Issue of the Week: Human Rights, War

Shoes of Holocaust victims, Majdanek death camp museum

 

Updated: “Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky” -Elie Wiesel

We take another break from our ongoing commentary today on the end of civilization as we knew it, to cover a related story, but one we choose to focus on in a singular manner as an historic moment that calls for this.

Today, the “last Nazi death-camp guard”, as The Washington Post described it, was expelled from the US.

How can this statement be sufficiently underlined?

The last one.

From the Nazi barbarism that nearly destroyed civilization.

And from which the word genocide emerged.

This was an important political day in many other respects in the US given the convictions related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigations and, among other things, the fallout for President Trump. But in the end, this will all depend on the political make-up of Congress. So, this may be going to something huge, or to nothing. The possibilities in this, and other respects, are many.

That the Trump White House chose to announce the expelling of the last Nazi guard today is obviously rich with irony.

In any event, the action has been years in the making, and was greeted with bipartisan praise.

But whatever the politics of the action, whoever had been in the White House, the fact of it represents a much larger historical reality.

The last one.

For now, we leave it to the following three articles from The Washington Post to cover this historical marker. From a report today, an opinion piece today, and a related editorial in May with links to a new special exhibition at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Americans and the Holocaust”.

Then, a repost of an excerpt from our post for Issue of the Week and Message of the Day for September 20, 2016, on Nicolas Kristoff’s Sunday Review piece in The New York Times, “Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?”.

Kristoff wrote: “It was the Nazis who committed genocide, but the U.S. and other countries also bear moral responsibility for refusing to help desperate people. That’s a thought world leaders should reflect on as they gather in New York to discuss today’s refugee crisis”.

The piece was haunting then. More so revisiting it in our post from that day now. Written as the war in Syria, the worst combination of slaughter and refugee crisis since World War Two, was raging as it had been for years, moving toward an appalling apex. Continuing along with war, again, in Iraq, ISIS, and instability throughout the region, over the two years since, and not finished still.

At that point, Brexit had, in no small part, already been part of the collateral damage, and the US election, also in no small part, was about to be, as we’ve referenced from the start of our series on the end of civilization as we knew it. But we’ll get back to that.

Our post at the end below from September 20, 2016 also refers to Ken Burn’s and Artemis Joukowsky’s documentary premiering on PBS that day, “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps War”, which Kristoff writes about in his article. The link to viewing is in the post. Its more than worth revisiting.

Reminders all, of realities that have never been fully faced, can never be forgotten, have contributed to policies allowing millions of deaths in genocides since, and have application now. Not just in many specific horrific situations, but in the lack of a needed global system to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a reality. We will of course be back to addressing that issue.

Here are the articles in The Washington Post:

“95-year-old Nazi guard living in the U.S. deported to Germany as prosecutions for Holocaust crimes surge.”

By Rick Noack, Seung Min Kim contributing, August 21, 2018

“LUDWIGSBURG, Germany — Before Allied forces liberated Nazi Germany and the survivors of Adolf Hitler’s death and labor camps more than 70 years ago, tens of thousands of Nazi criminals who were directly involved in the Holocaust disappeared.

Some escaped abroad. Others hid in German cities, moving into houses with people they would have sent to their deaths under the Hitler regime.

Few of them faced justice — until now, perhaps.

At least 23 alleged Nazi criminals who are believed to have worked in death camps were already facing charges in Germany and Austria by June, marking a dramatic increase, compared with previous decades.

On Tuesday, the White House announced that it had deported 95-year-old Jakiw Palij, the last known alleged former Nazi labor camp guard living in the United States. Palij is not currently facing charges, but prosecutors said that they were looking for more evidence that would justify criminal proceedings.

The resident of the Queens borough of New York was arrested Monday and deported to Germany early Tuesday, according to the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Palij was moved to a nursing home upon arrival in the city of Düsseldorf, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported.

In a statement, U.S. officials indicated that the deportation was the result of negotiations by “President Trump and his team” and “collaborative efforts with a key European ally,” Germany.

Palij was born in what today constitutes Ukraine but was part of Poland at the time. After the end of World War II, he left Europe for the United States, where he became a citizen in 1957 by hiding his Nazi past. But 17 years ago, in 2001, Palij admitted his involvement with the Nazi SS, Hitler’s feared paramilitary organization.

