Mauthausen, Justice and the Long Arm

 Joseph Bernstein's New York Times Magazine article today tells the story of his father, who was blown up in Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland  37 years ago, and the Libyan terrorist, Abu Mas'ud, who built or planted or planned the bomb, is now being brought to trial at age 74, in America.

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Bernstein asks about the meaning of justice. Mas'ud was one of Gaddafi's terrorist/spy network operatives, and was acting under orders. The murder of his father and the other passengers happened almost 4 decades ago and the accused is now an old man.

Michael Bernstein's State Dept ID

Some of those concentration camp guards who have been found in the USA or in Germany are now so demented they cannot recognize their own children: Can justice be served if the criminal cannot recall the crime, understand what is happening in the court room or function on more than a vegetative level?  

"My father was an American citizen, and so the latest justice to which he is entitled, given the context, is the prosecution of an old man, for a crime he is charged with committing 36 years ago, under orders.

Since the Nuremberg trials, it has been a principle of international law that crimes legitimized by a state bureaucracy are still crimes."

The man who drew Michael Bernstein to Berlin was in his 70's, and his crime, although committed nearly 40 years earlier,  was shooting an unarmed prisoner in the back as he tried to escape. The shooting was recorded in writing, in the meticulous records kept by the SS at Mauthausen concentration camp, and the accused remembered the crime, the day and, after much evasion and dissembling, when confronted with the actual log and his name clearly written there, he broke down and admitted it. 

I am left wondering why the SS would even bother to record a single death, the executing guard and the name of the inmate, as if it mattered to these guys.

But, Michael Bernstein had tracked all this down, and the guard was living happily in the United States and Bernstein thought justice demanded, at the very least, the man be deported as an SS murderer who had been given refuge by the United States 8 years after the end of the war. The technical basis for the deportation was he lied on his immigration form. The moral basis was he was an SS concentration camp guard who definitely murdered one inmate and likely others.

In 1988, deporting a man from America back to Germany was not simply a matter of sending some masked ICE agents around, and loading him on some sketchy airplane. Michael Bernstein had to get on a plane to Berlin, along with other State Department officials, and make arrangements, and once he had done his job, he hopped another airplane for the trip home to Bethesda, Maryland.  And thus was he fated to be blown out of the skies by another agent of hate, this time a Muslim, whose hate was no less lethal than that of the Nazis.

But Bernstein's son wonders if there is a difference between the man his father pursued, who pointed a gun at a specific human being, and pulled the trigger and the man who antiseptically assembles a bomb, who has no personal knowledge of the people his act will kill, who functions as part of an organization whose overall goals he might embrace?

American Army Air Force pilots dropped bombs on civilians. Why are they not murderers? Because there was a war. Not that the children of Hiroshima may have been able to understand that distinction. But it is an important distinction.

And when you think of Hamas, and their operatives, who may strap a bomb to a pregnant woman and send her into a busy market one week, and then the next week murder babies in their cribs with their own hands, are they any less worthy of retribution than Mas'ud?

Oddly, I have actually walked around the grounds of the Mauthausen concentration camp where Bernstein's father, some might argue, was the last victim. I had been on a Viking cruise and one day they mentioned that the concentration camp was only a 90 minute bus ride away. I had never seen a concentration camp and was surprised to learn Austria had concentration camps, but this was a bone fide concentration camp alright.  

I went to see it in the rain

It was not set up to simply incinerate people. 

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

It was a work camp. The prisoners were sent to work in a nearby quarry, where they worked within sight of townsfolks who also worked in the quarry, but the prisoners carried large blocks on their backs, back up the hill to the camp area.  

The townspeople did not much like the SS guards, who lived in the village, sometimes billeting with townspeople, and they tended to be what in America might be Hell's Angel's types, drunk at night, prone to fighting, destruction, nasties. But the townspeople could not say they were unaware of the camp.

Gas Chamber At Mauthausen

The camp itself, brought to mind Hanna Arendt's famous observation about the banality of evil. Looking at the low, one story buildings, it was hard to imagine anything very significant went on inside. And even inside, it looked very factory like, business like. There was a small one room gas chamber and a single oven for cremations, but it was not entirely clear who they selected for murder. For the most part, apparently, they simply worked prisoners, mostly Jews, to skeletal death and when they could no long haul boulders, the SS  simply killed them. Likely in that gas chamber, and then likely incinerated the bodies. I wonder if those ledgers recorded all that as well. 

Abu Gharib

There was a large field nearby, where they kept Russian prisoners of war and the conditions there were hard to reconstruct as there were  no permanent structures, just tents apparently.  But there were thousands, and the field was no bigger than a football field. Many died. What happened to their bodies is unclear to me. The single oven would not have been sufficient for large numbers.

As far as punishing a 74 year old man for crimes he committed 40 years earlier, I see no problem with that. 

An American man, at age 70, in prison for a murder he committed at age 20 once argued that every cell in his body had been replaced twice over in those 50 years and so he was like a wooden ship in which every plank, every rope had been replaced--it looked like the original, but it had been completely rebuilt and was no longer the same boat.

But as long as people can recall childhood events, friends and lovers from 50 years ago, and enemies--I would argue they are still the same person and punishment should follow them as long as the law can provide due process and sufficient records and evidence of their crime.

If for no other reason than deterrence. The man Michael Bernstein pursued, the lethal Mauthausen guard, said that he had really no other options than to join the SS and working as a guard. Times were tough. He was uneducated, and the food and housing for concentration camp guards was better than anything he could have acquired any other way.  All he had to do was to shoot the occasional human being in the back.

Church Near the Camp

So, when we are faced with choices and one seems pretty attractive compared to the alternatives, one thing which might make it less attractive is the idea that if you choose the short term gain, there may be some long term pain awaiting.

You Can Choose Your Friends

Christopher Hitchens noted that nobody needs a church or a religion to tell them that certain actions--murder, rape, theft--are bad. You don't need to look up the Ten Commandments to know killing someone is bad. We all share, no matter what culture we come from some basic notions of what is good and evil. 

Aryan Nation

I would argue that Hitchens may not be correct in this, as there are some tribes I studied in college, where they would laugh when someone else's baby crawled into a campfire because that was one less mouth to feed, and as that famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia attests, the Arab who shoots a man dead for drawing water from an oasis well had no remorse, as local tribes guarded wells as if they were sacrosanct. 

But, in general, that guard knew what he had done was evil, and he took comfort in the commendations of all his fellow SS guards, who shot prisoners for sport. And he denied having every been an SS guard at a concentration camp. He knew it was evil. On some level, they all know, as did the October 7th Hamas terrorists, that what they were doing was evil and justice ought to, if we can manage it, pursue them all until they are dead.