Demjanjuk ruling strikes fatal blow to ‘just following orders’

[CHIMO]

Sixty-one years ago this summer, the United Nations agreed on the Fourth Nuremberg Principle: Nobody can escape war-crimes charges by claiming that they were just following orders from superiors.

For most of the postwar era, that principle was ignored. While most of the top political figures who were in charge of the Third Reich faced trials immediately after the war, those who carried out their orders tended to melt into the German bureaucracy or disappear into exile.

On Thursday, this principle faced its sharpest test: Should a man who really was just following orders, and nothing else, be convicted and sentenced for the greatest single crime in human history?

In the end, the German court in Munich answered yes: John Demjanjuk, a 91-year-old Ukrainian-born former Ohio auto worker, was guilty of having contributed to the mechanized murder of 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland in 1943.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe/demjanjuk-ruling-strikes-fatal-blow-to-just-following-orders/article2020454/