Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On The Nazi Hunters 20160726

Mentioned i think its always fun when you can put documents together that casts several different lights, several different kinds of light on the same event and sometimes even the same person saying something differently at different points in time. A little example of that for example, in hemingways novel about the war for whom the bell tolls, the central episode in that novel the blowing up of the bridge behind nationalist lines, hemingway himself part in a. That lou up the bridge and i tell that story in the book. Anyway in that novel he paints an excoriating picture of stalins man who was in charge of the international brigades. When the book appeared in this country, the communist press was outraged because they had expected hemingways muchanticipated book about the war would be about workingclass men from Different Countries standing shouldertoshoulder in the fight against fascism and the hero is a lover of Spanish Literature who is nonpolitical and heres this portrait of stalins leading commissar in spain and one of American Party officials and spanish civil war veteran, himself an author of quite a good memoir about the war reviewed the novel and the communist party publication and talked about how dreadful it was that hemingway distorted history in this way and said these insulting things about you know the great antifascist andrea marteeyo. You compare it with bessies own diary about when he met mark t. And found him with bug in the demagogue and said so in his diary. So its putting together things like that. I think we are running out of time. A quick question. I recall one of the books i read mention was made that one franco forces marched into barcelona that one of the First Political leaders they executed happened if the president of barcelona, the soccer team. In your research did you find out anything about the role of the soccer club and the resistance . I did not. As i mentioned, yes you could write a whole other book about this period with a whole different set of care cares and the stories would be equally fascinating. My wife knew for 30 years i have lived in the shadow. Cant measure up to that war hero. She did mention he was shot. He was wounded in the stomach and he met hemingway and said he was there again. His dad was in the brigade. A couple of questions quickly. What would spain have looked like if the republicans won the republicans want to would it be stalinist or democratic and if the republicans one would hitler and mussolini maybe not started at start of the war . A good question. I think if the spanish public republicans one where the people of spain would have been much better off. There are rightwing historians who say well if a republican one it would become a soviet satellite industry that the soviets did have great insolence in the army and the Security Police but i think to effectively turn the country into a satellite you have to have military occupation. A soviet satellites in Eastern Europe had remained that way for 40 years because the red army was on hand and moscow didnt help, didnt stop to, didnt hesitate to deploy it when somebody got out of line like in hungary in 1956, it is germany 1953 and just look czechoslovakia in 1963. Similarly the u. S. Kept most nations in Central America and the caribbean doing pretty much it wanted throughout the 20th century there is ceaseless string of military interventions without the red army occupying the public republicans painted out that it would have been a soviet satellite. What kind of a country would have been quite say think democratic, disorganized, chaotic but not a military dictatorship. Furthermore in this sort of gets to the second question you asked, if the republicans won the war, spain would not have been a de facto ally for hitler in world war ii. Spain never joined the axis powers in world war ii but franco gave hitler a base for 21 attack submarines on spains united coast. Spain supplied radio listing post encouraged 45 dozen young spaniards to volunteer for hitlers army and his doomed invasion of fresh and most important supplied hitler but they stream of Strategic Metals and minerals of the war, things that were very important in making weapons. If the republic of spain had one hitler would not have had a de facto ally in world war ii. I dont think it would have stopped hitler from launching the Second World War because i think spain for hitler was always something of a sideshow. His real ambition was to show russia who was boss and control Eastern Europe and the western parts of the soviet union and breach the balkan and cascade oilfields. I dont think a loss in spain would have deterred him from that. Thank you. Thank you. [applause] the Democratic National convention is live from philadelphia this week to watch every minute on cspan. Listen live on the free cspan radio app. Its easy to download from the apple store or google play. Watch live or ondemand anytime at cspan. Org on your desktop, foner tablet where you will find all of our Convention Coverage in the full convention schedule. Follow us at cspan on twitter and like us on facebook to see video of newsworthy moments, the Democratic National commission live from philadelphia all this week on cspan, the cspan radio app and cspan. Org. Good evening and welcome. My name is howard unger and on behalf of the Holocaust Memorial museum its my honor to lucky me to todays program entitled ever let loose pursuit ringing holocaust perpetrators to justice. I am the son of a holocaust survivor and had served on the council for the u. S. Museum museum for the past five years but ive come to learn that the museum is so much more than just a building that houses exhibits. The museum researches history, trains educators members and military and the judiciary both in the u. S. And internationally and has many programs focused on preventing future genocides from occurring again. Here in new york the northeast Regional Office offers a variety of events including talks like the one youre about to hear plus Film Screenings and programs on holocaust history as well as contemporary genocide and antisemitism. Tomorrow we will be holding this same program at the synagogue and not kisco new york so please encourage her westchester friends and families to join us there tomorrow evening at 7 45. Tonights program is part of a conversation of the u. