Nazi military passport of John Demjanjuk, accused of being
a prison guard at the concentration camp at Sobibor, Poland.
Financial Times Deutschland, Germany
Trial of Alleged Nazi
Guard Demjanjuk a Chance for German 'Redemption'
"The
German state came close to losing a great opportunity: to come to terms with
injustice, to establish guilt and to punish. An opportunity for truth. A chance
to redeem itself. The fact that the Munich public prosecutor's office took
this opportunity after all these years deserves unqualified praise."
John Demjanjuk in Cleveland in 2005: The naturalized American is breaking legal ground in Germany. Rarely has someone so low in the Nazi pecking order been prosecuted in a German Court.
The trial of alleged
concentration camp warden John
Demjanjuk
is an opportunity for the German state. It can show its citizens that it's able
to come to grips with even historic injustices.
The crimes date back more
than 65 years and the offender is close to 90: The Munich public prosecutor’s
office has finally charged alleged concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk with
being an “accomplice to murder” in 27,900 cases. It will be one of the last great
Nazi trials.
It was almost too late. The
questions of whether and how Holocaust criminals like Demjanjuk should be sentenced
threatened to take care of themselves, given the advanced age of the accused. Thus
the German state came close to losing a great opportunity: to come to terms
with injustice, to establish guilt and to punish. An opportunity for truth. A chance
to redeem itself.
The fact that the Munich
public prosecutor's office took this opportunity after all these years deserves
unqualified praise. It ends the appalling “draw-a-line argument” - leave in
peace an old man who for decades has been an honest citizen of the U.S. state
of Ohio. Draw a line; it’s been too long. But murder and complicity to murder don't
fall under the statute of limitations. And there's no age limit for the
punishment of crimes.
Some complain that Demjanjuk
is about to be punished for a crime that others have gotten away with. The
native Ukrainian is the first concentration camp guard in a German court who
wasn't born in Germany. Up to now, the judiciary has avoided taking on cases
like this. But just because the courts in the post-war era were slow on the
uptake, is by no means a reason to continue making the same mistake now. There
is no right to an equality of injustice.
Under German law, there is no
deadline for prosecuting murder. That may sound formalistic - especially since
it's unlikely that Demjanjuk will actual serve out his sentence. He's been
declared fit to stand trial, but that doesn't mean he's fit enough to go to prison.
But serving a prison sentence isn’t the decisive issue. It’s the verdict itself
that counts. Six decades after the atrocities of the Nazis, a sentence still
serves a purpose.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
A look inside the Sobibor death camp with one of its few
Most of the reasons for
punishing Demjanjuk no longer apply: social rehabilitation can’t be the
purpose, since he has already been rehabilitated. He's no longer a danger to
anyone. There's no question of deterring other potential mass murderers. Which
only leaves revenge - and considering the cruelty Demjanjuk is accused of, this
is a very human need. But revenge is about morality and not justice - and morality
has no place in a criminal proceeding.
The true purpose of the
indictment is altogether different: The state needs to prove to its citizens
that laws are enforced and just penalties meted out. This is a direct message
to the people. For this, there is no need for Demjanjuk to spend many years in
prison. The verdict itself is important, as it means that citizens can be
confidence that the state is making an effort to impose justice - and to make
sure that the truth comes to light.
In Demjanjuk's case, that
will take a lot of effort. To begin with, there are great difficulties finding reliable
evidence: most witnesses are dead and the accused himself is expected to remain
silent. The statements of deceased witnesses contradict one another and many of
the documents that supposedly prove his guilt have been disputed as inauthentic.
Proving his guilt in individual cases is all but impossible. Prosecutors must
at least prove that he was a guard at the Sobibor
extermination camp. Anyone deployed at the camp was, according to historic
research, part of the machinery of death - and is therefore guilty of
complicity to murder. But even proving this will be difficult.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Inmates at the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland: At
least a quarter million people were murdered there.
Another obstacle to
convicting Demjanjuk is the predicament that the young man would have found
himself in back then. After all, it was the Nazis and the particular
circumstances at the time that turned him into the perpetrator he became. If it
hadn’t been for being trained as a concentration camp guard in Trawniki,
he may well have died of starvation, froze to death or fallen victim to one of
the many diseases that were so rife in the camp he was then imprisoned in.
In addition, his lawyers will
invoke putative duress. They'll argue that Demjanjuk killed out of fear that
the Germans would kill him if he refused to obey their commands. However,
Demjanjuk could have fled like others in Trawniki. And if he had been caught,
it's unlikely that the Nazis would have killed him. Demjanjuk would have known:
He once escaped briefly and, upon his return, was punished comparatively mildly
with only a few blows from a stick.
It won’t be easy to convict
Demjanjuk. His deeds and motives, his dealings with criminals under duress -
all of these the court will have to resolve. But the victims and their
relatives are entitled to a verdict. And citizens are entitled to see the state
go out of its way to deliver justice. Because only the attempt to uncover the
truth at all costs makes a state one of law. And truth doesn't fall under the
statute of limitations.
