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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: 3, Informative) by Francis on Tuesday November 29 2016, @04:10PM
Which is why we had the situation at Abu Ghraib never being properly cleared up. The commanders that were supposed to make sure that things like that didn't happen were never properly held to account. Culpability for it extended much higher up the chain of command than was ultimately prosecuted.
And yes, they do have a limitation to legal orders, but how sure are you that you'd know in all cases where the exact line is? Sometimes its quite clear, raping people is clearly illegal, war or no war, but how about dropping bombs. Precisely how close can you drop them to a hospital without it becoming a crime against humanity? And how harsh can you be on the prisoners before it goes from punishment to illegal torture? These are not necessarily black and white issues that can have a line that everybody is going to depend upon.
It also ignores the fact that if you refuse a lawful order, you can wind up court court-martialed. Even if it is an illegal order, you can be court-martialed, but they don't generally do that, but mistakes do happen from time to time.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 29 2016, @07:51PM
And countless POW's who were executed under order. I can't say much, only that a former Iraq solder in the US Army was ordered to execute numerous prisoners right after they surrendered. Not all at once but after misc skirmishes. Anywhere from just a few to a dozen or so. The rational was "We had no prison or prisoner logistics. If we let them go, they just come back with more guys and more guns". Lined up, on their knees screaming crying "no mista! please no!" And one by one he shot them in the head. I suppose they shoulda thought about that before pointing a gun at a grunt I suppose. This was during the initial invasion so it was all up in the air. Though, it haunts him to this day.