The last of the german war criminals have lost their minds and can no longer be held accountable for their crimes
"When local prosecutors in northeastern Germany made an announcement about 96-year old defendant Hubert Zafke this week, it appeared like standard procedure. Zafke's dementia, they said , had “reached a severity that the defendant is no longer able, inside and outside the courtroom, to reasonably assess his interests or coherently follow or give testimony.”
Those few words, however, could mark the start of the end of an era of war crimes prosecutions.
Zafke stood accused of assisting in the killing 3,681 people at the Nazi's Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Although he has denied the charges, a Polish court established in 1951 that he served in the medical unit of the Auschwitz concentration camp, after joining the SS at age 19. At the end of World War II, he was sentenced to four years in prison in Poland, but German prosecutors urged for a separate trial in 2013."
Putting 96 year olds on trial for anything is problematic imo.
I wish we could say that the spotlight shone on the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis has eliminated mass murder from this world, but post WW2 history shows us this is not the case.
All the good people can do is keep trying to call attention to the worst aspects of human behavior.
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The search for the Nazi genocidal murderers was passed from generation to generation.
When I was stationed in Germany in the late 70s, I made friends with an American ex-pat who met a German woman while he had been stationed there, married her and remains there to this day. We met for lunch one day at an outdoor cafe in the town's riverside park area and he started point out old men who'd been Nazis. I'd been in country for about a year but it had never occurred to me until that moment that I would have been passing and occasionally interacting with some of these men every day in various situations. Gave me the creeps then and knowing their ideologic heirs are still around here apparently both increasing in number and boldness makes it even creepier. We can never let down our guard against this scourge.
Just imagine the obsession involved in putting a 96 year old with dementia on trial. And yet, putting genocide in a spotlight is a worthy endeavor. But all things come to an end sooner or later.
But all things come to an end sooner or later.
Unfortunately, it's but one chapter of an ongoing horror story that is still being written in the here and now.