Palij admitted to U.S. officials in 2001 that he was trained at the SS paramilitary camp in the town of Trawniki where units were specifically prepared to participate in the Holocaust. The now 95-year-old also worked at Trawniki’s labor camp the same year the Nazis massacred 6,000 Jews there. Palij has maintained that he did not participate in any killings and German prosecutors currently believe that it is impossible to prove his involvement.

Palij’s deportation appears to have been the result of pressure by the Trump administration, rather than by German authorities.

U.S. officials took away Palij’s citizenship in 2003, and the former Nazi guard lost an appeals process two years later, but administrative challenges dragged on until now because it was unclear to which country Palij should be deported. American courts were unable to charge Palij because his alleged crimes occurred abroad and all three European countries where prosecutors would have had more jurisdiction — Germany, Ukraine and Poland — refused to accept the former guard.

U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell indicated in a briefing call on Tuesday that Trump had taken a personal interest in Palij’s case, which likely made the difference. “I don’t know how he learned of the case, but it was very clear that he knew this individual as a Nazi guard and wanted him out of the United States,” Grenell said.

The ambassador said he brought the issue up in a number of recent meetings with German officials. “The president asked me to do this … they could tell we were making it a priority.”

“(The Germans) saw this as a moral obligation that they had, not so much a legal obligation,” said Grenell, referring to Palij not being a German citizen.

In Germany, Palij’s case will be handled by the country’s Nazi crimes authority, based in the city of Ludwigsburg, where officials said on Tuesday that the likelihood of a trial against Palij was low. The agency is currently focusing at a number of cases that are more likely to result in a trial.

All of the agency’s suspects are in their 90s, and some are likely to die ahead of any sentencing or could be declared unfit to stand trial. More than 70 years on, there is little time to be lost: It could be the last chance for Nazi criminals to face justice for crimes that continue to represent the worst of mankind.

How many more individuals will be charged largely depends on Jens Rommel, Germany’s sixth chief prosecutor for Nazi crimes. “All of my five predecessors assumed that they’d be the last person in this office,” Rommel said in an interview in June.

“In recent years, though, we’ve made some remarkable progress,” he said.

There was little reason for such enthusiasm only a few years ago, after German prosecutors for decades faced hurdles that made it impossible to charge a wide range of suspects despite evidence of their Nazi past.

“By 1960, murder and abetting murder were the only Nazi-era crimes that prosecutors could charge,” Elizabeth Barry White, a senior historian with the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, explained last year. High-ranking Nazi officers were often charged with lesser offenses only because their direct responsibility for the killing of one or more individuals could not be proved based on the narrow German jurisdiction. In many cases, lower-ranking guards or soldiers such as Palij were not even prosecuted at all.

“As time passed and the higher-ranking perpetrators died out, the pool of potential defendants shrank to those against whom evidence was hardest to find,” White said. A new approach was needed, and it came after a court convicted former Nazi guard John Demjanjuk in 2011.

Before 2011, prosecutors needed to provide evidence that guards had themselves murdered Jews or other Nazi opponents. But the Demjanjuk verdict was based on a dramatically different approach: His mere presence at the Nazi death camp was sufficient to establish responsibility for the killing.

Demjanjuk later appealed the sentence but died before a court could evaluate his claims. The new legal framework’s viability was proved only two years ago when another former guard lost his appeal following a similar sentence.

At the time, many feared that it may also have been the last.

And while the verdict may have led to the sentencing of hundreds more guards if it had come years earlier, the recent increase in investigations has led to new optimism among Germany’s Nazi prosecutors, said chief prosecutor Rommel, sitting in his Ludwigsburg office filled with books about the Nuremberg trials and a map of World War II Germany.

Rommel and his colleagues mainly rely on documents found in archives or in memorial sites of former death camps. The unit’s eight investigators then painstakingly compare the entries found in equipment or sick lists to establish a suspect’s identity. Once they’ve found a possible match, Rommel’s team checks whether the individual could still be alive.

“In 95 percent of cases, this isn’t be the case,” Rommel said.

In the agency’s basement, tens of thousands of paper documents are stored that include details on convicts or clues that may eventually provide the identities of more suspects. It’s the world’s most comprehensive database of Nazi criminals.

