If John Demjanjuk’s conviction is—as seems likely—the final act of an international quest for justice that began shortly after the first Allied troops gazed in horror at the newly “liberated” death camps, it will stand as a curious and potentially troubling counterpoint to those earlier triumphs of civilized legality. This was not the prosecution of German military officials, high and low, that took place at Nuremburg in the immediate aftermath of war, nor was it the arrest and trial of Adolf Eichmann and his “banal” smile by a Jewish state. It even stands distinct from Demjanjuk’s deportation, trial, and conviction in the 1980s, when he was accused, stout and middle-aged, a happy escapee, of being Ivan the Terrible, the infamous and sadistic Treblinka guard. Instead, we have this image of the now 91 year-old convict:
Mr. Demjanjuk spent most of the proceedings, which lasted much of the day, lying on his back in a bed set up not far from where Judge Ralph Alt read the sentence in a sweltering courtroom. With his face hidden behind a blue baseball cap and dark glasses, Mr. Demjanjuk remained nearly motionless, occasionally lifting a knee or an arm but showing no reaction to the proceedings.
One pauses to wonder—is it, perhaps, so late that it was not worth the spectacle? How aware was Demjanjuk of the proceedings themselves? If he had been found not guilty, would it have been worth putting an innocent nonagenarian through another multi-year trial?
And yet, murder and crimes against humanity are not subject to a statue of limitations, and it is difficult to believe that this is not as it should be. To expand Yitz Greenberg’s standard beyond the Holocaust and the burning children, could one say, in the presence of any murder victim, that it had been “too long” to try those responsible for his or her death? Now let us think, more narrowly, of the Shoah, of the children valued less than the expense of their murder, of the crime so vast Arendt paused to wonder whether it could even be understood in the language of murder. If John Demjanjuk was willingly complicit with the murders at Sobibor, then his ninety-one years provoke no sympathy from me, nor should they from you.
There is a problem, however, and it lies not in his age, or even in the idea of complicity—though his defense would not concede that he was at Sobibor, as a guard, they would not rule out the possibility—but in that adverb: “willingly.” How are we, standing in a world returned to civilization, supposed to peer into the world of the camps and determine willingness? Consider what the prosecution and defense agreed on:
Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian soldier in the Soviet Red Army, fighting against the Germans—killing Nazis—through 1942. Then he was taken prisoner, when he was twenty-two, and put in one of Hitler’s prisoner-of-war camps, places where people like him faced ill-treatment, hunger, disease, and a high death rate. (Again, there is no disagreement about this.) The prosecution says he got out of the P.O.W. camp by willingly volunteering to work as a guard at a death camp, knowing full well what that involved, and that the S.S. trained him. The defense won’t concede that he was at Sobibor, but says that, if he was, he was there as, essentially, a forced laborer. (The I.D. papers the prosecution produced say that he was ordered there.) No one says he was a member of the Nazi party.
And then consider that, even if the defense’s variant of this story is the accurate one—that he did not volunteer, but was forced, initially against his will, to work at Sobibor—it does not rule out the possibility of willingness. Here, Christopher Browning’s studies of Ukrainian (Nazi) Reserve Battalions are relevant: while “a significant minority … became eager killers as they were transformed by what they were doing,” the overwhelming majority of the others—the un-enthused—were not willing to refuse to participate in the explicit murder of unarmed civilians. (Browning puts the number of those who refused to participate—but “did not hinder or protest the killing process”—at around 10 percent.) These men would not have been willing, under other circumstances, to murder—but when compelled by the Nazis to participate, even when there were ways to evade participation in murder that would not have endangered their lives, they were not willing to opt-out. That John Demjanjuk, before and after the war, may have been a perfectly ordinary man does not mean he could not have been willingly complicit in extraordinary crimes during it.