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is holding nationwide examining the role each of us has when confronted with difficult and complex challenges. Only in recent history has International Law evolved to define and punish Mass Violence against civilians. Out of the devastating crimes of the holocaust the allied powers were forced to bring state access to justice for unspeakable crimes never before tried in a court of law. A small percentage of nazi officials and collaborators were brought to trial in immediate postwar period. As the years passed the global Legal Community largely lost interest in pursuing the remaining perpetrators however a few remarkable individuals continue to work to bring nazi criminals to justice and these later trials continue to influence International Law. Love grows the dissenting of president s but how you apply the law helps determine what the law means. To the judgments of these tribunals and courts International Law on genocide and crimes against humanity evolves deepening our understanding of the crimes and our capacity to respond. Today our outstanding panel will discuss how these precedence were created and applied to help carry them out in the ongoing legacy of its history. It is now my pleasure to introduce a special guest. Andrew nagorski, journalist and author of the new book the nazi hunters and talk or Lawrence Douglas chair of the jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College and author of the right wrong man. Our moderator this evening is dr. Elizabeth white. She goes by mary. Following the program both authors will be outside in the lobby to sign copies of their books. Thank you. [applause] [applause] good evening everyone. I am dr. Elizabeth barry white. This is Lawrence Douglas and andrew nagorski. Thank you all for coming out tonight and thank you both for participating in this program. Brutal atrocities have been a feature of warfare since the dawn of Human History and to the extent that perpetrators were ever made to account for their actions it was true acts over to fusion either winning side against the losers. During world war ii the allies signaled that they were going to take a different approach. Late in 1943, as it became clear that nazi germany was going to lose the war, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain and the soviet Union Announced that the perpetrators of nazi atrocities would be brought to trial under the laws of the countries where they committed their crimes and that the major nazi leadership and criminals would face joint punishments by the allies. Did the signal that the allies have decided that they were going to forgo vengeance in favor of justice and what are they hope to accomplish by putting nazi criminals on trial . Not really in the sense that justice and vengeance were inevitably intertwined at the end of the war and 1943 the moscow declaration that you cited there was a lot of fighting ahead all the way to berlin and a lot of it was very vicious and especially the red army had suffered massive losses and they were getting revenge, among others not just on the military but for instance rapes by the red army made it close to 2 million in germany. But, there you have that declaration which was a novel idea that instead of you exact vengeance you do seek justice but right away six weeks later if the tehran Conference Call and said to roosevelt and churchill, zero i have an idea of justice. Lets line up to 2000 or 100,000 of the top german commanders and lets shoot them. That would be justice. Churchill was horrified and roosevelt said Something Like lets have a compromise. Lets shoot 49,500. It didnt go over well with churchill but whats interesting it goes back and forth and eventually stalin and roosevelt decide they do want a trial for different reasons. Stalin loved show trials. The 30s he had faked trials but roosevelt really wanted the principle and churchill was aware of the danger of the trap of show trials and he suddenly declassified documents we found out that at one point he was considering a plan to just have summary executions of a few top leaders and some just imprisoned without trial. This went back and forth and eventually the trials happen as we know. Nuremberg and so forth and it was imprisoned in but every step of the way was controversial right up to today. And what were the reasons they opted to go for the trials . Where their particular goals besides Holding People accountable . Aside from Holding People accountable and the obvious one that somebody has to be punished for all the horrors there was the educational elements very early and present chairman at one point said what these trials are meant to do is to make it impossible for someone to say now or anytime in the future that these things happened and that is why it immediately you have at the trials documents, films, witnesses and in some cases witnesses in some cases documentation by the west to set the record straight because so many people were in denial but what happened especially in germany and austria but elsewhere in the world people are only beginning to grasp the aptitude of what it happen. So we were focusing on the german people and show them the evils that have been done in the name than . That was the priority at first and while we fought this war but there was a media opposition terms of the United States both on the left and the right. For the people who went into the concentration camps and liberated them they said no this is not justice. Lawrence you