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Originally Posted by Kizzy

''So few of those responsible for the genocide of Europe’s Jews have been held to account in postwar Germany that the German writer and Holocaust survivor Ralph Giordano described it as a “second guilt”.
But in 2011 a German court found John Demjanjuk, a Soviet prisoner-of-war who volunteered as an SS guard, guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp.
When Thomas Walther, a government official tasked with investigating Nazi crimes, sought to bring charges against Demjanjuk, his colleagues laughed.
But the case overturned years of legal precedent in the German courts that only the senior Nazi leadership could be held responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust. For the first time, anyone who had been a guard at a death camp could be held guilty.''

So it seems that Germany only decided to try any SS officer from 2011, wonder what prompted the change.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...to-murder.html

Because time marches on and the millions of people who lost their families to the genocide carried out by the Nazi regime deserve justice, even if it's down to the dregs of the Nazi party. There is a difference between what the Nazis did to Jews, gays, gypsies, the disabled and anyone else they saw fit to put into their government sanctioned slaughter houses; and what happens in the usual horrors of war. This was something extraordinary in the literal meaning of the word - the world had never seen anything quite like it and I hope will never see it again... I'd hope that the same justice would be dished out to any perpetrators in the Rwandan genocide or if/when the North Korean regime falls and the extent of what happens in the gulags over there ever comes to light... but what we have is a German government that has accepted the burden of the past and done its best to try and right the few wrongs they are able to... nothing will change what happened, nothing will change that this particular man went on to lead a full life afterwards... the past cannot be undone, but the future can still be written. Well done to the German legal system for pursuing this line of action - it'll be controversial long after this man dies and the last of those who can remember World War II are gone but at least it was something.