But more to the point is that utilizing POWs and other prisoners as parts of the camp system was a Nazi policy. Jews were recruited to lead others into the gas chambers, and to cart the bodies to the crematoria; we are keenly aware of the Kapos and ghetto councils. Non-Jews were no exception to this policy—indeed, Demjanjuk, as a POW would have fit a necessary role. Primo Levi writes, in “The Gray Zone,” of Nazi attitudes toward their former enemies:
It is not enough to relegate them to marginal tasks; the best way to bind them is to burden them with guilt, cover them with blood, compromise them as much as possible, thus establishing a bond of complicity so that they can no longer turn back.
Whether or not Demjanjuk initially volunteered or was compelled, he was right where the Nazis wanted him, as a non-German and as a POW: complicit in the system of the extermination camp, guilty because he was there and helped to grease the wheels of a machine that was not designed for his annihilation. If he was a prisoner compelled to serve as a guard, as his defense held, then it was a classic example of the Nazi policy of involving even the powerless in the power scheme, so that there could be no innocence, so that everyone was complicit, so that they could, as Levi puts it, demonstrate their power to destroy souls as well as minds and bodies. If he came unwillingly, he may still have come to participate willingly. But if this is the case, if he was truly an unwilling participant in the system, but could not bring himself to sacrifice himself by refusing to perform a duty that did not, it seems, have him directly commit murder then it is much harder to pass judgment. As I asked, not expecting answer, when speaking of the accusation that George Soros was a “Jewish Nazi”:
[I]f survival requires that one take part [or], in some small way, participate in an evil system that seeks to destroy you, does survival become tainted by that evil? Does survival itself require expiation?
The court has found that he participated willingly, and that he was and remains guilty of participating in some 20,000 murders. But even with the verdict in, that blurring of innocence and complicity, even if only among others, even if not at all relevant to Demjanjuk’s life, hangs over the proceedings. And in the silence as we pause, trying to determine what causes that faint hesitation in ourselves, as we try to weigh out the facts of what happened in a world none of us can truly understand, that faint, hollow, sixty-five year-old cackling you hear in the distance is the last laughter of the Nazi hierarchy as it takes final pleasure in its ability to impose, for at least a time, utter meaninglessness upon the world.
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In contrast Jewish warcriminals such as Solomon Morel, Nachman Dusanski, and others were allowed to go to Israel in the 1990s to be safe from Polish and Lithuanian justice. Of course given that much of the Israeli government consists of current war criminals the fact that Stalinist warcriminals from the 1940s find haven there is no surprise. There is an incredible double standard here. Indeed Mr. Wall just had two posts definding, justfiying, belittling and essentially denying the Nakba with its attendent massacres like Deir Yassin. The constant harping about Ukrainian and Baltic Nazi collaborators rings hollow. Some of the worst criminals in world history were ethnic Jews working for Stalin like Lazar Kaganovich, Genrikh Liushkov, Genrikh Yagoda, Matvei Berman, and others, yet it is considered ill mannered to mention this fact. By the way these were very high ranking officials in the Stalinist regime. Liushkov was head of the NKVD in the Russian Far East, Yagoda head of the NKVD, Berman head of the Gulag, and Kaganovich a member of the politburo. This is a much greater level of collaboration in crimes against humanity than any Balt or Ukrainian occupied under the Nazis.
When will Morel and Dusanski be extradited by Israel to stand trial in Poland and Lithuania? The claim by their Jewish defenders is that they are too old and the crimes were too long ago. The exact same arguments Wall would deny to men accused of collaborating with the Germans. As I said the last time I commented on one of Mr. Wall’s screeds, “Never Again” only means never again will Jews be victims of genocide. It has nothing what so ever to do with universal human rights. Indeed he just had two posts justifying their denial to the Palestinians.
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Well, Morel died in 2007 and Dushanski died in 2008, so their extradition at this time will be difficult.
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1) I didn’t go into his prior conviction and then appeals victory in much detail because, as I wrote and revised, this post moved in a direction that was more and more focused on “the Gray Zone” (to use Levi’s term) than one that would benefit from my non-attorney evaluation of evidence I’m not intimately familiar with. Had my copy of Roth’s OPERATION SHYLOCK not been a few hundred miles away at the time, I might have gone into a discussion of the original trial/acquittal in light of that novel, but probably in another post. (I did hunt through my apartment before resigning myself to the fact that it’s still on a shelf in Louisville.) I’m willing to grant the court the benefit of the doubt, as I typically am, but I’ll confess that the prior record also adds some to my discomfort. But even without it, the discomfort I described would still be there.
