"I'm going to take whatever confession he gives--it's better than no confession. Maybe this is the best thing he has ever done in his life. Isn't that sad?"
--Eva Kor, 81, a survivor of the Holocaust who is still seeking details of the "medical" experiments she and her twin sister underwent at Auschwitz at the hands of the notorious "Dr." Josef Mengele.
The 93-year-old defendant in a German courtroom faces 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. That's right: three hundred thousand.
The defendant's name and former rank: SS sergeant Oskar Groening, aka the accountant of Auschwitz.
A junior bank clerk, his wartime assignment was to count and confiscate the money of some 425,000 Hungarian Jews passing through the gates that proclaimed their labor would set them free (Arbeit Macht Frei) in May and June of 1944 before being dispatched in the gas chambers.
Why not take their money? "They didn't need it any more," to quote Sergeant Groening.
It would be hard to find a more businesslike summary of the whole, inhuman transaction: short, to the point, efficient, comprehensive, thorough . . . a compressed summary of German gründlichkeit.
Sergeant Groening freely admits his "moral" guilt, but said a court would have to determine whether he was legally guilty. And if the court does find him guilty, what would be a fitting punishment for an accessory to 300,000 murders? Some crimes are on a scale that they defy punishment. Just by their enormity.
But now let us praise the new German state, its people, and its legal system for pursuing justice with the old idealism that once marked German culture--the Germany of Goethe, Lessing and Schiller, not to mention Beethoven and Mozart.
People may damn themselves by crimes so monstrous that they make just keeping count of them a surreal experience. Yet a people may also redeem itself by coming awake and pursuing justice with the same determination they once courted evil. Let us hold onto that thought in a world that needs every hopeful thought it can muster.
Meanwhile, as another anniversary of the Armenian Massacres comes and goes, there are still Holocaust deniers of every nationality who try to wash their hands of any responsibility for such enormities--like the current regime in Turkey, which is too busy pursuing its Islamist aims to face the terrible truth.
But some of us remember and will always remember. And in remembrance the seeds of justice may yet take root.
Editorial on 04/25/2015