The Persecution of John Demjanjuk
"John Demjanjuk Guilty of Nazi Death Camp Murders," ran the headline on the BBC. The lede began:
"A German court has found John Demjanjuk guilty of helping to murder more than 28,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp in Poland."
Not until paragraph 17 does one find this jolting fact: "No evidence was produced that he committed a specific crime."
That is correct. No evidence was produced, no witness came forward to testify he ever saw Demjanjuk injure anyone. And the critical evidence that put Demjanjuk at Sobibor came—from the KGB.
First was a KGB summary of an alleged interview with one Ignat Danilchenko, who claimed he was a guard at Sobibor and knew Demjanjuk. Second was the Soviet-supplied ID card from the Trawniki camp that trained guards.
There are major problems with both pieces of "evidence."
First, Danilchenko has been dead for a quarter of a century, no one in the West ever interviewed him, and Moscow stonewalled defense requests for access to the full Danilchenko file. His very existence raises a question.
How could a Red Army soldier who turned collaborator and Nazi camp guard survive Operation Keelhaul, which sent all Soviet POWs back to Joseph Stalin, where they were either murdered or sent to the Gulag?
As for the ID card from Trawniki, just last month there was unearthed at the National Archives in College Park, Md., a 1985 report from the Cleveland office of the FBI, which, after studying the card, concluded it was "quite likely" a KGB forgery.
"Justice is ill-served in the prosecution of an American citizen on evidence which is not only normally inadmissible in a court of law, but based on evidence and allegations quite likely fabricated by the KGB."
This FBI report, never made public, was done just as Demjanjuk was being deported to Israel to stand trial as "Ivan the Terrible," the murderer of Treblinka. In a sensational trial covered by the world's press, Demjanjuk was convicted and sentenced to hang.
But after five years on death row, new evidence turned up when the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia opened up. That evidence wholly validated the claims of Demjanjuk's defenders.
Not only had Demjanjuk never even been at Treblinka, the Soviet files contained a photograph of the real "Ivan"—a larger and older man.
To its eternal credit, the Israeli Supreme Court reversed the conviction, rejected a request to retry Demjanjuk as a camp guard elsewhere in Poland, freed him and sent him home to America.
Exposed as a laughing stock, and denounced for fraud by Ohio district and appellate courts, the Office of Special Investigations began crafting a new case, John Demjanjuk of Sobibor, to deport and try again the old man whose defense attorneys had made fools of them.
Thus the Sobibor story and Demjanjuk's supposed complicity in the murder of 28,000 Jews—though, as the BBC notes, no one testified at the trial that they ever saw John Demjanjuk injure anyone.
Consider the life this tormented American has lived.
Born in Ukraine in 1920, as a boy he endured the Holodomor—the famine imposed on his people in 1932 and 1933 by Stalin and his hated henchman Lazar Kaganovich, which resulted in the starvation and death of somewhere between 5 million and 9 million Ukrainians.
It has been called by historians the "forgotten Holocaust."
Conscripted into the Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured in the German blitzkrieg. Unlike American and British POWs, whom Germans regarded as racial equals, Ukrainians were untermensch who could be used for medical experiments.
Not only did Demjanjuk survive, he managed to evade the Allied order, under Keelhaul, for all Red Army POWs to be repatriated to Stalin, which was the Soviet dictator's demand before he would return the U.S. and British POWs his troops liberated in the march to Berlin.
In the war's aftermath, Demjanjuk married his wife Vera, who had been conscripted in the Ukraine and brought forcibly west to work in the German economy.
Thence he moved to Cleveland, became an autoworker, raised a family and practiced his Christian faith. But he made a mistake.
He sent his wife to Ukraine to tell his aged mother that he had survived the war and was living in the great United States of America.
Word got around the village. The KGB came calling. Swiftly, the payments his mother had been receiving for her war hero son were halted, and suddenly, there turned up an ID card that said John Demjanjuk had been trained at Trawniki to be a Nazi camp guard.
The KGB began feeding OSI from its "files," as OSI began a manic persecution of Demjanjuk that has lasted 30 years.
Stalin died in bed in 1953. Kaganovich died with his family around him in Moscow in 1991. And John Demjanjuk, 91, after spending five years on death row for a crime he did not commit in a place he never was, is stateless and homeless in a Germany where veterans of the SS walk free.
That is justice—in our world.
