The genocide of the Jews during the Holocaust has caused me great stress just from reading it and I cannot even imagine how it must have been for the dipsomaniacs and their next generation. The treatment and execution of the Jews was completely devastating. In the all male concentration camps, an average of 68 Jews went mad on the first night after continuous beatings. Noncoms pushed the heads of some of their charges into overflowing latrine buckets until they suffocated. Women and children were soon experiencing similar treatments and mass killings at point blank range were common. Although some of the ones in charge were singled out after the war i.e. Rudolf Hess, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keifel, there were probably many more who had involvement with this. For example, Israel Special Forces tracked down one of the architects of the Holocaust in 1960 and smuggled Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to Israel where he was eventually hung in Jerusalem in 1962, at the age of 56. To this day, not all of the war criminals responsible for the most atrocious of crimes have been punished, such as the few remaining members of Adolf Eichmann’s Death Squad.
A crime committed will have its consequences and nothing can be done to reverse its actions. The phrase, “All’s fair is love and war”, does have a certain value in times of war. Being fair would be killing your enemy in order for you to survive. Being fair would be sparing the innocence of children and those senescent with humanity values. However, in this case, the Nazis’ torturing and genocide of man, woman, child and the aged for their entertainment, with the segregation of themselves with the ‘sub-humans’, are twisted beyond cognition with that phrase. The Bible’s statement of ‘an eye for an eye’ implies, to me that these war criminals should never be forgotten and that a sentence should always await them, regardless of age.
To justify my comment, we must look at the families of dipsomaniacs and their relatives. A death would have disrupted a bond of love within the family and be a cause of grief. Learning of how that loved one died, would accentuate that grief and pain. Witnessing the justice brought to that war criminal would not be able to heal that broken bond, but it would bring relief and gratitude to the family, knowing that that criminal would not be walking away, free of his sadistic actions, allowed to live a life which he does not have a right to.
However, octogenarian war criminals can be classified into two classes. One is that of those who when, trialed, defend their actions of ethnic cleansing. The slightly more benevolent would be those who after all those years of hiding, feel the burden of regret and try to seek repentance, would come as the other category of war criminals. The second type of war criminal is no doubt less odious and deserves more consideration. However, it must be remembered that even if they feel regret now, it had took them 50 years or more to come to their senses. If they had felt the urge to turn themselves up, a better situation could be undertaken such as their help with exposing more war criminals. Also, acts of war crimes might have been ordered through authoritative propaganda where, for example, if you did not shoot a POW, you were shot. However, it is the leaders that international crimes of humanity organisations want and not their mindless minions. Thus, we can safely agree that punishment would be just.
