Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maiximum Leader usually appends blog posts he writes about those who have recently passed with the letters RIP. Of course, those letters abbreviate the latin requiescat in pace - or “Rest in Peace.”

Well… Sometimes the dead don’t deserve to rest in peace. Such is the case of Heinz Barth.

Herr Barth died recently, of cancer, presumably at home, in Gransee, Germany. In case the name doesn’t sound familiar to you here is the obituary run in today’s Washington Post. In case you don’t want to click through…

Heinz Barth, 86, a former SS officer convicted of involvement in the massacre of an entire village in Nazi-occupied France, has died, a priest in the German town where he lived said Aug. 14.

[…]

In 1983, a court in East Berlin convicted Mr. Barth and sentenced him to life in prison for his role in the slaughter of villagers in Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944, widely considered the worst atrocity in Nazi-occupied France.

On June 10, 1944, as they headed toward Normandy to combat Allied invasion forces that had landed four days earlier, German troops of the 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” slaughtered 642 men, women and children in the village.

[…]

In addition to involvement in the massacre [at Oradour-sur-Glane], East German judges also found that Mr. Barth volunteered to participate in an execution of 92 Czech civilians in 1942. Mr. Barth, the SS equivalent of a lieutenant, was also sentenced to death in absentia in France in 1953.

Mr. Barth lived under a false name in communist East Germany, working as a decorator in Gransee and running a grocery store, until his identity was discovered in 1981 and he was imprisoned.

In 1997, a state court freed him on health grounds, commuting his sentence to probation. Mr. Barth, who lost a leg in the war, suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure and other ailments.

Your Maximum Leader would have had Herr Barth dragged out and shot… Probably in 1982. As he figures it, Barth got at least 26 more years of life than he deserved. He should have been dragged out and shot in 1953…

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t like to speak ill of the dead, even if he didn’t think much of the deceased in life. But sometimes one is just replused by the knowledge that someone who didn’t deserve to live died much too late.

Carry on.