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@Matej: the universities are responsible for developing and transmitting knowledge and increasingly wisdom. For many decades, they have insisted on a hard leftist interpretation of history. In recent years this has somewhat softened, but not for the history of the past 100 years. They perpetuate the kind of worldview that says "Communism good/Bolsheviks bad; Naziism bad/Nazis bad" and gives the criminals of the former stripe a more sympathetic image.
Our political class is also to blame for willingly succumbing, but ths point is that there are many people at many levels who need to be read out.
The view is that left wing violence is misplaced idealism, whereas right wing violence is cynical criminality.
While some here may claim that there are double standards towards violence perpetrated by student activists, literature professors, former anti-fascist resisters, and the likes of Erich Honecker, has everybody also not considered that police officers in even Lyndon Johnson's Great Society America had no problems with harshly suppressing violent protests by demonstrators of such type?
Or were there instances back then of police being told to give such protesters a wide berth?
The view is that left wing violence is misplaced idealism, whereas right wing violence is cynical criminality.
Exactly.
While some here may claim that there are double standards towards violence perpetrated by student activists, literature professors, former anti-fascist resisters, and the likes of Erich Honecker, has everybody also not considered that police officers in even Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society America had no problems with harshly suppressing violent protests by demonstrators of such type?
No, but the suppression you cite is spelled out quite clearly in university textbooks and American history classes and the anarchic horror is defended as "free expression." But frankly, "violence perpetrated by student activists, literature professors, former anti-fascist resisters" is only the tip of the iceberg of what gets the green light or at least is deliberate overlooked in the eyes of the modern establishment.
Police were not a joke @ 2009 G20 Pittsburgh or the 1999 Battle of Seattle. There is no need to harken to Chicago 1968. RT has youtube of Pittsburgh G20. Domestic media was lacking.
The other point to make is that Johnson and the WTO are not "right wing" in any sense...
I think you two have correctly understood me, but just in case, I just meant to say that even in times under a radically progressive Democrat like Lyndon Johnson, there was not too much tolerance for misbehaviour by left-wing activists either. Presumably, a progressive Democrat would be biased to protect other progressive Democrats, but it's probably not always the case.
That was my small counterpoint to the idea that a leftist establishment often likes to protect violent leftists.
At the same time, I wouldn't want to completely undermine your points either. MLK used some tactics which could have been easily moderated, but either way, his reward was to be able to have conferences with Presidents. The bizzare thing about leaders of civil disobedience movements is that they actually get to have the cake and eat it too. They get to disobey the authorities in power in the streets, even as they get to dictate terms to the same authorities inside. They always have one foot inside the establishment and one foot outside.
In a similar example, I'd say South African apartheid was an extremely wrongful system, and yet, even as Mandela was released from prison and was preparing for elections, he said that the armed struggle was to continue. They want it both ways! - to be the radical outsider and the in-power insider.
@ Prateek Sanjay: I’d say South African apartheid was an extremely wrongful system
Upon what basis?
And, if so, was it more or less wrongful than the system that exists in South Africa today?
I think that a comparison of quality of life in S.A. before and after apartheid will reveal the ugly truth: that everyone was better off in the Bad Old Days.
@ 7 Robert
While watching foreign news channels last night, France 2 dredged up that Dershowitz snake to apologize for the lunatic swindler Strauss-Kohn.
NGPM @34,
By what measure does Buchanan approve of Hitler and the 3rd Reich? By that do you mean SUPPORT? From what I gathered by reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, Buchanan is simply sympathetic to Germany because of the extreme atmosphere of Teutonophobia throughout the rest of the West from the mid-19th century through WWII.
Alex @32,
I would venture the opinion that NOBODY was right in either WWI or WWII.
Patrick Buchanan has been completely clear about his disapproval of Hitler. In "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War" Buchanan writes, "For[World War II] one man bears full moral responsibility: Hitler. A self-described 'barbarian' who mocked Christian concepts of morality, he was content to take responsibility before history." (pp. 292-293)
@Brock H.: looking back, my phrasing was unclear. What I meant was that Buchanan disapproves of American intervention in WWII--I am aware that he is far, far from a Nazi sympathizer. However, I do not share his view on the geopolitical innecessity of American involvement. On the subject of Nazi charges, though, I do think Buchanan has been, like Roosevelt toward Japan, somewhat needlessly provocatory. As you suggest, there was not really a victory by any "good" side and while I do think our victory was the preferable one I also think a correct reading of history should be far more somber and nuanced regarding both the bombing of civilians and the postwar cultural influence of the victors (almost universally horrifying: the UN, the Communists, the Christian Democrats). But it is not necessary to oppose involvement in World War II to point out these sad truths. Buchanan must be aware that calling WWII will open himself up to some pretty outlandish charges. Blame the hysterics of the mass media all you want--you certainly have reason to--but that's reality. Yes, they'll call you names for a lot less, but why give them more bait than they need?
