Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

Fortunately evil never knows when to stop oppression or extortion, and so
the noose tightens around its own neck. This same scenario is happening
with the absurd legal case playing out in Munich where John Demjanjuk is on
trial for murder that allegedly happened over sixty years ago. Over the 19–20
December weekend Ben Knight and Robert Mudge put together this article
for Deutsche Welle, which published it the next day, Monday 21 December
2009, informing the world that the current German government still holds
itself accountable for the legal results that flowed from its unconditional
surrender in 1945. What choice is there but to toe the line – to this date
Germany still has no peace treaty with its former enemies, the Allies.
Without raising the specific 2005–08 Holocaust show trials surrounding
Germar Rudolf, Horst Mahler, Sylvia Stolz and Ernst Zündel, the
Demjanjuk trial is having a similar effect on the German judiciary. The two
mindsets driving German legal thinking are again converging the absurdity
of Holocaust trials and their legal entanglements, where it has become a
matter of a victimless crime and no evidence of a factual nature can be
presented in defence for fear of attracting an indictment for the defence
counsel; the Demjanjuk trial will hear evidence from deceased witnesses!
Demjanjuk presents German law with an almost impossible problem
The Demjanjuk trial, which resumed Monday, has offered up some
awkward moral questions for the German justice system. But compared
with other Nazi trials, Demjanjuk represents a completely new legal
challenge.
The trial of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian former prisoner-of-war turned
concentration camp guard, has once again lifted the lid on questions about
how the German justice system has dealt with the murderers of the
Holocaust.
Not least among these questions is: ‘why now?’ Even by the glacial timescale
dictated by the law, the Demjanjuk trial has been a long time coming.
The file of evidence against him has not changed since his identity was
established in 1993, when an Israeli court cleared him of being a
notorious Treblinka guard called Ivan the Terrible. A single identity card
is the main piece of evidence: it shows that Demjanjuk was indeed a guard
at Sobibor, probably between March and September 1943, and therefore
must have helped murder at least 27,900 people thought to have died
there in that period.
But the rest of the evidence against Demjanjuk is either circumstantial or
mitigating. Most of the 35 plaintiffs are simply relatives of those killed at
Sobibor, and the four actual survivors of the camp are too old to have a
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