Look beyond the clickbait headlines. You come close to saying, “there are some crimes so heinous that innocence is no defense.”
Make it clear: I am not defending the Nazis. I am not defending a convicted war criminal. I am not defending war crimes. The crimes of the Nazis were heinous, and the convicts at the Nuremberg trials got their just deserts. There was abundant evidence against them - including orders that they personally signed.
I am defending the process of law - which I hope that we all enjoy, no matter what the accusation. When I hear arguments, against any accused criminal, that began, “he gave up his rights when he…,” my only answer is “what part of ‘inalienable’ did you not understand?” Similarly, the argument that “many thousands of others, less guilty than he, are detained and deported by ICE without a fair hearing, and dozens are imprisoned at Guantánamo with no legal process at all,” argues in favour of their getting a fair hearing, not of his being denied one.
The case at hand is not directly the case of even an accused war criminal. This person was a private, aged twenty when the war ended. He was conscripted as a guard at a death camp. He was by no means a Nazi mastermind. Even the accusation that he “helped to train” the executioners of Project Reinhard is twisting the facts in evidence. He guarded the camp where they were being trained. The alternative was to be shot for desertion.
Even the Nuremberg tribunals declined to try every rank-and-file German soldier, even among those who guarded the camps. They tried the officers; they tried the soldiers against whom there was personal evidence of atrocities. They did not erect concentration camps to execute systematically every member of the German army. While it established that “Beispiel ist Beispiel” is not an absolute defense, the clemency that the victors exhibited to the rank and file surely showed that there was diminished responsibility ascribed to the common soldier. (As an aside, this applied as well to the German people. The US could have executed the Morgenthau Plan. It didn’t.)
In this one case, because the person erred by, in effect, checking the wrong box on a form that asked, “were you ever a Nazi?” The case for his deportation builds from this simple fact of concealment, not from any further crimes that it may or may not have concealed.
It sounds as if many here would subject him to summary execution without trial. It must be without trial, because over seventy years later, it’s impossible to marshal evidence and witnesses against him. Still, he must be punished, because a soldier drafted in his teens to serve the Nazis must be guilty of genocide. Or perhaps he can be accorded a show trial, without witnesses, without evidence, without rules. Do you have the confession written that he would be compelled to read? Or would you prefer he simply be executed on the street? Are you willing to pull the trigger yourself?
If he is guilty of a crime worse than failing to desert the army, and failing to report his former conscription, I have yet to see any mention in the press of what that crime was. Do you have information I lack? As far as I know, personal responsibility under our law must stem from a personal act, or a dereliction of a duty personally to act. (“Extreme duress,” such as would surely be argued in this case, could possibly stand as an affirmative defense against the accusation of dereliction.)
Nearly everyone in this forum agrees that there are prominent Americans who have committed crimes against humanity. I dread the day that they are brought to your sort of ‘justice’, because I shall surely stand condemned for being at too few degrees of separation from them.
“I would give the Devil himself the benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.”
