Nazi hunters combine Shylock, Inspector Javert

Look at the photo at  left accompanying this story. Doesn’t that guy look like a dangerous, evil, murderous Nazi? Can’t you just imagine him slaughtering thousands of Jews at a World War II concentration camp?

Sounds silly, doesn’t it? He looks like somebody’s benevolent grandfather. Make that great-grandfather — he’s almost 94 years old.

This photo which appeared in the German newspaper Die Welt is of Hans Lipschis, who was born to a Protestant family in Lithuania in 1919, who served in the German Army in World War II, and who at one time was a camp guard — or at any rate, who served in some capacity — at Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp where more than one million people, mostly Jews, were gassed or otherwise murdered prior to 1945.  About a week ago, German police arrested him at his home in southwest Germany on charges that he was “complicit to murder” for serving at Auschwitz.

Did some “Holocaust survivors” come forward to point to this elderly grandfather and say, “Yes, that’s him — that’s the man! Hans the Horrible! I saw him mow down women and children by the score with a submachine gun! I saw him turn on the gas for the ovens! That’s him! I’d recognize that face anywhere!”

Even 68 years after the fact.

No, that hasn’t happened. There has been no alleged eyewitness, no written evidence, no German propaganda film belatedly discovered, that provide “probable cause,” as they say in American courts, to haul in the unrepentant, still dangerous Hans the Horrible. He just worked at Auschwitz — which he has acknowledged in a recent interview with Die Welt which accompanied his photo. But Lipschis says that he was a cook at the camp — not a guard. That he killed no one — although he heard talk about things like that happening.

But that doesn’t matter in today’s Germany. Its government, thoroughly intimidated and emasculated by such Nazi-hunting groups as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, changed the laws recently concerning such half-century-long pursuits of “ex-Nazis”. At one time, eyewitnesses to murders in the concentration camps had to come forward before arrests of elderly men who had lived peaceably and lawfully for most of their lives could be made. Some type of evidence which could be produced in court to convince juries, had to exist. But the laws were changed to make it much easier for the Nazi-hunters to hound these elderly men clear to their graves. Now, all that is required is proof that they worked at one of the Nazi concentration camps. That, heigh presto! makes them “complicit to murder” since that was the only purpose of the camps. Or so says the Simon Wiesenthal Center. And would the Simon Wiesenthal Center lie to us?

Other “former butchers” fingered by the Nazi hunters in past years  have defended themselves in court by saying they were “just following orders.” Of course this statement brings only outrage, scorn and ridicule from the professional “Never Againers.” Because of course any decent human being serving in the army of a totalitarian state during a world war would absolutely refuse to follow an order that they considered illegal or inhumane. Of course they would, Never Againers. And of course, any who had actually taken such a “principled stand” would have been summarily executed by the German Army themselves; and someone else whose set of priorities was headed by  “self preservation,” would have done the dirty work in their places. I didn’t realize that “self preservation” was a shameful, selfish emotion to hold. And by the way, did all those “camp guards” at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, etc., volunteer for their jobs? Were none of them assigned to the camps — “just following orders”? You often have to do that in the army, you know; especially in wartime, and when refusal would be met not with a court martial, but with an automatic firing squad.

So this “Hans the Horrible” Lipschis, who was hauled off to jail in Germany and now faces criminal charges: Is he married — or was he? Does he have children, grandchildren? What did he do all those years that he was a U.S. citizen? The world press seems not to have one iota of interest in any of those questions. Presumably he just lived all alone in a rented room somewhere in America for all those years, working … well, someplace … and nervously looking over his shoulder for the Never Againers to come searching for him. And they finally found him.

He had come to the United States in 1956, and lived here until 1983, when he was deported for “lying about his status as a Nazi concentration camp guard” when he first entered the country. Then he lived in Germany, known to the authorities but undisturbed, until this year, when the change in the law made it easier for the Never Againers to put great pressure on compliant German officials to arrest him and haul him in, for “complicity in murder.” And a doctor appointed by the government, certified — oh, so conveniently — that the 93-year-old Lipschis was “healthy enough to be incarcerated.”

So now poor Herr Lipschis will presumably be seated in the dock in some German court, hearing a state prosecutor detail how evil he was for being a cook in a concentration camp. If he manages to survive long enough for his trial, that is.

