Old Scores

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

A former Nazi concentration camp guard is set to start trial in Germany within the next couple weeks, charged as accessory to the murder of three thousand, five hundred eighteen persons. He’s one hundred years old.

A medical assessment says the man, whose identity is kindly protected by German privacy law, can bear no more than two and a half hours a day in the courtroom. The witnesses against him say they’re not sure they can bear more than five minutes in a room with him.

Some people ask what purpose can it serve to prosecute so old and frail a person, even for so heinous a crime.

Efraim Zuroff has a few ideas about that. He’s spent more than forty years tracking down men and women who committed their crimes before he was born. He’s found more than three thousand of them, living under new identities in twenty countries. He’s been called the last Nazi hunter. He still hunts.

The passage of time, he says, makes these criminals no less guilty, these victims and their families no less harmed.

The trials make it hard to distort or deny the Holocaust, when real — if only barely live — Nazis animate the evidence.

Zuroff says Nazi war criminals are the last people on earth who deserve any sympathy: not a single one he has found has ever expressed regret or remorse for the people they helped bring to their final solution.

He expects the same will be true when the hundred-year-old man is convicted and sentenced as accessory to mass murder.

The last such prison sentence was five to fifteen years in prison.

Likely longer than a life sentence.