TEL
AVIV, Israel, Feb. 13 (UPI) -- A lawyer who represented families
of victims of Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk said he wants
28 other alleged low-level war criminals prosecuted.
Cornelius Nestler, also a professor of criminal law and criminal procedure at
the University of Cologne in Germany, said of Demjanjuk,
an Ohio man convicted in May of having been a Ukrainian
guard at the Sobibor, Poland, concentration camp where
he abetted the murder of tens of thousands of Jews during
World War II: "Yes he is a small fish -- of course, that's right. He was at the lowest level
of the hierarchy. But from the perspective of my clients,
who lost their families in Sobibor, there's no doubt that
everybody, big fish or small, who participated in murder
of their families should be brought to justice."
Nestler spoke this week at the
Hebrew University's Institute for Advanced Studies in Israel,
Haaretz reported.
In a Tel Aviv interview with Haaretz,
Nestler said he had a list of 28 German guards who had
been stationed at the Flossenburg concentration camp in
Bavaria and are now in their 80s.
"Statistically speaking,
I would assume that some of them are still alive, and so
a prosecutor needs to do his job and find them," Nestler said. "Age doesn't play a role. You cannot run away from your responsibility just because
you are getting old."
He said he gave the list to the
German chief prosecutor in Munich, who is charged with
bringing Nazi war criminals to trial, but the prosecutor "isn't really moving forward in a timely fashion" to track down the war criminals even though they could be found with information "readily available" to police such as phone books and computer data bases.
Nestler blames a lack of resources
for the failure to track down the suspected death camp
guards.
Given the ages of the alleged
war criminals, Nestler said, time for prosecuting them
is running short.
"If these kind of cases
are not prosecuted in the next two to four years, they
will never happen," he said. "The witnesses are still alive, and so you have to do something rather soon."
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2012/02/13/Lawyer-Prosecute-aging-war-criminals/UPI-96411329159698/#ixzz1mMM9u2jU
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