Of course, Lipschis is not the first “small fish” to have been the subject of years-long, strenuous efforts to deny him a peaceful old age and passing from the earth away. A man named John Demjanjuk, Ukrainian-born and a former Soviet Army soldier who was captured by the Germans, was hounded from 1986 until his death in 2012 at age 91, because some “Holocaust survivor” fingered him as having been “Ivan the Terrible,” an especially cruel and murderous guard at the camps who killed quite a number of people. After his expulsion from the U.S., where he had lived from 1952 until 1986, he was tried in an Israeli court and found guilty; then was freed when the Israeli Supreme Court overturned his conviction because exculpatory evidence had been hidden from the defense by the prosecution, and other evidence had surfaced indicating that the real “Ivan the Terrible” was a fellow Ukrainian named Ivan Marchenko, who had been dead for many years.

Demjanjuk was allowed to return to his home in the U.S. in 1993. But then in 2001, with the German laws having been watered down to try to catch the dwindling number of “Nazi camp guards” before they could die peacefully, surrounded by family and friends, the federal government once more deported Demjanjuk on new charges filed in Germany, and finally he was tried and convicted there, on questionable evidence, in late 2009. His defense appealed his conviction, and he was allowed to live in a German nursing home awaiting the outcome of the appeal. When he died there on March 17, 2012, the appeal was still pending, and so he was not officially convicted of anything. His family wanted his body to be brought back to the U.S. for burial, but the federal government caved in to demands by the Never Againers that this not be allowed, as they said his gravesite could become “a rallying place for neo-Nazis.”

Of course, in a way the anger and frustration of the Never Againers can be understood, although I don’t sympathize with it. All the big-dog Nazis slipped through their fingers. Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin. He was not afraid of death, but he WAS afraid of becoming a jailed, prosecuted figure of scorn. He was quoted by an aide as having said once during World War II, “Stalin’s not going to parade ME through Moscow in a cage!”

Josef Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler — all took their own lives, either before capture by the Allies, or, in the case of Goering and Himmler, afterward. Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death” who is alleged to have conducted experiments causing death to many Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz, fled to South America after the war, managing to elude all attempts by the Nazi hunters to capture him, and drowning, or possibly dying of a stroke while swimming, in 1979.

Of course, the Israeli secret service managed to kidnap Adolf Eichmann, who was instrumental in organizing the Holocaust, from Argentina where he had fled after the war, and took him back to Israel for trial. He was convicted there of crimes against humanity, and hanged, in 1962. Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon (France)” who allegedly killed many Jewish prisoners there, was the only other relatively high-ranked Nazi to be convicted for his crimes. He spent the last four years of his life in a French prison.

So the Never Againers have wreaked their vengeance, for 68 years, on the small fry — the camp guards, mostly. They say that these old men must not be allowed to escape “justice,” so that “never again” will anyone try to extermine the Jewish people.

“Never Again”? Let me tell you something, Nazi hunters: Nazis have been a negligible presence in this world since the end of World War II. Pursuing men in their 90s in wheelchairs proves nothing except that you have sworn to never forgive, nor forget.

I’m an admirer of the Jewish people, for recovering, over and over, from all they have undergone for 3,000 years of history. Each time disaster has struck the Jews, they have gotten up, dusted themselves off, and kept going, again and again, through the downfall of the kingdom of David and Solomon, the Babylonian captivity, pogroms, expulsion from country after country — yes, and the Holocaust.  The founding of the State of Israel was, I believe, the fulfillment of God’s promise to His “Chosen People,” and a vindication of their two-millenia-long toast: “Next year, in Jersualem.”

But the Nazi hunters have not moved on with their lives. They can’t seem to let go of the Holocaust, of the Nazis, of Hitler, of Pope Pius XII allegedly doing nothing to help them. They continue to drag that grudge with them, everywhere they go — a fearsome burden. They are like Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice”: They demand their pound of flesh. They are like Inspector Javert in “Les Miserables”: If they think someone is “guilty,” they’ll pursue him to the ends of the earth, forever and a day, to finally run him down — never mind that he is now 90 years old.

You want to know about “Never Again”? “Never Again” is a strong, vibrant Israel which won’t take crap off the Muslim terrorists who want to destroy it as Hitler tried to destroy the Jews. “Never Again” is Israel’s striking back, hard, every time it is attacked. “Never Again” is a United States of America which remains Israel’s closest ally and supporter — despite the fact that we have a president who was raised in a Muslim culture himself, and whose enthusiasm for Israel often seems very tepid. “Never Again” is the continuing prominence of Jewish people in science, medicine, the arts, literature — far, far out of proportion to their numbers, 12,000,000 million to 14,000,000 million in a world with over 7,000,000,000 people.

You people of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the other professional Nazi hunters, need to retire. Your quarry are all nearing the century mark. You will prove nothing by continuing to pursue them, until you finally manage to catch them, or they all die of old age. Nothing, except that you have become obsessed combinations of Shylock and Javert.