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Hitler Abettors Must Feel Justice

P

rosecuting former Nazi death
had committed individual acts of murder.
camp guards for war crimes is
She applied the time-tested timber of justice
more than a symbolic memorial
that aiding in murder is tantamount to com-
to the 6 million Jews killed in the throes of
mitting it. Hanning has appealed the verdict.
the Holocaust during World War
BIGGER PICTURE
II. Prosecution also is a quest for
The judge’s ruling shouldn’t erase all
justice no matter how much time
the years Germany tried to obscure
has passed.
its Nazi past. But it does provide a
That’s why it was so gratifying to
measure of peace for victims and
hear a court in Detmold, Germany,
their families.
had sentenced a former SS guard,
The trial reinforced that a death
now 94, to five years in prison.
camp guard personally didn’t have to
Reinhold Hanning’s conviction and Robert Sklar
sentence on June 17 validated his
Contributing Editor kill or beat anyone amid Hitler’s fury
to be considered a Nazi collabora-
role as an accessory in the mur-
tor. To sustain the death camps, the
der of at least 170,000 people at
Third Reich relied on guards who turned a
Auschwitz-Birkenau. That notorious death
blind eye toward genocide.
camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was respon-
Hanning joined the Hitler Youth in 1935,
sible for the gassing of more than 1.1 million
people — mostly Jews. Following the verdict at age 13. He volunteered for the Waffen SS
against Hanning, according to the Associated in 1940. Following combat injury in Kiev in
1941, Hanning, a sergeant, was assigned to
Press, a 95-year-old survivor from Berlin,
Leon Schwarzbaum, called Auschwitz “a hell sentry duty at Auschwitz. He served from
January 1942 to June 1944.
on earth.”
In profoundly compelling post-trial
Witness testimony, always wrenching,
remarks, Central Council of Jews in
proved pivotal in convicting Hanning, who
Germany head Josef Schuster told reporters,
ran a dairy store in Germany after the war.
At sentencing, Judge Anke Grudde cut to the according to JTA: “No perpetrator should
be able to say, ‘For me, it’s the past.’ The trial
core of the criminal act, saying: “You were
in Auschwitz for almost 2½ years and thus
assisted in mass murder.”
To sustain the death camps,
In April, Hanning told the court, “I’m
ashamed that I knowingly let injustice hap-
the Third Reich relied on
pen and did nothing to oppose it.” Still, the
judge characterized him as a “willing and
guards who turned a blind
efficient henchman.”
The judge didn’t buy the classic defense
eye toward genocide.
argument that no proof existed their client

commentary

brings to the forefront, once again, what peo-
ple are capable of doing to one another, and
what incitement against minorities can lead
to. So the trial made an important contribu-
tion to our dealing with Germany history.”
It certainly did.

ON GUARD
The 2011 conviction of retired Ohio auto-
worker John Demjanjuk in a court in
Munich set a legal precedent for tying a
guard at a death camp to complicity in mur-
der. He was convicted for his alleged role in
the murders of 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor
death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Soon, the relentless march of time will
end the possibility of such trials although a
few are pending. Of 6,500 SS personnel who
survived the war, fewer than 50 have been
convicted under German justice, according
to NBC News.
That conviction ratio shouldn’t dimin-
ish the efforts of the governments of Israel
and the U.S. and more recently Germany,
or the doggedness of the U.S.-based Simon
Wiesenthal Center and other Nazi hunters,
in seeking long-overdue justice. More apt to
grab headlines are Holocaust restitution and
Holocaust denial.
A central tenet of deterring genocidal
attempts is to punish perpetrators involved at
every level — then keep the world spotlight
trained on those pursuits of justice regardless
of the passage of time.
Prosecuting as many former Nazi death
camp guards as possible no doubt helps bol-
ster the impact of the fervent rallying cry of
Holocaust survivors: “Never Again!”

*

continued from page 5

Referring to “radical Islam” or “radical
Islamism” when discussing Mateen won’t do
a thing to solve the actual problem, no mat-
ter how much Donald Trump may claim to
the contrary, but to contort oneself into knots
to deny what appears to be plainly obvious
recalls George Orwell’s famous aphorism that
“to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a
constant struggle.”
Equally clear should be that to tie either
Mateen or Goldstein to religious motivation
is not to disparage the entire religion itself.
All religions simultaneously contain good
and bad, with acts of monumental charity
and monstrous barbarity perpetrated in their
names constantly. That one sick, twisted
individual or even thousands of sick, twisted
individuals kill in service of a religion proves
nothing. It does not mean that the religion’s
faithful are all terrorists in waiting, but
simply means that the terrorists who kill in
its name are using the religion to justify the
unjustifiable.
Religion gives rise to terrible ideologies
that cloak themselves in the mantle of faith
and God, but it is foolish, absent evidence to

6 June 30 • 2016

Arthur M. Horwitz
Publisher / Executive Editor
ahorwitz@renmedia.us

the contrary, to assume that the parasite has
fully consumed the host. Many are quick to
point to Mateen’s connection to Islam as rep-
resentative of Islam writ large, and I vigor-
ously disagree with it but I understand where
it comes from, given how many terrorist
attacks are committed in Islam’s name.
We can run multivariate regressions all
day that demonstrate that Islam is statisti-
cally insignificant compared to poverty,
political repression and all sorts of other
factors when it comes to terrorism, but it
seems to belie common sense. Also belying
common sense is to then blanketly insist
that Islam is synonymous with violence,
rather than understanding that we live in a
time when Islam is employed for violence
more than other religions, as Christianity
was employed for violence more than other
religions during the Middle Ages (as Jews
know full well).
The fact that American Jews would never
tolerate being tarred by Goldstein’s brush is
precisely why it is so important to maintain
the same standards with other religions,
even when Jewish terrorism is a drop in the

F. Kevin Browett
Chief Operating Officer
kbrowett@renmedia.us

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bucket compared to Muslim terrorism.
Goldstein killed a group of Muslims for
the crime of being Muslim. Mateen killed
a group of gays for being gay. In Tel Aviv
last week, two Palestinians killed a group of
Israelis for being Israeli. There are complex
factors and wider contexts involved in all
of these cases, but it would be foolish to
ignore some of them for political reasons.
Acknowledging that there are uncomfort-
able truths at work does not justify any of
these acts of terrorism in any way.
Terrorism and killing innocents are
wrong no matter the reason and no matter
the perpetrator. People should not be afraid
of complexity, and when we give in to the
temptation of turning everything into a
black-and-white political issue that priori-
tizes ideology over the struggle for truth, we
set ourselves up for a generation of leaders
who prioritize sound bites over substance,
platitudes over policy and division over
discourse.

*

This essay was originally published on the Israel Policy
Forum, where Michael Koplow is policy director.

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