There is a ninety four year old man currently standing trial in Germany. Under normal circumstances we might call into question the validity of convicting someone of such an advanced age. His crime was committed over half a century ago. It would seem too late for justice to be done when someone has gone free for so long and is now not long for this world. These are not however, normal circumstances. The man in question, one Reinhold Hanning, is a former guard at Auschwitz charged with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder. Hanning has pleaded not guilty on the basis that he does not consider himself personally responsible for those deaths. After all, his role are to keep order within and to protect the compound from without. He was not directly involved in the actual business of the place and it is this logic which has seemingly spared him from feeling guilt.
The Holocaust was an act of genocide conducted on what can be described as an industrial scale. The smallest component to be found within any machine is as responsible as the largest component is for the continued operation for the whole. So too, by way of analogy, is it clear that a concentration camp guard is as responsible for the Holocaust as was Hitler himself. It was the political philosopher Hannah Arendt who first coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe such cases. In fantasy evil people are portrayed as objectively different from the normal, fundamentally good citizens of the realm. Real life does not work that way; all people are capable of evil, given the right circumstances.
Time is not a factor here since we are still very much living in the same world; a world which allowed the Holocaust to happen and has yet to absolve itself. That is why we cannot afford to forgive or forget. There have been and, tragically, will continue to be, acts of genocide. What there can never be again, so long as we continue judge all those who were responsible, is another act of genocide in which so many ordinary people were willingly complicit. It is too late to punish Hanning in any significant way but, if he is convicted, we can set an important example.
No matter how banal a person’s actions may be, they are responsible for the consequences of your actions. One of the few good things to come out of the Holocaust is an increased awareness of an individual’s social responsibility. From the Stop the War Coalition to Occupy Wall Street, we can see that the lessons of history are being learnt. People are growing ever less willing to pretend that the banality of their role in society absolves them of blame. We ensure that this lesson is not forgotten by bringing those responsible for the genocide, whether they were a guard, an admin clerk or a dictator. That is the circumstances under which there is indeed virtue in convicting a ninety four year old man.
Michael Everritt
Image courtesy of Markus Schreiber/Associated Press