are our legal expert here. The charges before the International Military tribunal at nuremberg were crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. At least some of these word new terms. Did the international Legal Community consider these to be wellfounded in existing law or were some of them particularly controversial . Well the whole trial was engulfed in controversy. Its remember that this was the First International criminal court in Human History and in certain respects not only were there 21 individual incentives on trial, that is to the extent that the allies had committed to doing a Trial Program is supposed to summer education they really had to demonstrate that law was an adequate tool for dealing with crimes of this magnitude so they wanted to certainly make sure that whatever charges were brought against these defendants that they had adequate grounding in International Law. That said i think we need to bear in mind that norbert trial, the famous before the International Tribunal was not in the first instance a holocaust trial. As you mentioned the principle charge against the defendants that norm berg was that they had waged an aggressive war in violation of International Law and that charge to wage an aggressive war, that has not shown a lot of durability since nuremberg and even at the time it was very my chin developed and controversy. The victors justice was applied to the charge of waging an aggressive war because the question emerged since when in Human History was waging war at crime . It might be something you dont like it might be something you disagree with us since when was it a crime . The other charges that were brought, were crimes is pretty well established in International Law and crimes against humanity in my mind was the most distinctive contribution that norm berg made it was through the channel of this relatively new thing called crimes against humanity that most of the evidence of the crimes of the holocaust answered the nuremberg trial and i think we can say now with 70 plus years of hindsight crimes against humanity was the most instinctive and important legal breakthrough of the nuremberg trial. And crimes against humanity included what kinds of actions . A basically included what we can describe as extermination, systematic attacks on the civilian population. We have to remember that genocide which is a term that we offered used today to describe discriminatory practices genocide was only coined as a term in 1944 a year before the trial started. It was coined by a Legal Adviser to the u. S. War department and so even though today genocide stands as an independent crime and International Law at the time of norm burkett was very much a new term and it does emerge in the trial itself. If you look in particular at the closing prosecutors they start to use this new term but the new term of genocide is basically used as a description of the nazis crimes against humanity. I think that was in the indictment as well. The indictment is mentioned as a war crime and in the closing arguments of the lawyers that prosecutors then started describing it as a crime against humanity. If you are going to hold a trial yet to present evidence to support the charges and so late in the war the United States army formed war crimes investigative teams and the mission was to accompany combat troops as they fought their way across germany and to seize and collect evidence of nazi war crimes. Lets take a look at how this works according to nuremberg prosecutors. An odd what i would do would secure the records. An odd in order to have the sex successful war crimes prosecution beyond a reasonable doubt and specific crime no crimes been committed. And you needed a defendant. If you havent got a together at the same time youve got nothing and to bring the two together is not easy. Between 1945 in 1948 there were thousands of trials of nazi criminals by the allies, in germany. There are several but i will point to three and i will get that to ben for ends in a moment but with poland where there was an investigator by the name of of. He was from a polish family of german origin and i discovered researching a story it turns out that his brother during the occupation that registered as ethnic german and became the mayor of a small town and disappeared after the war, he was a lawyer who did not do that and he became the most fervent war crimes investigator in poland and he was the one for instance those of you who of course know from schindlers list the concentration camp commander. He was the one who had him hanged but most importantly the most important was the longestserving commandant of auschwitz and what was interesting he was representing a regime that communist postpost regime so he had gone by the stalin rules. He would summon the guy how to make a quick statement hang him. Instead he spent days, weeks, months coaxing tests to write his whole life story and the story of the camp and it is i think the most chilling document of the holocaust because here is hess explaining how hes a functionary in working so hard and he is hurting kids and women into the gas chambers but im working so hard that i dont have time to play with my own kids across the yard. And its beginning, he understood the value of these trials is to get them on record and everybody he got on record and later on it with these the basis for the auschwitz trial and the guards in germany as well so in his trial has was hanged in 1947 but as much as the verdict and the outcome i think its what that produce. And for those of you dont know for ends is 96 years old. Hes incredible. Hes about 5 feet tall and he is an amazing person. When i went to see them with my wife in delray beach florida he was just back from the. Jenna and the showing my wife is biceps. And he became at age 27 the prosecutor in what was called the special killing squads case that the nazis sent out to the Eastern Front before the gas chambers were operational. This was at warm up mass murder and has been described it a researcher found all the records the germans were scripted lists. They have the records, how many people were killed in this village this day and how many the next day and he said i sat down with my calculator, adding machine and when i reached 1 million i stopped counting. He goes to the chief prosecutor for the followup trial and says we have to try these guys. Taylor says we dont have it budgeted. I dont even have a prosecutor for this. He does that at age 27 and in that case very welleducated commanders of these groups, just a fascinating morbid case but its also calculates what happened. 