UNJUSTIFIED PURSUIT OF THE VERY ELDERLY The unholy crusade against alleged ‘Nazi war criminals’ grows worse each year. By NIGEL JACKSON

On Yahoo News on 26 February I have read a report online marked Reuters and headlined “Former Nazi camp guard arrives in Germany after removal from US.” It tells that 95 year-old Friedrich Karl Berger has been deported to Germany on February 20 after living in the USA since 1959. He had not then been arrested, but it looked as though charges were pending.

A US court last year ruled that he should be expelled after prosecutors in Celle (North Germany) opened an investigation into whether he was involved with the murder of prisoners at a satellite concentration camp of the Neuengamme network near Hamburg in 1945. Earlier in February prosecutors charged a 100 year-old man with being an accessory to 3518 murders committed while he was allegedly a guard at the Sachenhausen concentration camp.

The report noted that “in recent years prosecutors have [been]… seizing the last opportunity to secure justice for the millions who perished in concentration camps.”

To a Christian brought up in the British legal tradition this behaviour seems monstrous. You do not treat the very elderly so mercilessly. You leave it to God. And it is clear that such men cannot possibly be given a fair trial when they are so infirm, feeble and fragile. Such monstrous behaviour is a clear sign that something is very corrupt in nations that indulge in such cruelty and wickedness.

Yet Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in California, claims otherwise. In an article in The Irish Times online dated 18 February and entitled “Germans are right to pursue 100 year-old former Nazi war criminals”, he provided eight justifications of such pursuit. There follows a list of his points with my responses in italics.

(1) The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of the perpetrators. In theory, yes. On the other hand, much evidence has been brought forward by Holocaust revisionists that many accusations in the past were not soundly based.

(2) Old age should not afford protection for those who committed such heinous crimes. However, it becomes an argument against pursuits and prosecutions when the accused are too old to be given a fair trial.

(3) We owe it to the victims. If we owe them anything, it is to be completely fair and humane in the way in which we treat those we believe committed crimes.

(4) The trials send a powerful message that if you commit such crimes, even decades later you may be held accountable. Yes, but those accused must be capable of receiving a fair trial. Moreover, the use of pseudo-justice for political propaganda purposes is not ethically acceptable.

(5) These trials play an important role in the fight against Holocaust denial and distortions. Or they may be seen as unethical attempts to prevent a controversial approach to Holocaust history from being publicly aired and debated – which seems likely to be the case.

(6) Nazi war criminals are the last people on earth who deserve any sympathy, since they had no sympathy for their victims. No human beings are totally undeserving of sympathy. There is a tendency here to make humans appear as inhuman. And why are they ‘the last people’? How are they worse than all the other criminals in world history?

(7) At the time Germans who did not want to participate in executions were not in danger of being executed or facing other severe penalties. Maybe, but there could still have been terrible psychological pressures on them; and they may not have known the full details of what was happening.

(8) Defendants in cases witnessed by Zuroff have failed to express regret or remorse. Maybe this was because they saw themselves as innocent of the charges against them, in which case they were showing integrity.

In the USA The Department of Justice has been involved in assisting in this crusade. It is highly likely that this body has not been adequately impartial in its activities.

Who is going to protest against this inhumanity? What are Western intellectuals going to say about it? Can they recall the story of the Good Samaritan and the poor behaviour of those who just walked on by the wounded traveller? Are they turning their backs on the Old Testament

injunction not to bear false witness against your neighbour. For, failing to speak out here looks very much like complicity in false witnessing.

And why is this crusade really being mounted? Is it to terrorise a subject population?

As Bertolt Brecht wrote in 1939, “unhappy is the land that needs heroes.”