2) Re: Soviet criminals of Jewish extraction: I’m not familiar with the details of the cases you mentioned, but if there was sufficient evidence to meet the standard for extradition, and Israel refused with no genuine, substantiated concerns for a fair trial/safety/etc., then that was clearly wrong, and clearly inappropriate. But they are, in fact, dead, so the point about their future extradition is moot.
3) “Indeed Mr. Wall just had two posts definding, justfiying, belittling and essentially denying the Nakba with its attendent massacres like Deir Yassin.”
I had a post up that was questioning the authenticity of the narrative of Assad’s Times op-ed. I don’t doubt that his family, and many others, fled their homes out of fear; I do doubt, in large part because of his own past discussions of the matter, that they were forced out by the evil Zionist army, which is the impression the Times article gave. I’m skeptical of the narrative in which the current iteration of the Nakba is embedded, and I’m skeptical of many of the ways in which it is commemorated, but I do not deny that a large number of Palestinians left and/or were forced from their homes over the course of 1948-9: some of them were forced out by Jewish soldiers; others by Arab soldiers (again, refer to Mr. Assad’s own accounts of the initial flight); and others still of their own, uncoerced choice. (To quote myself, “it was a war and I will not assert that the hands of either side were clean. War, after all, is hell.”) If implying that the right of return will have to limited to a new Palestinian state as part of an agreement is a screed… then Obama must be some far-right Likudnik.
3) “Some of the worst criminals in world history were ethnic Jews working for Stalin like Lazar Kaganovich, Genrikh Liushkov, Genrikh Yagoda, Matvei Berman, and others, yet it is considered ill mannered to mention this fact. By the way these were very high ranking officials in the Stalinist regime. Liushkov was head of the NKVD in the Russian Far East, Yagoda head of the NKVD, Berman head of the Gulag, and Kaganovich a member of the politburo.”
And those men are one mass shande. However, their guilt does nothing to absolve the guilt of those who worked with the Nazi regime.
4) “This is a much greater level of collaboration in crimes against humanity than any Balt or Ukrainian occupied under the Nazis.”
If we’re talking about levels of individual crimes… then perhaps. But at least half of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust were killed at gunpoint in the forests of eastern Europe, not in the camps. The groups used to carry out these murders were, very frequently, Ukrainian conscripts — indeed, Browning’s book, mentioned above, examines the behavior of precisely these men. Both the gulags and the lagers were evil, but I’d hold that they were different types of evil. Regardless, I’d see nothing wrong with looking to convict former Soviet officials of crimes against humanity — and I continue to fail to see how this means that former Nazi collaborators oughtn’t be.
5) “The claim by their Jewish defenders is that they are too old and the crimes were too long ago. The exact same arguments Wall would deny to men accused of collaborating with the Germans.”
At risk of quoting myself too many times in a response, I’ll leave you with what I wrote in the post above:
“And yet, murder and crimes against humanity are not subject to a statue of limitations, and it is difficult to believe that this is not as it should be. To expand Yitz Greenberg’s standard beyond the Holocaust and the burning children, could one say, in the presence of any murder victim, that it had been “too long” to try those responsible for his or her death?”
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The purpose of this post was not to distract from Jewish Soviet criminals, or from Israel and Palestine and the mess that pervades that situation, but to discuss, in light of a recent event, the continuing effect (and successes?) of the Nazi camps to utterly destroy meaningful categories of morality and right, at least within their physical bounds, and the difficulties of applying those categories to anyone involved, except those most clearly and heinously guilty. THIS for me, is the ongoing challenge of the Holocaust — because that imposition of utter meaningLESSness is the vacuum out of and against which the moral imperative (or Commanding Voice, if you’re into Fackenheim) of Auschwitz booms/whispers. The Holocaust demands the existence of meaning, but the evil of the lagers was so wholly unique that it renders the application of meaningful categories immensely problematic — and that subsequent imperfection of previously stable categories is what the “laughter” I mentioned refers to.
