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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: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday November 29 2016, @03:04PM
War is evil, and even well-meaning people are inevitably caught up in doing unthinkable things to other human beings.
With the Marshall Plan, the US rose above this at the time: Re-building Europe, including West Germany, in hopes of producing a more prosperous future. And it worked!
Prosecuting "war crimes" like this? This is the winners extracting petty revenge, over the course of more than six decades. What possible sense is there in prosecuting a 95 year old enlisted bookkeeper, who was under military discipline and simply following his orders at the time? Especially one who has since worked on behalf of Holocaust victims?
Had the allies lost, the firebombing of Dresden and the nuking of two cities in Japan would have resulted in war crimes prosecutions. Would it be appropriate to prosecute not only the leaders, but the aircrews, and even the aircraft maintenance staff? And to drag this out for sixty years?
Pathetic, just pathetic.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @07:39PM
Yes, the winners write the rules, so the badness and what gets punished are sometimes disconnected.
But while pointing this out, careful with the Bad-O-Meter.
The firebombings in Germany and Japan were an order of magnitude less casualties than the Holocaust.
Also, they were against a foe that had declared war and attacked and would not stop even facing likely defeat.
None of the above acts are good, but downplaying the extreme badness of the Holocaust is the kind of thing that provides what little justification prosecuting a 95 year old has.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday November 30 2016, @12:43AM
I agree with a lot of what you say regarding winners making "rules"... BUT:
This is the winners extracting petty revenge, over the course of more than six decades. What possible sense is there in prosecuting a 95 year old enlisted bookkeeper, who was under military discipline and simply following his orders at the time?
Except these prosecutions are happening in GERMAN courts on GERMAN citizens. To my knowledge, there is no pressure for these prosecutions coming from the U.S. or French or UK governments or whatever. Sure, I'd bet there are Jewish citizens in these countries, and in Germany, who are pushing for them, among other victims, but these prosecutions can hardly be blamed on the "winners" of WWII.
Especially one who has since worked on behalf of Holocaust victims?
I would note that in reading about this case, I came upon at least one Holocaust survivor (and victim of the work of Josef Mengele, no less) who has spoken out with a different opinion about what might constitute "justice" here. From Eva Mozes Kor [itv.com]:
"He has accepted responsibility and admitted his guilt. [...] But I do not think the court has acted properly in sentencing him to four years in jail. It is too late for that kind of sentence. [...] My preference would have been to sentence him to community service by speaking out against neo-Nazis. I would like the court to prove to me, a survivor, how four years in jail will benefit anybody. Groening said in his statements that he was wrong, it never should have happened, and it should never happen again."
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday November 30 2016, @01:22PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves