Earlier this week, Israel and the Jewish world marked Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust
Memorial Day.
This year, for the ninth time, we used the day to release our annual
report on the worldwide investigation and prosecution of Nazi war
criminals, and a "Most
Wanted" list of Nazi criminals.
The names and stories of the criminals who are considered the worst always attract
widest attention. On a certain level, this is only natural. With
the Holocaust firmly enshrined as the worst example of man's inhumanity
to his fellow man, there is interest in the identities of its worst
villains.
These days, however, the task of ranking the criminals
has become more complex than ever. The architects and main perpetrators
of the Holocaust are dead. Gone are the days when it was no problem
to compile a list headed by the likes of Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller,
and escaped commanders of death camps and Einsatzgruppen (mobile
killing units). But many of their middle and lower level henchmen
remain alive, unprosecuted and, thanks to the advances of modern
medicine, healthy enough to be held accountable for their crimes.
The major problem in compiling such a list in 2010
is not the lack of suspects, but rather the difficulty in assessing
their degree of guilt in order to be able to rank them fairly.
We have therefore delineated three major criteria
to assess criminal responsibility for Holocaust crimes:
1. Degree of command responsibility
2. The extent of personal involvement in murder
3. The scope of the crime.
Thus an officer whose decisions sealed the fate of
hundreds or possibly thousands of innocent civilians would obviously
be accorded a high rank even if he had personally not killed a single
person. A guard in a death camp without command responsibility but
who participated in the mass murder of tens or possibly hundreds
of thousands of inmates, although he may not have personally pushed
them into the gas chambers, would be ranked higher than a person
who committed a limited number of individual murders him or herself.
This year's top suspects could basically be divided
into three major categories: individuals with command responsibility
whose decisions determined the fate of at least hundreds of victims;
persons who served in units which carried out mass murder who had
no command responsibility, among them some individuals who clearly
were actively involved in the process of mass murder and others whose
precise role requires additional clarification; and men (no women
on this list for the third year in a row) who personally committed
at least one murder.
The first two spots this year were therefore given
to individuals who appear to fall into the first category. These
were Hungarian gendarmerie officer Dr Sandor Kepiro (currently residing
in Budapest), who is accused of being among the officer organisers
of the mass murder of at least 1,200 civilians (mostly Jews, the
others Serbs and gypsies) in Novi Sad, Serbia, on January 23, 1942;
and Croatian police chief Dr Milivoj Asner (Austria) who is accused
of deporting hundreds of Serbs, Jews, and gypsies to Ustasha concentration
camps where they were murdered.
At number three is a man who appears to fall into
the second category. German Samuel Kunz (Bonn) allegedly served as
a guard at the Belzec death camp, where approximately 600,000 Jews
were murdered with the active assistance of all the camp personnel.
Others who are accused of serving in units involved
in killing Jews and others but about whom we have no evidence of
personal participation in murder were given the last three slots.
Number eight is Peter Egner (Seattle, USA), allegedly of the Belgrade
Gestapo; nine is Algimantas Dailide (Germany), accused of being a
member of the Lithuanian Security Police in Vilnius; and number 10
is Mikhail Gorshkow (Estonia), who allegedly served in the Gestapo
in Belarus.
The remaining places were given to those accused of
committing individual murders themselves. The highest rank was given
to German Adolf Storms (Duisberg, Germany) who is alleged to have
actively participated with his unit in a massacre of 58 Jewish forced
labourers in March 1945. The others on the list are Dutch Nazi collaborator
Klaas Carel Faber (Ingolstadt, Germany) who murdered at least 11
Jews and Dutch anti-Nazis; Hungarian army sergeant Karoly (Charles)
Zentai (Perth, Australia), who allegedly murdered a Jewish teenager
he caught in Budapest without a yellow star, and Danish Nazi Soeren
Kam (Kempten, Germany) who, as he admits, killed a local anti-Nazi
newspaper editor.
The list represents a wide geographic scope and ethnic
composition, which underscores the extensive auxiliary role of non-Germans
in the crimes of the Holocaust, and the fact that bringing them to
justice today is a global problem, not confined to Europe.
The good news is that of the three men who had to
be replaced from last year's "Most Wanted" list, two have been brought to trial during the past few year with number six,
Dutch SS executioner Heinrich Boere, already convicted and sentenced
to life imprisonment, and number one, Ukrainian Sobibor death camp
guard Ivan Demjanjuk, facing charges of mass murder in Munich.
Only number 10, Estonian Political Police operative
Harry Mannil, escaped prosecution by passing away.
Hopefully, this coming year we will see at least similar,
if not better, results.
thejc.com
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