Not Yet Too Late: Round Two

"Unfortunately, very few people who committed the crimes had to pay for them. The passage of time is no way diminishes the crimes."    
Efraim Zuroff, U.S.-based Wiesenthal Center

"Late, but not too late. Millions of innocents were murdered by Nazi war criminals. Some of the perpetrators are free and alive! Help us take them to court."

Does time run out for justice to be meted out in the apprehension, charging and trials of those who took a hand in the destruction of human lives in numbers too difficult to fully apprehend by the human mind? Or does the sheer number of six million simply anesthetize the mind; the struggle to imagine that number and translate it to human beings, men, women and children who perished through a deliberately baneful plot of annihilation paralyzing the imagination.

And because it floods the mind with an automatic rejection that the immensity of such a violation of all that is meant to be human stifling the need to examine the horror, most people, while deploring the unspeakable horror of it, would prefer not to think any longer about it. That it occurred is undeniable, that many who were involved in the prosecution of the Final Solution evaded justice is unjustifiably puzzling, an oversight of moral justice but yet neighbours who suddenly discover that the elderly man next door has been identified as one such, are anxious to attest to his good nature.

This is because there is a limit to the imagination of most people who would far prefer decency and goodness to psychopathic terror and dread predation on an entire ethnic-religious group in a state-sponsored collaboration of exquisite attention to mass extermination. And how does one equate an elderly man, quiet and no trouble to anyone, going about his unassuming business, with a youthfully virile part of the Nazi scheme to rid the world of those Jewish vermin?

Just as well, perhaps that survivors of the Holocaust, and better yet, offspring of survivors and of those who perished have no intention of allowing elderly mass killers to go to the grave unmolested by inconvenient interruptions in their golden years by claims that they had once performed the unspeakable. And so it is that The Simon Wiesenthal Center has launched what it has termed Operation Last Chance II.

Last Chance, for obvious reasons. That perfect physical specimen of German manhood who proudly wore an SS uniform and who, in the pursuit of his duty to his country served as a guard at Nazi death camps or was a member of death squads engaged in massive killing sprees pre-Zyklon B and huge corpse-eating ovens, now a respected elderly pensioner moving inexorably toward death, has never atoned for crimes against humanity.

It is estimated that 60 people remain alive in Germany fit to stand trial for their crimes. A reward of 5,000 euros to be paid for information; upon the indictment of a suspect, another like sum and a further amount until conviction, if found guilty. After the successful conviction of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk a precedent was set allowing German prosecutors to reopen hundreds of investigations to prosecute former death camp guards as accessories to murder.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter for Simon Wiesenthal Center, talks to journalists as he stands in front of a placard reading "Operation last chance - late but not too late" displayed in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, July 23, 2013. With 2,000 placards in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne cities the centre launched another campaign to find and prosecute Nazi war criminals while they are still alive.   Photograph by: Gero Breloer , AP