Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

eliable memory of him or his immediate actions. The defense lawyer
Ulrich Busch has repeatedly argued that Demjanjuk is also a victim of the
Nazi regime: as a Ukrainian prisoner of war, Demjanjuk became a
Trawniki - one of the many local non-Germans trained as guards in the
easternmost concentration camps - to avoid starvation.
Why now?
Busch also asked the question ‘why now?’ in court in the first days of the
trial in early December. Demjanjuk has only been legally pursued for
these crimes since 2001. Busch pointed to the trials of Demjanjuk’s
superiors that had resulted in acquittals - particularly that of Karl Streibel,
a Trawniki recruiter, tried in Germany in 1976 and scandalously acquitted
after his attorneys successfully argued that he did not know what the
guards he trained would be used for. ‘How can those that give the orders
be innocent, when those that receive them are guilty?’ Busch asked the
court.
Angelika Benz, a PhD history student writing a thesis on the eastern
Polish concentration camps, visited the first days of the Demjanjuk trial
and described the central difficulty in blunt terms. ‘Even though we know
what happened at Sobibor, the problem is that this crime - the Holocaust -
simply can’t be dealt with by our judicial system,’ Benz told Deutsche
Welle, ‘This becomes clear when we’re dealing with someone like
Demjanjuk - someone about whom we know very little.’ With so many
facts missing about Demjanjuk’s actions and motivations, his judges are
forced to redefine the law according to the general and abstract definition
of the Holocaust itself.
The judges’ answer to Busch’s question of how Demjanjuk could be
considered guilty when the man who may have trained him had been
acquitted was simple - the past mistakes of the German judiciary need not
be repeated. This signal that past judgements in Nazi trials are irrelevant,
even flawed, is apparently necessary if any judgement can be passed on
Demjanjuk at all.
The precedents are useless
The historian Joerg Friedrich became famous when he published two
provocative books on the Nazi trials in the early 1980’s - ‘Freispruch fuer
die Nazi-Justiz’ (‘Acquittal for the Nazi-Judiciary’) and ‘Die Kalte
Amnestie’ (‘The Cold Amnesty’) - in which he argued that the German
judiciary had failed to bring the Nazi perpetrators to justice. Now he
believes that the judiciary has come round to his point of view, and is
attempting to correct its mistake by going after the last remaining
perpetrators with new vigor. The trial of 88- year-old Heinrich Boere, a
Dutch member of the SS, is also currently under way in Aachen after
decades of legal prevarication and a tireless campaign to bring him to
justice.
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