Mr. John Demjanjuk has a temperature. And a headache, too, I shouldn’t wonder. Of course names come in and out of the press but his seems to have held our attention for a long time. It is because this is the second bite of the cherry. In the 1980s he was convicted of being ‘Ivan the Terrible’ at Treblinka camp and sentenced to death in Israel, until the Israeli Supreme Court deemed the sentence unjust (they had discovered it was someone else). He was released and sent back to America, which has now answered an extradition request (more quickly than they ever did for IRA suspects!) and sent him to Germany, where he is accused of being a guard at the Sobibor death camp. And now his lawyers say he can’t stand trial because he is ill. He is 89 Years old.
Demjanjuk, if the prosecution is to be believed, was born in the Ukraine in 1920 and served in the Red Army until he was captured by the Germans in 1942, was enlisted into the SS Foreigners unit and sent to Sobibor. I must say I am torn about this trial. There is the technical issue of trying such a man – nobody could recognise in the comfortably framed retired Cleveland car worker the strained, fanatic stare of Demjanjuk’s wartime ID. There is the aspect of his being tried in Germany (the country, you will remember, where the holocaust was planned) when he isn’t German and they can’t prove he killed any German citizens. And in any case, having been in the world’s newspapers as a convicted wartime criminal, the average juror is going to find it hard to put that out of his head. Are we putting him through the trial even though we don’t believe he can be convicted? That would be wrong – imagine it was you and they had incorrectly identified you.
Then again I think we hear too much of the war, seventy years after it started, and that it is unhealthy. Do we want not just the generation born after the war but the generation after that to be defined by its horrors? Shouldn’t we instead try to draw a line under it? And shouldn’t that line have been fifty years after its end?
Lastly, he can claim that he was forced into it: that if he had not pushed Jews into the gas chambers he would have been killed himself. This is a moral dilemma few are made to face in these happier days. Should he have refused the work and stepped right in there with them, or maybe faced some other even less humane penalty from the SS? What would you have done?
But lastly, unfortunately, the moral right is on the side of pursuance. We have a statute of limitations for small crimes, not for murder, certainly not for mass murder. And whilst some say Demjanjuk is a victim, Danny Finkelstein in the Times, whose mother was at Belsen, has a strong piece which ends ‘I want the victims like my mother to see that we can still tell the difference between them and their prison guards.’
But I can’t help feeling it migh thave been better if someone hadn’t just put a pillow over his head (even though I don’t agree with killing the convicted, much less the unconvicted) or that he should die before the sorry charade gets going. Relatives of the victims of Sobibor want a conviction of someone (Demjanjuk is accused of having been associated with the deaths of some 10% of the people who died in that horror) but if he is acquitted they will die in despair.
Demjanjuk, if the prosecution is to be believed, was born in the Ukraine in 1920 and served in the Red Army until he was captured by the Germans in 1942, was enlisted into the SS Foreigners unit and sent to Sobibor. I must say I am torn about this trial. There is the technical issue of trying such a man – nobody could recognise in the comfortably framed retired Cleveland car worker the strained, fanatic stare of Demjanjuk’s wartime ID. There is the aspect of his being tried in Germany (the country, you will remember, where the holocaust was planned) when he isn’t German and they can’t prove he killed any German citizens. And in any case, having been in the world’s newspapers as a convicted wartime criminal, the average juror is going to find it hard to put that out of his head. Are we putting him through the trial even though we don’t believe he can be convicted? That would be wrong – imagine it was you and they had incorrectly identified you.
Then again I think we hear too much of the war, seventy years after it started, and that it is unhealthy. Do we want not just the generation born after the war but the generation after that to be defined by its horrors? Shouldn’t we instead try to draw a line under it? And shouldn’t that line have been fifty years after its end?
Lastly, he can claim that he was forced into it: that if he had not pushed Jews into the gas chambers he would have been killed himself. This is a moral dilemma few are made to face in these happier days. Should he have refused the work and stepped right in there with them, or maybe faced some other even less humane penalty from the SS? What would you have done?
But lastly, unfortunately, the moral right is on the side of pursuance. We have a statute of limitations for small crimes, not for murder, certainly not for mass murder. And whilst some say Demjanjuk is a victim, Danny Finkelstein in the Times, whose mother was at Belsen, has a strong piece which ends ‘I want the victims like my mother to see that we can still tell the difference between them and their prison guards.’
But I can’t help feeling it migh thave been better if someone hadn’t just put a pillow over his head (even though I don’t agree with killing the convicted, much less the unconvicted) or that he should die before the sorry charade gets going. Relatives of the victims of Sobibor want a conviction of someone (Demjanjuk is accused of having been associated with the deaths of some 10% of the people who died in that horror) but if he is acquitted they will die in despair.
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