Here are two stories from The Gazette that show how slow our world has been to react in regard with Nazi hunting. Of course one has to realize that in the western world, in the U.S. for example, nazi war criminals, especially those coming from Ukraine and Belarus, have been offered a free pass for immigration in gratitude for their services. After serving the Third Reich as counter-communist agents in Eastern Europe, some of them were smuggled to the U.S. through the channels of State Department Office of Policy Coordination and the protection of U.S. Justice Department. John Loftus’ book, The Belarus Secret, which has recently been republished under the title America Nazi’s Secret, goes into the concrete details of these facts.
What strikes me here is the humour and irony of these situations. In the first article, we have a 90 year-old Ukrainian man living in Germany accused of helping to murder roughly 28,000 Jews during WWII as a nazi death camp guard. The trial coming to an end, the accused, John Demjanjuk, has threatened to go on hunger strike! For him the trial is a « political show ». It is not the first time that he has been accused of something similar. He had a trial in Israel previously and been found guilty but he was released. The Supreme Court established that he was the wrong man. Suffering from multiple illnesses, he accuses Germany of blaming him for the holocaust. The second article presents briefly the case of a 89-year old former Nazi police officer who became a U.S. citizen in 1955. He is now being expelled from the United States for rounding up and shooting Jews in Ukraine during WWII.
To make a long story short, what bothers me the most here is the atmosphere of circus that characterizes those proceedings. These two individuals are probably guilty of the charges that are laid against them. That is not the point. The point is rather that the accusations come six decades later, at a time when the accused are elderly, barely capable of sustaining any proceedings or any activity at all. Obviously, the accusations come after the delay of imposed secrecy has passed. When these agents from Ukraine and Belarus have been smuggled into certain countries, sometimes with new identities, new assignments, etc, a security seal has been placed on their files which can take several decades to be declassified. That is why we find ourselves today with these ridiculous trials. If you can’t bring somebody on trial for crimes against humanity in a reasonable delay, please…