Richard Rashke - Useful Enemies

Voluntary collaboration is more problematic. What is a morally acceptable reason to voluntarily collaborate with the Nazis? To avoid being shot? To avoid starving to death? To protect one’s family from retaliation if one refuses? Out of a need for a paying job to feed one’s family?

Where is the moral line in wartime?

When a new prisoner arrives at a death camp and volunteers to work with the Nazis as a tailor, blacksmith, shoemaker, or knitter, is he or she really volunteering?

When a Soviet POW voluntarily agrees to work with the Nazis in an unspecified job, is he really volunteering?

Where one draws the moral line suggests another distinction: life or death. If a Jew standing in the selection line at a death camp does not volunteer to make boots for the SS men at the camp, he will die. Is his “voluntary” decision under those circumstances really involuntary? Is the law of survival higher than the moral law that forbids working for an enemy who commits crimes against humanity?

If a Soviet POW does not agree to work for the Nazis in an unspecified job, he faces a high probability of either being executed for refusing or of eventually dying from starvation, overwork, or disease. Unlike the death camp prisoner who will certainly be killed if he refuses to work for or with the Nazis, the POW does not face certain death. Is he morally justified in working for the Nazis in order to increase his chances of survival?

If a German soldier or a civilian volunteer is ordered to shoot Jews lined up in front of a ditch in a forest in Estonia, he could be executed on the spot for refusing to follow orders. He faces a personal life-or-death decision. Is he morally obligated to be killed rather than to kill? Is it murder to kill someone when the alternative is death for oneself? Is the decision to choose to disobey the order an act of morality or an act of heroism?

If a death camp SS man is ordered by a superior officer to kill a sick old man at the “infirmary” and refuses, is it clear that he will be executed by his SS commander? Is it a life-or-death decision? If it’s not clear, is he morally obligated to take the risk and refuse to obey the order?

There were thousands of Nazis and those who worked for them who never personally killed a civilian. Are they war criminals? That question leads to still another distinction clearly defined in the 1871 German criminal code: specific hands-on crime or unspecific abetted crime.

A civilian denounces a Jew. The Jew is executed. The denouncer did not pull the trigger. He was a voluntary collaborator in the process of killing a Jew without specifically killing him. Is he guilty of a crime? What if he did not know the Jew would be killed? What if he believed the Jew would be sent to a work camp in the east?

A camp commandant like Trawniki boss Karl Streibel never killed a Jew. All he did was train the men who did. He played a major role in the process of killing without specifically killing. Is he guilty of a crime?

A death camp Trawniki man stands in a guard tower. His job is to prevent escapes. There are no escapes, so he doesn’t shoot anyone. He is part of the killing process without specifically killing someone. Is he guilty of a crime?

An SS officer works in the death camp office. He has a pistol that he never uses. He is never ordered to drive Jews into a gas chamber. He is never ordered to shoot the old and the sick at the “Infirmary.” He is part of the killing process because he helps administer the death camp. Is he guilty of a crime?

Assuming John Demjanjuk trained at Trawniki and served at Sobibor, he may have volunteered to drive a truck for the Nazis without knowing what it would carry. He did not volunteer to be trained at the Trawniki school. He did not request a job at Sobibor. Once at Sobibor, he did not choose which jobs he would and would not do. The SS could order him to perform any of the grim tasks at a death camp:

• Guarding the perimeter or the worker Jews inside the camp or those who worked in Kommandos outside the camp; unloading the new arrivals from boxcars.

• Keeping order at the unloading dock to prevent a revolt; making sure the new arrivals undressed and that the girls and women had their hair shorn.

• Leading or driving the victims up to and then into the gas chambers.

• Supervising the burial or cremation of the corpses and the extraction of gold teeth.

• Shooting or prodding resisters.

• Killing the old and the sick at the “Infirmary.”

If John Demjanjuk never specifically killed or severely brutalized anyone at Sobibor but was only a cog in the killing process, did he commit a war crime or a crime against humanity under German law?

On May 12, 2011, the Munich court issued its ruling. The court found that:

• Without a doubt, John Demjanjuk served as an SS guard at the Sobibor death camp from March 1943 to September 1943.

• As an SS guard, John Demjanjuk knew that the 29,060 Jews who arrived at Sobibor while he served there were murdered.

• As an SS guard, John Demjanjuk assisted the Germans in running a smooth killing machine.

After acknowledging that Demjanjuk had already spent ten years in Israeli and German jails, the court sentenced him to five years in prison. Because he was not a flight risk due to poor health and age, the court freed Demjanjuk from prison until all appeals were settled.

The court decision in Munich came thirty-four years after the United States first charged John Demjanjuk with lying on his visa application about his activities during World War II.

After thirty-four years of hearings and trials in the United States, Israel, and Germany, the panel of seven German judges found John Demjanjuk guilty of aiding and abetting the Nazis in the murder of more than 29,000 Jews at the death camp of Sobibor. Although the Munich trial was an important legal benchmark in the search for justice, it did not provide closure.

The trial of John Demjanjuk left the case of John Demjanjuk legally, intellectually, and emotionally unresolved. Some observers were satisfied with the verdict and sentencing. But more were disappointed. Most were simply relieved that it was over, except for the tears and rants. They took comfort in the thought that in a short time there would be no one left to cry and rail.

For Sobibor survivors and relatives of the victims who died in the gas chambers there, Munich brought a measure of emotional satisfaction and peace. That the five-year prison sentence was light was irrelevant. Justice was done, and that was all they had asked for in their emotional pleadings before the court.

Munich was the funeral service they never had. Their last good-bye.

For the Treblinka survivors, however, the trial in Germany brought no peace. Those who had died since the Israeli Supreme Court found John Demjanjuk not guilty went to their graves convinced that he was Ivan the Terrible. The Treblinka survivors still alive believe that Ivan of Sobibor was also Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka and should have been swinging from a rope, not freed on his own recognizance because he was too old and disabled to run and hide.

The Ukrainians who believed John Demjanjuk was the victim of an international Jewish conspiracy against émigrés still believe that. Jews understandably thirst for revenge, as those Ukrainians still argue, but unfortunately Jews have chosen to vent their blind rage at working-class Americans who also survived the horrors of World War II.

The Jews who believed there is no such thing as an innocent World War II Ukrainian still believe that. Without the complicit silence and active collaboration of Ukrainians, those Jews still argue, the Nazis could never have robbed and murdered nearly a million Ukrainian Jews. They say Ukrainians continue to hide behind their flag, calling the Nazi collaborators among them heroes in the fight against communism and Soviet domination.