Too Little, Too Late ... Justice Forestalled by Age, Dementia

"[Zafke's dementia had] reached a severity that the defendant is no loner able, inside and outside the courtroom to reasonably assess his interests or coherently follow or give testimony."
Prosecutors, northeastern Germany

"There are few days which I do not spend wishing that we could go back in time by a couple of years or decades."
"We could have found so many more suspects [involved in helping to carry out genocide]."
"We need to keep in mind that the age range of the suspects we now focus on is 90 to 99."
Jens Rommel, chief prosecutor, German Nazi crimes agency 

"By 1960, murder and abetting murder were the only Nazi-era crimes that prosecutors could charge."
"As time passed and the higher-ranking perpetrators died out, the pool of potential defendants shrank to those against whom evidence was hardest to find."
Elizabeth Barry White, senior historian, Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.

Entrance to the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp which operated 4 gas chambers where 6,000 people were put to death each day by the Nazi regime.

That constraint in the type of charges seen at that time to be acceptable in prosecuting known Nazi war criminals saw that high-ranking Nazi officers known to be inextricably involved in the Final Solution's details carrying out the extermination of European Jews to satisfy the goals of Nazi Germany's campaign of its Final Solution in ridding Europe of its Jewish population, meant in practical terms that the most gruesome of crimes went unpunished.

Instead, those responsible for the cruel deaths of tens of thousands of innocent, children, women and men of all ages were charged with lesser offences with consequently lesser punishments. By the time that prosecutors no longer had to prove that individuals were indeed responsible for the crimes they were well known to have committed, enabling prosecution to proceed on extended grounds where, for example, being a guard in a death camp whose function was mass murder, representing sufficient cause to find an accused guilty of mass murder, age and senility took its toll.

Survivors at Buchenwald Concentration Camp remain in their barracks after liberation by Allies on April 16, 1945. Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize winning author of Night, is on the second bunk from the bottom, seventh from the left.

Under the newer, extended recognition of responsibility the assumption was that anyone who acted for the Nazi regime by being present and actively engaged in such facilities was liable for the success of the mass murders taking place within them, as an obvious accomplice to the crime of such absolute magnitude as the Holocaust. But the time it took between the search for high-placed figures of authority in the Nazi regime, to find them guilty of horrendous acts of mass murder, and the final agreement that all who aided and abetted genocide in enabling capacities were also guilty, those responsible had been allowed to live their extended lives in peace denied their victims.

Emaciated survivors of one of the largest Nazi concentration camps, at Ebensee, Austria, entered by the 80th division, U.S. Third army on May 7, 1945.

In the latest prosecution of a former SS medic at Auschwitz, 96-year-old Hubert Zafke, so much time had elapsed between the horrendous events that took place at the death camp and the eventual search for its many enablers and perpetrators that age has had the final word. It is age -- after a long and gracious life of conscience-free ease -- that debilitated body and mind, presenting Hubert Zafke with his final and successful defence: dementia.

The crime of which this man stood accused was assisting in the killing of 3,681 people at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. A Polish court had established back in 1951 that this man had served in the medical unit of the Auschwitz concentration camp; he was sentenced to four years in a Polish prison. It was not until 2013 that German prosecutors initiated another trial for this man. Three years later the trial was to begin in the town of Neubrandenburg. At a time of fading health.

And fading expectations on the part of the families of those who had died such agonizing deaths to satisfy virulent anti-Semitism rampant in Europe and enabled by Fascist Germany toward a Final Solution. In 2013, some 30 suspects were accused of such Nazi crimes, yet 27 of the accused died prior to their trials or were exonerated as a result of ailing health. One, Reinhold Hanning, died before he could be imprisoned. Another, Oskar Groning, is serving his too-late, too-little punishment.

Prisoners from Hungary arrive at the Auschwitz concentration camp, about 50 km west of Krakow, Poland, spring 1945