70 years after Nuremberg trials, Germany tries to right wrongs
BERLIN: Seventy years after the trials of top Nazis began in Nuremberg, Germany is racing against time to prosecute the last Third Reich criminals to make up for decades of neglect. The cases aim to bring to justice “even the most minimal participant” in the crimes under Hitler, but also to “allow the last survivors to speak”, historian Werner Renz said. The approach is intended to serve “judicial, pedagogical and social” purposes in a nation still working to atone for past atrocities.
Around a dozen investigations are currently under way against former SS officers, just months after the so-called “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz” Oskar Groening was sentenced to four years in jail as an accessory to murder in 300,000 cases in which Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers between May and July 1944. A 91-year-old woman and two men, aged 92 and 93, who worked at Auschwitz could still face trial next year for their alleged part in exterminating Jews. Two of the elderly accused could, unusually, have their cases heard by a juvenile court due to their young age at the time of the acts in question. “It is too late for those who actually took the decisions, so we have to stretch the notion of guilt to a ridiculous point to try the lackeys,” renowned French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld complained before the Groening trial.
‘Second guilt’
Whether or not the cases go to trial depends on preliminary assessments by the courts-a high hurdle given the amount of time that has passed and the advanced age of the suspects. Case in point: the investigation into the Nazi massacre of 642 civilians in the French town of Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1944, which was thrown out last year due to lack of evidence against the suspects. The attempt to prosecute the last surviving officer believed to be behind atrocities in the Italian village of Sant’Anna di Stazzema in August 1944, which claimed the lives of 560 people, fell apart in May due to the suspect’s poor health.
And in January 2014, a German court halted proceedings against 92-year-old former SS officer Siert Bruins accused of the murder of a Dutch resistance fighter. The presiding judge ruled after four months of hearings that because crucial evidence had been lost since the killing and key testimony was unavailable, it had been impossible to convict Bruins of murder. Yet even the abandoned cases point to a new zeal by the German justice system, driven by a younger generation of prosecutors and judges. It was also spurred by case law established in “work carried out after reunification on crimes by former East Germany”which posed similar legal problems, said law professor Christoph Safferling of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Taken as a whole, however, the record is damning: looking only at Auschwitz, where 1.1 million people died, fewer than 50 of the 6,500 SS officers who worked there and survived the war were ever convicted. The late German writer and Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano called it his country’s“second guilt”. — AFP