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from the just-the-bookkeeper-is-no-longer-a-defense dept.
The BBC reports that the 2015 conviction of 95-year-old Oskar Groening, the so-called "bookkeeper of Auschwitz," has been upheld on appeal. Groening's case marks a significant change in prosecution policy, since he was neither a leading Nazi figure who ordered executions, nor did he apparently commit any murders (or other violent acts) directly. Nevertheless, Groening was sentenced last year to four years in prison as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people:
The verdict overturns a 1969 ruling that being a staff member at Auschwitz was not enough to secure a conviction. Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said it was the biggest change in years. [...] For decades, thousands of ex-Nazis who took part in the Holocaust escaped conviction. Monday's ruling sets a precedent for pursuing suspects, now in their nineties, accused of serving in death camps.
Last year, when Groening's trial was getting started, the New Yorker ran an extended piece by Elizabeth Kolbert on the history of Nazi trials. She described the "three waves" of prosecutions, where each held different standards of culpability. The first were the prominent public trials at Nuremberg: "The initial phase was the one scripted for the movies. The villains were demonic, the rhetoric stirring, and at the end came the satisfying snap of the hangman’s noose." The next involved lower ranking Nazis, but a line had to be drawn for prosecutions. As Groening himself said in an interview: “then where would you stop? Wouldn’t you also have to charge the engineer who drove the trains to Auschwitz? And the men who ran the signal boxes?”
Eventually, the standard settled upon in the "second wave" was to merely prosecute those who actually committed murders, and specifically those whose actions went beyond the mere bureaucratic functions of the camps into sadistic or excessive behavior. Reading beyond Kolbert's article, I have learned this standard was partly justified by new psychological research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Milgram experiments (whose results were first released around the time of trial of Adolf Eichmann) and the Stanford Prison Experiment. The first experiment claimed that most ordinary volunteers were willing to convey apparently lethal shocks to an unseen (but heard) participant in a "learning" exercise (actually an actor), merely because it was the given experimental protocol. The latter involved a wide variety of spontaneous bullying, intimidation, and even sadistic behavior that emerged in ordinary participants who were randomly divided to be "guards" and "prisoners" in a simulated "prison"; the experiment was designed to continue for 14 days but was abruptly shut down after 6 days because of ethical concerns about the level of abuse that was occurring. (Interestingly, dramatized versions of both of these experiments were released as films in the past year: Experimenter and The Stanford Prison Experiment .)
[Continues...]
But in recent years, the "just following orders" defense has been called into question as the "third wave" of prosecutions have begun. (Milgram's experiments, too, have been subject to renewed debate about their meaning.) Groening's prosecution was relatively easy, since he has been forthcoming about his role in the camps for decades. He felt a sense of duty to debunk "Holocaust denier" propaganda, to speak out against Neo-Nazis, and to tell the story of the horrors of the camps, writing a memoir and giving extended interviews to the BBC and Der Spiegel in 2003-2005. At the time, Groening had nothing to fear from the "second wave" standards of prosecution, but now his conviction represents another turning point in Nazi trials.
Beyond the descriptions of the trials, Kolbert's New Yorker article contains a great deal about her great-grandmother who died in the camps, whom Kolbert decided to memorialize in a Stolperstein, a small stone installed in memory of Holocaust victims into the sidewalks or streets in many European cities. She muses in her conclusion on whether these trials of nonagenarians are actually "justice" or something else:
There was never going to be justice for the Holocaust, or a reckoning with its enormity. The Stolpersteine, in a way, acknowledge this. They don’t presume to do too much. That is perhaps why they work. And perhaps the Gröning case and any others that may follow should be approached in a similar spirit. They should be regarded less as trials than as ceremonies—another kind of public art on the theme of its inadequacy.
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:42PM
First of all, it was Nuremberg that set the initial precedent that 'just following orders' wasn't a valid defence.
