This year saw the passing of Britain’s last World War I veterans, Harry Patch (aged 111) and Henry Allingham (aged 113). They were rightly honoured – praised for the courage they showed in their youth, and for what they represented: hundred of thousands of their generation, slaughtered on muddy battlefields almost a hundred years ago. Of course, we will remember them.
There’s a lesson to be taken from that remembrance, particularly for the people who find the pictures from the trial of the 89-year-old war crime suspect, John Demjajuk, disturbing. He entered the court in Munich today looking old, and frail and in some pain. He then lay on a stretcher, moaning and making faces as his trial began, as if to evoke sympathy from the court and from those witnessing the proceedings.
But truth is this: just as we honour the heroes of war so many years later, so we ought to punish and censure those who committed terrible crimes during them. I’m not assuming the man is guilty, but there is much evidence against him. And the prosecution will detail his suppsed involvement at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland, where almost 30,000 Dutch Jews were murdered. His trial, therefore, could become a symbol of justice for victims of the Holocaust and its survivors.
There is nothing wrong with that symbolism, and there is nothing wrong with prosecuting the smallest cog in the Nazi machine. Even if John Demjanjuk was 112, it would be the just and right thing to do.
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