In latest death row case, German courts have solved biggest questions

A German court this month convicted Irmgard Fuchner of his involvement in the murder of 10,505 people. From 1943 until 1945, Fruchner served as secretary to the commander-in-chief of Stutthof, his SS concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Curiously, the 97-year-old defendant was tried in juvenile court because he started his secretarial job at the age of 18. Partly for this reason, the court sentenced him to two years of leniency with probation. Fruchner may be the last person convicted of his involvement in the genocide of six million European Jews by the Nazis.

Legal assessment of the Holocaust began early, with the Soviet trials of the perpetrators of the genocide in Krasnodar and Kharkov in 1943, even before the war ended. From 1945 to 1946 he was the first international criminal case in history, the trial of major Nazi war criminals. Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. The logistical mastermind behind the deportation of Jews to the SS extermination camps. And in 1987, the trial in France of former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, the so-called “Butcher of Lyon”.

Compared to these historic trials, Fruchner’s case, in which the 90s sentenced as a minor was suspended, may seem like an odd accusation. But the value of judgment should not be overlooked.

In important ways, this case brings the Holocaust’s quest for justice full circle. As early as 1950, in the trial of two officers at Sobibor, an SS killing center in eastern Poland, a Frankfurt court ruled that everyone operating in the camp was “a unit with the sole purpose of killing Jews.” The court found that even the camp bakers and the SS men who worked in the Shoe Commando, responsible for collecting, sorting and storing the shoes of the murdered Jews, were “(killed).” We are responsible for the success of the operation,” he said. ”

Other German courts, however, did not follow this lead. In 1969, following a harrowing ruling, Germany’s Supreme Court of Appeal, the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), considered Auschwitz to be a unified criminal complex that could recognize the complicity of all those who worked in the camp. I couldn’t. Instead, courts treated Auschwitz as the site of thousands of separate crimes, each of which had to be proven separately. . Especially since the German statute of limitations had long affected all Nazi-era crimes except murder. Without evidence of specific acts of murder by designated camp personnel, prosecution was essentially impossible. A cynic might say that was exactly the point. In any case, for decades German prosecutions of former camp guards have been on hold.

The conviction of John (Ivan) Demjanjuk by the Munich Court in 2011 marked a belated break with this regrettable case law. In convicting Demjanjuk, the court found that all the guards at his SS extermination camp, including his Sobibor, where Demjanjuk worked, had facilitated the murder. In such cases, the court ruled that it was not necessary to provide evidence of a specific act of murder to prove guilt. I straightened my steps.

Yet the Munich court calculated Demjanjuk’s collusion in a strangely aggregated manner. A court that found Demjanjuk complicit in the deaths of some 28,000 Jews found the defendant guilty for each particular Jewish deportation that arrived during the months he worked in Sobibor. The court held that each shipment represented a clear act of collusion, and therefore treated as a separate cause of action against Demjanjuk. Alas, this conclusion represents the permanence of the flawed understanding he accepted by the BGH in 1969. Due to Demjanuk’s judge’s reasoning, Sobibor abruptly and episodicly established itself as a murder center only when the transport arrived. Of course, this was a mistake. Sobibor exists as a murder center, and courts should have treated Demjanjuk’s conspiracy holistically, rather than as a collective crime cluster.

Now, with Furchner’s conviction, a court in the northern German town of Itzehoe has finally accepted a unified understanding of participation. In contrast to the Demjanjuk case, the court he treated Stutthof itself as a criminal complex. The court did not deny that Fruchner played a very small role in the mass extermination operation. In contrast to Demjanjuk, she did not escort the Jews from the train to the gas chambers. Nor did she patrol the watchtowers to prevent escapes. However, by entering her commander’s orders, she contributed to the success of the Stutthof camp. The Stutthof camp is a unified and organized criminal operation created to destroy people.

Her suspended sentence reflected both her age and low responsibilities. But her convictions made it clear that participation in the extermination system, at any level, deserves to be recognized as a crime. It reverted to the original perception that everyone involved in the genocide system was complicit.

Lawrence Douglas Dean of the Faculty of Law, Law and Social Thought, Amherst College.

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