[lively instrumental music]
[Oskar Groening speaks German]
[interpreter] The main camp of Auschwitz
was like a small town,
with its gossiping and chatting.
There was a canteen.
There was a cinema.
[cheery song in German]
There was a sports club of which I was a member.
It was all fun and entertainment,
just like a small town.
The special situation at Auschwitz
led to friendships, of which I'm still
saying today,
I like to look back on with joy.
[music continues playing]
We were convinced by our world view
that we had been betrayed by the entire world,
and that there was a great conspiracy
of the Jews against us.
But surely when it comes to children,
you must have realized that they couldn't possibly
have done anything to you.
The children, they're not the enemy at the moment.
The enemy is the blood inside them.
[news anchor] A former guard at the notorious
Auschwitz concentration camp has gone on trial in Germany.
Oskar Groening is charged
with more than 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.
Groening is now 93 years old.
[thunder rumbling]
[sorrowful music]
[Bill Glied] My children grew up knowing our family
had a secret,
a burden.
They would ask me why they don't have
any grandparents,
aunts, uncles.
If I think about my Holocaust experience,
those few minutes on the ramp in Auschwitz
were really the defining moments
in my life.
[Hedy Bohm] Try to imagine that tomorrow
someone comes and tells you,
you have to leave your home,
your parents are taken away,
and you don't know if you ever see them and when.
And eventually it's over and you live.
And then you find out you're alone.
You have no parents.
You have no family.
Is it over, ever?
[Bill Glied] I first heard about Oskar Groening
when Thomas Walther, who was a former judge
and an advocate, a lawyer in Germany,
approached me and told me that he would like
to talk to me about my experience in Auschwitz
in connection with a trial
that is being held for Oskar Groening.
I felt that, "What have I got to do
with this particular person?
I certainly didn't know him."
I did a considerable amount of thinking.
You know, first of all, I had to decide
this question as to whether a 94-year-old man
who did this terrible deed
seventy years before is still guilty of the crime.
[Bohm] The first time I've heard of Oskar Groening
was from Thomas. He tried to convince me to come
to Germany as a witness.
At first, my gut reaction was, "To Germany? No way.
Why would I go and put myself through
all the memories and all the horrible feelings
of being a 16-year-old slave again?"
But Thomas was persistent.
He said, "It's not only about Oskar Groening,
and you and the past,
it's about establishing a precedent for the future."
[Thomas Walther] Groening is very old,
but nobody was too old
to be killed in Auschwitz.
If you take part in killing as a 20-year-old man,
then you can be prosecuted as a 50-year-old man,
or also as a 90-year-old man.
Look, for a long time,
I feel that I have a responsibility
as a survivor to make sure
that this terrible event, the Holocaust,
should not be forgotten.
This trial is a defining moment
in the history of the Holocaust.
The fact that so many Nazi perpetrators
went unpunished after the war...
But Thomas told me
it was not just about me and the past,
it was also about setting a precedent
for the future.
And so I felt that I must be a witness
at the trial.
[Kai Feldhaus] Luneburg is a tiny city
in the north of Germany.
You got your occasional murder and you got
your everyday trial business, but a trial of that size...
Luneburg had never experienced anything like it
and hardly any German city ever has.
The trial took place in Luneburg
because this is where Groening is living,
and according to German law, you have to be tried
by the court that is in the vicinity
of where you live.
So they set it up in a community center
where they could house enough people,
where they could house all these plaintiffs
and all the lawyers,
and all the media attention, and also have
enough seats for public because public
was supposed to come
and see and, you know, follow the proceedings.
[man 1 speaking German]
They should pay for what they've done. They all knew.
For the kind of crimes they committed
and what they did to the Jews,
that should be punished.
[man 2 speaking German]
The little ones are hanged and the big ones are let go.
That's the way it is.
To convict a 93-year-old man doesn't make sense.
I think he's lived in fear of being
caught for the past 50 years,
and that he would eventually be exposed.
He was more or less forced. He was a follower.
And what were our fathers?
Nobody talks about that anymore.
They were also followers.
Then one would have to hold many old judges accountable.
Millions yelled, "Heil!" And nobody supposedly
knew anything.
[Hans-Jurgen Brennecke] When I was a child,
nobody talked about the war in my surrounding.
At school, we didn't hear a single word about the war.
I had to learn when I was 16 and 17
in some movies or in some books
that there was a war that started in my country.
Some liked to talk about the war,
but only what they suffered during the war,
or what heroes they were during the war.
Nobody talked about the victims.
And that was really hard for us to understand
that we had so many criminals in our country,
millions of them,
and nobody explained to us what really happened.
Both of my parents supported the Nazis.
My mother just followed her husband.
My father was a Nazi from the very beginning.
He died '53, he committed suicide.
Uh, he was still stuck to the old system of Nazi time.
We have old fascists and new fascists of today.
[indistinct chatter]
One organization that helped in the Groening trial
was the Anti-Fascist organization.
As the title says,
they fight against fascism.
And it happened 70 years ago in our country,
and it happens today.
[all] Sieg Heil!
[indistinct talking and shouting]
[Brennecke] There was some disturbance
from right-wing people.
So, the lawyer, Thomas Walther,
called six weeks before the Groening trial started here,
that we can prepare ourselves
and make a system of banners to keep away
the Holocaust deniers from the survivors
and their relatives.
[both speaking German]
-Is the text ready? -Yes, it's ready.
There are people making the banners as we speak.
[Astrid Steinert] I'm an Anti-Fascist.
It's, uh,
what kind of society I want to live.
And we have a lot of racism here in Germany
and lots of houses are burning
because racist and fascist people
are mobilizing against refugees,
and lots of people get killed.
And if we know our history, then...
we can't do nothing now.
So we have to act now too.
What may be one of the last big Holocaust trials opened
today in Germany.
