At 95, It’s Time To Let It Go

There are many lessons worth remembering from World War II, though it’s unclear whether they will be remembered or they will be remembered for the right reasons. Some of those lessons are about how a nation spiraled into hatred and the nadir of immorality. Others are about how a world, after beating that warmongering nation, allowed it to take a path back into society.

As a boomer whose father fought in the Nazis in the Ardennes Forest and freed a concentration camp, and as a Jew, this is not an emotionless subject for me. I was raised to Never Forget, and I can’t and won’t. When I went to German in the summer of ’79, I looked at every old man and wondered what he did in the war. But I couldn’t hate Germany or Germans. I chose to let it go.

There were individuals who personally committed unimaginable atrocities. Some escaped culpability for a while until they were found and tried. No doubt some were never found. As learned from the capture of a guard at the Sobibor camp, John Demjanjuk, who was an auto worker in the United States until convicted in 2011, the search never ended.

Last year, Bruno Dey, age 93, was convicted of 5,230 counts of murder for his actions as a 17-year-old guard at the Stutthoff camp. He was tried in juvenile court and was given a two-year suspended sentence. Survivors were outraged at the leniency. He was guard. He committed atrocities.

But the same can’t be said of Irmgard F. She wasn’t a guard, but a secretary to the commandant. She’s 95 years old now. She was a juvenile then. After fives years investigation, she has been indicted for her complicity in the deaths of 10,000 human beings.

Public prosecutors in Germany have indicted a 95-year-old woman for her role supporting the Nazi killing machinery as a secretary in a concentration camp, charging her with 10,000 counts of being an accessory to murder, and complicity in attempted murders.

The woman worked between June of 1943 and April of 1945 as a secretary for the camp commander at the Stutthof camp, 20 miles from the Polish city of Gdansk, which was known as Danzig under German rule at the time.

What’s the right question to ask in deciding what to do about Irmgard? What did she do? What did she know? Or is the question now, what purpose is served?

“It’s about the concrete responsibility she had in the daily functioning of the camp,” said Peter Müller-Rakow of the public prosecutor’s offices in Itzehoe, north of Hamburg.

No doubt she had a “concrete” role in the daily functioning of the camp as the commandant’s secretary. But that role was moving papers, not gassing, shooting, and the myriad atrocities committed on prisoners. She is not without blame, as part of the machine that made concentration camps perform their horrific function, but was her blame of a different sort than those who  committed the atrocities with their own hands?

“It’s a real milestone in judicial accountability,” said Onur Özata, a lawyer representing survivors in the trial of the former camp secretary. “The fact that a secretary in this system, a bureaucratic cog, can be brought to justice is something new.”

It’s not as if they didn’t know who Irmgard was or what she did. She was a witness against the commandant in 1957.

According to the public broadcaster that interviewed her last year, Ms. F. had been in court as a witness in 1957, when the camp’s commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, went on trial. Mr. Hoppe was convicted of his crimes, but was released in the 1960s and died in 1974. The prosecutors did not provide details of the former camp secretary’s life after she served in Stutthof.

Now, when she’s 95, they have decided that she must pay for her involvement, her complicity? To what end? If she wasn’t deemed sufficiently culpable in the ’50s, what makes her sufficiently culpable now as she’s at the end of her life?

“The court cases are also important because, beyond historical research, they help to document and clarify Nazi crimes, and because they bring the subject to the public’s attention,” said Jens-Christian Wagner, the director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora concentration camps memorial.

It is important to never forget, to not let Holocaust deniers convince people it never happened, wasn’t as bad as claimed or usurp its atrocities for their own purposes. But that doesn’t justify extending the concept of culpability into an entirely new realm of attenuated atrocities and indicting Irmgard F. at the very end of her life.

If they find another guard alive who, by his own hand, committed atrocities, then he deserves to be prosecuted. But Irmgard knew what she was involved with, and we knew what she was involved with back in 1957 when she was a witness against Hoppe, back when there were far more serious concerns about culpability and who deserved to be prosecuted for their crimes against humanity.

They’ve run out of teenage guards to prosecute, so now they’re on to teenage secretaries. We must never forget, but we have reached the end of the path of prosecution and need to return to the path of redemption. It’s time to let it go.