U.S. Sec. of State attends memorial ceremony at Sant'Anna de Stazzema

[Angela]

The U.S. Secretary of State attended a memorial service in Lucca, Toscana, for the Italian victims of a Nazi atrocity at Sant'Anna de Stazzema, and took the opportunity to decry such deliberate atrocities against innocents anywhere. Let's see if they mean it this time.


See:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/10/world/europe/rex-tillerson-russia-syria.html

At Sant'Anna de Stazzema 560 women, children (about 130 of them, the youngest of which was 20 days old, and one of which was cut out of its pregnant mother's body and then killed separately), and old men were gathered in the church or basements and then grenades were tossed in, after which they were machine gunned. Others were machine gunned against the wall of their church cemetery. Their "crime" was that many of their men had gone to join the partisans in the surrounding mountains. After all of this the SS burned everything down and sat down for a rest and lunch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant'Anna_di_Stazzema_massacre

Until 2004 no one was prosecuted for it.

"Apart from the divisional commander Max Simon,^[a] no one was prosecuted for this massacre until July 2004, when a trial of ten former Waffen-SS officers and NCOs living in Germany was held before a military court in La Spezia, Italy. On 22 June 2005, the court found the accused guilty of participation in the killings and sentenced them in absentia to life imprisonment:^[7]

• Werner Bruss (b. 1920, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Alfred Concina (b. 1919, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Ludwig Goering (b. 1923, former SS-Rottenführer who confessed to killing twenty women),^[8]
• Karl Gropler (b. 1923, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Georg Rauch (b. 1921, former SS-Untersturmführer),
• Horst Richter (b. 1921, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Alfred Schoneberg (b. 1921, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Heinrich Schendel (b. 1922, former SS-Unterscharführer),
• Gerhard Sommer, (b. 1921, former SS-Untersturmführer), and
• Ludwig Heinrich Sonntag (b. 1924, former SS-Unterscharführer).
  However, extradition requests from Italy were rejected by Germany.

In 2012, German prosecutors shelved their investigation of 17 unnamed former SS soldiers (eight of whom were still alive) who were part of the unit involved in the massacre because of a lack of evidence.^[9] "

" Simon was sentenced to death for war crimes. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison. He was pardoned in 1954 and died in 1961."

Is this supposed to be justice?


It's memorialized in the Spike Lee film where he got absolutely everything wrong, except that there was a massacre of innocents there by the SS, but at least raised awareness of it. It's worthless junk. I absolutely detest people who distort history, and particularly other people's history, for their own political and ethnic agendas.

 

[bicicleur 2]

what about all those ISIS fighters who come back to Europe?
they are being 'monitored' but presumed innocent as if they went out on a tourist trip
they even continue living on welfare

this is WW I in Belgium :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Belgium

because it was picked up and exaggerated by British propaganda, the real facts were later dismissed as merely propaganda
in both WW Belgium did put up serious resistance but both times it was not backed up properly by France whose only concern was to defend Paris
that is how Hittler could bluff his way to Dunkerque in WW II, which never should have happened

 

[Angela]

what about all those ISIS fighters who come back to Europe?
they are being 'monitored' but presumed innocent as if they went out on a tourist trip
they even continue living on welfare

this is WW I in Belgium :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_Belgium

because it was picked up and exaggerated by British propaganda, the real facts were later dismissed as merely propaganda
in both WW Belgium did put up serious resistance but both times it was not backed up properly by France whose only concern was to defend Paris

I'm not getting the point, or at least I hope I'm not getting it.

Does one injustice excuse another one? I don't use that kind of logic.

Plus, I don't see how the situations are perfectly analogous. Clearly you haven't read the trial transcripts. What do European authorities know about these European Muslims who went to the Near East? Are they reported as present in a specific group committing a specific crime at a specific place and time?

The Germans kept very complete records, often in triplicate. At the time they weren't ashamed of what they did. That commander and those officers are on German records as participating in the action at Sant' Anna on that particular day with those particular results. The results come from not only the few survivors, but from forensic analysis. Do we need a video of them manning the machine guns? By that criteria you couldn't convict anyone of war time atrocities. The officers are at least guilty of conspiracy to commit war crimes.


There is absolutely nothing exaggerated about the accounts of what the SS did in Italy, nor, for that matter, what the Wehrmacht did, and to suggest that, if that's what you're doing, is insulting, as it would be if you suggested that what Germany did to the Jews has been exaggerated.

 

[LeBrok]

I can't believe that I'm saying this but I like this move of Trump's administration. To pick one of lesser known European atrocities to remind us how terrible and barbaric we could be to each other, how we changed and what we stand for now, and that we should stand up to protect all civilians and innocent of the world.