Revisiting "The Good War" will certainly draw the wrath of the American Exceptionalism crowd. PJB isn't sympathizing with the National Socialists he just points out the ugly realities of the American motives, dubious alliances and means to entering the war. Hitler's ascension can be laid on the altar of Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson should worship Lincoln for providing the means to break the bloody European stalemate with American man power. Without the 11 states of Dixie the United States expansionism would not have been possible.
The fact that people feel comfortable comparing Mayor Dayley's Chicago Police Force beating up Yippies to a brutal murderer like Erich Honecker or Romanian butcher Ceausescu is proof of the warped sense of socialist superiority inculcated by public "education" and managed media.
East Germans,Hungarians,Romanians,Poles,Slovaks and even Russians were murdered by explicitly atheistic Marxists. I guess it's OK if the Christians get murdered in the name of the Working Class but to allow a few protestors to be jailed and/or beaten is an atrocity?
Why no impetus to bring Castro to justice as there was for Pinochet?
@Bryan: Revisit WWII all you like! Many aspects need to be revisited. But when PJB, an otherwise astute and great man, starts critiquing the very idea of U.S. participation in WWII, one sometimes gets the impression that he doesn't know what he wants. Why leave such a question open to speculation by men of potentially bad will? I do not think it is prudent, nor do I believe it necessary.
One of Pat's great strengths is that he treats people like adults. He does his research, lays out his facts, and reaches conclusions based on his good judgment and American values.
But many can't handle the questioning of their sacred cows. Even if the sacred cow is 66 years old. Usually these people are quite stupid, but even the smart ones seem to be victims of black or white, either-or, thinking. You'd hope they'd show a little humility, given their historical ignorance, but instead, they barge in yelling "Nazi".
Pat has made it perfectly clear what "he wants". The question is whether his critics have the guts to make it clear what "they want", without the smears, insinuations, and dancing around.
Pat is a man, and states things like a man. Too bad you can't say the same thing about his critics.
Nicholson Baker has an interesting take on the second world war. He tends to agree with Buchanan though he's coming from the other side of the political spectrum.
I've looked at it all from every angle I can think of, and all I can say is that if allied victory empowered the kind of people who pursue innocent elderly victims into their 90's, using whatever lies they can without shame, who only differ from Soviet era show-trial stagers in that they are so incompetent by comparison, then we shouldn't have fought the war to begin with. We're not really better off in any conceivable way that I can see. All we really did was destroy a continent physically, and then we empowered scumbags intent on destroying civilisation itself both on that continent and this one as well. No great victory at all, no saving of the world from evil, nothing worthwhile accomplished.
Why could not Gavrilo Princip have stepped out in front of a car or been kicked in the head by a big horse sometime in, say, April 1913 or so?
As for those who charge in yelling, 'Nazi!', they are all a bunch of willfully ignorant scumbags, because if they had any honesty or moral character at all, they would not do that in the first place. The fact that they do shows that they are of a low moral character and are not decent people. It's that simple. To hell with them.
I believe that an important point to keep in mind regarding moral evaluations of the Second World War in Europe is that there was nothing inevitable about the alliances made during that conflict. Plenty of intense diplomatic maneuvers occurred all throughout the war and powerful interests in a number of the belligerent countries had hoped for different allies. Aside from the actual lineup of UK-USA-USSR vs. Germany-Italy, one could have very well have had:
1. A full-blown Soviet-German alliance that would likely have won the war in Europe and thus postponed Barbarossa to sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. (slightly less probable)
OR
2. An Anglo-German alliance that might have defeated the USSR and would have been a formidable rival in the postwar world to the USA. (very probable)
Molotov-Ribbentrop surely qualifies as a "full-blown Soviet German alliance" did it not?
