197 Comments
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Martini Glambassador's avatar

Meanwhile, in other military honor (?) news:https://twitter.com/ByYourL...

oafishcad's avatar

Dracula too could be very civil. He was still a blood sucker.

puredog's avatar

I would have to think that there were a fair number of officers who found themselves staring at a Luger pointed between their eyes who gave up their Jews. I can't even really judge them, never having been in an analogous position, but that's why this guy is exemplary.

puredog's avatar

Seconded. I do not see what it is that is keeping that garment in place. But I hate it, whatever it is.

beatbort's avatar

Herman Goring was known to have a great sense of humor.Just saying...

oafishcad's avatar

Yvgeny Yvteshnko (sp?) the Russian dissident poet wrote a poem about how even murderers love their families. At what point does the bad outweigh the good, or vice versa? Does giving a deserving man a medal outweigh climate destruction or transfer of America's wealth to the few? Today's Conservatism is a plague spreading across the globe.

Porkchop's avatar

You'd think with a belly full of Big Macs, he wouldn't be able to lift off. And yet.....

GrannysKnitting's avatar

I was gonna say - that's a bit harsh to M, then I realized who you were talking about

doktorzoom's avatar

I don't make the rules, I just read the Wikipedia articles. I think that, while you're right about the danger he faced, once someone is a POW, they are immediately a noncombatant. The distinction matters, because it's key to the "you can't shoot your prisoners and say it's war" part of the Geneva Conventions.

That said, I believe the first attempt to get him honored tried to declare him eligible for the Medal of Honor. And I doubt anyone's going to start fretting international law is at risk if that happened. I won't claim any expertise, but I do know the Pentagon and its lawyers take those distinctions seriously. Until now, so did presidents.

Not that the present administration is all that hot on not murdering prisoners anymore, either, as we see with Eddie Gallagher.

doktorzoom's avatar

Yep, so Jewish GI's sometimes ditched theirs.

https://twitter.com/18airbo...

Doug Langley's avatar

How on earth can anyone look at Donny all this time and still think he has an iota of urge to help anyone else??

richardgrabman's avatar

At least Major Siegmann was honorable enough to accept the Geneva Conventions. More than can be said for Trump and Co.

Werewolf's avatar

A guy I knew who was a B-17 bombardier said that he had a separate set of dog tags not identifying him as a Jew that he wore on missions.

carpethefish, decappinated's avatar

My argument isn't with you, it's with the legislators and it's pedantic. =)I accept the framing, and the desire to reserve the award for explicitly shooty shooty actions, but this was a combat scenario. When a POW camp commander is trying to find the Jewish POWs so he can have them murdered, he's not abiding by the Geneva Conventions, and the second he opened his mouth to yry and scare people to opt-in to being Holocausted, those guys were combatants again.

"M"'s avatar

That's how high he is.

Frightening, isn't it?