Word: conscription
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...Demjanjuk has a different take on the past. He portrays himself as a victim of the Nazis - a Red Army conscript who was captured by the Germans and then held as a prisoner of war in different camps. Demjanjuk has thus far remained silent about the charges leveled against him. "I expect he won't say anything during the whole trial," says his lawyer, Günther Maull. And, he adds, even if prosecutors can prove that Demjanjuk was at Sobibor, Maull maintains that he would have been there under duress. (Read "New Trial for Nazi War-Crimes Suspect...
...does a country often parodied for its neutrality policy have a conscript army? This makes especially little sense when one considers that Switzerland is now surrounded by countries beginning to look more and more like Switzerland itself: friendly, peaceful, and law-abiding. The Swiss have no threatening neighbors and it is popular sentiment that the army would quickly be blown to smithereens if an invasion did occur...
...some say the Bundeswehr, which is a conscript army, is too bureaucratic and ill-equipped to deal with the modern-day challenges of combat. "Germany's armed forces are often overstretched. There are too many bases in Germany, too many personnel and the equipment is often old-fashioned," says Riecke of the German Council on Foreign Relations. "There is long-overdue reform under way to make the Bundeswehr leaner. It should be easier to deploy forces quickly abroad," he adds, referring to far-reaching plans to modernize the army's equipment and scale back troop numbers...
...Concerns have also been aired over rumors that thousands of army conscripts had been given leave until Saturday - the day after the elections. To go on leave, conscripts must leave their birth certificates with their army garrisons, which in turn can be misused by others for voting. At a street rally last week, where a group of Mousavi supporters facing a smaller group of Ahmadinejad supporters were chanting, "If there is no cheating, Mousavi will be first," an army conscript said confidentially, "We were told this morning by our commander that we should vote for the current head of government...
...place where it was launched. "This is a place where we speak of the importance of memory," Shalev told reporters after the ceremony. "To not specifically mention the perpetrators, the murderers... He missed that point." Shalev also wondered why the German-born Pope, who was an unwilling conscript into the Hitler Youth, chose to offer no reflections of his personal experience. (The Pope had condemned anti-Semitism during his remarks at Ben Gurion airport earlier Monday, when he'd arrived from Jordan as part of his eight-day Middle East trip.) (See historic pictures from Kristallnacht...