Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Taking A Turn We Don't Deserve

From the Des Moines Register: Nazi guard's case, something's amiss

The new pope, some of us were surprised to learn, was once a Nazi in training.

"From Hitler Youth to the Vatican," said one of the headlines last week when Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. A day later, the story was a footnote swept away in the worldwide celebration.

Now, you'd think the College of Cardinals could find a worthy papal candidate who wasn't a member of the Nazi children's corps - a candidate who didn't serve briefly in a German army anti-aircraft unit that guarded a factory manned, reportedly, by concentration camp prisoners.

But there wasn't a lot of fuss. There were extenuating circumstances.

The pope was just a teenager during his Hitler Youth days. Enrollment was mandatory. There was no avoiding military service later. Resistance meant death.

That's the pope's version, anyway, and not everyone buys it. Some Germans did resist, the skeptics say. Some did live to tell about it, setting a courageous example for others.

Wherever the truth lies, the young Ratzinger muddled through the best he could, served his time and got out without ever firing a shot.

End of discussion. Except for one thing. It's hard to believe Joseph Ratzinger gets to be pope while John Hansl doesn't even get to keep his American citizenship.

Hansl, you'll recall, is the 80-year-old south-sider who had his citizenship revoked a few days ago and could be deported. He is an ethnic German from Yugoslavia who, at age 18, was conscripted into the Nazi Waffen SS.

There are those who refuse to believe anyone was forced to join such a select unit, but this is what the Nuremberg Tribunal, as quoted in one of the defendant's briefs, says about that:

"Until 1940, the SS was an entirely voluntary organization. After the formation of the Waffen SS in 1940 there was a gradually increasing number of conscripts . . . It appears that about a third of the total number of people joining the Waffen SS were conscripts."

As a Waffen SS guard, Hansl kept prisoners from escaping. Like the pope, he never harmed anyone. He says his request for a transfer to the front was originally declined, though he was sent there later, shot in the face and captured in uniform.

Hansl was cleared of any war crimes by France and the United States. He never hid his SS record from immigration officials, who said he was legal and let him into the country.

For 45 years Hansl assumed he was legal. Now he's hearing different. Though nobody is saying he committed any atrocities, the court decided that the threat was constantly there and that Hansl had "personally assisted in the persecution" of prisoners.


On the face of it this whole episode sounds ridiculous. I mean, who would it seems had the best ability to determine the relative culpability of someone in such circumstances, a court sitting in judgement just after the events at question, with access to all the information and witnesses needed to make a prosecutorial or a defense case? Or a court sixty years after the fact that has access to neither?

It seems clear that what is involved has nothing to do with the cuplability of Mr. Hansl as such. No one is even asserting that he is guilty of war crimes of any kind whatsoever. So why are they persecuting him? The answer is, because he is there. What he is is a whipping boy by proxy. We are running out of real life Nazi war criminals to take a crack at, so we are relying on whatever comes to hand, even if it means previously cleared individuals are now being called upon to take responsibility for all of the crimes of the National Socialists.

The whole thing is sordid in the extreme. It reminds me of the figure of Goldstein, "The great enemy of the state," in Orwell's 1984. In that novel one proves your worth to the state by heaping abuse on this figure Goldstein without having any real knowledge of them. it is enough to be told to do so by the state. And, sadly, so it is with us in the United States today. And why? Mostly because this generation, so far seperated from the days of World War II, hasn't had its turn to visit nasty retribution on the Nazis.

Granted we are not alone in this. The energy being expended in China against Japanese atrocities during the same World War would be much better spent bringing the multitude of criminals from the, much more recent, days of "The Great Leap Forward" to justice. But the state wants none of that, of course. Never look inward when there is an outsider to name enemy. And so you have gangs of youth born in the 1980's chanting slogans and hurling slurs in the name of crimes committed 40 years before they were born. Hell, you have Serbs doing the same thing about events that happened in the 14th century, and arabs still bitching about the crusades before then. (Just for kicks I'd love to see the Austrian government serve the Turkish government with a bill for damages caused by the seige of Vienna in 1683. Hey, it is no more or less specious than any of these other examples.)

All of it is idiocy pure and simple. None of it concerns justice in the slightest degree, unless you call the injustice being done to Mr. Hansl justice.

George Orwell would recognize this right away.

So what's wrong with us?

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