German lawyer seeks trial for possibly last living alleged perpetrator of Nazi atrocities
Eighty years ago, a ravine in the north of what is now Ukraine’s capital city turned into a bloodbath as Nazis, aided by local collaborators, shot tens of thousands of Jews to death.
For two days at the end of September 1941, Ukrainian collaborators brought more than 33,000 Jews to the hills of Kyiv’s Babyn Yar ravine, where soldiers in Adolf Hitler’s army executed group after group of defenseless victims – children, as well as women and men of all ages.
The victims were shot with machine guns above an open pit. After none remained standing, the perpetrators would jump into the pit with their victims to finish off those who were still dying and those pretending to be dead. The bodies were then buried and a new group of victims brought to stand atop the fresh, thin layer of earth covering their dead neighbors.
The 80th anniversary of the massacre, the first mass shooting in what is known today as the “Holocaust of bullets,” is eliciting a wave of commemorations,
including a ceremony in Israel to honor a survivor, and the minting of a memorial coin in Ukraine, where Nazi collaborators are increasingly being celebrated alongside their victims.
It is also reinvigorating a German lawyer’s mission to bring to justice a man he says may be the last living Babyn Yar perpetrator, a 99-year-old German named Herbert Waller.
For Hans Brehm and
partners, the attempt to indict Waller is a symbolic, last-ditch effort to correct decades of what they see as inaction by German authorities against almost all the people responsible for the largest single mass slaughter of Jews during the entire Holocaust. Of an estimated 700 participants, only 10 have ever been convicted of a crime.
Last week, Brehm traveled to Kyiv to speak with relatives of Babyn Yar victims. That’s because under German law, parties affected by major crimes may initiate criminal proceedings against defendants even if prosecutors decide not to indict.
“I want to have the man dragged in front of a judge,” Brehm told Der Spiegel last week. He is aware there is little chance of the court punishing such an elderly defendant, he said. Brehm said he only wants to see Waller indicted, and if found guilty convicted.
“This is about atonement, about late justice,” Brehm said.
Waller’s name in 2014 was first flagged to Germany’s Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, in a list of 80 names given to them by Efraim Zuroff, the famed “Nazi hunter” of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The men were members of the Einsatzgruppen: German Army death squads that between 1941 and 1943 shot dead more than two million Jews in Eastern Europe.
In 2017, the office began
the world over the last week, or around five every minute. However, the global death rate has been slowing in recent weeks.
There has been increasing focus in recent days on getting vaccines to poorer nations, where many people are yet to receive a first dose, even as their richer counterparts have begun giving booster shots.
More than half of the world has yet to receive at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data.
The World Health Organization this week said its COVAX distribution program would, for the first time, distribute shots only to countries with the lowest levels of coverage.
Co-led by the WHO, COVAX has since January largely allocated doses proportionally among its 140-plus beneficiary states according to population size.
“For the October supply, we designed a different methodology, only covering participants with low sources of supply,” Mariangela Simao, WHO assistant director-general for access to vaccines, said in a recording of a conference presentation last week posted on the organization’s website.
The United States, which has been battling vaccine misinformation that has caused about one-third of the population to avoid inoculations, surpassed 700,000 deaths on Friday, the highest toll of any country.
US cases and hospitalizations have been trending lower, but health officials are bracing for a possible resurgence as cooler weather forces more activities indoors.
Russia reported 887 coronavirus-related deaths on Friday, the largest single-day death toll it has recorded since the pandemic began and the fourth day in a row it has set that record. Only a third of Russia’s eligible population has received a first
vaccine dose.
As a region, South America has the highest death toll in the world, accounting for 21% of all reported deaths, followed by North America and Eastern Europe, which contribute more than 14% of all fatalities each, according to Reuters analysis.
However, India, one of the first countries ravaged by the Delta variant, has gone from an average of 4,000 deaths a day to less than 300 as its vaccination campaign has been rolled out.
About 47% of India’s eligible population has received a first shot, with officials administering around 7,900,000 doses per day over the past week, a Reuters analysis of Our World in Data showed.
The Delta variant is now the dominant strain around the globe and has been reported in 187 out of 194 World Health Organization member countries. (Reuters)