US deports SS 'murder pits guard'

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BBC NEWS | Europe | US deports SS 'murder pits guard'

As Austria is apparently in the process of renewing it's love of Nazi politics, this man will feel right at home.
Both Austria and Germany have long held the idea that War criminals should be permitted to live out their lives in peace and tranquility without being compelled to justify their behavior during the Nazi era.

Well their is definately no doubt the guy is a warcriminal who had a direct hand and not only issuing orders.
Just the names, the amount of time served, and locations are some of the worse of all the names in the whole slave labor system occurring then.
Couple it with being a part of the SS unit assigned to Guard and there is no doubt he committed crimes.

Who knows maybe he was one of the few who where "better" then the "bad ones". You had bad... then unbelievably bad.

U.S. investigators alleged that he participated in a 1943 mass shooting in Poland in which 8,000 Jewish men, women and children were murdered in pits at Trawniki in a single day.

"Josias Kumpf, by his own admission, stood guard with orders to shoot any surviving prisoners who attempted to escape an SS massacre that left thousands of Jews dead," Acting Assistant Attorney General Rita Glavin said in a statement.

Peter Rogers, Kumpf's immigration attorney, said Kumpf was stationed at Trawniki, "but he never laid a finger on anyone, he never shot at anyone."

"In fact, even the government never asserted that he took any particular action," Rogers told The Associated Press. "The court found his mere presence at a place where admittedly horrible, horrible things happened, was sufficient to find him a persecutor."

Justice Department spokesman Ian McCaleb referred attempts for comment to a 2006 ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. "Kumpf's personal presence functioned to discourage escape attempts and maintain order over the prisoners... (H)e presided over and witnessed the torture and murder of helpless people," it said.

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The guy was 16-17 years old in '42-'43.

How much authority did the teen actually have in the decision making process?

I'm definitely in favor of chasing down the goons involved in the atrocities committed in WWII, but some of these cases take it a bit too far.

He was complicit in mass murder. How can you even sugar coat that?

I think this is an unfortunate decision.

He wasn't a leader, he wasn't organizing or managing the death camps. He wasn't even an officer.

He was a GRUNT. Even the Austrians (who actually have physical ties to the holocaust) aren't going to prosecute him, and I agree with their stance.

I am a bit sickened by the stripping of citizenship for actions taken before then (though, admittedly, he did not admit being in the SS before applying for a visa).

He was complicit in mass murder. How can you even sugar coat that?

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First, let me say I am not trying to justify the atrocities.

But this particular man was conscripted into the SS (so he claims), and was not an officer. Meaning he had no control of the situation and was not there by choice.

Also, the event occurred on a single day. If we were to have judged and done away with all the SS/Wehrmacht/Luftwaffe soldiers who had been present at atrocities on at least one occasion, there wouldn't have been any German men over the age of 15 left! "Complicit" can mean a lot of things. It can be argued that all German people not executed by the Nazi's for treason were complicit with that regimes atrocities and therefore deserve the punishment thereof, no?


I am glad that the Mossad hunted down Eichmann and brought him to justice, and I wish they could have found Mengele. But this, I think, is over the top. We are talking about a person who was forced into actions 66 years ago, before he was even an adult! Perhaps his attorney should have argued that because he wasn't yet 18 at the time, it should have been locked away in his file and never brought up.

His story may be true, but he will be incapable of escaping the modern world's perspective of history. Any connection to the SS makes you guilty, even if the reality is that some people were forced to work for them. I for one don't believe his story and am glad he was deported, but that's because I'm biased... I know that we can never really know for sure what his role was.