Let the People of Israel decide

 Nazi War Criminals

What would you do?

Last week, my wife and I saw a video of a group hunting down Nazi War Criminals based in South America.

The man they were after was a camp commandant at one of the "death camps," after being cornered, he decided in order to save himself he'd rat on another German. The other German turned out to be none other than Erich Priebke, second in command of the massacre in Rome during WW2.

I have to give the film crew, especially the lady they used to trap him full credit; they knew once they started the process the Nazi hinterland in South America would be on alert to them.

The lady deserves extra credit as she had to sit facing a man she knew was responsible for the deaths of her family before he went to Rome.

This film reminded me of two others, the first is about a Dutchman called Dries Riphagen who set himself as a banker/ collector for goods belonging to Jews in Amsterdam; then having taken his "cut," he turned the goods over to the Germans along with the names of the people.

The other film is about Pieter Menten who was an art collector of stolen goods from Jewish families in Rotterdam; despite the hard work of Dutch journalist Hans Knoop in proving he was also responsible for killing people. Menten walked free after eight months, the only charge the Dutch laid on him was dealing in stolen goods.

The true victim, in this case, is Knoop, he was told that if he chased the story it could cost him his job, and it did, he went from being a respected journalist on a top paper to writing articles on toilets.

It has, and will always be, my choice. Rather than take these people to court, hand them over to the people of Israel; they are the ones whose families died, and they should be the ones to act as judge and jury.

This brings me to another subject concerning Israel.

At the end of the war, there were two camps with views about founding the state of Israel; one view put forward by Abba Kovner was to poison several cities in Germany in reprisals for the death camps. This was challenged by David Ben Gurion who said, "We should bring these people to court for if we kill innocent people we are no better than those we class as murderers.

Honestly, I can see both sides of the argument, but I can't say who is correct.