There was a programme on BBC4 on Tuesday called ‘My Father was a Nazi Commandant’ which told the story of a German woman, daughter of a Nazi, meeting a Jewish girl, who had worked as a servant under his auspices in the Plaszow concentration camp, near Krakow. The Nazi in question was the infamous Amon Goeth, famously depicted by Joseph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s ‘Schindler’s List’. As the programme and the film show correctly, Goeth was following orders from above, but he was in ultimate control of the thousands passing through the gates of Plaszow. Many of them making the journey from the ghettoes of Poland would never see anything else again.
What was clear from the German woman, who had never met her father (Goeth was hanged when she was a baby), was that she felt the burden of grief and pain from a generation that she did not know and from a father she had no connection. She had grown up in a Germany that had lost millions of its citizens to war. There was a culture of reticence, rather than denial. Even to do this day, criminals with an association to Nazi terror are still being tried. In May, a trial in Munich ended following the case of John Demjanjuk, a 91-year-old naturalised American, found guilty for the murder of nearly 30,000 prisoners at the Sobibor camp. Although found guilty, Demjanjuk did not face a penal sentence. So have we reached a stage where justice serves simply as a footnote to history? Have we learnt anything from putting men and women in a court of law to face judgement?
In the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands and Arusha, Tanzania, prosecutors have been questioning suspected war criminals and instigators about their roles in ethnic violence and murder in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia. Perhaps what is most noticeable when we see the men (mostly) in the dock is their meekness, their banality; the very essence that we expect of monsters does not appear present as they take the stand. These men naturally see themselves as Pontius Pilate figures, guilty of accessory but not murder, as academics call it perpetrators not instigators.
This was true of Adolf Eichmann, an organiser and overseer of the Holocaust, who was captured by the Israeli security services in Argentina and brought to trial in Jerusalem. Though historians and spectators conclude that Eichmann was part of a ‘show trial’, (many of the Nazi hierarchy had escaped justice through suicide at the end of the war) this was an opportunity to see why he had participated in the murders. Why did he get involved? What was it about his personality that saw he thought he was doing right? Eichmann’s answer, like many men in that situation, was that he was following orders from above and that it was opportunity for him to further his career. There is something chilling of these men’s evidence, and perhaps it seems naive to account it to a selfish streak and opportunism. Yet, when you account for the massacres that took place in Poland, Bosnia and Rwanda, the perpetrators weren’t trained soldiers or mercenaries they were blue collar tradesman or labourers who lived in a system that inculcated values that inevitably stoked ethnic tensions. They became actors in a play that been written many years before.
What was clear from the German woman, who had never met her father (Goeth was hanged when she was a baby), was that she felt the burden of grief and pain from a generation that she did not know and from a father she had no connection. She had grown up in a Germany that had lost millions of its citizens to war. There was a culture of reticence, rather than denial. Even to do this day, criminals with an association to Nazi terror are still being tried. In May, a trial in Munich ended following the case of John Demjanjuk, a 91-year-old naturalised American, found guilty for the murder of nearly 30,000 prisoners at the Sobibor camp. Although found guilty, Demjanjuk did not face a penal sentence. So have we reached a stage where justice serves simply as a footnote to history? Have we learnt anything from putting men and women in a court of law to face judgement?
In the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands and Arusha, Tanzania, prosecutors have been questioning suspected war criminals and instigators about their roles in ethnic violence and murder in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Yugoslavia. Perhaps what is most noticeable when we see the men (mostly) in the dock is their meekness, their banality; the very essence that we expect of monsters does not appear present as they take the stand. These men naturally see themselves as Pontius Pilate figures, guilty of accessory but not murder, as academics call it perpetrators not instigators.
This was true of Adolf Eichmann, an organiser and overseer of the Holocaust, who was captured by the Israeli security services in Argentina and brought to trial in Jerusalem. Though historians and spectators conclude that Eichmann was part of a ‘show trial’, (many of the Nazi hierarchy had escaped justice through suicide at the end of the war) this was an opportunity to see why he had participated in the murders. Why did he get involved? What was it about his personality that saw he thought he was doing right? Eichmann’s answer, like many men in that situation, was that he was following orders from above and that it was opportunity for him to further his career. There is something chilling of these men’s evidence, and perhaps it seems naive to account it to a selfish streak and opportunism. Yet, when you account for the massacres that took place in Poland, Bosnia and Rwanda, the perpetrators weren’t trained soldiers or mercenaries they were blue collar tradesman or labourers who lived in a system that inculcated values that inevitably stoked ethnic tensions. They became actors in a play that been written many years before.
It is estimated that between 1900 and 2000, around 60 million people were killed through genocide and ethnic cleansing, that’s around the same amount of combat deaths in World War Two. Men like Goeth, were sadistic animals and oversaw terror that no human should have seen. Perhaps it is too difficult to rationalise the others, they are participants and for no palpable reason can we explain why they committed, watched or acquiesced. Like countries and international organisations. We are all guilty to some extent. It is often easier to sit back and do nothing. As the eighteenth century politician Edmund Burke said, “When good men do nothing, evil prevails”. History dictates all.