The gulags were evil. I don’t dispute this. But their evil was not asymptotic.
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You’re not allowed to talk about any atrocity unless you talk about my favorite atrocity.
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Should the evidence against Dejmanjuk, such as it is, be admissible?
The documents that place him at Sobibol were provided by the KGB. Even leaving aside the possibility of forgery, they have a filthy pedigree. We can be entirely certain that they weren’t offered out of concern for justice, in fact, they were made available by the group that is responsible for many of the worst human rights abuses of this century. Nothing gathered by the KGB could possibly have been gathered lawfully.
Would western courts be as comfortable using internal Nazi Party documents in the prosecution of non-Nazi’s? I suspect that they’d all balk at doing so, because to use evidence is to offer a kind of endorsement of it’s source. Shouldn’t the same standard apply when the situation is reversed?
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As for internal Nazi documents — I’d actually be interested to see whether this happened in the past. I think that the US/the West in the late 40s/50s would have been much more willing to use that evidence — perhaps in the process of ‘rooting out Soviet spies’ or something — than we would today.
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As far as atrocities are concerned there really is no disagreement about the evils of Nazi Germany. It has been denounced and most of its surviving major perpetrators were tried and hanged in Germany after the war. In contrast there has been no such coming to terms with Stalinism and the crimes of Israel are still being committed on a daily basis. Stalin has been rehabilitated in Russia and that rehabilitation is based on claiming that all acts done were justified by defeating the Nazis because they were somehow uniquely evil, an opinion Wall shares, but does not explain. How is killing a Jew more evil than killing a Crimean Tatar, Chechen, Kalmyk, or Volga German, all nationalities that were deported in their entirety to areas with known lethal living conditions? The mortality rate for the Chechens during WWII in terms of percentage was around a third of the population. This is certainly a crime on the same moral level as the Holocaust.
A big part of Stalin’s rehabilitation is based on claiming that peoples like the Ukrainians and Balts who resisted Soviet rule were Nazi collaborators. This was the whole point of the original Soviet case against Demjanjuk, to discredit Ukrainian national dissent as tied to Nazi Germany. One need only look at the neo-Stalinist propaganda coming out of Russia recently to see that the justification of things like the forcible deportation of the entire Crimean Tatar and Chechen populations to Central Asia is that they really were Nazi collaborators and that Khrushchev was wrong to denounce Stalin. One result of viewing the Holocaust as unique has been that other crimes are allowed to repeat themselves. Hence Yeltsin and then Putin were given free reign to pick up killing Chechens where Stalin left off.
I would take Wall more seriously if his writing did not make special exceptions for certain atrocities. But, his denial of the Nakba is no more intellectually serious than Irving’s denial of the Holocaust. It is well established that the Haganah, Lehi and Irgun began the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs in 1947. If somebody wrote in Europe about the Holocaust the way he does about the Nakba he would be thrown in prison for Holocaust denial.
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Killing a Jew is not more evil than killing any other person. The uniqueness (a blunt word, one I don’t quite like, but one I’ll work with because I have none better) of the Holocaust lies not in WHOM the Nazis killed, but the precise causes and manner—and, indeed, the efficacy—of that killing. The world of the camps was not merely centered on killing Jews, but on the total domination of the whole being—body and soul—of those imprisoned, and on the implication even of the victims in their murders; it was premised not merely on killing the physical being, but on the total domination* of the super-physical (soul, spirit, consciousness, free-will, individual, what-have-you) as well. That the “Special Squads,” the “crematory ravens” who led Jews into the gas chambers and then transferred their bodies to the crematoria were, at Auschwitz, composed almost exclusively of Jews was no accident. It was part of the design. Had the Nazi ideology become obsessed with another group, and had this obsession led to this same end, the “crematory ravens” would have been composed of members of that group.
