Accused Nazi guard case challenges the public's concepts of justice

The road to justice is often long, winding, and full of dangerous potholes. There might be no better example of this than the case of John Demjanjuk. Demjanjuk, who is a former U.S. autoworker, is accused of being an accessory to 29,000 murders at Sobibor Extermination Camp in the Lublin region of Poland. But Demjanjuk is no Hermann Goerring, heir apparent to the Fuhrer. Rather he spent his war years as a lowly guard. His case brings up questions about the statute of limitations on war crimes, of whether or not jutice has been served according to the Court of Public Opinion, and why it might not matter anyway.

by Buffy Naillon

By some accounts, John Demjanjuk is unlucky. When the alleged Nazi guard finally goes to trial, his case will be making history in the German courts. He is the first non-German, bottom-of-the-totem-pole henchman to stand trial in Germany for war crimes committed during World War II. He will be held up to a standard that many accused of far worse crimes were not expected to face.

Demjanjuk’s case is complicated. According to reports, Demjanjuk spent some of his war years at Sobibor. However, Demjanjuk was no major player in the machinations of the Third Reich, nor is that the crime of which he is accused. His crime is not that he committed gruesome acts against camp victims, but rather that he, as it was said in this week’s Der Spiegel, helped keep the killing machinery running smoothly.”

Concentration and death camps are what is meant by keeping killing machinery running smoothly. While many would not make the distinction between the two terms, there was a difference. Sobibor as well as camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and others were distinctive in the Third Reich. The sole function of camps like Sobibor was to help rid Germany of the “Jewish Problem” as it became known in the Third Reich. There was no question as to what the outcome for the prisoners being sent there would be. They were going there to die. Because that was the purpose of the camp and because seven solid pieces of documentary evidence from different agencies and archives substantiate that Demjanjuk worked there, he is going to be tried as an accessory to murder. There’s also damning testimony against Demjanjuk left by witnesses who are now dead.

There are some criticisms that the post war trials to convict Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg were far from perfect and many suspected war criminals, because of budgetary concerns, escaped being tried altogether. It has been suggested that had circumstances been different, many lower ranking alleged war criminals like Demjanjuk might have been tried sooner.

Demjanjuk position is an unenviable one. He has claimed his innocence all along. He himself was a prisoner of war taken by the Nazis. Prosecutors of the case have said that Demjanjuk volunteered for the German SS. However, Peter Black, chief historian at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, said in Der Spiegel that it cannot be concluded “that these men volunteered to commit mass murder. The conditions in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were so horrific that the men ‘had limited options.’”

There are some who disagree with this assessment, among them Sobibor survivor, Thomas Blatt. While he does concede that many of the guards were forced to commit murder by the SS, he also contends that like many guards, Demjanjuk could have deserted the camp; there were other choices.

This argument is not new, and in fact, it was one that was bounced back and forth about the guards at Abu Graib when news about the prisoner abuses there broke in the media. And like Abu Graib, there is some question as to how far people like Demjanjuk should be held accountable for crimes committed in the past done while under orders. This week’s announcement that Demjanjuk’s health was fit enough for him to stand trial in Germany brought a new round of criticisms to the case. While the argument that he was fit enough to stand trial was the one most written about in the media this case, the low hum of public opinion has begun to be heard concerning matters of equal weight to the public.

In a poll conducted earlier this year by Cleveland.com, the question of whether too many years had passed for Demjanjuk to stand trial loomed just as large in people’s minds as whether or not he should be treated any differently because of age and ill health. The results were surprising. It was an equal 50/50 split between the people who said that Demjanjuk should be treated no differently, because he was old and sick. But it was a 36/63 split in favor of him not standing trial because too many years have passed between the present and the crimes he is accused of committing in years past. The Local, an online German newspaper netted similar results when a similar poll conducted this week about another accused Nazi guard, Heinrich Boere, was also, but separately deemed fit enough to stand trial. The prevailing opinion of the general public in that case, too, was that too much time had passed.

But as is often the case, the Court of Public Opinion and the Court of Law diverge, and this time is no different. Accused war criminals like Demjanjuk and Boere will stand trial whether or not such a move is supported by public opinion. Other matters are at stake in matters such as these, according to South African judge Richard Goldstone, the former chief U.N. prosecutor for war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. While often trials against suspected war criminals have been imperfect in the past, that there were trials at all is what is important. They lay the ground work that ensures fairer and more sophisticated trials than the ones at Nuremberg, ones that recognize the rights of victims to representation, but also ensure a fair trial for defendants. Aged and frail with sixty some years between him and his alleged crime, Demjanjuk has the sympathies of much of the public. In the future, without a trial and rules governing the pursuit of justice already in place, what is to happen to war criminals and their victims who do not?

Demjanjuk's son speaks out-AP story