Is it really worth all the trouble it will take to find and then prosecute the death camp guards when Demjanjuk only got five years for his complicity in the murder of more than 28,000 Dutch Jews?
GERMANY TO REOPEN PROBES INTO HUNDREDS OF FORMER NAZI DEATH CAMP GUARDS AFTER DEMJANJUK CONVICTION
By Allan Hall
Mail Online
October 5, 2011
Germany is pursuing hundreds of elderly men and women who worked in Nazi concentration camps in a bid to get them to face justice before they die.
The investigations come in the wake of a new precedent set by the conviction in May of John Demjanjuk, 91, a former camp guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi occupied Poland in World War Two.
He was found guilty in a Munich court in May of assisting in the murder of more than 28,000 Dutch Jews and sentenced to five years jail. He is out pending appeal.
The Demjanjuk case was the first time prosecutors were able to convict someone of a Nazi era crime without direct evidence that the suspect participated in a specific killing; it was enough that he was there.
In bringing Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. autoworker, to trial, Munich prosecutors argued that if they could prove that he was a guard at a camp like Sobibor - established for the sole purpose of extermination - it was enough to convict him of accessory to murder as part of the Nazi's machinery of destruction.
After 18 months of testimony, a Munich court agreed and found Demjanjuk guilty, sentencing him to five years in prison. Demjanjuk, who denies ever having served as a guard, is currently free and living in southern Germany as he waits for his appeal to be heard.
Kurt Schrimm, head of the prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi crimes, says he's now looking into other possible suspects who could still be alive and prosecuted once Demjanjuk's appeal is heard.
Mr Schrimm said the verdict had given new impetus to the drive to clean up the patchy German record on prosecuting war criminals.
He added his office is going over all of its files to see if others may fit into the same category as Demjanjuk. He said there were probably 'under 1,000' possible suspects who could still be alive and prosecuted, living both in Germany and abroad. He would not give any names.
'We have to check everything - from the people who we were aware of in camps like Sobibor ... or also in the Einsatzgruppen,' he said, referring to the death squads responsible for mass killings, particularly early in the war before the death camps were established.
The youngest suspects are now in their eighties, many of them in OAP homes in Germany and receiving state pensions.
For example, Karl Streibel - the commandant of the SS camp Trawniki where Demjanjuk allegedly was trained - was tried in Hamburg but acquitted in 1976 after the judges ruled it hadn't been proven that he knew what the guards being trained would be used for.
But the current generation of prosecutors and judges in Germany has shown a new willingness to pursue even the lower ranks, something applauded by Zuroff.
'Our goal is to bring as many people to justice as possible,' Zuroff said. 'They shouldn't be let off if they're less than Mengele, less than Himmler ... in a tragedy of this scope, their escaping justice should not in any way mean that people of a lesser level would be ignored.'
Working in favor of the new investigators is the fact that most suspects would likely have lived openly under their own names for decades, thinking they had no prosecutions to fear.
Those who are harder to locate will be the focus of the Wiesenthal center's new appeal, which Zuroff said would include reward money for information that helps uncover a suspect.
On the other hand, Mr Schrimm said it only makes sense to try to bring new cases to trial once the Demjanjuk case is through the appeals process, rather than expend all the resources needed to charge a suspect only to have the case thrown out if Demjanjuk wins.
But the appeal could still take at least another six months to a year - or longer - and the suspects are not getting any younger.
'It's very clear that they're old, that's why we're preparing everything now so that as soon as there is a final decision, we can move immediately with charges,' Mr Schrimm said.
Zuroff said he hoped that the appeal could somehow be fast-tracked so that new charges against others could be filed before it is too late.
Many will be the 'little fish' of the Nazi machine - the camp and prison guards deemed too small to bother about at the Nuremberg Trials who slipped into obscurity after the war.
'This ... is a test for the German judicial system to see if they can expedite this in an appropriate manner to enable these cases to go forward,' he said.
The Wiesenthal Center's Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff said in Jerusalem that he will launch a new campaign to track down the last Nazi war criminals.
'It could be a very interesting final chapter,' he said.
'This has tremendous implications even at this late date.'
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