Pursuing evil to the grave

JOHN DEMJANJUK, the Nazi death camp guard who has lived in the United States since falsifying his entry papers in 1952, is again in the news, facing deportation to Germany or perhaps Ukraine, his country of origin.

Demjanjuk has been extradited once, to Israel, where the Supreme Court in 1993 overturned his conviction and death sentence, saying that he was not, in fact, Ivan the Terrible, an infamous guard at the Treblinka death camp. But today, the documentary evidence is clear that although he was not Ivan, he was a guard in several concentration camps, including Sobibor, in Poland, where the Germans exterminated an estimated 250,000 people in 1942 and 1943. Because of the persuasive evidence of Demjanjuk’s service to Nazi mass murder, a federal judge stripped him of his U.S. citizenship in 2002, which set the stage for the current deportation proceedings.

The Holocaust ended 60 years ago. Many undoubtedly wonder why Demjanjuk, now 85, should not be left in peace. News reports described him at his most recent hearing, last week, as frail, moaning, hunched in a wheelchair and suffering from chronic back pain. His will certainly be one of the last legal proceedings against the Holocaust’s perpetrators because both the perpetrators and the survivors of the Nazis’ crimes are dying off. The trials (which the German public never supported anyway) have all but come to a halt in Germany.

So, should Demjanjuk at this late date be held accountable? Indeed, how should we assess the overall record of the last 60 years in bringing these mass murderers to justice? Now that the surviving victims of the Holocaust are becoming ever fewer, have we failed or succeeded in bringing their tormentors and the murderers of so many to justice?

No one should shed a tear for Demjanjuk and the other mass murderers, even if they are now elderly. They committed unsurpassable crimes, willfully torturing and slaughtering unthreatening, defenseless Jewish men, women and children by the tens of thousands. There is no statute of limitations for murder in this country, and, recognizing the historic nature of the Holocaust, the German Parliament repeatedly voted to extend the statute of limitations for murder there as well. Legally, the perpetrators’ culpability for their willful crimes is beyond doubt. Is it any less clear morally?

That Demjanjuk and others escaped justice for decades, many rejoicing over their crimes, should not earn them a permanent “get out of jail” card. Eluding criminal punishment and living well after murdering so many, and while one’s surviving victims bear their scars every day, is no argument for being allowed to continue to elude punishment. The notion -- never baldly articulated -- that if someone is arrested for his crime immediately or six months later, he should be punished, but that if he manages not to be punished for 10, 30 or 60 years, he merits permanent immunity, is illogical and strange.

If anything, the moral outrage should not be directed at those seeking justice but, in addition to the criminals themselves, at the political and legal authorities that have done so little over 60 years to punish these murderers.

Germany -- not surprisingly, because most of the perpetrators were German -- has done the most to prosecute these mass murderers. But from the perspective of justice, the record has been dismal, in two senses. Even though the Germans have convicted what seems like a large number of people for Nazi crimes -- 6,500 -- it is a tiny percentage of the hundreds of thousands who committed murder and other heinous crimes against Jews and non-Jews during the Nazi period. (In 1996, the German justice system’s clearinghouse for prosecuting Nazi crimes had more than 333,000 names in its catalog listing members of killing institutions, of which there were more than 4,100).

And the sentences the killers received -- typically a few years for the murder of hundreds, thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands; sometimes no more than minutes or hours in prison for the murder of each of their victims -- were travesties, not instances of justice. (Josef Oberhauser, for instance, who was convicted in 1965 in Germany for his participation in the murder of 300,000 people in the Belzec camp, received a prison sentence of only 4 1/2 years). So, contrary to what many say or imply -- that enough is enough, that we should let these harmless old men alone, that we should not hound them endlessly -- there is no good argument for letting them be. They have not been hounded; most (and especially non-German Nazi collaborators) have lived well, enjoying perfect immunity.

Still, the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators has been more successful than the prosecution of other genocide perpetrators. After most mass murders, those who committed the atrocities generally get off scot-free, with perhaps a few symbolic prosecutions of leaders or sacrificial underlings serving as a stand-in for actual justice. In Turkey, Indonesia, Cambodia, the countries of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, murderers of thousands have enjoyed the sympathy and protection of the political authorities and populace alike.

This is all the more reason to redouble our efforts, to press forward prosecuting mass murderers from any genocide for as long as it takes, no matter how old they are. Until those tempted to slaughter others know that they will be pursued and punished, they will have little reason not to kill.

So, instead of worrying about this frail old man, shed a tear instead for Demjanjuk’s victims -- and the victims of future Demjanjuks. Demjanjuk, still living well near Cleveland, has not received a small portion of his deserved punishment -- of the punishment he would have gotten had he murdered one non-Jewish German or one American in 1943, 1960, 1980 or 2000.

DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGEN, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” (Vintage, 1997), is completing a book on genocide in our time.