Interview
with Nazi War
Crimes Prosecutor
'I Have Never Seen
Remorse'
The
trial of John Demjanjuk, who is accused of being an accessory
to the murders of 27,900 Jews, is set to end this week. In a SPIEGEL
interview,
Ulrich Maass, one of Germany's most prominent Nazi war crimes
prosecutors,
discusses the case and details the failings of the country's justice
system.
Alleged
former Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk stands accused of being an
accessory to the murders of some 27,900 Jews at the Sobibór
extermination camp
in occupied Poland. After one-and-a-half years, the 91-year-old's trial
is set to wrap up this
week in Munich. It is likely to be
among Germany's final Nazi war crimes trials as ageing suspects die off.
Ulrich
Maass has spent
the last decade pursuing similar cases as head of North
Rhine-Westphalia's
special public prosecutor's unit for violent Nazi war crimes from 2000
to 2010.
The 64-year-old shares his insights on the Demjanjuk trial and how it
reveals
changes in Germany's approach to trying the remaining few Nazi
perpetrators.
Maass:
The verdict will tell us that. How the death factory in Sobibór
worked has been thoroughly studied. The guards were involved at all
levels of
the extermination effort. They picked up people from the deportation
trains
and, in the end, drove them into the gas chambers.
SPIEGEL:
For Christiaan F. Rüter, an Amsterdam criminal law professor,
Demjanjuk is the "smallest of the small fish." He was a Soviet
soldier who the Germans recruited him after he was captured.
Maass:
This plight has to be taken into account, of course. But it
doesn't mean that he was compelled to obey orders. Historians have not
found
any evidence that someone would have been shot if he had refused to
participate
in mass shootings.
SPIEGEL:
Defendants got off with such arguments in the past. Why do the
courts take a different view today?
Maass:
At that time, the courts tended to pursue the principle that the
last links in the chain of command were not to be charged. We have more
comprehensive information today, such as data from Eastern European
archives.
Accounting for East German injustices has also given us greater insight
into
how much leeway existed in a dictatorship. In a groundbreaking 1995
decision,
the Federal Court of Justice decided, for example, that the stricter
standards
that West German courts had applied to East German judges should also
have been
applied to Nazi judges.
SPIEGEL:
But by then the Nazi judges had already died without ever being
charged, like many organizers of the genocide. Now the courts are only
prosecuting perpetrators at the lower end. Is that fair?
Maass:
Of course not. The Allies released many of the main perpetrators
after only a few years in prison, and the German courts could no longer
touch
them. In other cases, doctors were found who would declare 60-year-olds
unfit
to stand trial and issue the necessary documents, which stated that
they
suffered from ailments like heart problems, cirrhosis of the liver and
silicosis. This doesn't fly anymore today.
SPIEGEL:
How did you cope with this injustice?
Maass:
You feel a certain queasiness, perhaps comparable with the
feeling one has when shoplifters are caught while the big economic
fraudsters
manage to get away scot-free. But the alternative cannot be to let the
shoplifters go, too.
SPIEGEL:
Was the German judiciary persistent enough in investigating Nazi
perpetrators?
Maass:
Fortunately North Rhine-Westphalia decided to establish a
specialized prosecution agency. But justice happens to be a matter for
the
states to decide …
SPIEGEL:
… and in other places prosecutors were working on Nazi criminal
matters in addition to their everyday activities, so that many cases
fizzled
out. The Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the
Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg can only
conduct
preliminary investigations. Should the Federal Republic of Germany have
developed a central agency to prosecute Nazi criminals?
Maass:
You'd have to ask the politicians. There is no such thing in
German law as a special offense for Nazi mass crimes. We prosecute
people for
murder or aiding and abetting. We criminal prosecutors have sometimes
felt like
road workers who are handed a screwdriver instead of a jackhammer.
SPIEGEL:
To prosecute Germany's far-left Red Army Faction terrorists more
efficiently, the judiciary concentrated its competencies in the office
of the
General Public Prosecutor in Karlsruhe. Why wasn't this done with the
Nazi
perpetrators?
Maass:
It depends on where politicians set their priorities. They set
their sights on leftist terrorism and pursued the criminal prosecutions
that
ultimately led to success. This doesn't apply to our cases. In
retrospect, it
would certainly have been correct to assign more prosecutors to
research such
cases. But decades ago they were saying that the problem would resolve
itself
for biological reasons, because the perpetrators would die. And now, 66
years
after the end of the war, we have 12 active cases in Dortmund alone.
SPIEGEL:
Does this mean that the Demjanjuk trial will not be the last one?
Maass:
All I've done in the past few years is prepare
cases that were supposedly the last of their kind. The problem,
however, is
that the defendants are becoming increasingly unfit to stand trial or
are
dying, as was the case with a former guard at the Belzec camp, who
lived near
Bonn.
SPIEGEL:
You have dealt with dozens of men who committed murder during the
Nazi era. Is there such a thing as the typical Nazi criminal, and how
does he
feel about his crimes?
Maass:
I have never seen remorse. The usual excuse is that they acted in
accordance with the law, as if there were no such thing as a higher
prohibition
against killing. There were sadists, but they were not the norm, which
was more
likely to be the ordinary accessory. "Hitler's Willing Executioners,"
though a controversial book title, hits the nail on the head. It was a
large
group of people who were prepared to do anything.
Interview
conducted by Jan Friedman