The german wehrmacht in Modern America (RAR!)

[Patroklos]

We don't need to imprison them, we simply need to have them barracks in place under their own officers until we get around to them. Except for some high profile players there are not going to be any trials, at least not initially. Plenty of time for that in the coming years, including dealing with double jepardy issues.

[Simon_Jester]

I do not know of any real prison system that contained and handled over 15 million imprisoned men simultaneously. The USSR interned over 3 million people at a given time, and even that was hard enough.

For once, the staggering preposterous hugeness of the American prison system works in our favor!

Not that we actually have the infrastructure to handle fifteen million imprisoned men, but we're closer to it than most, and again, we DO have large areas of empty land where prisoners can be given piles of lumber and be told "here, build temporary housing." It won't be easy but on the scale of the entire country it's a meet-able challenge.

Yay Germany? Who said Germany is going to accept the return of 17+ million Nazi troops from the past in a matter of a few months? It will likely try to stop repatriation with all possible means, saying that it has nothing to do with the event and the US should sort their refugee/POW crisis themselves.

If there's a UN convention granting them citizenship, the Germans have a problem on their hands then.

[Me2005]

Yay Germany? Who said Germany is going to accept the return of 17+ million Nazi troops from the past in a matter of a few months? It will likely try to stop repatriation with all possible means, saying that it has nothing to do with the event and the US should sort their refugee/POW crisis themselves.

If there's a UN convention granting them citizenship, the Germans have a problem on their hands then.

Would that even apply? I mean, these are people who were born ,and many died before, the UN was created. And by all real accounts they are dead - many of their bodies can be exhumed for proof and everything, unless this scenario resurrects everyone prior to dropping them off in the US.

[Borgholio]

They were born German citizens so they would still be German citizens. Granted the law is not meant to tangle with the issue of time travel but from the most basic viewpoint, these people were born in Germany and thus are German citizens. These specific individuals did not die so they are still citizens.

[Me2005]

They were born German citizens so they would still be German citizens. Granted the law is not meant to tangle with the issue of time travel but from the most basic viewpoint, these people were born in Germany and thus are German citizens. These specific individuals did not die so they are still citizens.

If they're clones or other duplicates of people who were born citizens? The people who these people are copies of were citizens; does that make these ones citizens too?

[Borgholio]

They weren't actually cloned...they were pulled out of time. They were still literally born in Germany. Thus, citizens.

[Patroklos]

Also on the return issue lots of these people have living relatives who loved them. Sure there might be 1-50 years of shared memory missing but the children of these veterans won't just turn them out and most of those children are German citizens. There will be a few overlaps with currently living people but that will be minimal at this point. Not only that but for those that actually died in the war this actually represents a reuniting.

No, I highly doubt the Germans will have a choice to turn them away. They will need time to make accomodations and I am sure the US will work with them on this but those who want to be returned will be. For many of them though there will be no living relatives they knew in their lives and they may wish to stay in the US or go any number of places. While a bit dated a talented mechanic from a pazer motor pool is still a talented mechanic, and they actually have skills in a lot of machining and other lost tech that is making a comeback or still needed in many places so some will find plenty of niche markets to accept them. The German soldier was pretty well educated even by today's standards and most were 30 or younger so plenty of time to update a skillset or education. Its not all doom and gloom.

[Me2005]

... For many of them though there will be no living relatives they knew in their lives ...

Actually, many may find out that they died in the war because there are no living relatives.

[Patroklos]

Assuming no brothers or sisters, yes I assume a large portion of casualties were childless.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, to be fair that's actually a questionable stance to adopt. You're saying:

"Even though Hans Schmidt is thirty years dead, with his skeleton in his grave, survived by several loving family members who remember his tragic and ultimately failed battle with lung cancer, this man claiming to be Hans-Schmidt-from-1942 is Hans Schmidt and therefore a German citizen."

[Borgholio]

Well, to be fair that's actually a questionable stance to adopt. You're saying:

"Even though Hans Schmidt is thirty years dead, with his skeleton in his grave, survived by several loving family members who remember his tragic and ultimately failed battle with lung cancer, this man claiming to be Hans-Schmidt-from-1942 is Hans Schmidt and therefore a German citizen."

