SOBIBÓR - Holocaust Handbooks

376 J. GRAF, T. KUES, C. MATTOGNO, SOBIBÓR
ly banished to Elba. After he had succeeded in leaving the island and in
collecting once again a large army which then lost the decisive battle of
Waterloo, he was, once again, not condemned and hanged but merely
banished once more – this time, though, to the remote island of St. Helena
which made any return impossible. In doing so, the victors made
sure that Napoleon could never again constitute a danger – his honor
remained untouched. At that time the Occident valued highly such
things as chivalry and the respect for a courageous enemy.
All the more so, no one would have dreamed of pursuing a subject of
the French emperor for “war crimes” and certainly not decades after the
act – be it real or imagined. The thought that a French officer, ninety
years of age, could have had to appear before a court in 1874 for having
shot Spanish guerrilleros in 1809, when he was twenty-five years old,
would certainly have been viewed as something completely absurd to a
European citizen of the 19 th century.
With the triumph of “democracy” and “human rights” in 1945, however,
all this changed completely. The sinister farce mounted at Nuremberg,
in which the victors who themselves had committed heinous
crimes against humanity, hypocritically took on the role of judges over
the vanquished, sending the latter to the gallows or behind prison walls
on the basis of laws decreed ex post facto, amounted to the refusal of
any idea of chivalry. We may believe, though, that at the time, in the
immediate post war years, few people would have supposed that such
trials of men who had unfortunately been on the losing side would still
be held over five dozen years later.
John Demjanjuk’s martyrium is unfortunately not an exception. For
11 years now Erich Priebke, born in 1913, has been under house arrest
in Italy, because 65 years ago he had to shoot two hostages close to
Rome. In March 1944, after a terrorist attack by communist guerillas
had claimed the lives of 33 German policemen (plus several Italian civilians),
Adolf Hitler personally ordered to shoot ten hostages for every
policeman killed. The reprisal was carried out the day after the attack.
The victims were for the most part men who were already in prison for
underground activities. Women or children were not among them.
Sixty men had to take part in the reprisal shootings, among them
seven officers. One of them was Erich Priebke. If he had refused to
obey, he himself would have been shot: 1108
1108
Erich Priebke, Paolo Giachini, Vae victis. Autobiografia, Associazione Uomo e Liberta,
Rome 2003, p. 125.