That’s something a court should decide. If the USA is unwilling to prosecute there’s still the option of the ICC. Even non signatories can ask the ICC to prosecute. That won’t happen unfortunately because that would mean a severe loss of face diplomatically.
To be fair, the disable were the first people they sought to either sterilize or eliminate from the German body politic altogether - but again, as horrifying as that is (and very much derived from mainstream eugenics ideology), it was not an attempt as mass murder of an entire people.
I’m not a big fan of the German sonderweg view, but I am interested in understanding how such a thing can happen, because if we understand that, we can hopefully avoid it in the future - which we’ve done a pisspoor job of doing, with regards to attempted genocides and ethnic cleansing since the second world war.
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You can acknowledge it and still understand that the primary goal was the elimination of an entire people.
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To many of these individuals, Jews aren’t real people–they’re just taking sympathy away from actual victims.
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To be fair, I don’t think we should ignore the other atrocities or the non-Jewish victims of nazi war crimes (which I know you’re not suggesting here), because they were brutalized and murdered as well. We certainly shouldn’t ONLY talk about the Holocaust when we discuss nazi Germany.
I do think it’s important to remember the specific goal of the final solution, though when we discuss the other victims of nazi violence. A regime based on brutally cleansing the body politics will quickly move onto other groups once the primary group has been eliminated. That old poem holds true… first they came for the communist, etc.
It’s so fucking hard to thread that needle of historical specificity and inclusion, I think. And it’s sickening that the historical realities and current political realities make us do so.
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True but Demjanjuk was a Pole (also a significant ethnic population in NE Ohio)
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I was searching the web about the German citizenship given after the war to many people that were not born German citizens, and also about Polish children with “acceptable” racial features that were kidnapped to be incorporated into the German Volk and I came up to this. I felt compelled to share it with all those nitpicking about the Nazi crimes, and wanting to forgive the Nazis, or to afford them a platform to share their program:
At Auschwitz concentration camp 200 to 300 Polish children from the Zamość area were murdered by the Nazis by phenol injections. The child was placed on a stool, occasionally blindfolded with a piece of a towel. The person performing the execution then placed one of his hands on the back of the child’s neck and another behind the shoulder blade. As the child’s chest was thrust out a long needle was used to inject a toxic dose of phenol into the chest. The children usually died in minutes. A witness described the process as deadly efficient: “As a rule not even a moan would be heard. And they did not wait until the doomed person really died. During his agony, he was taken from both sides under the armpits and thrown into a pile of corpses in another room… And the next victim took his place on the stool.”
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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?
While this is true of some, not of all people who ended up working with the nazis.
And the realities of the Cold War also played a role in that decision as well - also in Japan.
It’s actually discussed in the article - he was a guard at a Trawniki, which participated in both forced labor and in the holocaust itself. From the article:
“During a single nightmarish day in November 1943, all of the more than 6,000 prisoners of the Nazi camp that Jakiw Palij had guarded were systematically butchered,” Eli Rosenbaum, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), said after the ruling. “By helping to prevent the escape of these prisoners, Palij played an indispensable role in ensuring that they met their tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis.”
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I did get that. One likely story: he was at the time a 19-year-old Polish-Ukrainian, pressed into service as a guard, most likely on pain of being inside the wall he was guarding. There are many possible stories, and it would take a court to sort them out. Because of the passage of time, it is virtually impossible to convene such a court. Whether he is an oppressor who deserves punishment, a victim of an oppressive regime, or (most likely) some mixture of both, is a question that most likely cannot be answered at this late date by a human tribunal. But I find it hard to imagine that a teenaged inhabitant of a conquered nation, compelled to serve the occupying power, can be rightly held fully responsible for his actions, either legally or morally.
Punishing him without such a tribunal would be an affirmative offense against the rule of law, and strikes me as a greater danger to the public order than letting a very small fish escape the net.
Actually, Thomas More refused to take the Oath of Supremacy, as demanded by his King. He thought that there were principles above human law. Not everybody feels compelled to do things against their conscience.
We can’t make that assumption either way, especially without an sort of trail to hear his response (which would of course be through the lens of time, anyway), which you rightfully note. However, just because someone might or might not have been actively complicit in a crime, that doesn’t mean we don’t go through a trial of some sort. The reality is that (whether he was enthusiastic or not, forced or not) he was involved in a crime against humanity here. Should we really just ignore that?
Are you saying 19 year olds aren’t responsible for their actions? or that there weren’t choices that people could make in the midst of this? Given the reality of the occupation of Poland - that they did not have a collaborating government, and had a relatively high level of resistance and backlash to that resistance, with thousands being killed for refusing to go along - there might be something to your argument here - but then again, “I was just following orders” has not been an excuse in many other cases, so why is this one different? I’d also offer that there was a very active partisan movement that many young people were a part of during the war. People had choices to make, and of course they were hard choices to make, and many went along with the occupation out of self-preservation. Others (many others) resisted or sat things out as quietly as they could.
But once again, there has been no actual case here, just a deportation order, which has yet to be acted upon. the issue at hand is that while many others who are here without documentation are being deported, often to places where there is a rather high chance that they will be killed RIGHT NOW TODAY. This has already happened to children who had come north without their parents and were sent back to be killed by the criminals they were fleeing in the first place. Sending this asshole back to Europe isn’t likely to result in him being brutally murdered in his sleep. He might be put on trial (though that seems unlikely in Poland at this point) for his participation in the holocaust (whether coerced or not).
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I don’t often agree with Ffabian, but the ICC would be the place to bring him to trial. You can’t just dump this guy somewhere, in limbo, and he effectively isn’t a citizen of any of the countries named above: Poland, Germany, Ukraine - he would end up stateless most likely. Not something which makes trial in one of the countries easier.
I think there should be a case. This doesn’t mean there is one, legally. But there should be, ethically. If there isn’t one, we have a legal system to fix.
I agree, but there is a deportation order and the US government regularly deports others who haven’t even committed a crime. The issue here is the racist way in which ICE is operating.
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Why not? ICE is more than happy to do just that with brown skinned types for way less than this guy has done.
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Agreed. At the same time punishing him is too late. There is not much nazi
left in him.
We should focus on the current threats.
And how do you know this? If someone who commits a crime repents, that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t still be consequences for their actions.
Then how about we stop deporting children who are leaving dangerous situations back to those countries so they end up dead? Deportation is actively leading to the deaths of innocent children, but deporting an old nazi is a step too far? Really?
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I understand this, and I agree it is a double disgrace. But two wrongs, etc.
To be very clear, I have no sympathy whatsoever with Nazis. And I don’t think crimes against humanity can ever fall under the statute of limitation.
I still think that with the ICC, a clean, legal solution could be found. I think most other action would lead to creating another so-called “martyr” of the right.
Just FTR, I’m not against a deportation to Germany, but considering his legal status I doubt it would be possible for the German state to a) issue a passport and b) sent him to trial without said passport. The willingness to send people to court because of funktioneller Beihilfe is generally given, I think. But it would be difficult to find a legal construction to allow a verdict over someone who seems to be a US citizen, legally, and nothing else. 
CC @TobinL
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