The Daily Beast
Old Nazis don’t deserve a pass just because they’re old
Photo illustration: The Daily Beast / US Department of Justice In February, a 95-year-old man was deported to Germany, a year after serving as a guard in Meppen, a Nazi concentration camp in Neuengamme. It was not one of the worst camps – it had no modern gas chambers, but instead it depended on the old school’s working hours to work prisoners to death. An assembly of Danes, Dutch, French, Italians, Jews, Latvians, Poles and Russians was forced by guards to dig anti-tank fortifications during the winter of 1945, “to the point of exhaustion and death”. This particular guard, Friedrich Karl Berger, who has lived in comfort and safety in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, since 1959, presumably enjoying all the benefits of life in the United States for law-abiding citizens who keep their heads down, claimed that he had 1.) just following orders, 2.) they made him do it, 3.) he hadn’t been there in a long time, and 4.) he couldn’t be linked to any particular murder. however, what had worked to the advantage of so many low lives in death camps in the past has proved to be outdated, and since John Demjanjuk, a death camp guard who lived his own version of the good American life as a nearby auto worker of Cleveland, was convicted in 2011 on 28,000 counts of accomplice to murder. This legal construction gave prosecutors a way to get in, as it proved almost impossible to attribute specific deaths to surviving perpetrators, especially over the years. And it came at the right time. The last of these war criminals is now in his nineties, some older. A former accused guard in Germany is 100 years old. Apologists for these ancient criminals are suggesting that the past is past. May we, the people, let them live their lives in whatever peace they have conjured up for themselves. Let us “leave justice to God”. Photo illustration: The Daily Beast / US Department of Justice This argument could be better refined if there was evidence of some moral atonement on the part of criminals. But they, for the most part, seem to have come out of the extermination camps, whistling a cheerful tune. Some were helped to reach South America through Ratline, with our CIA leading the way. Josef Mengele, the sadist who found his spiritual home in Auschwitz and whose only regret is that the killing did not end, lived pleasantly among friends and supporters in São Paulo until he drowned swimming at will on a beautiful beach. That list goes on and on, without excluding the princes of commerce, most of whom profited from slave labor. Bayer, Siemens, IG Farben, Krupp, Mercedes and Volkswagen built their factories next to the death camps and signed contracts with the SS, which would provide a specific supply of guards, dogs and whips, along with constant substitutes for prisoners who, understood, be worked to death. None of those responsible paid any significant price. In light of this, these last old Nazis being dragged to face the music at this point seem very small, as they really were and are. On the other hand, as Raul Hilberg pointed out in the film Shoah by Claud Lanzmann and elsewhere, it was these gears on which the whole machine of death depended. Without the guards in the camps, or the train schedules full of prisoners, running with historic efficiency day and night, or the badly used baby clothes wholesalers that flooded from Auschwitz to Berlin, nothing would have worked, or at least as perfectly. Even a guard who did not personally send his dog to a faltering detainee or hand Ilse Koch a beautiful young woman to turn his fur into gloves, was, if you step back a little, guilty. And where there is guilt, there is also a need for justice. Without that, we are left with resignation, great for a Buddhist monk in a rhododendron forest, but not exactly for a judge and jury in contemporary America – not to mention the general public, who have read Anne Frank and Night. Who had to watch last month while the homemade Nazis sporting hoods from “Camp Auschwitz” beat our own policemen to death. As we seek justice in Washington for these maddened contemporary haters, who, by the way, we can easily see standing shoulder to shoulder with the last of those accused Nazis, whip, nightstick or fire extinguisher in hand, we are viscerally reminded of why this is so important. As Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem, what we as a society are saying is that “something has happened … that we cannot be reconciled to”. Neither do we, as Americans whose parents and grandparents fought and died to stop the Nazis, are we still willing to reconcile with what happened to the men, women and children in their hands, not while there is still some measure of punishment to be applied. It is true that these last convicts are old, but “justice has no expiry date”, as said Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Committee of Auschwitz. Berger protested his deportation to a judge. “After 75 years, this is ridiculous – I can’t believe it. You are forcing me to leave my house. ”Welcome to the Holocaust, Mr. Berger.Victoria Shorr is the author of the novel The Plum Trees, a story of loss and survival during the Holocaust. Read more at The Daily Beast. our top stories in your inbox every day. Subscribe now! 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