Under a new legal theory that death camp workers
can be held accountable for the Holocaust,
even if they didn't murder anyone
with their own hands.
The man being charged admits he was at Auschwitz
but says he didn't kill anybody.
He just took the victims' money.
This court will now decide whether the so-called
"Accountant of Auschwitz" is also guilty
as an accessory to mass murder.
The first day, 11 Holocaust deniers came.
[people chanting and shouting in German]
They shouted out loud and even shared
some papers.
"Justice for the survivors of Auschwitz"
Our friends put up the banner
to show that there will be justice for the survivors.
[in German] It's a very difficult situation
for the survivors
to stand in line for two hours.
Especially when they're confronted with
fascists like Mr. Wulff or Mrs. Haverbeck.
[Ursula Haverbeck] In Auschwitz
there were no gassings.
Auschwitz was not an extermination camp.
Also, the commander's orders, the Reich's orders...
We will stop the conversation.
I told you earlier today you could face charges.
-Yes, but the... -It does not matter.
You'll be prosecuted and forced to leave.
[indistinct chatter]
I've had enough! I'm going over there
to a public proceeding.
And I said please don't criminalize us
by talking to us.
I want to go to the trial.
The survivors and their relatives
always had protection
against our right-wing people.
And that was important for us,
and also very important for them.
The first day, it was a frenzy,
it was amazing.
Everyone everywhere in Europe, all the major cities.
[Glied] We started being mobbed,
literally, by various TV cameras
and journalists
who wanted to know opinions
and where we were standing on this issue.
[Max Eisen] There's a lot of merits
to have a person, even 70 years after,
to bring him to court. Nobody should be able
to get away with crimes against humanity,
against Jews.
[Eva Mozes Kor] "The survivor of Auschwitz,"
sitting in a German court,
surrounded by German judges and German attorneys,
and being treated with respect.
And that was in itself
an interesting experience for me.
At the time, I was good friends
with Rainer Hoess, and Rainer Hoess
is a big advocate against the neo-Nazis.
I'm the grandson of Rudolf Hoess,
the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
He was responsible for 1.1 to 1.3 million killings
at Auschwitz.
Hate is a powerful weapon, and it was
in the Second World War, and it is today.
The Groening trial, it is important
for our growing youth.
In the past, we only had the voices of the survivors,
of the victims there.
But nobody really listened to the perpetrators.
[cameras clicking]
[officer speaks German]
Come out.
[cameras clicking]
They won't start without me.
[reporter] Oskar, what do you expect from the trial?
A verdict of not guilty, I don't know.
-[reporter 1] Are you innocent? -[reporter 2]
What are you thinking?
Mr. Groening, don't say anything.
[Glied] We were sitting in one section
of the courtroom
and opposite us
this frail old man walking with a walker
-walked in. -[cameras clicking]
I felt cold looking at this man.
The whole thing was a surreal type of experience.
That's the only way I can describe it.
[Bohm] I did feel sympathy for him.
He looked like a pitiful old man.
But that all changed the moment he sat down,
and he looked around,
and he put his arms like that.
[cameras clicking]
You know, I thought,
"You are the same Nazi,
the same person who thought you were gods,
and we were vermin... still."
So all my sympathy vanished at that point.
[in German] Good morning.
The trial made big headlines because Oskar Groening
was one of the few, if not the first,
Auschwitz accused who said that he will basically
say something in court.
He told what really happened, what he experienced
during the time in Auschwitz.
Most of them tell some lies,
what they did during that time,
but Mr. Groening told the reality.
He told the truth about his time,
and that was very special.
[Feldhaus] He basically admitted
that he collected goods, he collected the luggage
of the people that would be brought to Auschwitz.
He would skim through the luggage for valuables.
He was one of the very few Nazi perpetrators that admitted
in court that people were plundered of their belongings
and didn't really expect them to be given
back to them.
So in the consequence, everyone working there
knew people
were brought there to die.
[Alan Dershowitz] I think he's a symbol,
and symbols often get unfairly targeted.
Had he lived at a time or at an age
where the real perpetrators had been effectively punished,
probably nobody would have gotten to him,
he would have been so low down on the list.
The real issue is what did Germany do,
not only during the war, but what did it do
after the war.
And what it did after the war is disgraceful.
[soft music playing]
Here. "Do not bend."
Ha! Look what I got here.
This one do not bend, that's fan mail.
There's a picture in here and I have to sign it.
Here.
He wants me to sign the pictures for him.
Ah, this is a rare one.
I stood on the headquarters.
Ah, that's also a rare one.
I landed on the beaches of Normandy.
I was a member of General Patton's army.
We pursued the Germans back across France,
back into Germany.
And by that time, I was assigned
as a war-crimes investigator.
I believe I was the first war-crimes investigator
in the United States Army.
The problem I faced
as the chief prosecutor at Nuremberg
was what do I ask for?
Here were 3000 men
who every day went out and murdered in cold blood
thousands of people,
including children shot, one shot at a time.
And I felt that I...
could not possibly do justice
to the million people who had been killed.
But if I could establish a rule of law
which could protect humankind in the future,
that would make this trial more meaningful
than whatever I would do with these handful
of murderers.
This document, which I haven't
had in my hands
since 1948 maybe,
it's a list of my defendants
in the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg.
And I had prepared a list showing the names
of the defendants, the position they occupied.
For example,
Ohlendorf, commanding officer of Einsatzgruppen D,
killed 90,000.
All of them pleaded not guilty!
Nobody came in and said, I did anything.
Oh, my goodness, no!
They said this was necessary to carry out Hitler's orders.
And there was a war going on, what do you want us to do?
I had 22 defendants selected by me
out of 3000 mass murderers who murdered over
a million people!
And I could prove it! I had all their top-secret
contemporaneous documents. No question about the facts.
