Nazi Fatigue: Responsibility or Unjust Burden?

Over 60 years after the liberation of the death camps, Germany is preparing itself for its last prosecution of an accused Nazi war criminal. Prosecutors in Munich have thus far secured 22 witnesses to testify against John Demjanjuk, who was extradited to Germany by the US earlier this year to face charges of accessory to 27,900 counts of murder.

Earlier today, former German army officer Josef Scheungraber was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for a massacre of civilians in Italy. Many Germans, however, are experiencing a bit of Nazi-fatigue:

"We hear about the trial every day on TV, we read about it every day in the newspaper, politicians make sure it is as the top of the agenda," says Ursula Weber-Kelke, a retired schoolteacher from Darmstadt. "We are fatigued from the constant attention to it. It never stops.

"We are not saying justice shouldn't be carried out. These men committed crimes and need to be punished. Only that this horrible era continues to chase us. And it's time to move on."

Much has been written and debated (especially in academic circles, and at surprisingly rowdy conferences) about the issue of German guilt over the Holocaust. The line between remembrance and guilt-complex may not be clear, but it is certainly unfair to continue to blame successive generations of Germans for the past. Yet Germans do have a responsibility to carry the weight of that history, as all nations do (ahem --- slavery in America, among others), with eye towards warding off any possible repeat in the future --- or, as German philosopher Jurgen Habermas more eloquently put it:

"After Auschwitz our national self-consciousness can be derived only from the better traditions in our history, a history that is not unexamined but instead appropriated critically. The context of our national life, which one permitted incomparable injury to the substance of human solidarity, can be continued and further developed only in the light of the traditions that stand up to the scrutiny of a gaze educated by the moral catastrophe, a gaze that is, in a word, suspicious."

(Emphasis added.)

So where is the line? When does the "past become the past" when dealing with an occurrence of genocide? Or does it ever --- especially if you consider those still holding on to Nazi ideology?

As far as the actual trials go, though, I'm unsympathetic: The prosecution of Nazi war criminals, or war criminals anywhere (people expressed similar discontent over South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission) are primarily for the purpose of serving justice to the victims, however small and meager it may be in comparison with the egregiousness of the crimes committed against them.

[Photo of German soldiers abuses a Jewish man.]