Once the idea of parallel universes is accepted, then you can very easily have multiple legitimate copies of the same person running around. Hans Schmidt from 1942 is the same guy as the one in the grave...just not dead yet.

[Simon_Jester]

Immigration lawyers are not required to adopt this interpretation.

EDIT:

Even if we accept your premise, immigration law might well argue "very well, so Hans-Schmidt-1942 is that Germany's citizen, a citizen of a Germany that exists in a parallel universe we have no means of reaching. This does not, in itself, entitle him to be a citizen of this Germany. For all intents and purposes he is a stateless person, because we cannot contact the country from which he sprang."

[Patroklos]

Was the copy the one left behind or the one moved to the future? How could you prove it one way of the other?

[K. A. Pital]

Was the copy the one left behind or the one moved to the future? How could you prove it one way of the other?

The one that lived and died in the original timeline is considered a real man and all the life records in government archives relate to him, not to his newly-appeared clone.

[Metahive]

I already know how the German bureaucracy would react to this:

"Here's a bill over all the taxes of the prior 69 years you failed to pay, Herr Schmidt. Plus your passport hasn't been valid for just as long which incurs another late fee. Welcome back to Germany"

[TimothyC]

All of this discussion about who's the real German makes me think of this comic:

[Borgholio]

Immigration lawyers are not required to adopt this interpretation.

EDIT:

Even if we accept your premise, immigration law might well argue "very well, so Hans-Schmidt-1942 is that Germany's citizen, a citizen of a Germany that exists in a parallel universe we have no means of reaching. This does not, in itself, entitle him to be a citizen of this Germany. For all intents and purposes he is a stateless person, because we cannot contact the country from which he sprang."

So perhaps it would be best to NOT argue the parallel universe concept, and say he is directly from OUR past...meaning that legally the Germany in the past is the direct forerunner of modern Germany (think USSR -> Russian Federation).

[Simon_Jester]

Except that clearly, these German soldiers didn't come from the past of our Germany... because in the past of our Germany, the German soldiers didn't disappear in the first place! How can this guy in Atlanta be Hans Schmidt when Hans Schmidt (or his corpse) has been right here the whole time?

Clearly he's a duplicate, or an imitation, or even an outright liar. If he's a national of any place, he's a national of the place that randomly spawned all these Nazi clones... and we don't know where that is.

Again, though, the point is NOT that this is automatically a bulletproof philosophical argument. However, it is a very simple and pragmatic argument, fully in keeping with the letter and spirit of international law. Especially the parts of international law that would be concerned with preventing the new Atlanta!Hans Schmidt from usurping the name and identity of Hamburg!Hans Schmidt without just cause for doing so.

You personally may hold that the sudden horde of Wehrmacht soldiers are in fact citizens of Germany born in the Germany of this world with a legal right to return to it. However, you cannot actually provide any concrete evidence of this opinion. They may be elaborate fakes created by aliens and randomly teleported into position. They may be from another, different Germany on another planet that just happens to be full of people just like this one, again transported by unknown means.

And while Germany may be obliged to let any person who actually was born in Germany and can prove that they were into the country...

They are not obliged to provide such naturalization for people who have no way of proving that they are who they claim to be, as opposed to elaborate fakes created by unknown means. They may choose to do so, out of good will, in due time and in an orderly fashion. But they cannot be compelled to do so against their will in a way that would swamp them with eighteen million combat-trained immigrants, all of whom are catastrophically unfamiliar with modernity, and all of whom have echoes of Nazi propaganda ringing in their ears.

[Borgholio]

Except that clearly, these German soldiers didn't come from the past of our Germany... because in the past of our Germany, the German soldiers didn't disappear in the first place! How can this guy in Atlanta be Hans Schmidt when Hans Schmidt (or his corpse) has been right here the whole time?

And right here is none other than (quite literally in some cases) the grandfather paradox. If you remove these men from our actual past and plop them in our future, does that mean all of history is automatically re-written...or is what's written already written and can't be changed wholesale?

If it's a matter of parallel timelines / universes and there is no other explanation, then yeah I'll have to concede the whole argument since it's clearly NOT *our* Schmidt. But I don't know that there has been any real consensus on what actually would happen if time travel were to occur. Would it be parallel universes or something other?

