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 .)
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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 bd on Tuesday November 29 2016, @06:53PM
Sorry for the long post.
Records showed that Gröning actually was transferred to the front after two years,
something that was fairly high-risk in the later stages of the war, especially as an
SS trooper.
It is often said that no one in the SS was ever punished for refusing to kill prisoners,
but rather transferred to non-related posts, making the "I had to follow orders"
defense useless. But actually, his task was not murder, and therefore he arguably
would have been dealt very harsh punishment for not following his "lawful" orders.
He also would not have exactly known what he signed up for before making the
decision to take this assignment due to secrecy.
So he really was in a situation that he did not want to be in and had no way of
going out other than suicide.
It seems to speak for him that, given that choice, he apparently asked for what
amounted to soviet assisted suicide, if he really wanted to be transferred to the
front in 1943.
Since the 1980's, he actually publicly challenged neo-nazi holocaust deniers and
worked as a witness, which is actually fairly uncommon among SS men.
This is also propably the only reason why he was now tried, because it made
him known to the public.
On the other hand, we will never know how much of the story concerning his
disgust at the time about the mass murders was true and how much was changed
in hindsight, seeing that most of that part of the story is solely based on what
he said himself (other than being transferred in the end).
What made me somehow doubt him was the language he used when he
described Auschwitz. He somehow got back into the persona of an SS guard
and used rationalisations and language that makes your stomach turn.
And he actually said that he was not opposed to murder of jews in general,
but just could not cope with the levels of atrocity that happened there. Which
was the reason why he later felt guilt about it.
Somehow, this actually makes him quite believable, as he _was_ from a
right-wing family and indoctrinated from childhood. I would not have believed
him if he said he thought at the time that murdering jews was wrong.
Well, whatever. They should have tried him properly in the 1970's. And should
have tried people more obviously guilty than this guy. There were literally
thousands of them back then.