Of what specific crime does he stand accused? The case in chief is that he lied about his service in the German army. That by itself is not a matter that’s likely to attract the attention of a prosecutor in The Hague. Not all who served even as guards at the death camps committed personal actions that reached the level of ‘crimes against Humanity’ - particularly those who were drawn from among the citizens of conquered nations and were themselves pressed at gunpoint into service as teenagers.
It may be that Germany cannot prosecute him. Nearly 800,000 low-level offenders of the Nazi regime were granted unconditional amnesty during the Adenauer administration. He may be among them. Nor was there to be any prosecution of the 8.5 million members of the Nazi Party, or the nearly 45 million members of trade unions, social organizations, youth groups and the like that were direct arms of the Party. That amounts to over
two thirds of the German population. The Party was pervasive enough that the Morgenthau Plan was founded on the principle that the only way to de-Nazify Germany would be to reduce its entire population to subsistence farming, restrict access to education, and forever interdict the redevelopment of any industrial base - but it rapidly became clear that Europe could not survive being deprived of the mines of the Ruhr or the shipyards of the North, and Marshall’s plan replaced Morgenthau’s.
In any case, I have heard not one word of what he is supposed to have done. I see many impassioned posts about what others who wore the same uniform did. Do we still enjoy a system where responsibility is borne by those who committed or ordered individual acts, or do we now ascribe collective guilt to not only an entire people, but also to those from other nations that their leaders subjugated and conscripted?