13 of the 22 he had in the dock were sentenced to death and eventually only for the more hangs because the bandstand by 1958 the rest were out. Finally the one other case i will briefly mention william dems and who is another Army Prosecutor and he conducted the dock out trials of concentration camps and this was to get the people who are actually they are carrying out the worst work of really killing and torturing prisoners. And he espoused a theory called common design which was a theory that if you were part of the death machinery you were guilty. Whether or not you could true view killed person x, y or z. This was a complete contradiction that case. You have the controversy which goes right up to the present and then his trials were overshadowed by one case. He was the longestserving commander in chief was known as the pitch of ogun fall. She was known for her sadism and for going around and torturing having prisoners beaten and for flaunting her sexuality and then having prisoners picked off a responded in any way to it again there were various stories in the press that she had reznors especially with tattoos taken away, killed and stripped and lamp shades made of their skin. A lot of this, some of this became dubious and especially that latter part and later on she was, her sentence reduced from a life sentence by clay to four years and theres a whole uproar in washington. But interestingly enough west germany once in these trials as soon she was let out she was imprisoned by west germany and given a life sentence. She committed suicide in prison. Well, as you indicated after 1948 the allies were crime Trials Program really peter daut and instead of trying people they were commuting sentences and granting clemency and by 1958 pretty much everyone who had been convicted that hadnt been executed after sentence was free. Lawrence i want to ask you what were the reasons for this change correct of a few through the trials . Where through answered the through the third answers the cold war. I think that was really the reality where at some point the United States made the calculation that we needed west germany as a dependable ally against our former allies the soviet union and it was really just a calculation of trying to appease the germans. The germans turned against the allied War Crimes Program, really really aggressively and at the time of the nuremberg trials for the International Tribunal, the germans were actually quite sympathetic or at least they expressed their actual views but in the polls that were taken by the americans they express support for the nuremberg trials. When these additional trials were conducted some of the ones that andy was describing the germans felt now the allies were rubbing our faces in our crimes we do want to transition to a democratic society. Obviously in making that transition to the democratic side they were at tremendous number of former nazis who continue to occupy positions of power particularly within the legal apparatus of west germany. Those persons had very little incentive to support an aggressive War Crimes Program and so once the soviet union emerged as the principle antagonists of the United States and once the United States cant later that germany was used as an allied than the americans were willing to do a lot in order to secure support of germany and unfortunately it took the form of basically commuting sentences of perpetrators of genocide. One specific example i interviewed the man who became the head of the first cia base in lynn, the oss. He himself was a German Jewish who had left germany as a teenager in the 30s, gone to prison and came to United States, became a citizen and joined the army and the oss and the cia. So the young head of the first cia based in berlin, he said i was not interested in fighting the last war. They got rid of the young, the big guys. Its time to move on and that was the prevailing sentiment. He really just felt that very strongly. You have each written a book about the pursuit of justice for nazi crimes and your book focus particularly on the era after the allied war crimes Trial Program but you have taken different approaches. Your book focuses on specific individuals who plated dave very different role in the pursuit of justice. Explain how you picture subjects and why you thought this was a good way to approach the topic. I think first of all you have to understand when you say nazi hunters which is a very loose phrase and i know many people in the Justice Department so forth have qualms about it but there were two essential groups. There were the people who were the government and military prosecutors and investigators and you have the authority of governing behind them and there were what i call the freelance nazi hunters people like Holocaust Survivors and who made it their mission to publicize them push the issues when it was unpopular to do so and when that situation happened were governments were dropping this very quickly even people who were seen as a controversial character but everybody gives him credit for keeping this issue alive. The other thing that intrigued me as a reporter from recovering the collapse of communism im struck a history in retrospect looks so inevitable. This must have happened this way. In fact thats not sure in my experience. Individuals making decisions