This month German officials charged two more of their country’s citizens with World War II war crimes. One is a 95-year-old woman and the other a 100-year-old man. Seventy-five years ago, the woman had worked as a secretary at one of the concentration camps run by the Nazi government; the man was a guard at a different camp during the same years. Their arrests were preceded by a similar case last year where a 93-year-old former guard at a different Nazi camp was apprehended and charged.
The search for those tied to Nazi war crimes has been proceeding since even before the end of WWII. One of the more famous cases involved a man named John Demjanjuk, who had been accused of being a guard at a Nazi camp built to harbor and murder Jewish prisoners. He was living in the United States and had spent decades working at an automobile plant in Ohio. Several decades ago he was accused of playing a role in the deaths of 28,000 prisoners — mostly Jews. He insisted that he was never a guard at any Nazi camp, but he eventually faced trial in Israel where he was acquitted. One would think that such an acquittal would have brought an end to the case, but German authorities, working with U.S. counterparts, continued their campaign against Demjanjuk until he died 2012.
We make no attempt to excuse anyone who participated in the incarceration and deaths of Nazi victims. But we want to point out that there has never been a similar campaign to punish communist collaborators who participated in slaughters carried out by a succession of communists leaders.
Even after the trials and convictions of some Nazi leaders after WWII ended, communist officials of the Soviet Union upped their killings. And gulags operated in the Soviet Union until the 1950s, yet Soviet killers have not only been given a free pass for decades of monstrous crimes, they have also been welcomed by other governments, most notably the United States, as legitimate rulers whose blood-soaked hands are ignored.
Why the double standard? Shouldn’t all the perpetrators of crimes against humanity be brought to justice — particularly if they were high officials in genocidal regimes and played major roles in the atrocities?
In his 1990 book Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917, R.J. Rummel wrote that the number of human beings killed outright by Russia’s communist rulers easily dwarfs the total attributed to the Hitler-led regime. Soviet rulers committed mass murder, created famines, established slave labor camps (gulags), and more. The USSR leaders certainly bear responsibility for spreading lethal brutality throughout much of Europe and Asia. But there has never been any relentless campaign in which Russian officials or American officials have tracked down the communists behind the crimes — much less camp guards, secretaries, and others who carried out the designs of higher-ups. There surely must have been sentries and secretaries at the Russian camps. Why no campaign — even seven decades later — to find and punish the workers at the Soviet installations where lives were snuffed out? The answer has to be that while Naziism is dead, communism lives on, certainly in China and likely with the one-man rule in Russia, where communist tyrants such as Lenin are still honored.
R.J. Rummel isn’t the only historian to turn a needed searchlight on the Soviet crimes against humanity. A team of several Europeans issued The Black Book of Communism in 1999. It claims that Stalin and his bloodthirsty successors were responsible for the deaths of 65 million in China, 25 million in the former USSR, and millions more in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and many other countries dominated by the USSR after World War II. But there has been no tracking down of the major participants in the horrors-producing Red genocide, let alone more minor ones. And there certainly hasn’t been any Nuremberg-style trials for communist criminals.
Why bring this up? The answer is simple. Crime unpunished — or even unacknowledged by most — will be repeated. Much of the world closes its eyes and pretends that the current leaders of Communist China pose no threat to mankind. Sadly, it can be shown that China has become a world power with help from the West, and even the United States has been complicit in its growth. And Chinese Communism isn’t dead, its leaders are flexing military muscles, and they have internment camps of their own. Realists know this. It’s time for still-free countries to realize it as well.
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society.