Stalin's useful idiots in the US and France all vigorously denounced any attacks on National Socialists right up until Barbarossa.
I meant a Soviet-German alliance against the UK and the USA, not against poor Poland who was sacrificed by her so-called allies in the West so as to create a corridor for Hitler to attack the USSR.
I'm still not convinced that the physical destruction of the European continent and the empowerment of Christian Democrats that *we* inflicted really outfits the physical destruction of the European continent and the empowerment of anticlerical neo-pagans *Hitler* would have continued to inflict. If it only comes down to preferring Anglo-French-Soviet interests versus preferring German interests and not to any moral question, then my heart is admittedly on the former side. Admittedly, the U.S. is no longer my home and I suppose I do have selfish reasons for wanting things to "be a certain way."
As for those who charge in yelling, ‘Nazi!’, they are all a bunch of willfully ignorant scumbags
Agreed, but they can make your life miserable and for that, you've got to respect their territory.
My position is simply this: the negative moral implications of U.S. noninvolvement are at the least no better than the negative moral implications of U.S. involvement. Thus I am at a loss to understand why it is worthwhile to argue for noninvolvement when one will only attract the attention of slime-throated.
A worthwhile cause? Condemnation of the system built up after WWII. Must we see that system as the inevitable outcome of involvement? I don't think so, any more than we must say that Roosevelt, Churchill and De Gaulle (and even Stalin) were not made in the image of God and had no free will regarding the calamitous philosophies and power structures they propagated.
Another worthwhile cause? Defense of the wrongly charged, such as John Demjanjuk, which Buchanan does with grace.
I don't believe anyone is arguing for noninvolvement in WWII. It is a great disservice to accept beliefs of history at face value and ignore the facts and realities. People become very upset when their beliefs are contradicted by facts. Yet it might be of help in the future so as they do not blindly accept what they are told by their governments. The plight of Demjanjuk is indeed a travesty. They might as well prosecute his descendants as well. Certainly they must have known something of his alleged past and suppressed it.
I don’t believe anyone is arguing for noninvolvement in WWII.
Then why are people writing entire books referring to World War II as "the Unnecessary War"? Either they are arguing that Hitler could have been appeased into docility, which is demonstrably false, or they mean the U.S. should have stayed out of it.
It is a great disservice to accept beliefs of history at face value and ignore the facts and realities.
I don't think anything I have written suggests that I think otherwise. Quite the opposite. But some things are not worth the energy of questioning. The U.S. need not have been a monster to do evil during that war, nor have been angelic to have been right in intervening. To argue that U.S. involvement in World War II was unnecessary invites inflamed passions and calumnies, and detracts attention away from highly merited criticisms of the immoral revenge exacted upon the civilian populations on Germany and Japan and of the hypocrisy of fighting against a genocidal war machine (Hitler's) alongside an ally (Stalin) whose history should have made it clear that he would be just the sort to preside over a genocide against the Volksdeutsch.
Mr. Moses,
Have you actually read Pat's book on World War II? If you haven't--and it appears to me that you have not--my suggestion is that you stop pontificating about it.
My purpose in post 67 wasn't actually to respond to anyone else posting here, rather to make a general statement.
NGPM: Of course you're right that the rise of the modern liberal establishment was not inevitable, but I think it safe to say that the war facilitated it, especially in Europe, just as the first world war facilitated the fall of Russia to the Bolsheviks.
Now back to general statements:
As for how to deal with Hitler, I think Buchanan was right. Britain should have drawn a line around France and the Low Countries and gave a clear, unmistakable warning, 'DO NOT CROSS!' It was no concern of Britain's if Hitler got Poland or rump Czechoslovakia and in any case the Soviets provided a big, powerful limit to eastward expansion.
Hitler was a beast, but the idea that he just had to be stopped before he conquered the world is preposterous on it's face. He really did not want war with Britain or America, or even France, no matter how hard that may be for the willfully deluded to believe. The truth is that he, the French, and the Brits all stumbled into that war because they didn't have any better sense, and then they wondered what in the world they were going to do now, much like waking up in bed hung over, with a fat ugly woman snoring in your face, knowing the next couple months will be a hell of uncertainty. That's the most plausible explanation to me because it follows what I know of human nature, and matches how the other big one got started.
However, if we want to find someone who really wanted war for the purposes of world domination, we must look to Moscow. Harping on supposed Nazi aims of world conquest obscures real Communist aims for world conquest. I no longer doubt that Victor Suvorov knows what he's talking about concerning Stalin and his henchmen.
