To some people, it may seem absurd to see a procession of doddering old men, mostly in their nineties, being paraded before the German courts accused of crimes committed up to 65 years ago. Yet these old men, now close to the end of their own long lives, are accused of shortening the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners in Nazi death camps. The German prosecutor is now proceeding against 30 men accused of being involved in Hitler's program to exterminate the Jews, the gypsies, the mentally-ill, political opponents and anyone else he chose to consider socially undesirable. This slaughter, on a barely imaginable industrial scale that was conducted with Germanic efficiency, scarred the German people with wounds which even three generations on are still livid and painful. Two years after the savage Nazi regime was finally destroyed, the Holocaust also served to empower the new Israeli state with a brutish disregard for the Palestinians whose land they had seized and occupied. Nearly all of the old men now picked up by German justice are accused of being concentration camp guards or administrators while they served in Heinrich Himmler's SS. The case of a so far unnamed 94-year-old is typical. This former SS sergeant was a medical orderly at Auschwitz. He is charged with being an accessory to 3,681 murders. The precision of the charge suggests that investigators believe that they have done their work with the utmost care. It seems likely that rather than relying on the few former camp inmates still living to act as witnesses, they have combed the detailed records that the Nazis kept of their hideous crimes. If convicted, this individual could face between three and 15 years imprisonment. It seems almost certain that in such circumstances he would only leave jail in a coffin. His defense lawyer, like most of his colleagues representing other aging former SS guards, is protesting that he is too old to stand trial. Such a claim deserves closer examination.The logic of it is that these men are too old to be found guilty. The argument seems to be that there comes a stage in a very old man's life when the crimes he may have committed in his youth can be sloughed off in the same way that a snake sloughs off its skin. Yet a crime does not become less of a crime over time. The victims of savage repression do not after the passage of years leap from their graves and carry on with their lives as if nothing had happened to them. Horrific crimes against humanity do not diminish even decades later. They remain as an indictment, not simply of those who committed them, but of those who by omission or failure permitted them to carry them out. Justice is not a mist at the end of a long, dark night that melts with the dawning of a new day. It has to be inexorable and unflinching in its pursuit of the guilty. These frail old men in Germany were once very probably all youthful murderers. If they are allowed to live out their lives without prosecution and without punishment, then justice means nothing. They, like all who slaughter innocents, including the Israelis who have three times pulverized the Gaza ghetto, should all be brought to book, however long it takes.