But as German authorities assumed that active cases were going to drop, the archives were never digitalized. The agency’s bureaucratic paper trail isn’t the only challenge. Cases are also slowed because the Ludwigsburg-based Nazi crimes agency handles only early-stage investigations that are later taken over by local prosecutors. “It takes time for prosecutors to review and understand the evidence. Given the age of the suspects, their capacity to stand trial can change very quickly, so that a once-promising case can overnight become impossible to prosecute,” White said.

Investigators aren’t sure how long they will be able to continue their work, because of the advanced age of the identified suspects.

Walking through his agency’s headquarters, surrounded by thousands of files cards with details on the Nazi criminals he and his predecessors hunted, Rommel acknowledged that the job had taken a personal toll on the investigators, especially as time is now running out.

“I don’t take those papers home with me. I just wouldn’t be able to let it go,” he said.”

“Trump just deported a Nazi. That’s a move I can get behind.”

By David Von Drehle, Opinions, August 21, 2018

“President Trump’s approach to immigration has been among his most polarizing stances — which is really saying something. So it’s worth pausing over the story of an old man who was carried from his home in Queens on Monday, strapped to a stretcher and deported. All to bipartisan acclaim.

Jakiw Palij, 95, will likely be the last Nazi death-camp guard expelled from the United States. Tracked down by Justice Department sleuths and confronted in 1993, Palij admitted he was not a farmer during World War II, as he had said while lying his way to U.S. citizenship. But he denied participating in the murder of Polish Jews, even as he was stripped of his citizenship and was ordered deported in 2004.

Yes, 2004.

He remained so long in New York because his homeland, now in Ukraine, wouldn’t take him. Nor would Germany, which has only recently shown much interest in prosecuting aging guards from the camps. New York politicians, including Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D), pressed the State Department to try harder, and activists staged regular protests outside Palij’s house. Yet the years rolled by.

Then along came Trump, who finally made a priority of enforcingthe deportation order. In sending Ambassador Richard Grenell to Germany, the president instructed the envoy to turn up the heat on Berlin to issue the required travel documents.

“I’m glad this man is finally being sent back,” Schumer said. “He’s a war criminal.”

With luck, Germany will reconsider its stated intention to let the man die without standing trial, because his story is worth a hard look at a time when anti-Semitism is creeping back out of its swamps across Europe. The tale begins in 1941, when Palij was about 18 years old, a peasant boy living on the Polish-Ukrainian border.

Making what proved to be a suicidal miscalculation, Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union. The initial blitzkrieg captured Ukraine, including thousands of prisoners, among them Palij. Captives willing to collaborate with the Nazis were dubbed “Hiwis” and sent to a camp at Trawniki for special training.

What they were trained to do was enslave and murder innocent civilians, mostly Jews. The Nazis had begun in earnest their ghastly project of rounding up Europe’s Jews, stealing all their possessions, exploiting them as slaves and eventually killing them. But Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, worried that much of this work might have a demoralizing effect on his elite troops, so he staffed slave labor camps and policed ghettos with Hiwis such as Palij and the notorious John “Ivan the Terrible” Demjanjuk.

Thus branded as enemy collaborators, the Hiwis could not return home after the war. A number of them made their way to the United States as refugees, blending into the rivers of humanity displaced by the war. No one knows how many passed away peacefully, never unmasked.

By the time the feds knocked on Palij’s door, they had testimony placing him among the Hiwis dispatched to do the dirty work of the Warsaw Ghetto liquidation of 1943. Some 200,000 people or more were brutalized and killed in that process. Palij denied being in Warsaw but placed himself at Trawniki, which was its own variety of hell.

In one area of that camp, Hiwis oversaw the sorting of the few final possessions looted from Jews sent to gas chambers around Poland. In another area, the Ukrainians herded slaves to and from a nearby factory — until the day in November 1943 when they were ordered to kill the slaves.

U.S. authorities believe Palij was present, in some capacity, as 6,000 Jews were lined up and shot. A few workers were spared long enough to burn the corpses on a giant grill made of railroad tracks and to dig pits for the charred remains. Then they, too, were gunned down.

Seventy-five years is too soon for Germans to forget that in living memory their country did such things. And the crimes that Germans were too squeamish to commit themselves, they compelled their prisoners to do. I don’t believe guilt is inherited, but the obligation to remember is.

