“Not all”, and i cannot emphasize this enough, literal fucking SS men.
The entire organization was judged guilty for it’s critical role in the holocaust, to say nothing of the millions upon millions of people they murdered beyond the holocaust. The case was tried decades ago.
The interesting bit about the guilt is that Canadian courts did a “Ukrainian SS are no big deal” defense, there were decades of organized white washing for them. This can also be seen in wikipedia and the empirical work of historians who did in fact link Ukrainian volunteer SS units to war crimes are diminished there or not even mentioned.
the people who I feel like could have a case of not being executed are those who just joined and thus did not participate in any actions falling under crimes against humanity and can prove they joined either due to large pressure from others or to gather intelligence.
as I said in another comment, I don’t know much about about the SS aside from surface level information, so I admit it may be the case that there are no people who fufill both requirements I gave.
You are doubling down on not shooting every member of the ss in the head on sight.
What are you doing? No one was forced to join the ss. You need to drop this right now. You are defending the sharp sword of genocide.
During reading up a bit I found something which might interest you:
Approximately about 20 to 40 Icelanders served in the Waffen SS, including the first president of Iceland (1944–1952) Sveinn Björnsson’s son, Björn Sveinsson Björnsson. Most of Icelandic volunteers fought in the 5th SS-Panzer-Division Wiking, or in the SS Nordland[citation needed]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waffen-SS_foreign_volunteers_and_conscripts
Amid the 11,000 Ukrainian members of the former SS Galizien, who had fled westwards to surrender—replete in their German SS uniforms—to the British in Italy, only 3,000 of them were repatriated to the Soviet Union. The rest remained temporarily lodged at Rimini as displaced persons, many of whom became British or Canadian citizens as a result of Cold War expediency.
So up to 8000 Waffen SS Nazis did move to the UK, Canada or Germany.
As stated by @Tankiedesantski@lemmygrad.ml :
Late into 1944 and 1945 the SS was very much in the practice of conscripting people at gunpoint so that’s where it gets murkey to shoot all of them out of hand.
My point is those people, as long as they did not commit any crimes against humanity, should not be tried as SS members or be considered to be its members.
I’m guessing SS members could have access to valuable information to the allied war effort. if someone joined the SS explicitly to gather this information, either as a Allied spy or as a spy for various resistance movements and did not participate in any crimes against humanity committed by the SS, they shouldn’t be considered part of the organization.
people who joined the SS of their own volition? Yes they do, in my opinion, deserve either execution or long prison sentences, including life in prison.
I do not however think that those who were forced to join at the end of the war and can show they have not participated in crimes against humanity committed by the organization, should not be considered to be part of the SS.
