Perverted Justice

By Volodymyr Kish

As many of you may be aware, a farcical spectacle that passes for justice is currently under way in a courtroom in Munich, Germany.  John Demjanjuk, favourite “demon” of the U.S. Office of Special Investigation (OSI) and the Nazi hunting Simon Weisenthal Center, was extradited to Germany earlier this year where he was placed under arrest by, as an article in Esquire magazine put it, “the righteous progeny of Hitler-loving burghers who did nothing as Jewry burned”. 

What is particularly ironic is that Germany long ago stopped any serious pursuit and prosecution of Nazi war criminals following a series of “De-Nazification” and amnesty programs.  So now you have the almost Kafkaesque spectacle of the descendants of Nazis, who perpetrated one of the greatest evils witnessed by the 20^th Century, prosecuting one of the victims they created.

No matter how they spin it, the facts are that John Demjanjuk was in no way a Nazi and did not kill anybody.  Even the Israeli Supreme Court confirmed this.  He was a simple Ukrainian peasant caught up in the maelstrom of war who became victimized by circumstances beyond his control.  Conscripted into the Soviet Red Army, he was captured by the Germans and thrown into a POW camp.  These were brutal places which few survived.  It is estimated that some 60% of Soviet POW’s totalling more than 3 million prisoners perished in these camps. 

One of the few avenues for survival was volunteering to be a concentration camp guard.  John Demjanjuk took that option, received some basic training and served as guard at several concentration camps including Trawniki, Majdanek and Sobibor.  He does not deny serving as a guard, but is vehement in his claims that he was not a Nazi, and never abused or killed anyone.  During the many trials that he has had to undergo over the past couple of decades, not a single irrefutable shred of evidence ever came to light that proved otherwise.  The only case that can be made is that he was forced to be an unwilling minor collaborator in the Nazi killing machine.

So why are the German authorities going after an inconsequential nobody when there are still Germans alive today who had a direct hand in creating, building and running these death camps?  Why do they provide amnesties for their own citizens (against whom  there is no shortage of proof of their complicity in Nazi atrocities), but take a hard line against an 89 year-old terminally ill Ukrainian against whom there is only the flimsiest of evidence that he did anything but try and survive under life and death circumstances?  Why the concerted continuing propaganda campaign against Ukrainian “Nazi” collaborators after all these years?  Why is there not a similar campaign against French collaborators, Italian collaborators, and all the other countries the Nazis conquered? And what about all the collaborators of the Soviet system that killed even more innocent people than the Nazis?

Could it be because Ukrainians are easy targets?  Is it because there is a large economic and political downside in aggravating countries and people that have some global or military clout, whereas Ukraine and Ukrainians are weak and present easy targets?

It absolutely reeks of hypocrisy that once active Nazis and collaborators still walk the streets of Germany and other countries and lead peaceful normal lives while John Demjanjuk sits rotting in a German prison. This is not justice, neither for Demjanjuk, the millions of Jewish victims of the Holocaust, nor for any righteous Germans.  It dishonours them all.