there are two things that i write about, determination and for lack of a better word or a good word chutzpah. They all demonstrate chutzpah by saying i can take on this bigger case and by the display of the famous incident where is the corporal Marlena Dietrich came to the general headquarters and he was told to guard the latrines or she could take a bath. At a certain moment he walked into the bath when he was sure she was in it and so impressed that dietrich that she determination though not to be stopped and so you have people like four n. s forentz who are strongly motivated and he had chris bauer who was from a jewish family, social democrats had gone into exile and he was determined to make the germans face up to the past when it was incredibly unpopular as lawrence said. When sentiment was running against it and eventually it orchestrated the auschwitz trial and provided the cue stick for the idol wildman case. Later on you had people in the United States and france. Those of you that know something about it she grew up in their father was in the german army pitch he came to paris and fell in love. His father died with and she suddenly learning about all of this became passionate, going after nazis wherever she saw them and when a former nazi became the mayor, the chancellor of west germany in 1968 she actually got onto the stage like this and snuck by with a press credential by the newspaper people. She shouted you nazis. This is the year 1968 when Martin Luther king had been assassinated and she could have been shot. She did this so number of people took incredibly dramatic actions. This is a man who all told who tried twice in the United States on civil immigration charges for having lied on his immigration forms and he earned the distinction of being the only person in American History to be twice stripped of his naturalized u. S. Citizenship. He was tried once in israel in the late 19 80s as ivan as an ivan the terrible. This was a spectacular case in israel, the the only other case that rivals that is the trial of adolph fleischman. He was condemned and sentenced to death. His phase of the trial court sided with the unraveling of the soviet union. What this meant was that both defense lawyers and israeli prosecutor suddenly got access to literally hundreds of thousands of pages of documents that have been moldering in the kgb files and what this evidence indicated was that the israelis have the wrong guy. Now he had been convicted almost exclusively on the basis of eyewitness testimony of the survivors of treblinka who store a trance war with the uncertainty to recognize their former tormentor. This legendarily guard and these were survivors who were they testified they went out of their way of saying look, im not like someone who suffered the trauma of a passing car accident where i caught a fleeting glance of the person who injured me. I saw this guy day in, day out for months on end and his image is burned into my retina. Yet when the appellate phase had run its course the Israeli Supreme Court was able to conclude that they had got it wrong. They had mis identified him and this legendarily guard named or known as ivan the terrible was in fact at entirely different ukrainian named ivan march ankle. What made it to into a legal storm was that at the same time a year not been ivan the terribles also also made clear that he had been we can call ivan that not so hot, that is in fact he had been a guard but not in treblinka but an equally lethal nazi death camp camp this led to proceedings that led to his deportation to germany in 2009. In 2009 he stood trial in germany as ivan the not so hot rather than ivan the terrible of treblinka. I use this very lengthy and bizarre case. Its a conduit to look at the larger legal struggles. Looking at many Different Cases involving the effort to bring perpetrators an also collaborators in the holocaust to justice. The iceman trial that you both mentioned that was really a watershed event in the pursuit of justice for nazi crimes. Can you talk a a little bit each of you are what you think the impact of that case was in my about it was so important. Let me me just say one thing as a prelude to that trial, we all think of that the israelis were out there hunting for not tos everywhere. And i went to israel in researching this book and found that the two members of the team lead the team that physically snatched him at the time but coffee, the commander of the ground operation was there and hes still alive and i talked to him about it when it one point he said in 1953 i went to germany and i thought nazis, and he said no its not what youre thinking. I went there because at the time israel needed to vet all of the jews coming from Eastern Europe from the soviet union, poland and hungary who is coming to israel. They needed it for the population but they also knew that some of them were being recruited by the kgb and other eastern intelligence agencies. There be reporting back to their capitals, budapest or moscow and then be going straight to the outside. That was our our priority. Was not even thinking about nazis then and israel why the u. S. Had it. A patient with the cold war, israel had its preoccupation with just existing. But by the late 50s when they got this tip about eichmanns presence in argentina, at that point the origin really was in this is again theres one member of the prosecution saying gabriel block he said in our concern was that the holocaust was being forgotten not just abroad, but it was not being talked about in israel. Before the reason that young israelis could not understand how this could have happened, how people could have gone to their death seemingly without fighting and in israel you understood fighting and death. And that this would be if they got eichmann it would be a chance to explain this process and then during at that point they authorize the operation once the leads panned out which was a very long and difficult story. The trial