Students Skype with “Last of the Nazi Hunters”

“Sometime in the mid 60s, the German courts effectively stopped taking cases for anything associated with the Holocaust,” Joe Singer, the son of a Holocaust survivor, said. “They felt they got to the main culprits, the people who had direct blood on their hands, but anybody else involved were able to continue living their life without any repercussions for what they had done.” Joe Singer, upper Michael Singer’s father, gave a lunch lecture on Friday to present the trials of two Nazi officers.

“Both because I’m Jewish and I’m a person who cares about genocide not happening, I think it’s really important to have justice for the victims and the precedent of holding people accountable for their actions,” Liberatore said. “For genocides that have occurred more recently or that could occur in the future, we need a way of providing due process.”

Singer detailed the trials of 94-year-old Oscar Groening, nicknamed the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” and 95-year-old Renold Hanning, a SS guard at Auschwitz. The two men were convicted by German lawyers for being accessories to mass murders. “They almost escaped their day of reckoning, as so many have, until a new legal push by some extraordinary German jurists ashamed of their nation’s poor efforts to prosecute its ‘junior’ henchmen picked up the baton,” Michael Singer said. “Even though the Nazi Guards were frail and in their 90s, there is no statute of limitations to the fact that they were accomplices in this genocide.”

Co-head of Exeter Jewish Community (EJC) senior Sarah Liberatore provided data to quantify the gravity of these men’s misdeeds. “The amount of people that the men on trial were accessories of murder surprised me a lot, one of them had played a role in 300,000 murders,” Liberatore said.

Along with this statistical information, Singer offered personal accounts. “I felt the most important [parts] of Mr. Singer’s presentation were his personal details on each of the victims who suffered in the concentration camps,” senior Stearns Weil said. “Knowing all of them and understanding their struggle gave his descriptions a lot more depth.”

At the lunch, attendees Skyped Justice Thomas Walther, a lawyer in the province of Bavaria, Germany. Walther is a former judge and German federal prosecutor for the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes. He has been called the ‘last of the Nazi Hunters’ for his work in setting legal precedent and punishment for former SS officers and guards who were involved in the Holocaust, whether directly responsible for deaths or otherwise.

Michael Singer elaborated on Walther’s message. “Judge Thomas related how his life has been changed by working with the survivors and seeing how they were able to put aside their pain and anguish and were able to raise their families with love and affection despite the horrors that they had experienced as children,” he said.

Weil spoke to Joe Singer and Judge Walther’s message and demeanor in their presentation. “Both Mr. Singer and Judge Walther were very passionate about the Nazi trials,” Weil said. “On top of being well versed on the subject, they were both emotionally linked to the topic, which made their presentations much more meaningful. They both had a lot of great things to say about the horrors of the German machine created by Hitler and how one cog in the machine is necessary for the whole thing to work.”

Senior Amelia Lee explained that she went to the talk because it touched on values that her history class was discussing. “We’ve been talking about the psychology behind good people doing bad things and where justice fits into that equation,” Lee said.

Lee recalled a question she posed during the presentation. “I was interested about how victims defend themselves by saying they were part of a larger killing machine and therefore claim that they do not deserve to be punished,” she said. “I asked what goes through the judge’s head specifically when people still have no comprehension that they have done anything wrong. Some of them, in their mid 90s, have not admitted that they have made a mistake.”

“He said times have changed a lot, there has been a very large alteration in perspective,” Lee said. “What he tries to do is to bring justice to not only the entire community but to make examples of the men on trial to help bring closure to victims of the Holocaust that acted as witnesses during the trial.”

Liberatore elaborated on these trials’ importance, expressing the significance of consequences for people involved in genocide. “Both because I’m Jewish and I’m a person who cares about genocide not happening, I think it’s really important to have justice for the victims and the precedent of holding people accountable for their actions,” Liberatore said. “For genocides that have occurred more recently or that could occur in the future, we need a way of providing due process.”

Michael Singer concluded that he hoped the larger Exeter community would take away the message that the horrors of the Holocaust are still present generations later. “[I want them to know] that the pain and suffering of the Holocaust still continues and the implications of the crimes are still evident 70 years later,” he said. “People like my father and grandfather are working to make sure that people cannot excuse themselves from a mass atrocity by simply saying that they had no choice and they were under orders.”