By Madhavi Rao ’24
Staff Writer
Content warning: This article references antisemitism and contains discussions of the Holocaust.
The German government prosecuted a former Nazi secretary for being an accessory to the murder of more than 10,000 people in concentration camps during World War II. Although there is no evidence of the defendant’s specific involvement in these deaths, she is being tried for her role in the operation of the concentration camps, the functioning of which led to the murder of thousands.
The secretary, whose identity is not confirmed, is currently 95 years old. She will be tried in juvenile court, as she was under 21 years of age at the time of the alleged crimes. According to The Associated Press, she has made statements to the German broadcasting station NDR that she was not aware of the murders that took place in the camps. She is one of three people to be acquitted within the past year for their compliance with the Nazi regime. The other two, a 100-year-old man and a 93-year-old man, were both Nazi guards, reported The New York Times.
Visiting Lecturer in German Studies Catherine McNally spoke about the relationship between these people and the atrocities of the Holocaust.
“Overall, the Holocaust was enacted and carried out by bureaucrats — signing deportation orders, as Adolf Eichmann [a Nazi high official] did, or those changing legislation around citizenship laws,” McNally said. “The Holocaust would not have been possible without thousands of bureaucrats, the vast majority of whom themselves were sitting at desks and physically far removed from the act of killing, but as many would argue, were no less responsible for it. Almost all members of the Nazi party who stood trial defended themselves by saying they were ‘just following orders,’ thus absolving themselves from any personal responsibility,” she continued.
Until 2011, it was not common practice to prosecute those who were not directly involved in the murders of victims by the Nazi establishment. It was only after the trial and subsequent arrest of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, that anyone who played any role in a Nazi concentration camp was considered complicit in the violence committed there. Although Demjanjuk died before he could begin his sentence, his arrest led to largescale reform regarding how the legal system should treat former Nazi administrative workers.
As Cyrill Klement, the lead investigator of the 100-year-old former guard told The Guardian last year, “The core of this [secretary’s] case follows the decision [in the cases] of Demjanjuk and Gröning, that being part of the functioning of this machinery of death is sufficient for an accessory to a murder conviction.”
Jeremy King, professor of history and chair of the department, commented, “This latest case of belated attempts at justice seems to be near the end of a long tail. After all, the Holocaust was stopped early in 1945, something like 76 years ago — when the secretary in question was about 16 years old. The effort is largely symbolic at this point.”
Karen Remmler, chair of German studies at Mount Holyoke, commented on this as well. “The prosecution of Nazi criminals in the 1960s in (West) Germany did not fully acknowledge the deep infrastructure of systemic violence in German society during the Nazi period that went well beyond the acts of Nazi leadership or SS or even members of the Nazi party.”
“In some ways, the current — and belated — prosecution of Nazi bureaucrats could be seen as a symbolic measure in the midst of the failure of the German law enforcement to promptly and effectively identify current neo-Nazi and related right-wing attacks on German citizens, residents and refugees and their supporters,” Remmler continued. “That is, such acts are still treated as exceptions to an otherwise changed German society that is committed to learning from the murderous mistakes of its past.”
In recent years, the German political party Alternative for Germany has risen in popularity. Also referred to as AfD, the party is known for its far-right, extremist views on immigration and Islam. According to BBC News, the party’s rhetoric is also considered to have influences in Nazi ideology. One of the leaders of the party, Björn Höcke, has been known to oppose Germany’s remembrance of Holocaust victims, referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame,” The Independent stated. In 2019, the AfD Party gained popularity and added seats in Parliament. In recent months, though, the party’s popularity has been declining.
McNally was skeptical of the impact that measures to convict former Nazi workers at such a delayed period will have on Germany’s internal politics. “Germany as a country, politically, socially, culturally, has aggressively confronted the Nazi past — although, prosecution and accountability for individuals has not been as successful as it could have been,” McNally said. “It strikes me that an event like this gets international attention and I wonder how much international audiences are aware of the constant racist violence against nonwhite Germans and refugees that occurs at the hands of neo-Nazis in Germany today.”