was a great holocaust trial. If we go back to what were saying about nuremberg you recall nuremberg was not in the first of the holocaust trial was about aggressive war. In fact one thing that disturbed many Holocaust Survivors was at the nuremberg trial was a trial not of the testimony of people that survived, it was a trial by document. It is a trial in which the prosecutors basically read thousands and thousands of pages of captured nazi doctrines into the record in one of the consequences of that trial by document at nuremberg was the famous british writer rebecca west covered the nuremberg trial for the Daily Telegraph in britain. She famously described described nuremberg as a citadel of boredom. She said it was a boredom on a historic scale. Part of it was that it lacked the vibrancy of having a human voice. David bengurion and in particular the israeli attorney general very specifically wanted to make a trial which was supposed to merck nuremberg which would really focus on that holocaust and it would be a trial in which lived history would be told through the memory of survivors. That is exactly how the trial unfolded with many survivors testifying in both houston or were astonished by the success of the trial. They certainly wanted to trial as suggested for the purpose of trying to teach a domestic audience about the holocaust. They were completely caught by surprised at the degree to which the trial riveted not just simply at domestic audiences and reseal israel but international audiences. To put it on the map in west germany and put the holocaust on the map in the United States. In fact in many ways i hope this formulation is not confusing, but in the certain way it created the holocaust as the event as we now know it, that is up until the eichmann trial you can say that the extermination of the jews of europe was seen as a one of the features of the Second World War. After the trial it starts to emerge in the way that we see the holocaust today which is perhaps as exemplary event of the 20th century. And that generated huge intellectual debate with going through the trial in her theory about the trial and weather is eichmann the minor functionary which was carrying out orders as he tried to betray himself or was the monster that others pretrade himself and then what you say if someone is a monster than does that absolve other people who say only the monsters did this. So it becomes a focal point not just for justice and holocaust studies, but human psychology at its most basic level. It gave rise to many of these famous tight psychology experiments. With all these things were motivated and trying to make sense of the psychology of the perpetrator. So that is also one of the very interesting things that all these trials do. They create images of what it means to be a perpetrator of these crimes. So then in 1979 that United States Justice Department creates the office of special investigation and gives it exclusive authority to investigate and bring legal action against nazi criminals who are living in the United States. So in 1979 had anything done before . What are the government then at a time when almost nobody else was trying nazi criminals decide to undertake this venture . I think an interesting thing is time as one suggested the eichmann trial, the various earlier trials and how this affected geographically in time. I think the key moment is 1964 when stephen hears about this woman called grounds timer. He hears the story from survivors who are talking about this vicious guard who is called cabello which in polish means the mayor and she was kicking and lashing out at prisoners. They say what happened to this woman . They eventually trace her, she had, she was from austria and she had served it briefly in prison in austria. Then she marries an american by the name of russell ryan and is living in queens. Joe lawn fell to later becomes the editor of the New York Times as the hub reporter said go out and we have this kid from the and theres this woman in queens he knocks on her door, he writes a story in 1964 and until and intel it takes him till 1971 for for the ins to finally strip her of her citizenship and she is sent to germany, eventually convicted there and spent several years in prison in germany. But it begins to raise questions in other other people say will who else was in the United States and there are various reports, the inss post about these things and not to conduct war wartime trials then you can strip them of their citizenships. There are several such cases. In the early 70s elizabeth who is a congresswoman from brooklyn begins to hear about these things and she says, will a first i thought the case was an aberration and then i hear there is is some sort of list the ins has of nazi war criminals in the United States of about 53 people. The ins commissioner comes in testifies before a subcommittee and she asked do you have this list and he says yes. She says i about fell out of my chair and then begins the battle the ins is clearly not investigated these cases and eventually forces through the creation of the osi, the office of special investigation where people like yourself and that becomes the unit that finally gets back into the business of identifying people who are nazi war criminals and stripping them of their citizenship, deporting them if possible and if possible getting them tried someplace else. Each step along the way is a very difficult one. So at least establishing the principle that if you are nancy were criminal youre not welcome in the United States. You. You may have slipped in after the war specially with all the displaced persons, obviously some small percentage of them mad been involved in nazi war crimes and pretending to be someone else them who they were. So lawrence, when this was created it was represented a new approach of how to go back this pursuit of justice. What would you say where the strengths and weaknesses of the osi model . It goes back a