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April 15, 2009

Was justice done?

Most striking is these books’ consensus: despite their authors’ different aims and methods, and despite their contending interpretations of a host of questions, they all agree that, contrary to claims made after the war, the German people had wide-ranging and often detailed knowledge of the murder of the Jews.

In the end, it seems like at most a few hundred people were judicially punished for their crimes against humanity under Nazi Germany. Yet we know now that knowledge of the purpose of the the train cars, the gas chambers, and the crematories were widespread. That means that many who said that they didn't understand how they were contributing to these crimes in fact did understand. In light of this, I am tempted to say that insufficient punishment was meted out. Far more people deserved punishment, on the order of tens or hundreds of the thousands.

Note, the rest of this piece contains spoilers to The Forge of God. Read the review, buy the book, and let it age a bit on your unread book shelf until you forget exactly what it is about and read it then. Stuff like this is why I never read the backs of the books I'm about to read.
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At the end of TFOG, one alien race destroys (through robotic agents) most of humanity and all of Earth. Another alien race saves the a few hundred or thousand members of humanity and begins to prepare them for hunting down and exterminating the the first alien race for their crimes. That story is told in Anvil of Stars, which I've been meaning to read.

One survivor asks, what if we find the first alien race and they regret their crimes and have long since reformed themselves. The second alien race answers, it does not matter, the law requires that punishment. Some things are so terrible that they are unforgivable.

Which brings us back to the punishment dished out to the many collaborators to the war crimes of Germany in WW II. Justice is often inconvenient, expensive and unpleasant. I understand why many were not punished. As the cold war started their was tremendous motivation to pull Germany in to the orbit of The West. Collective punishment was also seen as a failure in WWI. War reparations created an ongoing grievance that partially motivated WWII. Nevertheless, given what we now know about the collective culpability of the German people, their punishment seemed inadequate for their crimes.

Some will point to the enormous loss of blood and treasure suffered by the Germans in WW II as proof they paid enough. I had a teacher in high school, I think it was Dr. Hirshman, who said that if you cheated on his exam and were caught, you got a zero on that test as well as the next test. After all, he reasoned, you would have failed this test anyway, that's why you cheated. That's an important lesson. To properly punish you requires giving something worse than if you hadn't cheated in the first place. Germany's war suffering was self inflicted. Within this framework, Germany's war deaths, misery, and wasted resources can't count as punishment. Punishment has to be beyond what you do to yourself.

What would have been enough? It is hard to know. However, I recently learned that some Nazis did choose to defy their orders and not commit certain crimes, and sometimes ... had nothing to fear from making such a choice. It is difficult to reach back and point out which people were inappropriately granted amnesty. Nevertheless, that quite different from saying that none or few of them were inappropriately granted amnesty. Rather than sending a few dozen people off to hang, it seems more just that closer to everyone working for the Nazi state at a death camp, concentration camp, ghetto, or prison should have hung.

What a lesson that would have been to would be order followers. If you participate in a genocide, even at the point of a gun, you will die. Perhaps then it will be harder to find those willing to follow such orders.

Posted by OneEyedMan at April 15, 2009 9:42 AM

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