I wanted top people, planners,
people who had high command,
responsible positions. Their specific assignment was
to murder, in cold blood,
every single Jewish man, woman and child
they could lay their hands on.
And I knew
that picking 22 defendants out of 3000 men
is only a poor sampling
for the ridiculous reason that we only had
22 seats in the dock.
Did we seek to do justice?
Of course not.
Because we'd still be there trying Nazis to this day.
So you try to make a statement of principle.
The principle is don't do this, it's a crime against humanity.
Stop doing it! If you insist upon doing it,
we'll try to catch you if you're a leader
and put you away so you won't do it again,
and others will be deterred from doing it.
And so, when the presiding justice,
Michael Musmanno, opened the trial, he said...
We're now ready to hear the presentation
by the prosecution.
I then went on to say, "Vengeance is not
our goal..."
...nor do we seek merely a just retribution.
We ask this court
to affirm by international penal action
man's right to live in peace and dignity,
regardless of his race or creed.
The case we present
is a plea of humanity...
"...to law." Because really,
that's what I was trying to accomplish.
[Eli Rosenbaum] Nuremberg was a trial
that marked
the beginning of international criminal law as we know it.
Notorious Nazi criminals tried at Nuremberg
included Hermann Goering...
Rudolf Hess,
many, many others.
But the trials themselves were not well received
by the German public. They were perceived
to be victor's justice.
Nobody feels like sitting and thinking
about their crimes.
They want to move on.
And some of that is legitimate.
This is a country that has been turned into rubble.
And it becomes a question of rebuilding,
brick by brick.
So the last thing people want to do is sit around
and talk about their crimes
and their guilt and how they devastated Europe.
[music playing]
[announcer] At the Hall of Justice in Nuremberg,
history's greatest trial nears its fateful close.
The outcome was most of the defendants were convicted.
There were a few acquittals.
Some of the defendants were sentenced to die,
and they were executed.
The new German government, as it was formed,
lobbied intensively
to bring the trials to an end, and lobbied
to have people who were convicted at Nuremberg,
even people who were sentenced to death
at Nuremberg, released.
And most of them were.
After the Second World War, the German system didn't fail
to prosecute Nazi war criminals,
it deliberately decided not to prosecute them
because many of the judges were Nazi war criminals.
There is evidence that a very high percentage
of German judges,
particularly West German judges
between 1945 and 1967 were Nazis.
Uh, I don't say former Nazis,
I say Nazis. People who sympathized
with the Nazis.
[Wittmann] The Ministry of Justice
are like 99% former Nazis.
And they are the ones who are
creating and defining the new legal system.
They were sitting in judgement of themselves.
And obviously, the result was terrible,
terrible injustice.
[indistinct shouting]
[Wittmann] So it's a terrible, terrible record
where almost nobody is convicted.
And again, there's no political will for it.
The vast majority of Germans find these trials
kind of cathartic and perfect
because they show the horrors of places like Auschwitz,
they nail a few, you know, bad apples to the wall,
and the rest of them look like innocent people
who didn't deserve to be punished anyway,
because they're not really dangerous outside of
the camp setting.
And this is where, for me, these trials
are such a disaster.
[Rosenbaum] Every country, just about,
has difficult parts of its past
that it, uh, struggles to...
to come to grips with.
That's true in the United States
still, I would say,
with respect to slavery and its aftermath.
It was certainly true in Germany
with respect to Nazi genocide
and crimes against humanity.
Imagine a population
in which a significant percentage
of the fathers, brothers, sons
took part in these crimes.
Later on, in ensuing decades,
grandfathers all over Germany had done this.
It was very difficult for the German public
to accept the idea
of large-scale prosecutions, and I don't think there was
great enthusiasm among prosecutors either.
I'd say in 1945,
there were probably around 800,000 members of the SS.
And that's what we're dealing with.
The Germans between 1947
and up to the present investigate over 100,000
of these people.
Of those, they bring about 6,200 to trial.
Of that, the convictions
for perpetrating murder is 124.
124 life sentences of over 6,000 people tried.
I still have nightmares about that famous photograph
of the German soldier
shooting the mother and her baby,
and imagining this man lived a full and complete life,
and died with his own grandchildren
and great-grandchildren surrounding him thinking
he was a wonderful man.
That's the legacy of the Holocaust in Germany,
not the few war crime trials.
[Edith Raim] I think what's happening now is
that the judges or the prosecutors
want to make good for
the mistakes that were made in the past,
like in the 1960s and 1970s.
And I think coming to terms
with the past can be done in a different way.
[Peter Singer] It's difficult to say
what good can be done
by punishing someone for a crime they committed
70 years ago.
The further question that I think has to be raised,
because of the time period, is, if you punish a man
of 93 for something that he did when he was 23,
are you still punishing the person who did the crime?
Everything about him
in terms of what makes one a criminal has changed.
He had grown up in a family
that was very nationalist,
he absorbed the ideology of the Nazis
as a teenager, a young man,
and joined the Hitler Youth, then volunteered for the SS.
So we're in a way
punishing someone for what a different person,
a different personality,
somebody with different characteristics did.
[Wittmann] It is too little too late.
This needed to be done a long time ago.
But how ridiculous is it that they're doing it now
when these people are all in their 90s?
[phone ringing]
Good afternoon.
I'm in my 98th year.
If I committed an illegal act, I could expect to go to jail.
If I committed an illegal act where there was no statute
of limitations,
as is the case with crimes against humanity,
you go to jail.
Age is no defense.
And they have to know that the criminal
will be pursued as long as necessary
to try to bring whatever justice is possible
under the circumstances.
How did it happen that here he was
in his own hometown for 70 years,
and nobody did anything about it?
All this is happening because it's doable now.
40 years ago, 50 years ago, it was very far from doable.
For many, many years, the German judicial system
used the wrong legal frame
to try to digest the crimes of the Holocaust.
