Many see John Demjanjuk's Holocaust trial in Munich as an effort
by the German justice system to make up for past mistakes.
Rarely has someone so far down the Nazi chain of command
been put in the dock. German commentators say it's about
time.
1/12/2009- Many assumed it was an act. When John Demjanjuk
was wheeled into the Munich courtroom on Monday for the
start of his trial on charges of helping to murder 27,900
Jews at the Sobibor death camp in 1943, he looked anything
but the picture of health. Covered in a light blue blanket,
his head was leaning back, his eyes were closed and his
mouth open. In the afternoon session, he was even carried
in on a stretcher. His lawyer began proceedings by arguing
that the court was prejudiced against his client and, furthermore,
that Demjanjuk himself was a victim of the Holocaust, having
been forced to work in the death camp. It was a statement
that shocked the survivors and relatives of the victims
who were watching proceedings in the packed courtroom.
But a second line of argumentation, repeated by both Demjanjuk's
lawyers and family is that the 89-year-old is unfit to
stand trial. He has been diagnosed with a bone marrow disease
and high blood pressure. His court appearances have been
limited to two 90-minute sessions per day. Many, however,
aren't so sure. The Süddeutsche Zeitung quoted witnesses
saying Demjanjuk was merely acting and the Simon Wiesenthal
Center's chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, who attended
the trial, wasn't buying it either. "Demjanjuk put
on a great act," Zuroff told Reuters. "He should
have gone to Hollywood, not Sobibor." Even if guilty,
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, a Soviet prisoner of war who
joined the SS as a concentration camp guard, was only a
tiny cog in the Nazi killing machine. Far more senior SS
members got off with lenient sentences or were acquitted
in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. Demjanjuk's lawyer Ulrich
Busch claimed that he was being put on trial even though
he had been forced on pain of death to carry out the work.
In the decades following the war, German justice authorities
made the mistake of basing prosecutions on the notion that
only the top leaders or the Nazi regime were responsible
for the Holocaust, and that the thousands of people who
carried out the murderous work were bound by a chain of
command and, therefore, had limited culpability. People
like Demjanjuk -- foreigners who helped the Nazis -- weren't
even pursued until recently, which is why this trial breaks
new ground. German media commentators say Demjanjuk's low
rank is irrelevant, and that the mistakes made by German
prosecutors in the past are no reason for Demjanjuk to
escape prosecution now -- providing that he remains fit
to stand trial.
Center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:
"
In the decades after the war, the justice system converted
mass murderers into little helpers. For decades, the prosecution
of Nazi criminals rested on the delusion that there weren't
many perpetrators in the Nazi state -- just Hitler, Himmler,
Göring et al; most of the others involved were supposedly
people who were forced to do things that were completely
alien to their nature." "Is this now being reversed?
Is the justice system now turning helpers into perpetrators?
Are the criminals who were far down in the pecking order
now being punished because their commanders got away with
it? Are past mistakes now being corrected very late at
the expense of the former henchmen of the Nazis? That's
the accusation being levelled at the prosecution by Demnanjuk's
attorney. But the accusation is wrong. Would it be better
to continue minimalizing the Nazi crimes until the last
concentration camp guard has died peacefully of old age?" "John
Demjanjuk must be prosecuted if he is fit to stand trial.
That's a medical question. And he must be convicted if
the charges against him can be proven. That is a legal
question. He must be convicted even if other former camp
guards weren't put on trial or won't be put on trial. The
severity of the punishment doesn't matter. If punishing
a sick old man is deemed unreasonable, he should be spared.
What's important is that the truth is established."
Conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:
"
Each of these trials is a signal for Germany and the world:
The country -- like probably no other -- is taking its
historical responsibility seriously. The determined search
for the perpetrators and the trials of aged defendants
are the result of the decision to remove murder from the
statute of limitations. The defense attorney's insistence
that a low-ranking henchman is being prosecuted while the
commanders were acquitted only indicates that there are
no easy answers here."
The mass-circulation daily Bild writes:
"
The behavior of the defense attorneys of SS henchman Demjanjuk
must leave all civilized people bewildered, speechless
and disgusted. Saying the defendant is 'a victim of the
Holocaust himself' is like killing the murdered victims
a second time. What cynicism and coldness. Someone who
hounded men, women and children into the gas chambers of
Sobibor can never be a victim. Demjanjuk joined the SS
and released his brutal urges on defenseless people. No
one was forced to join the SS guards in the extermination
camps." "At last, Ivan Demjanjuk is facing his
judges. It's belated gratification for his victims and
their relatives -- but also for the world's moral and ethical
conscience. Every day Demjanjuk spends in prison -- even
if it's just a single day -- is a little piece of atonement
and proof that we haven't forgotten those that were murdered."
Left-wing Die Tageszeitung writes:
"
The trial of John Ivan Demjanjuk is a first. For the first
time, a suspected foreign henchman who helped the Nazis
commit the genocide of the Jews is being put on trial in
Germany. The fact that that is only happening now is an
embarrassment to Germany's post-war justice system. Sparing
Demjanjuk the prosecution due to his advanced age would
have given retroactive justification for the sleepyhead
prosecutors of the Adenauer era (editor's note: Konrad
Adenauer was West Germany's first chancellor, from 1949
until 1963). As long as Demjanjuk is fit to stand trial,
the same applies to him as everyone else, as there is no
statute of limitations on murder." "The public
interest in the Demjanjuk trial is a good sign. But this
is no Eichmann trial. Demjanjuk, if he's guilty, was just
a very small cog in the machinery of the Nazi death factories.
Only very few of the Nazi decision-makers were ever held
to account for their crimes. That is the true scandal,
and even 10 Demjanjuk trials won't change that any more." "But
this trial is groundbreaking. It was the first case where
Germany agreed to have a Nazi war crimes suspect extradited
from the United States to Germany. There are people like
John Ivan Demjanjuk waiting in the US who have been stripped
of their US citizenship because they helped the Nazis.
They're allowed to remain there because no state is ready
to take them. Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle could
send a signal and declare that Germany is ready to allow
these men to be extradited here. Then the Demjanjuk trial
wouldn't be the last of its kind, but the start of a whole
series of prosecutions of similar perpetrators."
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