Prosecuting Old Nazi Guards and Young Clinic Workers
October, 2011
“Josias Kumpf participated in a 1943 Nazi operation that resulted in the murder of thousands of innocent victims. His culpability in this atrocity does not diminish with the passage of time,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich in June of 2008 when the decision was first announced to deport him. A press release from the U.S. Justice Department for March 19, 2009 announced that then-86-year-old was sent to Austria from Racine, Wisconsin to answer for his participation in the 1943 Massacre of 8,000 Jews while serving as a former armed SS guard at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Germany and another labor camp in Poland.
The Austrian justice ministry said the former guard could not be put on trial because the statute of limitations had expired and set him free.
Hmm. With the passage of time do crimes become less punishable? It may seem a bit late to punish an accomplice to murder seven decades after the crime. Moreover, in this case, the culprit was simply carrying out government policy. The Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt (Race and Resettlement Office), commonly known by the German acronym RuSHA, was first run by the infamous Heinrich Himmler. Otto Hofmann headed up RuSHA from July 1940 to April 1943. It was he along with Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and a dozen others who made the decision at the Wannsee Conference House to carry out the mass extermination of Jews and others. The little guys were just caught up in the everyday plainness of mass murder. What is the big deal?
Justice eventually prevails and maybe some need a good damning more than others. We take consolation in the fact that Judgment Day comes for everyone – in this life, at death (with various foretastes occurring during the short time when the living walk around in shameful disbelief) and at the resurrection of the dead. All souls will be raised up bodily and stand before His Honor, the Most High of all judges, and be charged with their own indictments. Some will be personally acquitted by the Mediator; others will be personally damned.
It is in this period of human history when judgments are not plain to the understanding, that we, like birds craning their necks to perceive their situation, look to discover what God is doing amidst His creatures. What sort of intermittent judgments does He execute in history? When is a disaster a “judgment”? What is the meaning of a particular calamity?
When can we say with confidence: “That disease was sent by God”?
“That war was God’s punishment upon a nation”?
“That hurricane was God’s judgment upon that wicked city”?
Was the Civil War in the United States a divine punishment for the national sin of slavery as Lincoln surmised?
We need not answer with absolute precision in order to affirm the general principle: a sovereign God rules the world and judges it both in history and at the Last Day. We need not fully understand all the particular events and the divine purposes involved with them to maintain the doctrine of His sovereign rule. And it is this doctrine which inspires optimism as we look at the world and contemplate the state of our nation in particular.
We imagine that happy day when abortionists and their accomplices will be tried and punished. Such hope is fanned by the current prosecution of another almost forgotten Nazi.
The conviction of retired U.S. autoworker John Demjanjuk is a curious event.
At 91 years of age, he was not too old to be put on trial. Murder and related offenses are not subject to a statute of limitations in Germany. (http://www.mahalo.com/john-demjanjuk/)
The big bad guys are mostly dead and gone but this little guy is given no quarter.
“Better late than never,” seems to be the mindset of most modern folks. “Almost forgotten” isn’t good enough to get a pass from the hounds hunting for justice. Indeed, the report said: “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” (“Hundreds of Nazi Cases Reopened,” AP, October 5, 2011).
The Door is Opening
The report said that “prosecutors have reopened hundreds of dormant investigations of former Nazi death camp guards and others who might now be charged under a new precedent.” The sentence of five years in prison seems like an incongruous punishment for a man convicted of 28,060 counts of accessory to murder. But justice delayed is often not justice.
So what did he do? He was serving simply as a lowly guard at the Sobibor prison in Nazi-occupied Poland. But Munich prosecutors argued that if they could prove that he was nothing more than a guard at a camp like Sobibor it was enough to convict him of accessory to murder as part of the Nazi process of eliminating of unwanted Jews. The sole purpose of the camp was the extermination of Jews, argued the prosecution. Anyone associated with such an institution was guilty of the deaths of those imprisoned there.
The door is open to prosecute persons who were involved with the process at the lowest levels. Near death as they might be 70 years after the crimes were committed, they are still vulnerable to prosecution. And there are prosecutors eager to spend the time and money.
