Germany shouldn't have tried 'Ivan the Miserable'
The man in the wheelchair rolled into court was merely one of tens of thousands of Nazi collaborators.
By Yitzhak Laor Tags: Holocaust Israel newsFrom its very beginnings, West Germany never enjoyed remembering, and its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, built his political career, and indeed his country's power, on defying the outside world's accusations, making out that the Germans were only victims. So who was guilty? Hitler and his gang, of course, and they had vanished a few years before. So that's all there was to the matter.
That Germany, ruled by the Christian Democrats, did everything it could to avoid legal proceedings against the Nazis who had escaped prosecution during the Allied occupation immediately after the war. The reparation and compensation agreements were a wise move, and Germany entered the international community by way of financial atonement. But the money did not go to all the countries that were devastated and whose people were slaughtered by the German military, but almost only to the Jews and Israel.
The most outstanding example of the way Israel repaid that Germany, with its scant memories, was the order David Ben-Gurion gave to the prosecutor in the Adolf Eichmann trial, Gideon Hausner. When describing the events that led to the destruction of the Jews, he was to omit one detail - the name of Adenauer's top aide in the postwar West German government, Hans Globke. Before the war, Globke served on the team that drew up the Nuremberg Laws, but he was not only spared prosecution, he became an important leader of the Christian Democratic Party.
As the years went by, the politics of German remembrance underwent a transformation. A generation passed and a truly new generation replaced it, one whose memory consists of islands of knowledge and ignorance. Either way, Germany waited until 1996 before marking the Holocaust, and even now it does so using a very selective memory. The other atrocities have never been memorialized. This selective memory jibed well with the Israeli memory that crystallized gradually over the same years. The horrors of World War II and the crimes by the German military on the various fronts are slipping slowly into oblivion, both here and there, whereas the Holocaust is singled out as a unique phenomenon, almost detached from all the other monstrous acts.
All the above provides a backdrop to the farce surrounding the trial of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk. In this last trial of its kind on German soil, a non-German has been accused of crimes against humanity; the proceedings will end, at best, with the moral that there were also wicked Slavs. Listeners to a German radio station or viewers of German television on Monday might have believed that Josef Mengele was going on trial, or that a the criminal who regrettably wasn't hanged at Nuremberg after the war had finally been caught. But the man in the wheelchair who was rolled into court, with hundreds of reporters and photographers looking on, was merely one of tens of thousands of Nazi collaborators the United States admitted after the war.
Israeli schoolchildren are not taken to march around Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany (the German government wouldn't allow such parades on its home turf), but to Poland, without learning what the Poles underwent during the Nazi occupation. Similarly, the last chapter in Germany's legal proceedings against Nazi criminals will be the trial of Ivan the Miserable. Heinrich Himmler thought that mass murder was not a simple matter for German refinement to handle, as he explained at length in his speech at Posen in October 1943. So he assigned the Slavs to do the dirty work in the death camps. He could have chuckled over this trial and said that the Slavs really did the job. The German judicial system would have done better to refrain from this self-debasement.
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Accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk. |
| Photo by: (Archive) |
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Congratulations, Mr Laor ! Based on a 40 years research of the prosecution of nazi-crimes in west and east germany, I can only applaud your excellent article on this subject - in each and every aspect. It is not without reason that we published the east german judgement against Globke on our "prosecution of nazi crimes website" www1.jur.uva.nl/junsv/Excerpts/ddr1068000.htm
Wow, that's a really good article. Maybe a little bit tough on Germans - I believe many of them do remember what they did to Slavs and they supported loyally our entry to the EU (for example). But many points are valid.
no one likes suffering, and I am glad you use your moderate commonsense to differentiate between nazi war tactics and Jewish/arab ones. unfortunately, the arabs you sympathize with are set into perpetual motion of anguish not by israel, but by Pal misleadership which is influenced by other arabs states bent on israel's destruction. Your people have been brainwashed from infancy to despise Jews and to believe total victory against Israel is moments away. familiar refrain in each war the arabs started. In the meantime your people suffer because Israel has no choice in defending her land and her arabs, christians and jews from your people's despotic heads. The day, the moment the pals accept Israel 100% &discard their charter of hate, the roads of travel, development and normalcy open-problems solved. you know that!Courage is only a word arabs know only in futile battle-Someday, an arab moderate with real courage will bring true encouragement to his/her people before he gets shot!
in particular the last chapter . My regards .
"... a truly new generation replaced it ... memory consists of islands of knowledge and ignorance." - it seems that you don't know the contemporanous German society well... "Israeli schoolchildren are not taken to march around Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany (the German government wouldn't allow such parades on its home turf), but to Poland, without learning what the Poles underwent during the Nazi occupation." - 1. I suppose, it is no problem to march in Germany, whether in Bergen-Belsen or in Buchenwald etc. The question rather is what will be the reaction in Israel of sending school children for this purpose to Germany, as far as I know many Israelis don't like the country, which is understandable. And you are saying "are not taken" - so I guess it's not Germany who decides where to go and where not... 2. Vernichtungslager were only situated in what is nowadays Poland. These are the spots where the holocaust was carried out. So, their link to the holocaust is more immediate
At least 12 million people perished in the holocaust and that includes 6 million Jews and that also includes millions of Ukrainians, who are of the defendent's ethnicity. He may be guilty. If so, he deserves the punishment. I can't think of anyone in modern times who has been prosecuted for killing some of the millions of non-Jews. It's maybe because for a long time the Soviets controlled Eastern Europe, and there was no way to push for the trial of Nazis or hunting them down. Billions of reparations went from Germany to Israel, but nothing to non-Jewish victims who were in the millions as well. And the Jewish holocaust victims often received so little money and were poor. So many live in poverty, in fact. Some of the people who have put so much effort to prosecute Nazis turn a blind eye to the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, ethnic cleansing people from East Jerusalem, using incendiary weapons. There is no holocaust in Palestine. There is injustice, Why no justice
"But the money did not go to all the countries that were devastated and whose people were slaughtered by the German military, but almost only to the Jews and Israel." - no, that's not quite right... 1. reparations were not only paid money, but also in technology and land of which so much went to Poland, the Soviet Union etc... (you can see still today so much German machinery in Russian companies which was taken from East Germany there 50 years ago...) Reparations to Israel were probabely mainly money... 2. what do you think, where, e.g., the Uranium for the first Russian nuclear bombs came from? Southeast Germany. This was so much more worth than money for the Soviet Union in these times... so, maybe you underestimate this issue considerably...
Although not quite the skilful way you put it Mr. Laor. At my level, it occurred to me that Germany's old age homes must still have hundreds of residents who helped, without being the boss. That's worse, because Demjanjuk did his deeds as a prisoner of the Nazis, whereas those old dears did it because they were in the Hitler Jugend or party brown or blackshirts. Demjanjuk may well be a Ukrainian who hates Jews and therefore didn't mind the work he was given. But the fact remains that it was not a free choice for him, whereas for many others who got off scot-free, Nazi affiliation and approval of the party's deeds, was.