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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 29 2016, @09:49AM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:53PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @02:53PM (#434475)

    Quite the opposite, really. Any potential whistleblowers now have to worry more about being prosecuted themselves. This is a dangerous precedent for justice when everybody with first-hand knowledge of the crime can be committed for it. This will chill whistleblowing. Those with the knowledge to speak out will no longer do so for fear of being prosecuted themselves.

    This is a grave day for justice indeed.

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  • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:10PM

    by RamiK (1813) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:10PM (#434483)

    That's not whistle-blowing. Whistle-blowing is to have the bureaucrats say No as soon as the papers land at their feet and immediately blow the whistle and notify the public what's going on.
    What you're talking about is witness immunity. That's part of the prosecutor's office and can still be granted regardless. In fact, by extending liability, it encourages more witnesses to come forwards seeking such an immunity simply over the numerical case that there are more libel people to sue.

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    • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:45PM

      by meustrus (4961) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:45PM (#434505)

      The bureaucrats are the ones in charge of the wrongdoings. It's the lower level people, the clerks, secretaries, and increasingly the programmers and mathematicians, who are likely to blow the whistle. And witness immunity is a tricky thing. If it isn't offered before the prosecutor even knows what the confession is about, the witness has to trust that they will get it after they have incriminated themselves. Only the strongest moral crusaders will come forward without any existing promises.

      Edward Snowden may one day be vindicated for blowing the whistle. Do you want him to then face prosecution for his role in what he himself decried? Because that's what this is about.

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      • (Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday November 29 2016, @07:10PM

        by RamiK (1813) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @07:10PM (#434625)

        The bureaucrats are the ones in charge of the wrongdoings.

        Everyone is responsible. Everybody is guilty. From the citizen that isn't protesting or even taking arms to the politician pocketing those fat brown envelopes with all the bureaucrats and functionaries in-between. It's all simply a matter of degree. And the judicial system should acknowledge that.

        It's impossible to run a corrupt and immoral system without at least the indifference of it's members. If a soldier can be found accountable for pressing the trigger that kills an unarmed citizen, an accountant can be found responsible for the signing off of provisions and bullets. Similarly, an engineer is responsible for setting up a data center designed to violate privacy. It doesn't mean they'll receive the same punishment, but the precedent needs to be set.

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        • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:49PM

          by meustrus (4961) on Tuesday November 29 2016, @08:49PM (#434682)

          What you're talking about is just punishment for moral wrongdoing. What I am talking about is punitive incentives not to engage in wrongdoing. It's a fine distinction, but I believe that when we allow our sense of justice to focus on just punishment rather than incentives, we fail to do everything we can to keep wrong from being done to begin with.

          The practical result of a world in which "an accountant can be found responsible for the signing off of provisions and bullets" is that accountants of strong ethics and character will refuse to participate. But this does not mean the provisions and bullets will not be procured. It just means that somebody with shakier morals will be employed. Persons of strong moral character will find themselves unemployable in virtually any industry, and may even get themselves imprisoned or killed. The net result will be the opposite of your goal: rather than people feeling more compelled to speak out against wrongdoing, those with adequate character will never find themselves in the position to do so.

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