This might be (at first) a question better answered by philosophers and physicists rather than lawyers.

[Gaidin]

Wait, was this parallel wormhole universe or time travel? Because if it was the former, then you could make an argument that there'd be a dead body. If it was legit time travel, not so much. He's time travelling. There's no body to kill. WW2 Germany lost the body to kill when he time traveled. Or so I would think.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Wait, was this parallel wormhole universe or time travel? Because if it was the former, then you could make an argument that there'd be a dead body. If it was legit time travel, not so much. He's time travelling. There's no body to kill. WW2 Germany lost the body to kill when he time traveled. Or so I would think.

If we are accepting that in the past, these soldiers just disappeared and ended up in our time, it opens up all sorts of weird paradoxes as well. How does history shake out if the entire Wehrmacht were to magically disappear? It depends a lot on where we "start"; do we start with the invasion of Russia? France? Poland? The Anschluss? Depending on the time point where the soldiers begin to disappear, history will be impossibly, unpredictably different.

But it gets even more complicated: the scenario states that we are getting transported every single individual that ever served in the Wehrmacht during the war. If, say, the 1940 Wehrmacht disappears, the war will end instantaneously, and any soldiers that were recruited in to the army from 1940-1945 won't have a Wehrmacht to join in the first place! There are two possible repercussions of this with respect to the original scenario that I can see right off the bat: either 1) those thousands/millions (not sure the numbers exactly) of soldiers who WOULD have joined the Wehrmacht if the war progressed as it did in our real life timeline never join and are thus never transported to Atlanta, which completely changes the numbers we are dealing with, or 2) those thousands/millions of soldiers are transported despite having no memory of ever being in the Wehrmacht (one moment they are working in a factory in Hamburg and the next they are in Atlanta in a soldier's uniform). Do their memories get magically rewritten so they can actually operate as trained soldiers?

In order for the OP to really proceed as Zor seemed to intend, a parallel universe of some sort is really the only option. Anything involving pure time travel (where the soldiers disappeared from our past) is too unstable.

[Purple]

I think that the way it would most likely work is that basically have a buffer that stores German soldiers. When ever a soldier dies during WW2 you instead put him in a buffer. At the end of WW2, pick up all the soldiers that are still alive and put them in the buffer as well. Finally teleport the whole buffer into our timeline. No need to rewrite memories, alter history or anything.

[Ziggy Stardust]

So do these soldiers have a memory of dying? What does this do to them on an existential level? Surely at least some proportion of them (those who died in the early months of 1945) were probably well aware that a German defeat was inevitable, as well. Would they even be willing to continue fighting without some magical rewrite of their memories?

[Raw Shark]

So do these soldiers have a memory of dying? What does this do to them on an existential level? Surely at least some proportion of them (those who died in the early months of 1945) were probably well aware that a German defeat was inevitable, as well. Would they even be willing to continue fighting without some magical rewrite of their memories?

Some form of PTSD, probably. Many will probably not want to fight, or even shut down completely, if they keep memories of original-time-line death. A significant minority would probably go berserk under the same circumstances, because it's exciting and why the fuck not at this point.

[Simon_Jester]

And right here is none other than (quite literally in some cases) the grandfather paradox. If you remove these men from our actual past and plop them in our future, does that mean all of history is automatically re-written...or is what's written already written and can't be changed wholesale?

The terms of the RAR do not say anything about a grandfather paradox. And introducing a grandfather paradox would radically alter the terms of the discussion, detracting from the conversation the original poster wanted to have. So I'm assuming, no grandfather paradox. The 'new' German soldiers we see today did not vanish from the universe in our own history at any time. Whether they vanished from somewhere else, or are copies of 'our' Germans made by unknown means, I cannot speculate.

The point is that from a lawyer's point of view, Germany isn't simply going to accept without dispute the idea that all these German soldiers have unlimited right to 'return' to a German that is unrecognizable to them. A UN convention that can theoretically be interpreted to mean they do really isn't important in that regard. Because it is highly debatable whether these living Germans (who claim to be other men who are themselves long dead) really are authentic German citizens.