Israel and Germany are cooperating in a new legal campaign to find and put on trial thousands of Nazi war criminals. The joint project is the result of a recent precedent-setting ruling in Germany in the case of John Demjanjuk.
There are about 4,000 names on the list of possible defendants, but probably very few are still alive, and many of those may be in no condition to stand trial.
Six weeks ago, the heads of the Simon Wiesenthal Center met with representatives of Germany's Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. The purpose of the meeting was to determine the implications of Demjanjuk's conviction in the continuing battle to bring former Nazis to justice.
Demjanjuk, now 91, was deported from the United States to Germany in 2009 to stand trial. He was convicted in May of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
He was sentenced to five years in prison.
It was the first time prosecutors were able to convict someone in a Nazi-era case without direct evidence that the suspect participated in a specific killing.
Read the full article here.
And I'd just like to point out one thing when discussing Germany and the Holocaust. As we see by this post, Germany has come a long way since the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. It recognizes what happened, recognizes that it was a blemish on German history, and makes sure it doesn't happen again.
Turkey, on the other hand, denies the Armenian Genocide and continues to persecute Armenians and Kurds.
Why isn't the world doing anything about Turkey? Genocide is genocide. And those who can not learn from history are doomed to repeate it (George Santayana).
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