Finally Going After Nazis

From Yahoo News:
"Hundreds of Nazi probes reopened"

In a final quest to bring Holocaust participants to justice, German authorities have reopened hundreds of dormant investigations of Nazi death camp guards — men who are now so old that time has become "the enemy" for prosecutors hurrying to prepare cases. The efforts could result in new prosecutions nearly seven decades after World War II. Special Nazi war-crimes investigators reopened the files after the conviction of former U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk, whose case set a new legal precedent in Germany. It was the first time prosecutors had been able to convict someone in a Nazi-era case without direct evidence that the suspect participated in a specific killing. Demjanjuk, now 91, was deported from the U.S. 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. Munich prosecutors argued that if they could prove that he was a guard at a camp like Sobibor — established for the sole purpose of extermination — it was enough to convict him of accessory to murder. Schrimm said his office is going over all its files to see if any other cases fit into the same category as Demjanjuk. He estimated there are probably fewer than 1,000 possible suspects in Germany and abroad who are alive and can still be prosecuted. He would not give any names. "We have to check everything — from the people who we were aware of in camps like Sobibor ... or also in the Einsatzgruppen," he said, referring to the death squads responsible for mass killings, particularly early in the war before the death camps were established. He estimated the number of suspects at 4,000. "Even if only 2 percent of those people are alive, we're talking 80 people. And let's assume half of them are not medically fit to be brought to justice. That leaves us with 40 people, so there is incredible potential," he said. Investigations of the lower ranks eventually fell to German courts. But there was little political will to aggressively pursue the prosecutions, and many of the trials ended with short sentences or acquittals of suspects in positions of greater responsibility than Demjanjuk. However, the current generation of prosecutors and judges in Germany has shown a new willingness to pursue even the lower ranks.

^ It is about time the German Government stops helping the former Nazis and punish them as they should have 70 years ago. It is sad that it had to wait until a new generation of Germans that was not directly affected by the war to grow up and finally make things right. If the Germans who lived during the war were truly sorry for what they helped their country to do then they had 70 years to make things right and they never did. It doesn't matter that the former Nazis are now in their 80-100s. The Nazis didn't discriminate against the elderly or disabled when they murdered people in the gas chambers, the ghettos, the mass pits or the death camps. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-hundreds-nazi-probes-reopened-061508463.html