They had to prove that the suspect
had committed a specific crime against a specific victim
and had done so motivated by racial hatred.
And as you can imagine, it's not easy to prove.
If you couldn't prove that someone had engaged
let's say in some kind of hands-on act of killing,
then you simply couldn't convict.
Which is one of the reasons why many, many, many guards
who we might wish had been convicted
couldn't have been, because in a sense,
the Germans failed to create an adequate legal idiom,
an adequate theory that would permit
these guards to be convicted.
That changed pretty dramatically
with Demjanjuk.
[Zuroff] Because of the Demjanjuk case,
all of a sudden, the prosecution
in Germany changed
the rules of the game.
Without the Demjanjuk case,
there wouldn't have been a Groening case.
[Rosenbaum] John Demjanjuk, originally Ivan Demjanjuk,
immigrated to the United States
around 1950
claiming to be a refugee.
[camera clicking]
Interestingly,
on his US visa application,
he listed as his residence from some time in the 1930s
to 1943
"Sobibor, Poland."
Sobibor is a word that should send a chill up the spine
of every person on this planet.
One normally thinks of there having been
six Nazi death camps,
extermination camps.
That is places that existed solely to murder people.
Those would be Majdanek,
Sobibor, Chelmno,
Belzec, Treblinka,
and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Unfortunately, the people processing visa applications
for the United States in 1950 had not heard
of Sobibor, and so the word meant nothing to them.
And Demjanjuk received his visa.
He worked in Ford as a machinist.
He put together, kind of, a perfectly respectable
mid-western life, until around the mid '70s.
[clamoring]
American prosecutors became aware
that he had lied on immigration forms.
And this started an investigation
which really turned into
probably the most convoluted and lengthiest criminal case
to arise out of the Holocaust.
When the Americans started
investigating Demjanjuk, they had discovered
an ID of Demjanjuk's that the SS had issued,
which indicated that he had been assigned
to work at the Sobibor death camp.
But when the Americans started interviewing,
uh, various death camp survivors,
they found that a number of survivors identified
Demjanjuk not as a guard at Sobibor,
but as a guard at Treblinka.
[reporter] John Demjanjuk goes on trial in Jerusalem,
accused of being the Nazi concentration camp guard
known as Ivan the Terrible.
[woman] It's described simply as "Criminal Case 373,
the State of Israel versus Ivan Demjanjuk."
-[horn honking] -Israel's last
war-crimes trial
convicted Adolf Eichmann, the administrator
of Nazi Germany's Final Solution.
25 years later,
another man leaves the same cell
in Ayalon prison,
to make the 80km trip to a Jerusalem courtroom,
perhaps to meet the same fate on the gallows.
[speaks in foreign language]
Hello everybody. I'm not 'Ivan the Terrible.'
[woman] John Demjanjuk is on trial
for his life.
[man] How are you today?
Good, thank you! I'm good all the time.
[interpreter] They would have shoved me
straight alive into a pit full of blood.
You weren't there. I was there!
Ask him! Ask him! Let him tell you!
Let him tell you what he would have done to me.
Stand up, John.
Look at me.
Put that away!
[in English] I wasn't there.
[interpreter] Mr. Rosenberg...
[interpreter in English] Please... sit down.
The public is requested to keep to its seat.
[reporter] John Demjanjuk continued
to try to convince the court
he is not "Ivan the Terrible," the SS officer who helped kill
850,000 Polish Jews.
[male interpreter] I am innocent,
innocent, innocent!
[female interpreter] We sentence him
for the aforementioned crimes, the punishment of death
as stipulated in section one of the Nazi
and Nazi collaborators law.
I'm not the Ivan the Terrible! I'm a good man!
After he was sentenced to death,
there was a rather long
and drawn out appellate phase that happened to coincide
with the unraveling of the Soviet Union.
[man] Mr. Gorbachev,
tear down this wall!
[crowd cheering]
[woman] As the old Soviet Union fell apart,
their archives opened up.
[Douglas] They discovered, that in fact,
the Israelis had the wrong guy,
that Demjanjuk had not been
"Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka."
In fact, "Ivan the Terrible" had been
this entirely different Ukrainian
named Ivan Marchenko.
It really showed you
the limits of structuring these trials
around the eyewitness testimony of survivors,
because these survivors, they were positive
that Demjanjuk was their former tormentor,
and they were wrong.
I miss my wife.
I miss my family.
I miss my grandchildren.
I want to go home.
[Douglas] As a result of this case
of mistaken identity,
he was acquitted. But the mistaken identity
also indicated that he wasn't entirely free of guilt.
[Rosenbaum] In my country, Demjanjuk worked
on an assembly line for the Ford Motor Company.
And I suspect if you had asked Demjanjuk
at that time, "What do you do
for a living?"
He would have said,
"I build cars." Even though, I assume,
he did one little operation,
tightened one bolt or something.
He did not ever build
an entire car himself.
But that's what he did for a living.
They were building cars.
At places like Auschwitz,
Sobibor,
what the SS personnel there did for a living
was kill innocent human beings.
There was nothing else going on there.
Today, a federal court in Cleveland
stripped John Demjanjuk of his US citizenship,
finding that he served the Nazis
during World War II
as an armed guard at the Sobibor death camp.
Our efforts were inspired by the courage
of the survivors,
who, in recounting for us
their nightmarish experiences of more than half
a century ago,
were willing to reopen psychic wounds
that of course have never fully healed.
What very few people know is that after ten years
of litigation against Demjanjuk in the United States,
when we had gotten courts to revoke his citizenship
and order him deported,
we went to the German government
and asked Germany to accept him,
and Germany said "No."
As Germany and other governments of Europe
have routinely done in our cases.
Uh, enormously frustrating.
