The German Government is Still Hunting Old Nazis

Germany's top Nazi Hunter, Kurt Schrimm in on  mission!

Ludwigsburg, Germany--Germany's Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes is located in this picturesque hamlet close to Stuttgart.  

The head honcho of this Nazi-hunting agency is Kurt Schrimm.  Schrimm is on a desperate mission to round up as many as 50 former guards from the Auschwitz concentration Camp believed to still be alive. 

Schrimm will not have to run fast after these guys because the old fugitives are well into their 90’s and have canes, walkers and wheelchairs.  Others are blind, deaf or suffering from dementia. 

What Schrimm lacks is convincing eyewitness testimony of the alleged crimes.  Schrimm will try to make these cases using old Nazi records that seem to place the men at Auschwitz during the time when atrocities were committed. 

Considering name similarities and the hearsay nature of these records this questionable legal quest seems incredibly complicated and flawed. 

There is no Statute of Limitations preventing prosecution but there comes a point in time when the quest for justice is purely symbolic but in reality totally meaningless. 

I don’t suggest for a moment that some or even all of the men were not involved in mass government sponsored murder and kidnapping.   The difficulty will be to separate the criminals from those conscripts that somehow avoided committing atrocities.  There were many cooks, clerks and medical workers within the ranks of the camp staff. 

The last man tried for War Crimes was retired Cleveland autoworker and naturalized U.S. citizen, John Demjanjuk.  Demjanjuk was tried convicted, sentenced to hang and was later cleared by an Israeli Court.  Nonetheless Demjanjuk was rearrested by Schrimm's agents and tried again in Munich and convicted.  He was sentenced to a nursing home where he peacefully died soon thereafter.  The irony was that the old man would have been confined to a bed no matter the outcome of the expensive and meaningless show trial.

Demjanjuk’s case was long fraught with despicable shenanigans committed by the U.S. Office of Special Investigations that essentially framed him with forged documents.  The OSI was struggling for funding and needed to justify its existence as a government agency at the time. 

What the Nazi’s did to fellow Germans, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Communists and Jews was shocking.  Hitler’s regime murdered six million of their castigated minorities but it’s somehow forgotten that over nine million German’s also perished under the Nazis. 

The U.S. Office of Special Investigations and Germany’s Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes has outlived their usefulness.  They need to shutter their doors and fade away like the old Nazis they’ve been chasing. 

It would make more sense to create better safeguards in every government preventing government tyranny and murder under color of law. 

After the Holocaust surviving Jews began to chant, “Never again!”  The fact is that history is replete with acts of genocide and government sponsored mass murder.  It will happen again and again as long as humans roam this earth.