I don't know if it set the "initial precedent," since there are cases going back centuries where "just following orders" was rejected as a defense. But, yes, the Nuremberg trials did establish that -- however, when it came to prosecuting former Nazis, that argument was ONLY applied to high-ranking officials and those in command. For many decades, there were repeated German court rulings that if you were just a soldier at Auschwitz "doing your duty," you couldn't be tried for murder, let alone a case like this one where the guy wasn't even directly involved in the process of taking people to the gas chambers or whatever. Unless you were a high-ranking official or went out of your way to murder someone specific not under direct orders (and they could prove that you murdered someone, which is difficult when most potential witnesses were exterminated), it was difficult to convict former Nazis. The New Yorker article explains this in a little more detail.
Second, the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment have so far failed the reproducibility test:
False. There have been replications that have refined the conclusions of both experiments, but there have been replications in both cases that show similar behaviors of subjects. Mostly they haven't been done again exactly the same way out of ethical concerns for the subjects. The study that perhaps most claimed to revise the previous ones is this one [wikipedia.org], which challenged the Stanford idea that "falling into roles" was always a natural process, but instead depended somewhat on ethics imposed by leaders. I think we can all agree that such nuances don't play much role in the case of Nazis, since the ethics imposed by the leaders in their case were clear.
It turns out that their 'random' selection of volunteers in the initial trials included a far higher percentage of sociopaths than the general population.
That criticism has been leveled at the Stanford experiment, since it advertised a study on "prison life," rather than a more generic study. Some psychologists claimed this biased the sample.
However, that criticism has NOT been aimed at Milgram, since Milgram's studies are remarkably wide-ranging in their pool of subjects compared to just about any other psychological study. Rather than just using Yale undergrads (which many studies do -- just looking for student volunteers), Milgram sought out community members using a neutral advertisement and placed them in a variety of situations, about 1000 subjects in total over all the variations. And there have been numerous replications by other scientists (perhaps the most infamous where they actually had people shock puppies right in front of them; this study and its results are well-known, but it was never published due to the uproar it created when it was presented at a conference).
But perhaps more to the point in the specific Groening case: while the standard Milgram experiment had roughly 60-65% compliance to administer the maximum shock, in a variation where the subject was only "involved in the process" (e.g., by reading questions to the "learner") and NOT pressing the shock button him/herself, 37 out of the 40 subjects in that variation went all the way to the maximum shock.
Anyhow, this is all neither here nor there. My point in bringing these experiments was not to say they were valid in all their details, but rather to point out that they influenced the way crimes were understood and prosecuted AT THE TIME, whereas the recent prosecutions are a departure from those previous standards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:05PM
Mostly they haven't been done again exactly the same way out of ethical concerns for the subjects.
Which makes it suspect. Also, without a way to prove exactly what is happening in the subjects' brains, the studies will remain suspect.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:01AM
Which makes it suspect.
Fine -- if you want, believe that the original studies that have not been replicated exactly are suspect. But exactly why does that allow you to doubt subsequent replicated studies that have basically shown the same thing and drawn the same conclusions in similar circumstances?
Also, without a way to prove exactly what is happening in the subjects' brains, the studies will remain suspect.
"Suspect" in what way? The experimenters told people to do bad things, or experimenters put them in situations where they could do bad things; the subjects did them. How does it matter "what is happening in the subjects' brains" when you're looking at parallels to actions in the real world where other people tell people to do bad things? What matters is that the people do bad things; that's the point of the study.
Unless you have evidence that the subjects were deliberately acting disingenuously (which there really isn't evidence of, aside from a few scattered Milgram subjects out of 1000 who guessed that the thing might be fake), what does their brain chemistry matter on the outcome? And if you think a greater number didn't take this stuff seriously, you just need to look at exit interviews of the subjects to see how sincere their performances were (and how many were disturbed by their own behavior, upon reflection).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @11:43AM
I could see pretty good arguments for why someone who does the bookkeeping (likely includes people in, bodies out, amount of gold and jewelry taken, etc) should be convicted, while some drafted soldier who would probably be shot for deserting should not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:33PM
You think the Nazis were above shooting book-keepers?