I then met Thomas Walther
and Kirsten Goetze,
and we brainstormed how there might be a way
to get Demjanjuk indicted in Germany.
[Walther] There was a very important connection
to the US Office of Special Investigations
with Eli Rosenbaum in Washington.
He always told me that
he cannot understand why we in Germany
do not prosecute these guards
who are watching that nobody can escape
from a killing place.
[Rosenbaum] Those camps existed to carry out
crimes against humanity,
crimes of persecution.
I gave him the example. I said,
"Thomas, look, we're sitting here in my office.
If you decide to chase me around my office
with a knife to kill me,
and you have a cohort who is outside the office
holding the door closed, so that I cannot escape,
under those circumstances, both you and your cohort
will be found guilty in my country
of first-degree murder." And I said,
"I cannot imagine that the law is any different in Germany."
[Kirsten Goetze] These camps had no other
reason than to kill people.
There is no question that this person
is responsible and part of the whole killing process.
[Rosenbaum] The guards in death camps
like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor,
they knew what was going on there, and they made sure
that the victims did not escape.
Ultimately, Thomas and Kirsten did the legal research
and ascertained that there was case law,
and brought the Demjanjuk case.
[indistinct chatter]
[groaning]
[Zuroff] This is a very wonderful day
for justice today.
The fact that this person, who was an active participant
in the mass murder of 29,000 Jews
in the Sobibor death camp, is finally going
to stand trial for those crimes
is extremely important.
We are extremely, extremely pleased,
and I think
that the American and German authorities
deserve a tremendous amount of credit
for their perseverance in this case.
[beeping]
[man 1] Um, target. I'm on the wrong side of the car.
-[man 2] He's walking. -[man 1] Yeah.
[clattering]
[woman] It looks rather innocent,
an elderly man walking and talking,
but that man is John Demjanjuk,
the alleged Nazi death camp guard,
who claims he's too ill and too frail
to be deported to Europe to go on trial.
Federal prosecutors submitted these videos
to the US Circuit Court of Appeals.
They were taken a few days before he was detained.
[indistinct chatter]
[Douglas] One of the things the Demjanjuk
tried to do in Munich,
is he tried to basically
create the impression of being incompetent.
[dramatic classical music]
[inaudible]
He actually engaged
in a rather dramatic theatrical performance
in which he tried to convince everyone
that he was kind of on death's door.
-[cameras clicking] -Oh!
Oy, oy, oy, oy, oy, oy, oy!
First of all, the problem is that Demjanjuk himself,
I think, put on a great act today, and he's gonna
do everything possible to try and create
an impression that he's simply incapable of standing trial.
[Zuroff] If you've seen the footage
of the Demjanjuk trial,
he looked like a total zombie,
like he didn't have a clue what was going on.
And what most people don't know
is that the minute
the trial sessions ended every day,
he was up and around,
walking around, joking around
with the people.
It has been a common ruse in Nazi cases
for decades to claim either a medical incapacity
or a mental health incapacity
to continue with the trial.
Some courts have fallen for those ruses,
others have not.
But it is a very, very common ploy.
[Zuroff] I always say that if there was an Oscar given
for the best performance by a Nazi war criminal,
Demjanjuk would have gotten it for 2010.
[Demjanjuk] Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
-Oh! -[recorded applause]
We now know that in fact he was
rather healthy at the time, and he did
successfully survive his trial.
In a verdict decades in the making,
a German court has found 91-year-old John Demjanjuk
guilty of accessory to murder
in the case of more than 28,000 Jews
in Nazi-occupied Poland.
John Demjanjuk is just a scapegoat
for the Germans.
He has to pay for all the mistakes
they made in the past,
and that's not justice.
What was very important about the trial in Germany
was in a way it was the exact opposite
of the Ivan the Terrible trial.
Ivan the Terrible trial focused
on the particular pathologies
of a very brutal guard.
The trial in Munich
was really the first trial to come along and say,
"We don't really care if you were cruel or not.
Your job description was basically facilitating
an act of extermination, and that's why we're going
to hold you guilty in a court of law."
You were an accessory to murder
because, by definition,
that was your job description.
[Rosenbaum] The following year, Demjanjuk died in Germany
while his case was on appeal.
But the precedent of court agreeing
that someone who served as a guard
at a death camp shared complicity
in the killings that took part there
inspired, shall we say, German prosecutors
to prosecute other guards.
[reporter] Prosecutors in Germany
are reopening hundreds
of investigations into former Nazis.
So why has it taken so long to bring these people to trial?
This is the uniqueness and significance
of the Demjanjuk conviction.
Basically what the court in Munich said in May was,
if you served
as an armed SS guard at a pure death camp,
you're automatically guilty of accessory to murder.
This gave the German prosecution
a new lease on life.
Now the question then was, how many of these people
are alive?
[Jens Rommel] After the Demjanjuk verdict,
the central office here started
to look again
at all the six death camps.
We put together all these puzzle pieces
in order to get an image
who was involved in a crime.
Yeah. There it is, right here.
[Jeff Ansell] Germany is making up for it
with what it's got.
There's slim pickings these days
for Nazi war criminals.
Many of them are dead. And many of the survivors
are dead.
It's not as if the German government
has its choice
of a wide variety of players to go after.
Now I got a tip from Simon Wiesenthal
in the early 1980s.
Mr. Wiesenthal told me that there was a Nazi
named Haralds Puntulis,
who was living in Canada,
but his whereabouts were unknown.
And Puntulis took part in the massacre
of more than 5,000 Jews and Roma
in a village in Latvia. He wasn't hard to find.
I found him,
gardening in Willowdale,
which ironically enough,
has a great many Jewish people who live there.
But, just before the authorities could act,
and before my article exposing him came out,
Puntulis died.
There is this real rush then to find people, anyone.
But as you can imagine, they're all
extraordinarily old.
There are very few of them who are still fit
to stand trial.
