Mikhail Rumer-Zaraev: Tints of totalitarianism

On the eve of 2018 in Germany, it would seem not such a significant event, nevertheless leading to thoughts. The country's Federal Constitutional Court rejected the complaint of the 96-year-old Oscar Grening, known as the “accountant from Auschwitz”, who asked for a delay in punishment in the form of imprisonment. In the summer of 2015, the court found Greening guilty of the murder of 300 thousand people during the Second World War and sentenced him to four years in prison. In the fall of 2016, the Supreme Court confirmed the legitimacy of the sentence, and a year later the Constitutional Court rejected the complaint of Greenoning. Thus, a more than two -year judicial marathon ended, as a result of which a deep old man should go to prison.

More than seventy years ago, the war ended. Over the past decades, outbreaks of trenched retribution passed the courts on one or another Nazi responsible for the atrocities of the Nazi regime. But it seemed that time had made its trial over those who escaped human court - even the youngest of them should now go a dozen. Before World War II, Gruning worked as a clerk at the bank, but with the outbreak of war he voluntarily joined the SS troops. In 1942, he was sent to Auschwitz, where they decided to use the banking experience of Greening, entrusting the accounting operations to account for the money sent to the gas chambers of the Jews and the remaining things.

The title of Greening was low-a non-non-commissioned officer, which corresponded to the army non-commissioned officer, but also the work, which is called, is nonsense: transfer money to Berlin, to the economic department of the SS, or even take them there, dispose of the baggage of Jews arriving at the camp. He was a screw of the Nazi destruction machine, stood at the famous ramp, where trains with prisoners arrived, because there was their luggage, which was to take into account and store. He knew everything, he saw everything, although, as he later said, he was horrified by his colleagues. And seventy years later he was to be responsible for belonging to this death machine.

Why was he tried so late? After all, Gruning did not hide his service in Auschwitz. Until recently, Germany required evidence of the direct participation of the accused of the crimes of the Nazism. In other words, it was possible to attract a person to the court only if there is evidence that he directly killed, tortured, or somehow pursued his victims. The prosecutors forced these victims or witnesses to remember the details of torment or persecution.

The situation changed six years ago after the decision of the Land Court of Munich in the case of Ivan Demyanyuk . Demyanyuk could not be charged with committing specific crimes. Nevertheless, the former guard in the death camp of Sobibor, accused of mating 28 thousand Jews, was sentenced to five years in prison. True, the verdict did not enter into force, since Demyanyuk died before the consideration of the cassation submitted by lawyers, but the precedent was created. Demyanyuk was condemned for indirect involvement in the murder, thus, any form of complicity in the crimes of Nazism became the reason for judicial persecution.

Such an expanded interpretation of guilt would make it possible to attract wide circles of the Germans to the court, if it were not for the time that took most of those who acted in the era of Nazism to the grave. And it involuntarily gives the impression that German justice was waiting with such an expansion of guilt for the time being, while the majority of the people subject to the court from these positions will die. It seems that both Gruning himself and his lawyer understood and tried to use some legal ambiguity of the situation. Moreover, the old man came into the view of the prosecutor's office thirty years ago, telling about his past, when he was awarded a book written by the negative of the Holocaust. He returned the book with the words: "I saw everything. Gas chambers, crematoriums, the selection process ... I was there." Then he shared his memories with the German press and appeared in a documentary shot by BBC . Then Greening was freed from criminal prosecution, but now that legal norms have changed, nevertheless attracted to the court.

Russia has missed its chance to conduct a favorable process of lustration for the formation of a democratic society

Nevertheless, there are people who believe that it is inappropriate to judge a deep old man who repented and voluntarily into the hands of justice. Let us leave this question open and think about the reasons for the public resonance caused by the Greening affair. Of course, the matter is not only in his fate, not only whether he would live in his home or in a prison cell. A much broader problem is related to the definition of responsibility for participation - direct or indirect - in crimes of totalitarian regimes. And it is considered not only in relation to the events of the seventy years ago - this problem is still relevant, it is indicated by the word "lustration", and this word comes from Latin Lustratio , "cleansing by sacrifice."

It is especially in our time to remind of the initial sense of the word when, throughout the central and eastern Europe, which has been freed from the shackles of Nazi and communist totalitarianism, a wave of lustration laws designed to cleansed the state structures through the “sacrifices” of people related to the party apparatus and the repressive services of the previous regimes, no matter how these services were called - headings or stations or stations or stations or stations or stams Gestapo.

Actually, the denazification that took place in Germany in the postwar years was a lustration process. Then, more than three million people passed the audit in the courts, 200 thousand of them were arrested. Yes, and the trial of Grening can be considered as perhaps the last echo of this process. Such processes took place in a number of other countries: the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, in 2011 - in Georgia. And in Russia?

Galina Starovoitova introduced in 1997 the draft Lustration Law "On the Banning of a Totalitarian Regional Policy", but he did not even reach the first stage of consideration to the State Duma. The ally of Starovoyova historian Andrei Zubov believes that Russia missed its chance to conduct this favorable process for the formation of a democratic society. If it was implemented, party apparatus and Chekists could not come to power with their authoritarian rule and a return to the Soviet realities so dear to their hearts. Cleansing did not take place.

Mikhail Rumer-Zaraev-prose writer and publicist

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