Why?
Nations, shamed by their ancestors’ behavior, seek to have their reputations cleaned up, perhaps. Or relatives of the victims continue to pressure governments to deliver justice. Or righteous citizens simply want justice to prevail and to cleanse their consciences of the guilt their countrymen brought upon an entire people.
The strangest thing about this prosecution is the actors in this play. The United States plays the role of the cooperating good guy helping with the sanctification of the semper reformanda Germany. Which one is the black kettle?
Demjanjuk was deported to stand trial in Germany by the abortion-blood-soaked U.S. in 2009. But who are we to send this Nazi to stand trial? Here the warning of Jesus is appropriate: “Judge not, lest you be judged.” Do not imagine yourself to judge in a way where you, yourself, are guilty.
Nazis and Abortion
So what, beside the killing of Jews, did those benighted Nazis do?
Well, they killed Gypsies and East Europeans for purity purposes as well. And they aborted children from these ethnic groups.
Allied prosecutors argued that voluntary and involuntary abortions were war crimes and crimes against humanity. Voluntary abortion was punishable because it was a crime against the unborn child. “The prosecution proceeded on the theory that Germany had a duty to afford protection of law to unborn children and that the deliberate failure of high-level officials to do so constituted crimes against humanity and genocide by acts of omission” (Jeffrey C. Tuomala, “Nuremberg and the Crime of Abortion,” University of Toledo Law Review, Winter 2011, vol. 42).
The prosecution focused attention upon the Nazis’ removal of the protection of law from unborn children in occupied Poland and from the unborn children workers in Germany from Eastern Europe. The Soviet prosecution detailed crimes committed against children and they “portrayed the abortion policy as the height of depravity in the Nazi treatment of children” referencing a directive from the Administration of Food and Agriculture, entitled “Treatment of Pregnant Women of Non-Germanic Origin.” The Soviet prosecutor stated that “in their hatred of the Slav race, the German fascist criminals even attempted to murder babes in the womb” (Tuomala).
The prosecution’s assumption in trying the Nazis was that abortion was a crime. The fact that the Nazis advocated for the aborting of children of particular ethnic groups is beside the salient point, which is that “by the close of World War II, most countries still criminalized abortion. German and Polish law treated abortion as a crime. Undoubtedly, the prosecutors simply assumed that the unborn children of Slavs and Jews were human beings just as their mothers were. Unjustified killing of a human being is criminal homicide.” Indeed, “The prosecution did expressly identify abortion as one of the biological devices that the Nazi’s used to commit genocide” (Tuomala).
Tuomala observes the fact that “The Nuremberg trials established the principle that abortion is a crime against humanity and that state officials are criminally liable for failing, as a matter of state policy, to extend the protection of law to unborn children.” Moreover, “in the decades following Nuremberg, the doctrine that high-ranking government officials are liable for massive human rights violations committed against their own nationals during peacetime has become widely accepted” (See Theodor Meron, International Criminalization of Internal Atrocities, 89, American Journal of International Law, 554, 569 [1995] in which he discusses the United Nation Security Council’s Statutes for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda).
What are the implications of this development for the United States and other nations? What specifically might we expect following a great epiphany regarding the harm population reduction has brought upon generations which have had tax payers, workers, homebuyers, consumers depleted by a veritable abortion holocaust?
Tuomala concludes as follows:
The legal theory of the Nuremberg prosecutors that the German government unlawfully encouraged abortion by providing or funding abortion services directly applies to the U.S. government’s practice of providing abortion services in federal facilities and providing funding for abortions. The prosecution’s theory that the German government committed crimes against humanity by prohibiting Polish courts from punishing abortion is analogous to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which effectively prohibited states from protecting unborn children.