So there is this feeling that now,
before it's too late, we need to do
everything we can
to bring every last Nazi to trial.
[Ansell] As the long list of people
that they believed were Nazi war criminals became smaller,
an accountant from Auschwitz was singled out.
He was put under the spotlight
because of an interview
that he did for the BBC, where he openly admitted
and described in detail
the crimes that were being committed in Auschwitz.
[interviewer] You were part of the largest
killing factory in history.
You were working there.
You personally contributed
to the killing of around one million people.
Don't you think you should have stood trial?
[speaks German]
[interpreter] No, I don't think so.
You imply with your question that just being a member
of a large group of people who lived in a garrison
where the destruction of the Jews took place
is enough to make you a criminal.
He was an accomplice. He knew what he was doing.
[man] But what he didn't know was that the interview
with the BBC
would ultimately spark the investigation,
because at that time, before Demjanjuk,
guards were not seen as being complicit.
And for decades, he lived peacefully
in a small town outside of Luneburg.
They got Groening. They went after him.
No.
Carla has prepared my lunch.
So we'll let her prepare it when she's ready to serve it.
-Okay. You gonna eat? -Hi, Benji.
-Good morning! -Hi, Benji.
There are many trials being carried on now,
which are remarkable.
Old people who have managed to evade justice
for many years.
It doesn't make a very big difference
whether they spend some time in jail or not.
On the principle, it does make a difference.
They should know that they're not going
to get away with it.
We'll pursue them wherever they are as long as necessary
and try to have them explain their actions.
If you know that he was a guard in a camp
which killed your father, your mother, your grandfather,
don't you have to have some consideration
for the victims, rather than the perpetrator?
[indistinct chatter]
[Hans Holtermann] Our argument about the case
was that the things that Mr. Groening did in Auschwitz
actually were not some kind of support
of killing the people who had been
transported to Auschwitz at that time.
Of course he supported the system,
but not the killing itself.
[Goetze] Many SS members here in Germany,
in former trials, they often said,
"Well, I didn't kill them!
They were killed by a... by a machine."
His position as a subordinate was quite clear.
He was not a high ranking officer.
He was not in a sort of position to give orders.
This is the question. Who is responsible?
Groening was a cog in the wheel,
but the wheel couldn't have turned without that cog.
Individual killing is not a requisite.
There is no evidence that Hitler personally
killed anybody
at Auschwitz, or any Jew.
Everybody who was aware
of what was going on at Auschwitz
is both morally and legally guilty.
The chef, less than the person
who poured the gas into the chambers.
The accountant, less than the guard.
But he made choices throughout
and he is responsible for his choices.
Groening was not just an accountant.
He's known as the "Bookkeeper of Auschwitz"
and the "Bookkeeper of Auschwitz"
creates,
I think, a somewhat misleading image.
It suggests that he could have been just squirrelled away
in some little shack adding up numbers.
He came to Auschwitz specifically as a bookkeeper.
But it took much more than bookkeeping.
He also had to look after the system.
And he was seen on the ramp.
[Douglas] This is the ramp where
it's kind of in the collective
or popular imagination from films like Schindler's List.
This is when the SS are sorting people out,
saying these people are being exterminated immediately,
and this small group is actually entering
the prison population of the camp.
If you look at something like Auschwitz,
why weren't more of the guards prosecuted?
Well, Auschwitz was a hybrid camp.
It was part slave labor camp,
and it was part death camp.
If these guards were just associated
with the slave labor aspect,
then you wouldn't necessarily know
that they actually were involved
with the killing.
And if you didn't know they were involved
with the killing,
you couldn't prosecute them for anything under German law.
In the case of Groening,
we know that Groening was at Auschwitz for a long time.
He was there for two years.
But if you look at the indictment,
the indictment focuses only on a three-month period.
During this three-month period,
that's when the trains were arriving
with these hundreds of thousands
of Jews from Hungary.
[Walther] In this case,
the Hungarian Action is the crime.
From the 16th of May
until the 11th of July,
there has been killed 300,000 Jews.
If we can prove that Groening has been
on one day in this time on the ramp,
then he is guilty of the whole crime.
The witnesses arrived on a certain day
at a certain hour during this "Hungarian Action."
Important is that the witnesses talk about
what happened with their families,
that they speak about their sadness,
they speak about the loss.
Tomorrow, Bill, you have to testify.
Speak slowly, but fluently.
And don't think about the faces of the judges.
This is a special thing as far as I'm concerned.
It's a very important, emotional thing.
The criminal department of justice
has made a lot of faults,
very heavy faults.
And I invite the German justice system
to come back in a better way.
[Glied] The time came for us to testify at the trial.
I sat down in front of the presiding judge.
Thomas Walther sat next to me,
and then the judge asked me to describe what happened
when I arrived to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Then train stopped.
After a while, all of a sudden, the doors were opened.
"Everybody out! Get out of the boxcar!
Leave your parcels in there! You'll get them later."
[Bohm] It was a space
filled with people running around,
some in striped pajamas
and a lot of soldiers with rifles.
Dogs on leash that were straining against the leash
and barking at us.
The people pouring out from the wagons,
thousands of people,
babies crying, mothers holding them.
They started screaming, "Men and boys into one column.
Five in a row, fast! Fast!"
I grabbed a hold of my dad's hand
and stood there, and my mom, my sister and aunts,
my grandma were in the other column
with the women.
They were screaming and yelling.
People were so traumatized, so scared.
[Kor] So there is that Nazi yelling
in German, "Twins! Twins!"
My poor mother hesitated and said, "Is that good?"
And the Nazi nodded "yes."
So my mother said, "Yes."
At that moment another Nazi came,
pulled my mother to the right, we were pulled to the left.
We were crying, she was crying.
I didn't really understand
that this would be the last time
that we would see her.