 

[Angela]

It's not as if contemporary documentary evidence doesn't exist.
Simon and his chief officers. He served nine years.

They liked to take pictures of their comrades performing the actual executions:

Children of the extended Tucci family:

She looks so typically like many women in my mother's family that she could be my first cousin.

I'm not so magnanimous. I'd string up every last one of those men, every single one that is reported as being present in that town on that day; If they're already dead I'd string up their dead bodies if I had to.* If you don't do that then monsters just like them think they can get away with it.

Ed.* Well, that's a bit of hyperbole, but if they're already dead I's cover the whole area where they were born and lived with pictures of exactly what they did.

 

[bicicleur 2]

I'm not getting the point, or at least I hope I'm not getting it.

Does one injustice excuse another one? I don't use that kind of logic.

Plus, I don't see how the situations are perfectly analogous. Clearly you haven't read the trial transcripts. What do European authorities know about these European Muslims who went to the Near East? Are they reported as present in a specific group committing a specific crime at a specific place and time?

The Germans kept very complete records, often in triplicate. At the time they weren't ashamed of what they did. That commander and those officers are on German records as participating in the action at Sant' Anna on that particular day with those particular results. The results come from not only the few survivors, but from forensic analysis. Do we need a video of them manning the machine guns? By that criteria you couldn't convict anyone of war time atrocities. The officers are at least guilty of conspiracy to commit war crimes.


There is absolutely nothing exaggerated about the accounts of what the SS did in Italy, nor, for that matter, what the Wehrmacht did, and to suggest that, if that's what you're doing, is insulting, as it would be if you suggested that what Germany did to the Jews has been exaggerated.

I'm not denying any atrocity.
I'm just pointing out atrocities are still happening every day, even today.
Many even remain unreported.
Some even happened right under the nose of UN forces who didn't intervene because they didn't have a mandate, neither the weapons to do so.
And the justice department is uncapable to stop any of them.
It's better not to wait for that.
The best one can do is to identify them, find them and execute them with a drone.
And I know, that is not much, it won't stop them.

But I do understand you Angela.
What happened in Sant-Anna-de-Stazzema touches you personnaly.
And it is not about preventing other crimes.
It is about getting recognition for what happened to people close to you and getting the responsables recognize it too and pay for what they'll never be able to pay enough.

 

[bicicleur 2]

I'm sorry to change the subject, Angela, but what do you think of this incident :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2015_anti-terrorism_operations_in_Belgium

Despite the heavy gunfire human right watch complained and acused Belgian police because 2 terrorists were killed. Pure kafka.

 

[Boreas]

After seeing what Ashkenazi people faced in Europe, and thinking what kind of country they created in Middle East. I don't think these kind of memorial has a meaning.

 

[Angela]

I'm not denying any atrocity.
I'm just pointing out atrocities are still happening every day, even today.
Many even remain unreported.
Some even happened right under the nose of UN forces who didn't intervene because they didn't have a mandate, neither the weapons to do so.
And the justice department is uncapable to stop any of them.
It's better not to wait for that.
The best one can do is to identify them, find them and execute them with a drone.
And I know, that is not much, it won't stop them.

But I do understand you Angela.
What happened in Sant-Anna-de-Stazzema touches you personnaly.
And it is not about preventing other crimes.
It is about getting recognition for what happened to people close to you and getting the responsables recognize it too and pay for what they'll never be able to pay enough.

You're right, Bicicleur, it does touch me personally. Sant'Anna isn't far away, but every town in the Lunigiana has a memorial to those killed in these strage. The tree outside the church which my mother attended and where she married my father has a little memorial honoring villagers who were hung from that tree in retribution for partisan activity. They hung there for days, and all the villagers were forced to file by.

However, I also think it's just part of my personality. I've always had a highly developed sense of justice, and compassion too, I think, more than compassion, perhaps, a kind of empathy with other people. It even shows up on those personality tests.

This kind of behavior, and brutality and deliberate cruelty to other human beings in general sickens me. I couldn't sleep the other night because I couldn't rid my mind of those images of gassed children in Syria.

People should pay for doing things like this, even if we'll always have monsters among us.

Sorry if I seemed to doubt you.

I don't understand the kind of selective outrage that groups like Human Rights Watch engage in.
What about the human right to life? What about, therefore, the human rights of innocent people killed in terrorist attacks? Where is their outrage about that? Or, take the so-called women's rights movement. Where is the outrage about how women are treated in a lot of the Muslim world?

It's all part of the fact that so many human beings are dishonest in their attitudes. Everything is based on their own political orientation. It's really disheartening.

@Boreas,
The memorial is not just about remembrance; it's about forgiveness. I'm not big enough for the latter.