As for America, none of what was happening in Europe was any of our business at all. Responsible dealing with Japan would have kept us out of war, and let them have Manchuria and as much of China as they wanted. It wasn't something to get American boys killed over, any more than a Chinese conquest of Taiwan would be today.
People who refuse to see through their own willful illusions deserve to suffer the consequences of those illusions until until they do see because they must, and the rougher and more painful the consequences the better, if that's what it takes. Let them follow the next psychopath out to 'save the world' from whatever new dragon, whoever he identifies as a dragon, who 'must be stopped no matter what'. That psychopath will die peacefully long after he has sacrificed them on the fiery altar of his own egomania. Much like drunks and dope-heads, I have no pity for them. They do it to themselves, for it is their own gullibility and willingness to be deceived and led that enables the psychopath at the top, and that gullibility and that willingness are very, very willful. I wont play those games.
After all is said and done, I still wonder who is crazier, the warmongers who insist that a war is 'necessary' because they want it, or the stupid ideological pacifists who never found a war they would fight no matter what. As for me, I will discuss that war with the willfully stupid no more. Let them remain stupid. It is just punishment.
In light of the fact that the conversation seems to have changed from the original point regarding Les Misarables style prosecution of apparently innocent people by leftists.
I repeat "Why no impetus to bring Castro to justice as there was for Pinochet?"
Why the skeptical attitude toward unrepentant terrorists like Bill Ayers and admitted cop killer Mumia Jamal while simultaneously pursuing a man the Israeli Court freed?
Why the double standard?
The need for show trials over that war has passed now. So why are they persecuting a man they know is innocent? Is it just because they cant stand being made fools of and want revenge? Or are they showing the world what they can do to anyone if they choose? Do it to who?
Make that "Les Miserables"
So why are they persecuting a man they know is innocent?
So they can call it a win and go on. The fact he is innocent is obvious from his sentence --- five years for participating in 27,900 counts of accessory to murder. Now either one murder is enough for life imprisonment and/or hanging, or it would require participating in 55,800 deaths to get ten years. The whole affair has been nothing but a trail of tears for those who have any respect whatsoever for human justice, mercy, life or death.
At one time he was listed as the number one Nazi criminal in the world, but as was said last year, "Demjanjuk is essentially on trial not for anything he did, but simply for being at Sobibor. No specific criminal acts need be alleged, much less proved. Look through transcripts of previous Nazi trials and you'll find a rigorous focus on particulars, because that is what should be required to convict a defendant. No one in any such trial ever was convicted simply on the basis of being present at the scene." Oh well, these days a win is a win -- if you are the winner. It's losers like Patrick Buchanan who are obsolete.
#58,
Mr. Oculus,
The Afrikaners (and the Coloureds) arguably have, in principle, a superior claim to the 20-30 percent of South Africa where their presence preceded that of the Black Nguni peoples from the north. However, the Afrikaners have no moral right to be masters of the entirety of the Union of South Africa, which in any case was conquered by the British and not by them. Apartheid is indefensible because the Bantustan policy was never designed to produce viable autonomous black-majority states, but rather to provide a fig leaf to cover the marshalling of a docile and cheap black work force. It was the capitalist economic development of South Africa, of which the Anglos and Afrikaners were the prime beneficiaries, that has led to these groups being demographically inundated by the Blacks. It is a bit rich for them to turn around now and bemoan the fate of their own making.
#62 and #75,
NGPM and Mr. Wilson,
I would not personalize the issue so much, FDR was merely continuing to implement the aggressive Open Door policy in Asia that had been followed by previous Presidents. Such a policy was bound to collide with Japanese efforts to set up their Yen bloc. Simply put, China was not big enough for both Tokyo and Washington.
#76,
Castro is still in power, that makes all the difference.
Pinochet's fate parallels that of men like Yezhov who did the dirty work for their masters but then found themselves hung out to dry when the sight of their blood hands became inconvenient. There is no "double standard" but a perpetually variable standard to be adapted to the needs of the moment.
But some things are not worth the energy of questioning.
What would those be, and who pray tell would determine that? You might as well say "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon".
