Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, May 1962.
Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty ImagesOn July 23, a German court convicted Bruno Dey as an accessory to the murder of 5,230 people. Mr. Dey had served in the SS during World War II as a guard at Stutthof, a lesser-known Nazi concentration camp located outside of Gdansk, Poland. Bizarrely, because the 93-year-old defendant had begun his guard duties when he was just 17 years old, he was tried in juvenile court. Partly for this reason, he received a lenient sentence of two years, suspended.
Mr. Dey may be the last person to be convicted for taking part in the Nazis’ annihilation of six million European Jews. The philosopher Hannah Arendt once described the Holocaust as a crime that “oversteps and shatters all legal systems,” but that didn’t stop prosecutors in dozens of nations from laboring long and energetically to bring its perpetrators to justice. Some of the most important trials of the last 75 years include the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the first international criminal proceeding in history, in 1945-46; the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, the logistical mastermind behind the deportation of Jews to SS killing centers; the 1987 French trial of former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, the so-called “butcher of Lyon”; and the multiple trials of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibór extermination camp who was convicted by a Munich court in 2011, in the last Holocaust trial to garner international attention.
These famous cases represent only a few of the many criminal trials that touched on the crimes of the Holocaust. Poland alone conducted some 40,000 trials and convicted over 5,000 German and Austrian nationals. Trials took place in every European country that had fallen under Nazi rule, from Norway to Albania—though it’s impossible to say exactly how many of these cases directly addressed Nazi extermination.
Former SS guard Bruno Dey uses a folder to shield his face from cameras at his trial in Hamburg, Germany, Oct. 17, 2019.
Photo: Daniel Bockwoldt/dpa/Associated PressWhatever the exact number, the effort to do justice to the crimes of the Holocaust demanded great legal creativity. Western legal thought had long viewed the state as the ultimate guarantor of safety and order; the idea that a developed state might itself turn criminal seemed unimaginable. Yet under Hitler, the German state did just that, becoming the agent of criminality and the principal perpetrator of crimes.
To puncture the shield of immunity that traditionally protected state actions from legal scrutiny, jurists forged new categories of wrongdoing. Although Nuremberg wasn’t primarily a Holocaust trial—the main charge against the 21 defendants was planning and waging a war of aggression—it was the first trial to involve “crimes against humanity,” the charge Allied prosecutors used to bring much of the evidence of the Holocaust before the international tribunal.
A second great legal innovation was the concept of genocide, coined in 1943 by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in occupied Europe. Wedding genos, an ancient Greek word for group, to cide, from the Latin word for killing, Lemkin named something graver than even mass murder—the “destruction of essential foundations of the life of…groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” In 1948, with the framing of the U.N. Genocide Convention, genocide became a crime in international law.
These new incriminations gave prosecutors powerful tools to pursue the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities. More recently, they have enabled the prosecution of mass crimes in Cambodia, the Balkans and Rwanda. The one nation in which these legal innovations proved less than useful was Germany itself. Germany enjoys the reputation of having confronted its Nazi past with impressive thoroughness, but when it came to bringing Nazi perpetrators and collaborators to justice, the Federal Republic’s legal system long struggled to get things right.
Germany reclaimed its partial sovereignty in 1949. Almost immediately, its courts concluded that because genocide and crimes against humanity weren’t formally recognized as crimes until after the war, charging former Nazis with them would be mean applying ex post facto law. This position, shared by no other European nation, meant that the very devices designed to facilitate the prosecution of Nazi exterminators were off the table. As a result, German prosecutors were forced to rely on charges of ordinary statutory murder to try former Nazis. In cases where prosecutors couldn’t prove an act of individual, hands-on killing, successful prosecution was basically impossible.
“ Historians have never found a single instance of an SS man being executed or even severely punished for opting out of genocide. ”
For decades, this case law essentially shielded all guards at SS killing centers from prosecution. Although German courts long indulged the myth that SS members participated in genocide because they had been forced to do so, historians have never found a single instance of an SS man being executed or even severely punished for opting out of genocide.
The trial of John Demjanjuk marked a historic break with this jurisprudence. Demjanjuk, known during World War II as Ivan, was a Ukrainian-born SS collaborator who worked as a guard at Sobibór, the Nazi extermination camp where some 250,000 Jews were killed by gassing. Demjanjuk immigrated to the U.S. after the war, became a naturalized citizen and lived for decades in suburban Cleveland—even after American investigators learned of his camp service. But while American prosecutors couldn’t try Demjanjuk for crimes committed overseas, they could charge him with lying about his wartime activities on his visa and citizenship applications and revoke his naturalization.
After decades of legal haggling, Demjanjuk was deported to Germany, where in 2011 a court convicted him as an accessory to the murder of 28,000 Jews. The court’s decision followed a simple logic that earlier German judges had rejected: At Sobibór, all the guards acted as accessories to murder because murder had been the camp’s very purpose. Once it was established that Demjanjuk served there as a guard, his guilt followed, regardless of whether the prosecution could prove that he killed anyone by his own hand.
“ The idea that the last Holocaust trial would end with the suspended sentence of a nonagenarian tried as a juvenile is certainly a strange denouement. ”
Armed with this belated precedent, German prosecutors promptly began investigating dozens of guards whom the old model had shielded. This resulted in the conviction of three former SS guards—Oskar Gröning, the so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz” in 2015; Reinhold Hanning, who also served at Auschwitz, in 2016; and now Bruno Dey.
Some may doubt the wisdom of trying people for crimes committed three-quarters of a century ago. The idea that the last Holocaust trial would end with the suspended sentence of a nonagenarian tried as a juvenile is certainly a strange denouement.
Yet in a sense Mr. Dey’s conviction stands as a fitting conclusion to the era of Holocaust trials, since it reminds us of an essential truth. While state-sponsored atrocities may be ordered by a few leaders, it is always largely the work of lowly foot soldiers. In such cases, guilt can’t simply be measured in terms of hands-on acts of cruelty; participating in a murderous system is a crime in itself.
—Mr. Douglas is a professor at Amherst College and the author of “The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial.”
Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
"crime" - Google News
August 27, 2020 at 11:59PM
https://ift.tt/3lpItAo
The Era of Nazi War Crime Trials Is Over - The Wall Street Journal
"crime" - Google News
https://ift.tt/37MG37k
https://ift.tt/2VTi5Ee
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "The Era of Nazi War Crime Trials Is Over - The Wall Street Journal"
Post a Comment