As for Palij, it is proper that he should pay, even at this late date, some price for his actions. Complicity in the Holocaust was never his only choice. Many Ukrainians chose to suffer in German POW camps rather than inflict suffering on others.

Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, was among the millions who suffered in Nazi death camps. From that experience, he concluded that the essence of human dignity lies in precisely such choices. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way,” he wrote.

It is never too late to be reminded.”

“A Holocaust exhibit raises disturbing questions. The answers still matter today.”

The Post’s View, by the Editorial Board, May 3, 2018

“IF THE point of history is to learn from it, there are lessons galore to be found in a new special exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the most important since the museum opened a quarter-century ago. The exhibit, “Americans and the Holocaust,” raises disturbing and complex questions about the years leading up to the killing of 6 million Jews and others in the Nazi camps. The answers resonate today.

A persistent myth is that Americans lacked information about the Nazi concentration camps. The exhibit shows otherwise, illustrating how news about the Nazi persecution of the Jews was reported in local, as well as national, newspapers and magazines, and in newsreels in the 1930s. On Time magazine’s July 10, 1933 cover , Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels appeared over the caption, “Say it in your dreams, ‘THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME’ ”

True, there was a dearth of visual information about Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The devastating photographs only came later. Still, a sizable gap existed between what was known and what was done. Without offering excuses, the exhibit probes the explanations for this lacuna, including the impact the Great Depression had on the American people, and powerful currents of xenophobia and isolationism. After the dreadful Nazi riot against Jews in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, polls showed that Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of Nazi treatment of the Jews, but also showed that they did not want to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the United States. The numbers of refugees admitted were a fraction of those who applied.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the nation to war, but he did not take the lead on a rescue of the Jews, a decision still much debated. The exhibit does not alter the known facts of Mr. Roosevelt’s logic. The president met at the White House with the Polish underground member Jan Karski in 1943, who told him of the horrors suffered by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and in a transit camp. But the president remained focused on war-winning, not rescue.

The exhibit recounts some shocking government blunders, including the State Department’s inexcusable refusal in 1942 to pass on information from Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress’s representative in Switzerland, about a plan being formulated in Hitler’s headquarters to eliminate 3.5 million to 4 million Jews. “Do not send” is scrawled on the document. More can and should have been done to raise the alarm during the war. By the time of the D-Day landing, 5 million Jews had already perished.

The exhibit notes that on Dec. 3, 1944, on this editorial page, The Post first introduced to readers a new word, “genocide,” coined by a Polish Jewish immigrant lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. Today, we have vastly improved tools to discover violence against a whole people; witness the telling satellite photographs of burned-out Rohingya villages in Burma or of the concentration camps in North Korea. To cite those examples, unfortunately, is to acknowledge that our response mechanism has not improved along with our technology.”

To conclude, here’s an excerpt from our post from September 20, 2016:

“Is there ever a time when it’s okay to lie”, the children asked?

“Yes”, we said. “If you were hiding Jews in the basement and the Nazis came to the door, you would be morally required to lie.” That’s the example everyone understands. The same would apply to any such situation of saving and protecting lives, we said.

Of course, the final step and only step that matters in a moral life is not just being ready to lie to protect the innocent, but being ready to lose everything, and being ready to die to do so.

That is the issue covered by Nicholas Kristof, our resident global conscience at the New York Times, in the Sunday Review.

“Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?” he asks in the title of his article. He then goes on to give an extraordinary example of those who risked their lives to do exactly that. And some who lost them, including children.

Kristof brings this home in his article, in a story with lessons for all of us today, “just as world leaders conclude two days of meetings in New York City about today’s global refugee crisis, an echo of the one in the late 1930s. ‘The vitriol in public speech, the xenophobia, the accusing of Muslims of all of our problems ‘ these are similar to the anti-Semitism of the 1930s and ’40s.’

The companion piece to Kristof’s article is Ken Burn’s and Artemis Joukowsky’s film, “Defying the Nazis: The Sharps War”, which premieres tonight on PBS. As you’ve heard before–not to be missed.

Here is Nick Kristof’s article in full:

“Would You Hide a Jew From the Nazis?”

Sunday Review, Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof

Sept. 18, 2016

And let’s not forget history is made every day. It’s our turn now.