German jurisprudence on the Holocaust - a critical piece

[Mortimer]

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/meinung/...xEhT6rliR1WpiM

They were murderers

The German case law on the Holocaust, which is still in force today, only knows three perpetrators. But what about the tens of thousands who have assisted them?
The entire Holocaust, the system of around 7,000 concentration and extermination camps as well as ghettos, this entire mass crime can only be accused of three perpetrators to date. Yes, you read that correctly: It was not more, only these three perpetrators bear sole responsibility, their names are Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich. All the others, the thousands who fired shots in the neck, kicked people in pits, spat at, insulted and laughed at people, beat them in gas chambers and murdered them with poison gas, all those who were still alive after 1945, they were just helpless assistants.

Please what?! What is that supposed to be, a self-righteous German apology from the 1950s? Mitigating talk, as we know it from AfD politicians like Alexander Gauland? No, worse: In summary, this is the German case law on the Holocaust that is still valid today, right up to the Federal Court of Justice. Only three perpetrators would have committed the crime of humanity, this strange, constructed point of view was conceived by German courts in the post-war years. In this way they created a convenient way out that made it possible for them to classify tens of thousands of concentration camp murderers as mere "assistants" and to let them get away cheaply or to stop their proceedings from the outset.

The 96-year-old Irmgard F. is only accused of complicity in murder - why actually?
Today it is easy to forget how far beyond the trace the German jurisprudence on Nazi crimes has been for decades, if you now, as a few over 90-year-olds are in court, especially in small close-ups with individual, sometimes positive developments in the recent case law busy. It's also easy to overlook how far off the track it is by and large to this day. Even if you look to Itzehoe, where an alleged former concentration camp secretary has been charged, Irmgard F. The 96-year-old has to answer before the regional court in Schleswig-Holstein.

The accusation: She is said to have helped organize the killing as the camp commandant's assistant. From her window she could look straight down at what was happening in the Stutthof concentration camp, which she kept going with the correspondence she wrote. But Irmgard F. is now not charged with any of the many murders that were committed day in and day out in this concentration camp. Nobody speaks of a life sentence, not even the public prosecutor's office. But only from aiding and abetting, one or two years in prison is to be expected, probably on probation, almost as if the crime accused of Irmgard F. - running a murder company - was smal

Almost everyone involved in the Holocaust has been defined as aide
This is how the legal standards in Germany are to this day when it comes to the Holocaust. Almost everyone involved has been defined as mere assistants. The shooters at the rifle because they were so low in the hierarchy and had nothing to report; the desk clerks in the room because they were so far removed in the hierarchy and had no blood on their hands; Even the deputy commandant of Auschwitz, Robert Mulka, was convicted in 1965 for mere aiding and abetting - against the loud protests of the courageous prosecutor Fritz Bauer. At most the few accused who went beyond the Nazi killing plan on their own initiative have been sentenced by the courts to life imprisonment as "excess offenders". And that's the exception.

The rule is: if one person kills another, that is murder; but when a few hundred people run a racist killing factory, almost none of them is a murderer, responsibility, so to speak, graciously diffuses in the air. Almost all of them are then only considered to be assistants. This legal twist made it possible for the German judiciary, to date, of around 140,000 Nazi suspects who have been investigated, only around 2000 to be charged with homicides, as the historian Andreas Eichmüller researched a few years ago. In just over 200 cases, the judges found murder, in just under 500 cases aiding and abetting murder, and in a good 300 manslaughter or aiding and abetting. Not more.

It is already clear: A criminal trial against a former concentration camp secretary at the Itzehoe district court in 2021 will not bring the dead back to life. There will be no less tears weeping if there is a punishment. No mother gets her murdered child back, no child gets its murdered mother. Naturally. But the same question about the meaning and purpose of punishing could be asked in any murder trial involving just a single victim. If you want to discuss them, then maybe first there, with the minor offenses, not here, with a mass murder. It does not mean harshness if, many years late, one would still like to see the most fundamental rule of law, that this crime is punished with the highest penalty, taken seriously today.

[Borealis]

We never hear about the individual soldiers and Waffen SS who committed the crimes. We need to hear their stories and analyze them to expose what causes people to act this way. But I already know people are monsters who are capable of committing any kind of atrocity.