little bit what andy was saying. These american prosecutors, their prosecuting their prosecuting civil charges that is theyre basically taking crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity and treating it as if it is lying on the immigration form. So in a certain way you are kind of torturing history by trying to digest these horrific crimes into something that is really a wrong. The reason the prosecutors do this is this a very clever and important strategy because also as andy suggested these are crimes that took place outside the United States in which the perpetrators were not american citizens at the time. In which victims are not citizens. So american courts had no jurisdiction to bring charges against these people. So they developed this clever strategy of using civil charges. But i think that had its limitation. The other thing to mention is that even bring in these immigration cases as also stated it was incredibly complicated. It basically required as you can probably tell even better than i could, it required the osi within the department of justice people to really create this new paradigm for bringing these trials for. Typically a prosecutors working with investigators who can kinda do investigatory work and they develop and in this case it simply would not work. You needed people first of all you needed people with language skills. Most of the information was in a Foreign Language which a typical investigator would have no ability whatsoever to negotiate with these documents. So the osi and youre one of the living examples of this, they pioneered this completely unprecedented arrangement within the department of justice and said basically garrett of all the normal investigators and hired professional historians. Though a site looks like an advanced institute for this event study of the holocaust. You end up having you and your colleagues and it being this remarkable team that works closely with lawyers for the purposes of mastering the incredible, the difficult document terry evidentiary and historical challenges that arise out of these cases. One thing that the osi also learned the whole hard way was the difficulties of relying on eyewitness testimony. Again this is something that came out in the case and it comes up in another case youre familiar with with the wallace case that came before. But you can imagine how difficult this is. You have these witnesses who swear with absolute certainty and you can see the way in which lawyers would be tempted to believe that people who had suffered such a trauma were accurate and identifications but ultimately they came to realize that as dry as it may be documentary evidence was ultimately more solid than the identification of eyewitnesses. So the case that we move on to germany, why does germany decide to prosecute him over 60 years after his crime and what was the significance of that case . A lot of people thought, just to be clear it was not a german, this was a guy who is originally from the year crane, born in 1920 and was taken as a prisoner of war by the german army in the spring of 1942. He is someone who many people said, granted he may have been a collaborator and he clearly was enlisted and collaborated and served as a death camp guard but there is this question about what good are we doing by trying someone who by all accounts was at the bottom of this hierarchy and who is never a nazi member and certainly was not a german. I wrote about this trial first one harpers magazine. When i first read or write about have to say that the trial is going to be somewhat grotesque. I thought my conclusion was going to be what are they doing trying this guy 70 years after the fact. By the end of the trial i came to the realization that this was incredibly important trial. Important because in many ways its the trial that got the logic of genocide right. That is it understood, it, it went back to the point that benson had me when you talk a number of people made the same point earlier, but german courts had for decades treated the holocaust as if it were a garden variety act of murder, just multiplied millions of times over. And the great achievement of this trial that took place in 2009 2011 is it really understood that genocide is not like murder. When you are dealing with states sponsored mass criminology does not criminology it does not matter someone is particularly cruel. It doesnt matter if they are a sociopath or status. If someone works in the factory of death, they were an accessory to murder because that was their job. That was a simple yet historic breakthrough of the german court. It took them 6060 years to frame that relatively simple conclusion but the critical conclusion not only for making sense of the holocaust but also making sense of mother instances of statesponsored atrocity and that is why we still have these remaining trials today because basically its operating under the conclusion is that why try someone who is 95 years old, 70 years after the war, they found that logic that you dont have to prove a particular murder, and every trial establish that there were obstacles. People did not have to do these jobs. Theres. Theres no consequences if you opted out. So these trials were seen today to make that point. Now the irony is of course that same logic where you sit in the 50s and 60s come in hundreds hundreds of thousands wouldve been on trial in theory. But at least the point is made and that obeying an order is just saying i obey orders is never an except will defense. In some ways its the worst offense you can have. I think we need to give people a chance to ask make. Let me follow up on one point that andy made which is one of the most interesting things that came out from Holocaust Research which was many of the people who were put on trial argued that the reason they engaged in manifest criminal acts is because theyre forced to. That is that they basically had a gun to their head and that is why they engaged in these mass