[Eisen] My mother, with my siblings,
my grandparents and my aunt,
they were told to go to the left.
I know they were taken into the gas chamber
of Krematoria II.
My father and uncle and I, we were selected
for slave labor.
We were processed. Our clothes were taken away,
our hair was shaved. And the next morning,
we were given a tattooed number
and striped outfits.
And I became a slave labor working for a German Reich.
[Kor] Mengele used 1,500 sets of twins
in his various experiments.
Take a set of twins,
inject one with a disease.
When that one dies, you kill the other one,
and then you get the results of how the disease works.
After one of those injections,
I became very ill
with a very high fever.
Next morning,
Mengele came in with four other doctors.
He looked at my fever chart and then he declared,
laughing sarcastically he said, "Too bad.
She's so young, she has only two weeks
to live."
But after two weeks, my fever broke.
I survived,
and I was released and reunited
with my twin sister
and the other twins.
[Bohm] While I was looking around,
trying to make sense of what I'm looking at,
I realized all of a sudden that I was alone
and my mother was several rows ahead of me,
and I started rushing through the crowds
to catch up to her.
And all of a sudden I was stopped.
A rifle in front of me,
and a young German soldier telling me,
"Nein! Over there! To the right!"
I said, "No, no, my mother is there,
I want to go with her!"
And he just kept the rifle there
and said, "No! You go there!"
And then I cried out after my mom,
and she turned.
And I don't know what I expected,
but she just looked at me and didn't say a word.
And then turned around and kept on going.
And I never saw her again.
That was, I think, the hardest thing
that ever happened to me.
Even now I have trouble talking about it.
And for over half a century, I couldn't.
[Glied] What happened to my mom
and my sister,
I don't know.
But I've never seen them again,
never said goodbye to them.
They just disappeared from my life at that moment.
Oh, here.
Here is my father. "Glied, Alexander,
1899, Petrovac, Yugoslavia.
Murdered in Kaufering, Germany."
Here is my sister. "Glied, Aniko, 1936,
Subotica, Yugoslavia.
Murdered in Auschwitz, Poland."
Here is my mom. "Glied, Miriam, 1907,
Jaszkarajeno, Hungary.
Murdered in Auschwitz, Poland."
Oh, my God.
All of these Glieds are relatives...
uncles and aunts of mine.
[indistinct chatter]
He spoke about this whole situation as
"there was this bug on the ground,
and I stepped on it."
To see the faces of the survivors
after Groening spoke...
it was a terrible situation
when he explained some stories
out of his work.
Like the crying suitcase.
[Eisen] And he said, "The crying stopped."
And that was... I think that was,
it almost killed me. I just couldn't believe it.
He said, "That wasn't nice."
And later on they asked him, "What would you have done?"
"Well, maybe shoot him.
That would have been the nice thing for him."
[Glied] I accept the fact that they were brainwashed,
but there comes a point
where no matter how much you are brainwashed,
when you see a baby being picked up
and smashed against a door, and you say,
"This is fine. This is okay. This is acceptable."
I can't accept that.
I mean, he was giving this information... willingly.
I mean, he was asked,
"Did a Jew have a chance to leave this place alive?"
He says, "Absolutely not."
And that affected me a lot, so...
[Dershowitz] He was an adult.
He was responsible for his actions.
Not everybody who joined the Hitler Youth
ended up joining the SS. Not everybody
who joined the SS
ended up being a guard at Auschwitz,
leading people to their death.
As far as following orders, what one often hears is,
"I had to take part in these crimes,
because had I not done so,
uh, the Germans would have executed me
or sent me to a death camp."
One of the most remarkable statistics
to emerge out of the Holocaust
is the number of SS officers,
or even senior German officers,
who suffered serious life-threatening consequences
as a result of opting out.
That number is exactly zero.
Not one instance has ever been found
in which it was confirmed
that someone who disobeyed criminal orders
was subject to severe punishment,
much less execution.
[Dershowitz] He was following orders,
but he had to know
at some level of consciousness
that it can't be legal
to murder infants, babies, the elderly,
to murder people who are his age now.
He had to know that that was not only wrong,
but in some ultimate sense, illegal.
You know, listening to Groening,
I got very upset,
because the things that he brought forward voluntarily...
I mean, he was a big talker.
All I would want him to say is, "I'm sorry."
That alone I think would have been,
at the age of 94, it would have
meant everything,
as far as I was concerned.
Just those two words.
Somebody will have to make the judgment,
and I think they are going to consider our testimonies
and we'll see what happens.
[indistinct chatter]
I did not know how the interaction
with him would be.
I did not know how he would be able
to answer my questions,
but nevertheless I testified,
and I said right there in a German court,
clear and loud,
that I forgave him, as I forgave all the Nazis,
and I forgave everybody who hurt me.
It's outrageous what she did, it's absolutely outrageous.
I felt like the floor opened up
and I fell right down into a basement.
She kept on repeating the fact
that these people are friends of hers.
And I said, "My God. This woman must be crazy
or what?"
Forgiving those who tortured her
and killed so many, so cruelly...
She's able to forgive.
Maybe she needs that forgiveness
in order to go on, to be...
To stay mentally normal.
And what was even more shocking,
the people in the audience,
wherever they were, they were clapping
this forgiveness thing,
and the judge said, "Not in my court."
[Rothmann] Eva Mozes, you know her story.
You know she was a twin,
and she is...
in every sense of the word, she is a victim,
as all the other victims,
and she should be treated like this.
[Kor] Saturday, I was coming back
to the United States.
The court session was over.
And he was still sitting at his desk.
So, I went up to Oskar Groening.
[Patrece Dayton] An embrace between two people
is touching people
around the world.
We begin tonight with an amazing story.
A Terre Haute woman is at the center
of international attention.
This after a courageous act of kindness
that took social media by storm.
