On the 12th of February, 2016, Time published an article entitled, “Inside One of the Last Nazi Death Camp Trials” about the second day of the trial of a 94-year-old former guard in the Nazi SS who has been accused of serving in Auschwitz. The survivors described the terror of the death camp, and the accused is being tried with ‘accessory to murder’ in at least 170,000 deaths because no evidence links him directly to any specific death. Hanning is one the last former Nazis still alive, and his case represents a new strategy that seeks to widen the circle of responsibility for the Holocaust.
Comment:
This case against an ageing former Nazi guard may be the last of its kind, and that would be a very good thing. Evil was in this world long before the rise of Nazi Germany, and evil has remained with us ever since its fall, and evil will continue long after the trials of all these former Nazis have been forgotten and the books of men have been closed on the matter.
The Nuremberg trials, which followed the defeat of Nazi Germany, resulted in 12 death sentences in October 1946 for those found guilty of direct involvement in killing Jews during the Holocaust. More trials in Nuremberg took place between December 1946 and April 1949, which resulted in the conviction and sentencing of 97 others. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials charged 22 more defendants under German law between 1963 and 1967 for their roles at the Auschwitz camp, and since then the extradition and trial of individual Nazis suspected of involvement in the Holocaust has continued at a slow, but steady pace. However, most escaped justice for what they did.
Nevertheless, the Holocaust has grown into a highly symbolic event, and in January 2000, 44 governments from around the world met in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, to discuss the importance of Holocaust education, remembrance and research. The resulting Stockholm Declaration contained in the beginning of Article 3 that “With humanity still scarred by genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, antisemitism and xenophobia, the international community shares a solemn responsibility to fight those evils.” Unfortunately, the evils described in the Stockholm Declaration are still rampant in the world.
The symbolism of the Holocaust has obscured the reality that the destruction of one group of people by a more powerful group of people is very common and it is happening today. Jewish lobbying has been successful in focusing so much attention upon themselves as the major victims of the Holocaust, and the democratic countries that promote the Holocaust symbolism have focused so much upon the evil of Nazi fascism and the moral superiority of democracy in fighting fascism that the genocide of Hitler’s campaigns against supposedly inferior races has become a truth of mythological proportions. However, democracies very easily commit such crimes against humanity.
Indeed, democracies invented concentration camps long before Hitler. Both the Germans and the British used them in Africa fifty years before the Second World War to starve their enemies into submission, but the US established the first concentration camps and these were used as part of the final solution for the Cherokee Indians who were driven out from their native lands. One of the guards said, “I fought through the War Between the States and have seen many men shot, but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.” Thousands died on the merciless journey to the camps that was called ‘the trail of tears’. Democracy could not save any of the victims of these genocides, because democratically elected governments passed the laws and appointed the policies for these acts of cruelty.
In 1995, less than thirty years after the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, genocide returned to Europe with the Serbian genocide against Bosnian Muslims. The Serbs even invented a new name for genocide. They called it ‘ethnic cleansing,’ and this name has been heard many times since. Now Europe is suffering again, and this time the mass flows of people are those escaping the devastation caused by their efforts to create democracies in the Middle East by force. Most of the refugees are from Syria, 897,645 up till December 2015 have applied for asylum in Europe and 4 million are refugees in countries neighbouring Syria. The suffering of these people is due to Bashar Al-Assad, and although he runs a brutal totalitarian state, he received support from the West who applied arms sanctions against the rebels who struggled to remove him and sought to keep him in power until a ‘satisfactory replacement’ could be found. None was found, and now the world has gathered against Syria to ensure a solution backed by force-of arms.
By continuing to place Hitler’s crimes against the Jews on a unique level, any other brutality in the world has been made to appear softer. Indeed, those who managed to ethnically cleanse the land of Palestine from half its former population were Jews, and the Zionist state they created has a terrible record of abuse against the Palestinians that remain.
By placing the defeat of Hitler as the greatest self-justification of democracy, the inhumanity of the democracies of today is masked by self-righteous incredulity. The Danish government welcomed Jewish refugees after the Second World War, but last week it voted to take away the jewellery, watches and phones of Muslim refugees to help pay for their costs. The last Nazis of Auschwitz will soon have died of old age, but more of what they stood for than the world would like to believe is still very much alive.
Dr. Abdullah Robin