In this article from The Guardian, it was announced today that Germany will re-open hundreds of investigations of Nazi death camp guards, because of a new precedent set in the trial and conviction of John Demjanjuk. However, the authorities are not going to wait until the end of Demjanjuk's appeals process to make sure the ruling isn't going to be overturned; this is because of the age of the suspects, all of them over eighty years old.
The case against Demjanjuk basically said that since he had been a guard at Sobibor, he was an accessory to murder on 28,060 counts. That's a lot, but when you think about it that number is nothing compared to the number of deaths totaling from the Holocaust. His prosecutors argued that if they could prove he was a guard at the camp (Sobibor existed solely for the purpose of extermination) it was enough to convict him as an accessory to murder. After eighteen months of trials, he was found guilty. This marks the first time someone could be convicted in a Nazi-era case with no direct evidence that they participated in the killing.
In The Reader, Hanna is convicted many years after she actually worked in the camp, and convicted in a trial that arguably was not handled perfectly. She is directly connected to the camp through witnesses and sentenced to life in prison. After all the time that has passed, investigators are going over every file they can to see if they can prosecute other suspects in the same way Demjanjuk was. One of the excuses Michael makes for Hanna is that she was just trying to make people more comfortable, and that she had taken this job because she was illiterate and was ashamed of her secret. Demjanjuk has appealed his conviction. Is it enough to sentence someone as an accessory to murder if they were a guard at a camp that existed just to kill prisoners? Authorities are going to test in court whether or not this prosecution will hold up for cases from camps not just for killing.
Is it enough to simply say you were doing a job that was assigned to you, and appeal for innocence? Or does being a guard at a death camp condemn a person to guilt? A five year sentence for accessory is not a life sentence, true, but what's your opinion? When it comes to investigating these war crimes, people have been acquitted on the argument that they didn't know explicitly what was going on; however, this might start to change that mindset. Is that for the better or for the worse?
I absolutely believe someone can be charged as an accessory to murder. Demjanjuk was employed by an extermination camp... so whether or not he killed someone with his own hands, he worked so that others would be able to kill. It's like the person who pays a hit man to kill- they may not have physically murdered but they are still a cause for the loss of life and guilty. I know that during the time the extermination of Jews was legal and acceptable, but times have changed and Demjanjuk's ruling has proved that old actions can be charged under a new legal system as crimes. At the end of the day- if a guard's mother was murdered, they would think it was wrong and against the law. But they murdered countless mother, children, fathers... I don't care if they thought they were doing there job. The bottom line is- those are crimes against humanity in any time period and they deserve to be punished.
ReplyDeleteI'm so glad you posted this! I was going to if no one else did! It's so pertinent to our class. I think it's clear that this is a new standard, that runs somewhat contrary to the standard in The Reader. There, it was not assumed that just because Hanna worked at the camp she had committed atrocities.
ReplyDeleteMolly, I agree with you - for me, the excuse of "doing my job" has never flown. A human being is conscious of rational thought, we discussed this when we addressed the secondary literature for Frankenstein. There may have been a few exceptional cases where people were truly unaware of what was going on but at some point a line has to be drawn. This defense is used repeatedly, on a scale this big to a military level to an everyday situation level, and it's really frustrating. Personally I think this new precedent is a good one and I'm curious to see where it will lead in the future, as far as the development of the legal system.
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