Germany Prosecutes Demjanjuk To Conceal Its Own Guilt

In his recent book Unser Kampf: 1968 – “Our Struggle: 1968” – German historian Götz Aly discusses an emblematic and still widely-debated episode in the history of post-War Germany: the fatal shooting of student protestor Benno Ohnesorg by a police officer in West Berlin in June 1967. As flagged by the heavily ironic title, Aly’s book suggests that there are important ideological similarities between Germany’s left-wing radicals of the “1968” generation and the earlier generation of German radicals known as National Socialists. The book and its thesis are eminently worth discussing in their own right. But I want to cite it here just for some details that Aly provides about the biographies of two leading Berlin police officials at the time of the Ohnesorg shooting and for the instructive light that these details cast on Germany’s arrest and pending prosecution of John Demjanjuk. (For background, see my earlier FF post on Demjanjuk and "The Amazing Hypocrisy of German Justice" here).

Aly writes (p. 28):

The chief of the West Berlin riot police, who headed the deployment on 2 June 1967, was named Hans-Ulrich Werner. He joined the SS in 1939, received a mark of “very good” in his course on the National Socialist “world view,” and in 1943-44 won accolades for his role as a unit commander of the Ordnungspolizei in Ukraine during punitive actions against partisans, which as a rule involved massacres of innocent civilians….

The Chief of Police of West Berlin in 1967 was the Social Democrat Erich Duensing. From 1936 to 1945, he was a career officer in the Wehrmacht. He had been in charge of the West Berlin police since 1962 and systematically handed out appointments to old comrades from the Wehrmacht and SS – including such as had worked in the Reich Security Main Office – as well as to former chiefs of Gestapo branch offices.

The Ordnungspolizei were German police units that were dispatched to the occupied territories and that were largely implicated in German war crimes. The role of one Ordnungspolizei unit in implementing the “final solution” in Poland is, for instance, the subject of Christopher Browning’s study Ordinary Men.

Ordnungspolizei pose with Jews awaiting deportation in German-occupied Poland

Specifically in Ukraine, Ordnungspolizei units are known, for instance, to have participated in the infamous Babi Yar massacre in which tens of thousands of local Ukrainian Jews were murdered. (For a novelistic account, see Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar.)

If the Reich Security Main Office sounds familiar, that is because it is the SS agency where Adolf Eichmann worked. The Reich Security Main Office – or RSHA, according to its German initials – was responsible for the planning of the Holocaust. If the lowly foreign “volunteer” John Demjanjuk was in fact involved in any Nazi crimes, then those crimes will have been devised by the SS bureaucrats in the RSHA. (On Demjanjuk’s lowly status and the highly equivocal character of his designation as a “volunteer,” see here.)

There is no special reason why Götz Aly should have happened upon the likes of Werner and Duesing in conducting his research. The section of his book in question is not about former Nazis in the German police. It is simply about the Benno Ohnesorg incident and the government’s response to it. On the latter level as well, incidentally, one quickly encounters former Nazis in prominent positions. The chief bureaucratic official in the Ministry of the Interior at the time was one Werner Ernst. Ernst wrote a “discussion paper” for his colleagues on the student unrest. Aly notes that “he began his career in the Reich Ministry of Labor in 1936 and thereupon joined the NSDAP….” (NSDAP are the German initials of the Nazi party: or, more fully, the “National Socialist German Workers Party.”) Indeed, the then German Chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, was himself a former Nazi. As Aly parenthetically reminds us, Kiesinger already joined the Nazi party in 1933.

What the examples reflect is quite simply the pervasive presence of former Nazis in West German institutions and not only of former Nazis, but indeed of former Nazis who by virtue of their positions were virtually surely involved in crimes and atrocities: persons such as Ordnungspolizei unit commander Hans-Ulrich Werner or the RSHA officials and “former Gestapo branch office chiefs” appointed by Duesing. This is the German reality. This was the German normality, which only changed by slow attrition as the generation of the perpetrators passed into comfortable retirement. But, of course, Germany’s pursuit of John Demjanjuk suggests precisely the contrary: in effect, that Germany must have made a clean break with its Nazi past. Otherwise, how could it have the moral authority (to say nothing of the jurisdiction) to try an alleged low level foreign auxiliary to Nazi crimes like Demjanjuk?

It is possible that younger Germans do not know the truth. But virtually all Germans of a certain age know it perfectly well: Germans like, for instance, Kurt Schrimm, the 59-year-old prosecutor who has spearheaded the efforts to put Demjanjuk on trial in Germany. Germany’s pursuit of Demjanjuk is a sort of a lie to the rest of the world.