Too Late? Never!
"We commend the (prosecutors) for seeking to apply the precedent as widely as possible and hope that they will be able to find as many perpetrators as possible.
"It's only a shame that this kind of legal reasoning was not applied previously, because it would have led to many, many more cases of people who definitely deserved to be brought to justice."
Efraim Zuroff, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Jerusalem
During the proceedings of the Second World War, while Nazi Germany and its Axis allies were battling the rest of Europe and North America, to accomplish the Thousand-Year Reich, they took the trouble, time and funding to build six main death camps all of which were situated in occupied Poland. There were other death camps in other occupied European countries, but it was the camps in Poland that were the major death-dealers: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Names of horror, each and every one. In Auschwitz alone between 1940 and 1945 about 1.5-million people, most of them Jews, but political offenders, gays, gypsies were also among those the Nazis felt they should rid the world of as pestiferous sub-human trash. By the end of the Second World War, Germany had succeeded in slaughtering roughly as many Jews as now inhabit the State of Israel; six million men, women and children of Judaic birth.
Ukrainian-born former Ohio autoworker, John Demjanjuk, was placed on trial on the charge that he served as a Sobibor death camp guard. He was the first person convicted in Germany on the basis solely of having served as a camp guard. No evidence was required that he was personally involved in a specific killing. A new legal argument has been advanced; anyone involved in the operation of a death camp is automatically considered an accessory to murder.
John Demjanjuk died in a Bavarian nursing home last year in the process of appealing his 2011 conviction on the charges that brought him to trial. Those charges now stand as a precedent for all others who may be brought to trial and face conviction. The prosecutors' offices investigating Nazi war crimes in Germany is now recommending charges be brought against dozens of former Auschwitz guards.
A new wave of trials fully 70 years after the end of the Second World War can be anticipated. Investigations are ongoing of 49 suspects with sufficient evidence being turned up to recommend state prosecutors pursue charges against 30 people, of accessory to murder. Those people were stationed at death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Others are also being investigated.
Some of those seen as suspects live elsewhere than in Germany; Austria, Brazil, Croatia, the U.S. Poland, and one in Israel.
State prosecutors in 11 of Germany's 16 states are receiving those cases for prosecution once they determine whether there is sufficient evidence to proceed with charges. Men and women are both involved. It must be determined whether the now-elderly suspects, in their 80s and even 90s, are fit to stand trial.
In their youth they were responsible for slaughtering countless innocents. They lived long and doubtless satisfying lives. And now some of them will be held to account for their malodorous past.
Labels: Atrocities, Conflict, Germany, Poland
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 05, 2013
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