[Eisen] She was the most famous
person in Luneburg
because the world's press were all around her.
Everybody caught onto this forgiveness business,
you see.
[Feldhaus] The biggest gesture you could imagine.
You hug the monster,
you hug part of the machine that killed your family,
that almost killed you,
so it was a gesture of forgiving,
but there was big media headlines and big outcry
if she should do that, if that is too much,
if one can forgive part of the Nazi machine
or if it just should not be forgiven.
She has succeeded in infuriating
practically every other survivor around,
and for good reason.
[Kor] By forgiving,
I removed whatever happened to me.
She asked me many times in the past,
"You have to forgive your grandfather."
And I said no, I can't forgive him.
Not with all that stuff he put on our shoulders.
But she has to deal with it.
She has to stand it.
So it's up to her.
If that's the way for Eva to live with it, I accept it.
The best way to defeat an enemy
is to make him a friend.
I believe that I defeated Oskar Groening
by making him a friend.
[Goetze] Groening, right after the war,
decided to marry the widow of his brother.
He had two children,
and of course he lived a peaceful life
and he enjoyed life.
[Holtermann] A very important thing
for Mr. Groening
was in the middle of the '80s.
He was meeting somebody who was collecting stamps,
like he himself did.
They were talking about the Nazi crimes
and the other person denied the Holocaust.
He found it insufferable that this guy
was going around saying the Holocaust didn't happen.
He was in Auschwitz. He could tell you
that it happened.
He wanted to actually come along and tell people,
"Look, I was there, I know that these crimes
were committed."
[Holtermann] He made some interviews to the German
news magazine Spiegel
and to the BBC.
Before these interviews, nobody knew Mr. Groening.
[inaudible]
[Singer] He exposed himself.
And that was a positive thing to do,
clearly, a courageous thing to do.
So, I think that's a very important
extenuating circumstance.
And to me,
that would have been sufficient reason
to not prosecute him.
[in German] Mr. Groening, what do you say to those
who still deny the Holocaust?
Nothing. They are hopelessly lost.
[Holtermann] Mr. Groening made a long statement
about the things he did in Auschwitz,
and he confessed that in a moral way,
he is guilty in the Holocaust. In the end, um,
the decision whether he is guilty or not
has to be taken by the court,
and that cannot be made by Mr. Groening.
[in German] Groening is testifying.
He is not acting sick.
He is the same age as Demjanjuk
but he is not wearing a baseball cap
or lying in bed.
[Dershowitz] Oh, I think the testimony
of Oskar Groening
is very, very important.
He is a hands-on participant observer
who puts the lie to all the Holocaust deniers who say,
"There were no gas chambers,
there were no crematoria, there was no Zyklon."
He puts the lie to all of that.
He was there.
He saw it with his own eyes.
And yet the Holocaust deniers can't accept the reality
of what he's saying, and he deserves some credit
for having testified to the truth of what he saw.
The truth of the matter is, you know, in 1945,
at the end of the war and the discovery
of the camps
and the horror of the Nazis' crimes,
the phrase "never again" was coined.
The only problem is there's nothing behind it.
In other words, there have been
so many tragedies,
similar, but not equal to the Holocaust
over the years
that this "NEVER AGAIN" basically is absolutely
meaningless.
It's too dangerous today. The world is different,
it's changing.
Our capacity to kill is getting completely
out of hand.
We see the wars that are taking place
now in Syria.
We talk about ISIS. It's nothing new.
[Zuroff] Part of the reason you had cases like Rwanda,
and Cambodia, and Biafra, and Darfur, and Bosnia,
and all these things, is that it's not at all clear
that if you participate in such crimes,
you'll actually pay for them. Again and again
and again and again,
people got away with it.
And that's terrible. That's absolutely terrible.
Without history, there is no memory.
Without memory, there is no future.
If we don't learn from the past,
we repeat the same mistakes again.
[all chanting] Jews will not replace us!
Jews will not replace us!
[indistinct yelling]
[crowd chanting]
[Dershowitz] If we can send a powerful message
that there is no statute of limitations on genocide,
it could have an impact on preventing individuals
from risking prosecution, even at the end
of their lives.
[speaking in German]
I wanted Groening desperately
to be convicted of this terrible act,
but I have come to the conclusion
that I don't want to see him go to jail.
I feel that the important thing
is that he should be convicted,
and he should go back to this town,
where he lived for 70 years,
where everybody knew what he did,
and where he was.
And people should see him walk on the street and say,
"There goes Oskar Groening,
the man who got convicted in the murder
of 300,000 people."
[Bohm] Well, he is all we have.
And if we want to establish a precedent,
a new law that in the future
will not allow guilty
to escape on technicalities, we do it through him.
[suspenseful music]
An extraordinary moment in Germany
when the sins of World War II finally caught up
with a man known as the "Accountant of Auschwitz."
He was convicted and sentenced
to four years in prison,
in what is likely one of the last Nazi trials
we will ever witness.
[speaks German]
[in German] Of course the verdict is
not very surprising.
But we will re-examine the details of the case.
It was emotional.
[woman] Thank you.
The fact that he only got four years,
I think with the same effort,
the judge could have given him 100 years.
I don't expect that he is ever going to be in a jail.
[Bohm] This is for future generations,
for all those people
who are still murdering people
because they are different color,
different tribe, different religion.
It is for them to know that judgment,
no matter how long it will take,
will catch up with them.
My being a witness was like putting a bouquet
on the non-existent grave of my parents.
I feel that my loved ones who were murdered
finally got some justice.
That my murdered mother and father
[voice breaking] now, perhaps,
can rest in peace.
I feel tremendous elation
in the fact that I am sitting in a German court,
with my daughter,
with my granddaughter,
which proves that we,
like the eternal phoenix,
rise again from the Holocaust ashes,
that we can survive.