BACKGROUND: Ulrich Maass, 64, spent a decade
pursuing Nazi war crimes cases as head of a special unit
for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2000 to 2010.
He is among Germany's leading authorities on trying alleged
Nazi criminals.
The trial of John Demjanjuk, who is accused of being an accessory
to the murders of 27,900 Jews, is set to end this week. In
a SPIEGEL interview, Ulrich Maass, one of Germany's most
prominent Nazi war crimes prosecutors, discusses the case
and details the failings of the country's justice system.
Alleged former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk stands
accused of being an accessory to the murders of some 27,900
Jews at the Sobibór extermination camp in occupied
Poland. After one-and-a-half years, the 91-year-old's trial
is set to wrap up this week in Munich. It is likely to
be among Germany's final Nazi war crimes trials as ageing
suspects die off.
Ulrich Maass has spent the last decade pursuing similar cases
as head of North Rhine-Westphalia's special public prosecutor's
unit for violent Nazi war crimes from 2000 to 2010. The
64-year-old shares his insights on the Demjanjuk trial
and how it reveals changes in Germany's approach to trying
the remaining few Nazi perpetrators. The interview with
Mr. Maass follows:
SPIEGEL: After one-and-a-half years of hearings, the verdict
is about to be handed down in the Munich trial of John Demjanjuk.
Has the defendant's guilt been proven?
Maass: The verdict will tell us that. How the death factory
in Sobibór worked has been thoroughly studied. The
guards were involved at all levels of the extermination
effort. They picked up people from the deportation trains
and, in the end, drove them into the gas chambers.
SPIEGEL: For Christiaan F. Ruter, an Amsterdam criminal law
professor, Demjanjuk is the "smallest of the small
fish." He was a Soviet soldier who the Germans recruited
him after he was captured.
Maass: This plight has to be taken into account, of course.
But it doesn't mean that he was compelled to obey orders.
Historians have not found any evidence that someone would
have been shot if he had refused to participate in mass shootings.
SPIEGEL: Defendants got off with such arguments in the past.
Why do the courts take a different view today?
Maass: At that time, the courts tended to pursue the principle
that the last links in the chain of command were not to
be charged. We have more comprehensive information today,
such as data from Eastern European archives. Accounting
for East German injustices has also given us greater insight
into how much leeway existed in a dictatorship. In a groundbreaking
1995 decision, the Federal Court of Justice decided, for
example, that the stricter standards that West German courts
had applied to East German judges should also have been
applied to Nazi judges.
SPIEGEL: But by then the Nazi judges had already died without
ever being charged, like many organizers of the genocide.
Now the courts are only prosecuting perpetrators at the
lower end. Is that fair?
Maass: Of course not. The Allies released many of the main
perpetrators after only a few years in prison, and the
German courts could no longer touch them. In other cases,
doctors were found who would declare 60-year-olds unfit
to stand trial and issue the necessary documents, which
stated that they suffered from ailments like heart problems,
cirrhosis of the liver and silicosis. This doesn't fly
anymore today.
SPIEGEL: How did you cope with this injustice?
Maass: You feel a certain queasiness, perhaps comparable
with the feeling one has when shoplifters are caught while
the big economic fraudsters manage to get away scot-free.
But the alternative cannot be to let the shoplifters go,
too.
SPIEGEL: Was the German judiciary persistent enough in investigating
Nazi perpetrators?
Maass: Fortunately North Rhine-Westphalia decided to establish
a specialized prosecution agency. But justice happens to
be a matter for the states to decide …
SPIEGEL: … and in other places prosecutors were working
on Nazi criminal matters in addition to their everyday activities,
so that many cases fizzled out. The Central Office of the
State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National
Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg can only conduct preliminary
investigations. Should the Federal Republic of Germany have
developed a central agency to prosecute Nazi criminals?
Maass: You'd have to ask the politicians. There is no such
thing in German law as a special offense for Nazi mass
crimes. We prosecute people for murder or aiding and abetting.
We criminal prosecutors have sometimes felt like road workers
who are handed a screwdriver instead of a jackhammer.
SPIEGEL: To prosecute Germany's far-left Red Army Faction
terrorists more efficiently, the judiciary concentrated
its competencies in the office of the General Public Prosecutor
in Karlsruhe. Why wasn't this done with the Nazi perpetrators?
Maass: It depends on where politicians set their priorities.
They set their sights on leftist terrorism and pursued
the criminal prosecutions that ultimately led to success.
This doesn't apply to our cases. In retrospect, it would
certainly have been correct to assign more prosecutors
to research such cases. But decades ago they were saying
that the problem would resolve itself for biological reasons,
because the perpetrators would die. And now, 66 years after
the end of the war, we have 12 active cases in Dortmund
alone.
SPIEGEL: Does this mean that the Demjanjuk trial will not
be the last one?
Maass: All I've done in the past few years is prepare cases
that were supposedly the last of their kind. The problem,
however, is that the defendants are becoming increasingly
unfit to stand trial or are dying, as was the case with
a former guard at the Belzec camp, who lived near Bonn.
SPIEGEL: You have dealt with dozens of men who committed
murder during the Nazi era. Is there such a thing as the
typical Nazi criminal, and how does he feel about his crimes?
Maass: I have never seen remorse. The usual excuse is that
they acted in accordance with the law, as if there were
no such thing as a higher prohibition against killing.
There were sadists, but they were not the norm, which was
more likely to be the ordinary accessory. "Hitler's
Willing Executioners," though a controversial book
title, hits the nail on the head. It was a large group
of people who were prepared to do anything.
Intellpuke: This interview with Ulrich Maass was conducted
by Der Spiegel journalist Jan Friedman; you can read it
in context here: spent a decade pursuing Nazi war crimes
cases as head of a special unit for the state of North
Rhine-Westphalia from 2000 to 2010. He is among Germany's
leading authorities on trying alleged Nazi criminals.
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