One could make the argument that this is the anti-ideal toward which all genocide and totalitarian labor camps strive. That the Holocaust, as it were, stands alone (at the moment) is not a testament to the value or the innocence of the Jews as opposed to all other people, but to the efficacy and nihilism of the Nazi regime and its machinery.
*This is Arendt’s term, in fact. She didn’t think that the Soviets couldn’t get there, just that they weren’t there yet. Pairing Solzhenitzyn with Primo Levi should reveal what I mean by that—but also, as you point out, reveal the abstraction of this debate. Both were evil; the distinction between the two is, in great deal, a matter of theory and philosophical approach/understanding.
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I’m not some shill for Bibi, and pointing out that Abbas’ English-language narrative does not match his Arab-language narrative does not make me David Irving, nor does opposing a solution that, erm, is in line with Hamas’ ideal. (Which brings me to the point that — and I don’t believe that I feel like I have to say this in self-defense, but anyway — of course it shouldn’t be a crime to deny the Holocaust. It should be enough to deny a history professor tenure, but not to lock one up.) That’s what my so-called “screeds” said. Politics is the art of the real. Regardless of the point of whether there OUGHT to be a full right of return, it simply will not be part of any two-state solution. That’s not revisionism; that’s reality.
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But, I thought that the whole idea of dismissing all cases of genocide other than the Holocaust as lesser evils had passed by now after its hey day in the 1990s. I guess I was wrong. As I have stated before I believe human rights should be universal. If certain acts are wrong they are equally wrong for all perpetrators regardless of the victims. Otherwise anything other than the Holocaust can be justified by pointing to the greater evil of the enemy, something that has been done recently in Russia. Something that is easy to do if the enemy’s evil is a uniquely greater than all other evils
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2) It’s clear to me now that you’re insisting on mis-representing what I’m arguing. I nowhere “dismissed” other genocides; nor claimed that human rights are not universal, nor that “if certain acts are wrong they are equally wrong for all perpetrators regardless of the victims.” Indeed, I made that statement in my above comment, when I state, “Had the Nazi ideology become obsessed with another group, and had this obsession led to this same end, the “crematory ravens” would have been composed of members of that group.” Put otherwise, the degree of evil is not dependent on the victims.
You are, it seems, an historian. We can, then, agree that no two historical events are precisely the same? That is, that there is at least a degree of uniqueness, of particularity, in all historical events. That every event, then, must be different to a degree from all others. I see no moral wrong in exploring the particularities of history to their full and necessary extent. I don’t see why you’re so terrified of that. But we’re clearly not going to agree.
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And then, when folks show up in comments and explain how, well, you have to understand… no one is excusing the excesses of Stalin but there are a great many factors that went into making trains run on time and, besides, the Tsar was bad too *THEN* go nuts.
Doing it before that point is a hair tacky.
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You know, it was official Soviet Policy not to talk about the extermination of Jews, specifically, by the Nazis, because it was thought that it would minimize the suffering of the other Soviet citizens. This is one of the reasons why Grossman’s Life and Fate was banned.
An amazing book by the way, if you haven’t read it – the letter from Shtrum’s mother is one of the most powerful things I’ve ever read. It looks like you can read all of it here: here, starting at page 80.
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My guest post would look exactly like this (feel free to move this to the front page):
Dude, Stalin was really bad, and he killed millions of people, targetings several groups, including Ukrainians, Jews, and the officer corps. It really sucked to live in the Soviet Union under Stalin; even worse than it sucked to live in the Soviet Union under other leaders, which is saying a lot. And that’s assuming you lived. Did I mention that Stalin murdered or encouraged the murder of millions of people? Also, read Life and Fate.
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Wait, that was a poor choice of words. We’ll be… um…
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below, note that Demjanjuk isn’t German. Even in the German press (which you’ll have to have Google translate for you if you don’t read it), they complain about the government picking on “this foreigner”.
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That review is wonderful as well. Thank you for posting it.
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Inevitably, that produces ridiculous stories such as the Demjanjuk case.
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