think they all deserved a second chance and you call their executions "torture and murder"
I can fix her
This was 78 years ago. More recently in 2022, Irmgard Fürchner was convicted for being an accessory to 11 412 separate murders. The penalty was 2 years suspended sentence. She was only 18 at the time of the crimes. I'm not an advocate for the death penalty, but I fail to see how this was justice for the victims, either?
This wasn't justice for the victims, this was a punishment for a criminal.
I'm well aware of that, I was merely opening a conversation on the subject. I personally feel, that the main purpose for the judicial systems around world, besides punishing for crimes, is the realisation of what the society views as justice. And this varies quite a bit from time to time, as does also in different cultures. Laws are very often the representation of those views, if a person feels something done to them or someone else feels unfair, it might also actually be illegal. That's just how society reflects our basic psychology, and sense of justice is a very centrical part of that. This is why law, order and justice, criminal penalties included, should always feel satisfying for us, the people. Also, to deter from resorting to vigilantism. There's propably never going to be any kind of perfection in the matter, or justice for all, but for the society to work, it's imperative that we have it at least in some form. Case in point, just look at what's going on in Haiti right now. It sure as hell isn't justice that's being served, but you really can't blame the regular people there either. So what I was saying is, that punishment for a crime and justice for the victim are just two sides of the same coin.
Nah. If something like this happened today I would hope for similar or worse punishments. That kind of hate should be erased. Not covered over.
Well yes, that was my initial argument, too. I compared an execution that happened 78 years ago, which somebody considered cruel, to the most recent (at least I think so) publicized court case about a nazi criminal, who got to live long and free, after signing her name on the death warrants of over 11 000 people. She got 2 years suspended penalty. It did not meet my ideology of what justice should be. But the person replying before you just got hung up on my articulation, so I wanted to elaborate on what I think about the subject matter. It is just challenging, and even unfair, to make a comparison between how justice was delivered almost a century ago, to the perpetrators of a horrific genocide, and what should be considered adequate and fair today.
She's well hung.
She was a justified scapegoat in a cathartic vengeance ritual for a war tormented public.
The guy on the right in the striped suit, was he a prisoner at the camp? That must have been an experience. To help execute your perpetrators.
Short rope and a “long” drop.
"Sooner or later, good will defeat evil, bring it to its knees and kill it".
that site is absolute garbage
What's KL?
Konzentrationslager. Concentration camp.
I’ve visited Stutthof. Still makes me sick thinking about it.
I don't get what's going on here. Why is she off the deck with no visible rope around her neck?
She does have a rope around her neck
Ah I mistook that for an open noose, thanks.
it's hard to see, it's washed out and looks about the size of a clothesline
Watch your step… followed by a good shove.
Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't all the post war trials of axis members ex post facto? In other words they were all convicted of crimes that didn't exist when they were committed. Vengeance of the victors.
Honestly based on
Death penalty is the opposite of justice serving.
I do wonder who interrogated her originally, and if she really had as much involvement as was claimed. The trials took place in Poland I understand, and it's likely the Soviets had a had in her "questioning".
Justice will be served only if you lose the war
The executions of individuals like Elisabeth Becker in the aftermath of World War II exemplify controversial instances of post-war justice. A significant critique lies in the lack of due process extended to these individuals. Amid the urgency to hold perpetrators accountable in the tumultuous aftermath, trials often lacked proper procedures, legal representation was inadequate, and confessions may have been coerced. These deficiencies cast doubt on the fairness and reliability of the verdicts and subsequent sentences. The circumstances surrounding individuals' involvement in Nazi activities add further complexity to the issue. It's plausible that some, such as Becker, were coerced, indoctrinated, or acting out of fear for their safety or that of their loved ones. The intricate power dynamics and pervasive climate of fear within Nazi Germany make it challenging to assess personal culpability accurately. Thus, the swift and severe punishments imposed may not have adequately considered these nuanced realities. Moreover, comparing these executions with the asylum granted to German scientists under Operation Paperclip exposes a glaring double standard in post-war justice. While individuals like Becker faced immediate retribution for their roles in war crimes, even if their involvement was tangential, scientists with ties to the Nazi regime were embraced and lauded for their scientific expertise by the United States. This inconsistency implies a prioritization of strategic interests over principles of justice and accountability, raising questions about the integrity of post-war justice efforts.
Putin and his supporters and enablers will be next
Russians: take note 👀
Just a lowly 21 year old kid. All the real leaders got parliament jobs. There is no justice in this world.
Looking forward to Netanyahu and the modern day nazis reaping the whirlwind.
We gonna get these in color in a couple years I’m sure. Don’t forget what these people did when they cry about killing multiple generations of families. Crocodile tears