Nazi equation

Surviving senior commanders of the squad were put on trial at Nuremberg and charged with war crimes.

The Nuremberg trials that prosecuted crimes against humanity committed in World War 2 primarily by members of the Nazi regime of German dictator Adolf Hitler, who engineered the Holocaust that killed more than 6 million Jews, provide a moral compass in the current Israel-Hamas war.

Among the current arguments in the conflict is the supposed double standard regarding the 1,400 individuals who are of several nationalities but predominantly Israelis whom Hamas terrorists slaughtered and the mounting victims of the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.

According to Martin Kramer, a historian of the Middle East at Tel Aviv University and a Walter P. Stern fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the same question was raised in the Einsatzgruppen case conducted by the Nuremberg Military Tribunal from late 1947 to the spring of 1948.

Einsatzgruppen were the paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany, which carried out mass murder by killing people with guns in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Nazi executioners claimed the lives of well over a million Jews and two million people all told.

Surviving senior commanders of the squad were put on trial at Nuremberg and charged with war crimes.

In the trial, the chief defendant, SS-Gruppenführer Otto Ohlendorf, was the commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which carried out mass murders in Moldova, southern Ukraine, and the Caucasus.

Kramer recounted that a prosecutor asked Ohlendorf: “You were going out to shoot down defenseless people. Now, didn’t the question of the morality of that enter your mind?”

In reply, Ohlendorf referred to the Allied bombings of Germany as a comparison: “I have seen many children killed in this war through air attacks, for the security of other nations, and orders were carried out to bomb, no matter whether many children were killed or not.”

“The fact that individual men killed civilians face to face is looked upon as terrible and is pictured as especially gruesome because the order was given to kill these people; but I cannot morally evaluate a deed any better, a deed which makes it possible, by pushing a button, to kill a much larger number of civilians, men, women, and children,” Ohlendorf said.

This line of reasoning became known as the Dresden defense, which argues, “I shouldn’t be punished because they did it too.”

Kramer said the Nuremberg war court enforced a fundamental distinction, which was that all civilian lives are equal, but not so on the ways of taking them.

“The deliberate and purposeful killing of civilians is a crime; not so the taking of civilian lives that is undesired, unintended, but unavoidable. The errors made by a bomber squadron cannot be deducted from the murders committed by a death squad,” the court differentiated.

“It’s a difference compounded many times over when those civilian men, women, and children are subjected to torture, rape, and mutilation before their murder,” it added.

Ohlendorf and the regime he served did all they could to conceal their deeds from Western eyes.

Kramer then posited, “Disturbing is the fact that Ohlendorf’s defense has been revived to frame the massacre of Jews.”

“The Ohlendorf and Hamas defenses are the same, and so is the identity of their victims,” according to Kramer.

An extra task for Israel would be to take some of the Hamas masterminds alive and place them on trial, Nuremberg-style.

“Israel owes it to the dead and wounded, their families, all Israelis, and all Jews. But it’s the Arabs and Muslims who most need to see the evidence, hear the testimonies, and weigh the arguments. No part of the world is further from drawing the line drawn at Nuremberg. 7 October is the place to start,” Kramer indicated.

The difference between the ages of Nazis and Hamas is that Israel can now defend itself from the unexplainable anti-Semitic hostility.

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Credit belongs to: tribune.net.ph