Germany: Slow Poke of the West in Liberalizing Abortion Laws
Germany was slow to follow the rest of the West in the women’s liberation, pro-abortion revolution of the 60s. Great Britain “provided” the Abortion Act of 1967, which allowed abortions of children up to 28 weeks. Canada and the United States, lacking popular support, “legalized” it by the will of the Supreme Courts instead in 1969 and 1973 respectively. Tunisia followed quicky (1973), then France (1975), Austria (1975), New Zealand (1977), Italy (1978), the Netherlands (1980) and Belgium (1990). Germany did not “legalize” abortion until 1995.
It was not that the German people were morally elevated above their fellow Christ-abandoning Europeans. The “liberated” (communist) East Germany legalized abortion in 1972. And many of West Germany wanted to follow the popular “liberation” from the restraints of pregnancy, especially with the reunification of the East and West Germany following the fall of the wall in 1989. But West Germany remained bound by the post-Nazi Constitution which had been penitently ratified in the wake of the Holocaust. That Constitution (Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, formally approved on 8 May 1949) contained specific sections on the crime of abortion – Paragraph 218 of the Criminal Code.
Legislative efforts of the Bundestag to conform West Germany with the rest of the western world as well as East Germany involved an investigative Commission in 1970, extensive hearings, parliamentary debates, and public demonstrations resulting in the decriminalization of abortion in the first trimester. The Constitutional Court, however, intervened and struck down the law because it clearly violated the Constitution, which protected fetal life. Following the reunification of East and West Germany in 1989, the pressure to discard Constitutional protections for fetal life were resumed with vigor. The ensuing debate ended with a 1992 law legalizing abortion in the first trimester with mandatory counseling. Again, the Court declared the law unconstitutional in May 1993, declaring:
The termination of pregnancy must be regarded fundamentally as wrong throughout the entire period of the pregnancy and thereby must be considered illegal. The right to life of the unborn may not be placed, even if just for a limited period of time, in the hands of a free, not-legally-bound decision of a third person, even the mother herself. (Andrea Wuerth, Whitman College, “Re-Unification and Reproductive Rights: Abortion in the German Public Sphere, 1989-1990, Center for European Studies University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, July 1997).
Once again, the legislature attempted to craft a new law. The result was the passage of the current German federal law in 1995 which, while it affirmed that abortion was illegal according to Paragraph 218, it stipulated that neither the woman nor the doctor will be prosecuted if certain conditions are met.
While it took an extra couple of decades – the effect of the guilt from the Holocaust was so strong – for Germany to catch up to the rest of the West, the Fatherland arrived and joined the post-Christian world in the festival of Godless and decadent blood shedding.
Ramifications for abortions world-wide
When justice for the womb child is restored, it will not only be the abortionist who goes on trial. It will be his accomplices: the workers in the “clinics” who assist with the process, the off duty policemen who guard the facilities against the threat of protestors and “vandals,” the “escorts” who accompany the women into facilities where protestors stand outside pleading for the lives of the innocent womb child. Certainly the list of accomplices must include those judges who removed legal protection from the womb children and politicians who continued to defend and advocate such rulings.
Yearning for justice, we can look to a day when judges will be prosecuted for their crimes against the womb child. Legislators who refused to pass a “human life amendment” and presidents who refused to issue executive orders in response to renegade Supreme Court edicts will be charged and prosecuted – whether in the flesh or zealously en absentia; police who arrested those who blocked doors and directors of law enforcement who conducted prosecutions of anti-abortion activists will be tried and punished.
It may not be so clean and easy, however. Perhaps the bringer of wrath will be some conqueror or an exogenous terrorist cell, which is planted amidst our own land and grows in power amidst a failed economy and social chaos. But imagine a conqueror, nevertheless, marching political leaders through a crowd of disdainful and indignant citizens who have been fully informed of the holocaust their leaders approved and led them into.
Oh, but our problem goes beyond the hearts of a few miscreant, immoral politicians. It is a disease, which has permeated the whole citizenry. The nation is ripe. Best to “come out of her” and form new governments. Let communities bind together in Truth and under the Law. Let states withdraw from the union. Let them find a way to secede and re-establish the Law of God. Reform must begin with the Churches as they advocate for the Law of God, for Justice, in the land.
Comments are currently closed.