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Member
News story......
CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Michigan — Federal authorities have freed a former Nazi concentration camp guard after failing to find a country to take the 81-year-old retired toolmaker who had been stripped of his U.S. citizenship.
In January, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, upheld a decision to take away Johann Leprich's citizenship.
On Sept. 18, Leprich's lawyer asked U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to order Leprich released, citing a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring the freeing of those who have not been deported within six months of a removal order.
The Justice Department said it released Leprich on Monday because Romania, Hungary and Germany refused to accept him, despite high-level meetings with officials from those countries, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Leprich was jailed in 2003 after agents found him hiding in a secret compartment in his family's home in Macomb County's Clinton Township, about 20 miles northeast of Detroit.
Leprich is an ethnic German born in Birk, Romania, in 1925. In 1943, he joined the Nazi military organization Waffen SS and served as an armed guard at Mauthausen concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Austria, court records say.
About 119,000 people were killed at Mauthausen. They included political prisoners, Spanish civil war veterans, Soviet, Dutch and Czech prisoners of war and Jews.
Leprich immigrated to the U.S. from Germany after World War II and became a U.S. citizen in 1958. But he fled to Windsor, Ontario, in 1987 shortly before a federal judge revoked his citizenship for hiding his Nazi party membership.
My commentary.................
I saw a program that described how the Waffen SS used it's reputation as an elite fighting force (akin to the USMC) to recruit in eastern Europe (Czechs, etc...) and then sent these under trained warm bodies to do their dirty work in the concentration camps, freeing up their best soldiers for combat.
I don't think one should underestimate the allure that a strong sense of "esprit de corps" has on young men.
I just recently read that this is the #1 reason why soldiers are re-enlisting to go back to Iraq. They may think the war really stinks, but they know they'll never match the "experience" of being on the A-team in a very hard situation.
Stephen Ambrose wrote that this sense of loyalty to their buddies was the real glue that motivated U.S. troops in combat, during WWII. Even though they had strong idiological reasons to fight, it was personal loyalty that kept them going in the face of extreme adversity.
In Viet Nam, the US Army made the huge mistake of rotating individuals out within a unit, and lost the "glue". They've learned their lesson and aside for emergencies, they only rotate entire units now.
Once these "kids" (the guy was 18 when he "enlisted") were duped into joining the Waffen SS (if not flat out conscripted at gun point), how much "choice" did they have to disobey orders? Summary courts martial followed by a firing squad were SOP!
Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer's seminary students were forcefully conscripted into the Weirmarcht....and they were following one of the few German leaders to openly oppose Hitler. Even the Pope was conscripted into an anti-aircraft unit at age 16.
Unless one has personally experienced this kind of catch 22, chosen iaw. moral principles and lived to tell about it, I'm not sure they have any business throwing stones. We seem to have lost all sense of history and fail to make any attempt to "walk a mile in someone elses shoes". It's just two easy to be an arm chair quarterback, with a bag full of rocks in a glass house these days....scoring political points by blasting souls who are affilitated with a "safe to condemn" issue. It seems that very little critique and analysis is ever even attempted.
If Leprich was one of the sadistic monsters who delighted in torturing and tormenting those imprisoned in Mauthausen, then he should be tried and hung. But if he was one of the many average Joes (Hans?) who stood watch in a gaurd tower....he's probably got enough ghosts haunting him already.
CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Michigan — Federal authorities have freed a former Nazi concentration camp guard after failing to find a country to take the 81-year-old retired toolmaker who had been stripped of his U.S. citizenship.
In January, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Ohio, upheld a decision to take away Johann Leprich's citizenship.
On Sept. 18, Leprich's lawyer asked U.S. District Court in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to order Leprich released, citing a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court decision requiring the freeing of those who have not been deported within six months of a removal order.
The Justice Department said it released Leprich on Monday because Romania, Hungary and Germany refused to accept him, despite high-level meetings with officials from those countries, according to the Detroit Free Press.
Leprich was jailed in 2003 after agents found him hiding in a secret compartment in his family's home in Macomb County's Clinton Township, about 20 miles northeast of Detroit.
Leprich is an ethnic German born in Birk, Romania, in 1925. In 1943, he joined the Nazi military organization Waffen SS and served as an armed guard at Mauthausen concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Austria, court records say.
About 119,000 people were killed at Mauthausen. They included political prisoners, Spanish civil war veterans, Soviet, Dutch and Czech prisoners of war and Jews.
Leprich immigrated to the U.S. from Germany after World War II and became a U.S. citizen in 1958. But he fled to Windsor, Ontario, in 1987 shortly before a federal judge revoked his citizenship for hiding his Nazi party membership.
My commentary.................
I saw a program that described how the Waffen SS used it's reputation as an elite fighting force (akin to the USMC) to recruit in eastern Europe (Czechs, etc...) and then sent these under trained warm bodies to do their dirty work in the concentration camps, freeing up their best soldiers for combat.
I don't think one should underestimate the allure that a strong sense of "esprit de corps" has on young men.
I just recently read that this is the #1 reason why soldiers are re-enlisting to go back to Iraq. They may think the war really stinks, but they know they'll never match the "experience" of being on the A-team in a very hard situation.
Stephen Ambrose wrote that this sense of loyalty to their buddies was the real glue that motivated U.S. troops in combat, during WWII. Even though they had strong idiological reasons to fight, it was personal loyalty that kept them going in the face of extreme adversity.
In Viet Nam, the US Army made the huge mistake of rotating individuals out within a unit, and lost the "glue". They've learned their lesson and aside for emergencies, they only rotate entire units now.
Once these "kids" (the guy was 18 when he "enlisted") were duped into joining the Waffen SS (if not flat out conscripted at gun point), how much "choice" did they have to disobey orders? Summary courts martial followed by a firing squad were SOP!
Even Dietrich Bonhoeffer's seminary students were forcefully conscripted into the Weirmarcht....and they were following one of the few German leaders to openly oppose Hitler. Even the Pope was conscripted into an anti-aircraft unit at age 16.
Unless one has personally experienced this kind of catch 22, chosen iaw. moral principles and lived to tell about it, I'm not sure they have any business throwing stones. We seem to have lost all sense of history and fail to make any attempt to "walk a mile in someone elses shoes". It's just two easy to be an arm chair quarterback, with a bag full of rocks in a glass house these days....scoring political points by blasting souls who are affilitated with a "safe to condemn" issue. It seems that very little critique and analysis is ever even attempted.
If Leprich was one of the sadistic monsters who delighted in torturing and tormenting those imprisoned in Mauthausen, then he should be tried and hung. But if he was one of the many average Joes (Hans?) who stood watch in a gaurd tower....he's probably got enough ghosts haunting him already.
