‘The last great Nazi trial’

The Eichmann trial, Fournet says, set the bar for what would not be accepted as a valid courtroom defence. The crux of Eichmann’s argument was that he had indeed committed crimes—but only because he was following orders. Since that defence was rejected in Eichmann’s trial, says Fournet, it has rarely been accepted. The trial was also a landmark in the establishment of “universal jurisdiction” over genocide. Eichmann was a German whose crimes were committed before the state of Israel even came into existence. But the Israeli court ruled that Nazi crimes were violations not only of state, but of international law; thus, Israel deemed itself competent to try him—a precedent that held.

Germany soon started to prosecute former Nazis as well, beginning with the Auschwitz trials of 1963-’65 that saw 22 ex-guards and officials from the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex brought to justice. At the vanguard of this homegrown crusade was Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of Nationalist Socialist War Crimes, set up in 1958 (it would later build the unfolding case against Demjanjuk).

Still, many of the groundbreaking Nazi prosecutions—of Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, Maurice Papon—were conducted by foreign courts. This is why, for some, Demjanjuk’s November trial is a token of a broader shift. “Germany has really changed,” says Michael Scharf. “It has a new interest in prosecuting war criminals—not just from the Nazi era but also Rwandans and Cambodians and Sierra Leoneans and Bosnians.” Adds David Crowe, professor of history at Elon University in North Carolina and president emeritus of the Association for the Study of Nationalities at Columbia University: “A lot of it is generational. Older Germans wanted to dismiss their wartime legacy. The younger generation of Germans want not to forget.”

But after more than 60 years of prosecutions, what remains? In a strictly legalistic sense, the relevance of further trials is waning; with so many having taken place, they are unlikely to set new legal precedents. The trials have also lost much of their symbolic aura, and many have come and gone quietly—such as that of Josef Scheungraber, found guilty in August for the murder of 10 civilians in June 1944. Much of the hype around Demjanjuk centres on his much-touted new title, No. 1 on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most-wanted Nazi criminals.

“That’s me—I said that,” laughs Efraim Zuroff in Jerusalem, the SWC’s chief Nazi-hunter. “I’m the Simon Wiesenthal Center.” He speaks playfully of his title, but Zuroff is indeed charged with the weighty task of ranking targets for the Jewish human rights organization. But Nazi-hunting has “dropped low on the priority list” of the SWC, says Zuroff. His annual budget, he estimates, including “the office, salaries, everything,” is $200,000. “Believe me, it’s a very modest sum.” Zuroff describes his traditional work, which helped bring hundreds of Nazis to trial, as “one-third detective, one-third historian, one-third political lobbyist.” Now he spends far less time searching for Nazis, and more time urging reticent governments to prosecute Nazis who have already been located. “There are some cases where I’m 100 per cent political lobbyist. Because that’s all I can do.”

The oft-quoted tenet of Zuroff’s work is, “The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the killers.” Overall, though, justice has often not been done. Many cases against ex-Nazis and collaborators were never carried through to a conviction. According to the German central office, it has conducted over 113,000 preliminary interviews; of those, only 7,377 have been passed along to prosecution services. Christoph Safferling, director of the Research and Documentation Center for War Crimes Trials at Philipps-Universität Marburg, estimates that around 6,400 have been convicted.

Some now argue that the whole process should be put to rest. For these critics, trying old men for half-century-old crimes is simply an exercise in futility. “If he’d been Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka then he would have been somebody pretty special,” says Christopher Browning, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But a guy who worked in a series of camps in which we don’t know what he really did?” Others identify more pressing concerns. During the 1994 French trial of Paul Touvier, charged with ordering seven Jews murdered in 1944, France’s intellectual elite rallied against the indictment, insisting that a trial involving the wartime Vichy regime would divert attention away from contemporary war crimes in Yugoslavia. “What good does it do to express one’s disgust over Vichy,” wrote philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, when the French are “Vichyites in our dealings with the victims in Yugoslavia?”

And, clearly, the process is no longer driven by any popular outcry. “I don’t think the people are asking for it,” Efraim Zuroff concedes of the Demjanjuk trial. “I think people in Germany recognize the importance and they’re in favour of it, but it’s not as if there’s a groundswell of popular opinion.” So why now—especially given that, according to Zurroff, Germany could have taken charge of the Demjanjuk file years ago? “I presume it was a political decision,” says Christoph Burchard. “To have the last big Nazi trial in Germany.”

The man at the centre of this “last great Nazi trial” was born as Ivan (later John) Demjanjuk in 1920 in Ukraine. Since most of Ukraine had become a Soviet republic after the First World War, Demjanjuk was drafted into the Red Army to fight against the Germans in the Second World War. “You had no choice,” explains David Crowe. “If you were a young male, you were forced to participate.” In 1942, he was captured and became a German prisoner of war. And that, says Demjanjuk, is where the story ends. In his version, he simply languished during his wartime years as one of many German POWs.