atrocities. Well historians have have spent huge amounts of times looking into that claim. The total number of ss men who are german and ncos who suffered serious consequences as consequence of opting out, there were people opted out, the total number of people who suffer under conine consequences is exactly zero. Great. I know we could talk for a long time and there are a lot of interesting aspects to the subject. Im sure that many of you would like to ask some questions. We have mikes at either ends. I cannot see unfortunately. But if you want to line up and you can ask your questions. And i ask that you please keep them pretty specific. I think well take a few questions and then and then talk abt them. Is just wondering if you think the focusing on the female perpetrators which are always kind of a scandalous that in a way diverted the attention from the wider spans of the criminality that is where nobodys responsible everybodys just a function in there is not this personal element of cruelty. I wonder if you could talk more about. [inaudible] because in a sense take one country like lithuania. Now one commander has ever been put on trial in lithuania. And 90 of lithuania june jews were murdered in three months. I would like to hear more about what you have to say about that. And one more question. I was curious about the trials ive been reading about in germany today. A 90 someyearold nazis that suddenly the germans have decided to prosecute and convict. Can you talk talk a minute about that . Im happy to answer that last question about and maybe ill answer couple. So once the trial tonic is actually going on right now in germany and this past summer the socalled bookkeeper of auschwitz was convicted this past july. Both of these trials were basically building on the precedents. In fact one of the things that some of the people who had a cynical reaction to the trial was is not just ironic that the germans finally have this great conceptual breakthrough when there is no more perpetrators to bring to trial. So i think one of the things the german prosecutors were interested in doing was central at least were going to try to use, in the time that remains to us, we are going to try to use this precedent as an opportunity to go after some of the remaining guards who are alive. I think the point of these trials is that in fact many of the survivors in the family of survivors who have attended these trials i think theyre really interested in seeing the symbolic statement of a conviction. I think theyre less interested in seeing him being sent away for the rest of his days as much as they are interested in seeing the symbolic understanding that this person was accessory to murder because that was the job he was performing. To connect that point to the question about the female perpetrators and i do think in those kind of trials are very misleading. The kind of the kind of fit into this layer understanding of nazi crimes as this ghoulishly spectral lies. I think that was the point about the greatness of the demond yet trial. This is not a person who is associate path. It was not a person who is acting out of deviancy, this was an entirely ordinary person. In many ways he was the denial figure that eisman never was. We now know he was a very jealous and he was like a lowly footsoldier of genocide. I would just add on these trials today, just like lauren said, it is not so much the punishment that is the issue. These are the last trial where you get the perpetrate perpetrator who will Say Something but you have eyewitnesses still and you get testimony as to put this on record and that is critical and its been critical from the beginning. Its interesting that for instance a bower, the german prosecutors first case in 1962 was a case against the man by author. [inaudible] if you saw the attempt to sansone eight hitler, he was the guy who marched and was supposed to arrest thinking hitler was dead, hitler gets on the phone and says arrest the plotters. But bauer was suing him for libel not because of that but because he said after the war in the far right rally that the people who try to assassinate hitler were traders and foreign agents. He won the defamation case. He forgot to ask for a punishment. The point was to win and to show that to be a patriotic german meant to oppose hitler. That is something again and again in these trials that we are getting to. So for the group theres no satisfaction there any place. Friends was a man who did not asked for a particular sentence the crimes are so great. He had documentation on 3000 people he said who every day would go on shoe people. In nuremberg there are 24 seats in that docket they chose 24 at first and then to dropped out for a few reasons. So he tried 22 and as i mentioned only four were put to death. And the rest serve sentences that sentences that were all done by 1958. So again it was no more symbolic. And a a lot of this justice was symbolic. But the notion that at least you get the verdict and you get the history. And that has an impact. Some of the people operated in lithuania were tried by the west later. But it was very small, they did not to all the killings themselves and thats it, misnomer. There really the organizers of the killings and they rely very heavily on local support wherever they went in in lithuania that was true there are many involved in the killings. There were some trials postwar even when lithuania was under the soviet union. After lithuania became independent they looked at the double victims they suffered under the nazis and the soviets. There is great reluctance to face up to what some of their countrymen had done during the holocaust. That is a process that theyre still going through. I think there has been some progress in that. Definitely not in the form of trials in that. And probably too late. Is there any more questions. I do. One of the purposes of trial would be to prevent these kind of incidents from happening in the future. When ioo