Germany is now seeking the arrest of John Demjanjuk, suspected of being concentration camp guard Ivan the Terrible, who participated in the torture and murder of 29,000 people, mostly Jewish, at Treblinka and Sobibor. Stripped of his US citizenship for lying on his immigration application in the 50’s, and living as a stateless alien because no other country will take him, the Germans would like to take a shot at making the charges stick in a case in which Israeli prosecutors failed to get a conviction. Given all that, and the fact that the man is already 88 years old, does this really make sense? You bet it does! But frankly, I sometimes struggle with why I feel that way.
Given all of the challenges we already face in dealing with people currently engaged in mass murder around the world, does it make sense to keep fighting the last century’s wars? At some point, can’t we figure out how to let go of the fight without forgetting that it happened and that it must not be repeated? Might it not be more appropriate to stop worrying about one old man, or even a small bunch of them scattered powerlessly across the globe, and fight against those who follow actively in their footsteps, instead?

As much as I believe in the importance of asking those questions, and appreciate how too often we fight the past wars as an excuse for not fighting harder in the current ones, I cannot get away from the fact that in the case of Ivan the Terrible, and those like him, we must not let go of the fight. Too many sites that seek to exonerate him are just a click away on Google. Too many people equate letting people like Denjanjuk go with forgetting what they did. And if we did it properly, the search for the murderers of the past would provoke us to redouble our efforts to prosecute the genocidal maniacs of the present.
What do you think? In cases like this, is it time to say ‘enough is enough’ and move on, or should we and our governments continue to search for old Nazis and prosecute them when we find them?