Karl Münter #fundie tellerreport.com

Seventy-four years later, he still has no regrets. In a report broadcast on Thursday 29 November, on the German public broadcaster ARD, Karl Münter is surprised by the question: "Why should I have regrets? The old man asks, 96 years old. On the night of April 1 to 2, 1944, he was one of a few dozen young soldiers, members of the 12th SS "Hitlerjugend" ("Hitler Youth"), who massacred 86 civilians in Ascq (North), near Lille, after the train they were in had been attacked by resistance fighters.

Pursued by the French courts, Karl Münter was sentenced to death in absentia, in 1949, in a resounding trial in which sixteen other former SS defendants were accused of having participated in the massacre then described by Le Figaro as " Oradour du Nord » . In the interview broadcast Thursday night, he says he shot no one, his role was limited to monitoring the arrested French. But he considers that the shots were legitimate: "If I stop the men, then I have the responsibility. And if they run away, I have the right to shoot them. Too bad for them ! "

From this time, Karl Münter does not seem to regret much. Faced with the camera, he claims that the SS did not commit "any crime" during the war. On the extent of the Holocaust, he also has doubts: "There were not as many Jews here at the time. This has already been refuted. I recently read somewhere that this figure of 6 million is not true. I do not believe it, " he says.

If he does not leave his quiet village of Lower Saxony, where he has rebuilt his postwar life as a house painter, Karl Münter sometimes makes an exception. As on the day of early November when he went to Thuringia for a meeting organized by nostalgic of the Third Reich, in the presence of the vice president of the neo-Nazi NPD party. Invited as a "witness of the time" , he has dedicated dozens of photos, like the one he keeps preciously in an old album and shows it, at age 21, blond as the wheats and face poupin, in his uniform SS non-commissioned officer.

[...]

On the spot, the stupefaction is all the more intense as the name of Karl Münter is far from unknown. It was indeed out of oblivion thanks to the complaint filed in Germany, in 2014, by Alexandre Delezenne, whose great-grandfather had been murdered by the SS seventy years earlier. As a result of this complaint, the German investigators found traces of Karl Münter, waking the victims' descendants with the hope of a new trial. But on March 27, the prosecution of Celle (Lower Saxony) put an end to the prosecution. The reason: Article 54 of the Schengen Agreement, which states that a person already tried by one of the signatory states - even without attending his trial, as was the case of Münter, in 1949 - can not be prosecuted for the same facts by another State bound by the same agreement. The other argument against a new trial was that Münter had been convicted for "war crimes", which had been prescribed after thirty years.

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