The trial of John Demjanjuk will be an unsatisfactory mish-mash
which will end with an invalid spending the rest of his life
in a prison hospital, says Harry de Quetteville. But it still
matters.
There are some crimes so ghastly that they seem to demand
the norms of justice be overturned. Innocent until proven
guilty? Sure, until the charge is herding 30,000 Jews into
the gas chambers, then instinct wants the defendant locked
up, reasonable doubt be damned.
And when the defendant is John Demjanjuk, an 89 year-old
Ukrainian turned US auto worker who, American courts have
ruled, definitely worked at some level in the Nazi death
machine, why not throw away the key too?
Why bother with the legal hooplah? Why bother with extended
extradition processes that have taken almost a quarter
of a century? Why bother, above all, with the trial today
of a man who has less than a year to live and is faced
with a prosecution which has not a single witness to testify
against him personally?
Whatever way you look at it, the last great Nazi war crimes
trial (lest we forget, in the Hague, the war crimes trial
is currently underway of a man, Radovan Karadzic, accused
of overseeing the deaths of 7,000 people in Europe not
65 years ago but 14) is a washout.
If you want a normal case, with conviction secured only
on the basis of watertight evidence, you seem very unlikely
to get one. If you prefer the Mossad method of a bullet
in the back of the head on some quiet foreign street (“everyone
knew he was guilty…”), that’s not going
to happen either.
Instead we have an unsatisfactory mish-mash which will
inevitably end with an aging invalid spending the rest
of his life in a prison hospital, no matter the merits
of the case.
For surely the few survivors of the Sobibor camp, at which
Demjanjuk is accused of having been a guard, alive to see
his case open in Munich today, will not be forced to suffer
the grotesqueness of another mistrial.
Demjanjuk, after all, already has one trial to his name,
in 1993, after which the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that
he was not Treblinka’s ‘Ivan the Terrible’.
So who does this proceeding benefit, so long after the
event it is examining, with so few of the victims left?
Of course, Jewish campaigners are happy – like Ephraim
Zuroff, the indefatigable Nazi hunter whom I last spoke
to last year, when he was in Chile trying to hunt down
Aribert Heim, the Nazi ‘Dr Death’ who killed
his victims by injecting petrol into their hearts.
Zuroff said the Demjanjuk trial “sends a very powerful
message” that it is not just officers – like
Heim – who can get punished. The lowly agents of
the Holocaust, he insists, must be forced to take responsibility
too.
That, of course, is true. But ultimately, such trials
are about more than the defendants, more even than the
victims.
Instead, this kind of trial is about humanity remembering,
trawling through the memory banks, wracking its brains
and saying: “Did this happen? Could it have really
happened? How? How could we have let this happen?”
As Thomas Blatt, the 82 year-old Sobibor survivor who
is at the trial, said today: “I don't know Demjanjuk
in person. I'm here to tell the way it was years ago.”
He is one of the few who can. And now we have an opportunity
to listen.
telegraph.co.uk
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