@Mr. Wilson: I'm afraid I've allowed us to stray off-topic, but I essentially agree with your statement that Hitler was not out for world domination. What he wanted was a rematch of World War I that would return the Brest-Litovsk gains and the Alsace-Lorraine départements to Germany. Would Hitler have respected British demands not to cross into the Low Countries and France? At first, perhaps, but probably not in the long run once he had gained significant clout. (Perhaps the Soviets could have resisted successfully and thwarted this hope, but their resiliance when the invasion came would not have played into many contemporary geopolitical strategies.) Moreover, fortifying France's position in the Netherlands was NEVER a policy that Britain would accept throughout history.
For that matter, if Britain had remained sufficiently Christian to stay off Stalin, could she possibly have stood morally for a sequestration of Christian countries just a couple of states away by an anticlerical pagan? Obviously Britain ultimately did stand for the sequestration by an anticlerical atheist, but in my mind those are separate issues--Britain's intervention against Hitler and lack of verve against Stalin. (Admittedly this is an issue which does not particularly touch the U.S.)
My own view is this: the best way to avoid World War II would have been to occupy the German Empire in 1918, dismember it permanently into at least four independent states (apart from Austria) with old dynasties on the thrones, prohibit any future German confederations in exchange for guaranteeing the thrones of the sovereigns against German nationalists and communists, give France the entire Rhineland province while making Belgium and Holland British protectorates, and finally pushing further on into Russia until every last Red was extinguished. Once that was not done, there were a lot of geopolitical forces and a great deal of philosophical intertia working against Britain and France.
On the U.S. side, there was FDR continuing the Open Door policy as has been mentioned, as well as the Deep State gentlemen over in the Army War College. The U.S. could have avoided intervention only with radical alterations in its trading strategies and military mentality. Worthwhile alterations, perhaps, but politically and practically highly unlikely.
@Bryan: question all you like, but it is a question of diminishing returns on investment. A discussion of World War II revisionist history obviously opens the door best by knocking the conduct of the Allies, not publishing a book that says "It was unnecessary." That is guaranteed to provoke a reaction and turn away many who might have listened if they have not already been conditioned to accept that the Allies were not "all good."
NGPM,
Your prognosis of what would have been required to prevent WW2 is accurate, though I would add that such a strategy would have been absolutely impossible for the following reasons:
1. Both Britain and the USA were adamant that France would not be allowed to dethrone Germany and thereby reclaim its position as premier European Power. (You already alluded to this point when discussing the Netherlands)
2. The USA in particular, to a great extent, shielded Germany from Anglo-French demands for reparations. Reparations after all, would strengthen the British and French colonial empires that US capital was working so hard to break into. On the other hand, without reparations, Britain and France would be all that much more hard pressed to repay their war debts to the USA, thereby strengthening the hand of US capital against those of their principal European rivals. The US would do the same thing after WW2.
3. A serious Western campaign against the Russian Bolsheviks was also out of the question, for two reasons:
a. War fatigue and the wave of popular strikes that would have inhibited contributions from several European countries.
b. Since the Bolsheviks were themselves financed to a great extent by New York high finance, I doubt that the true ruling circles of the USA would have countenanced a vigorous campaign to extirpate them. After all, the USSR of the 1920s-1930s did become an important market for American industry. I see the seemingly confused and weak-willed Western response to the Bolshevik Revolution as a result of infighting between mostly American financial elites keen to support the Bolsheviks and mostly European aristocratic elites frightened of the consequences of so recklessly playing with fire.
Oh, no question it was practicably speaking impossible. Had Europe and the U.S. had the moral courage to do all that, there never would have been a FIRST World War to begin with.
Just reading the final pages of Robert Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow, which details the Soviet regime's deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants in 1932-33, I wonder what Demjanjuk's remembers about this event that he experienced as a young teenager. We are inundated with stories from the "survivors" of that other holocaust, but when do we ever hear any first hand accounts of the the holocaust that occurred in the Ukraine?
Wait a minute: it is not "prudent" or "necessary" to question U.S. involvement in WWII? A war that cost us 416,000 lives, tore millions of men and women away from homes, families and communities, fostering cynicism and cosmopolitanism in the men and setting the example for women to work outside the home and all the mess that entails; a war that sealed off, probably permanently, any hope of America's returning to something like the normal life and behavior of a normal state instead of the world bestriding leviathan it has become? And yes, it was inevitable that defeating the lesser evil would empower the greater evil, just as it was in WWI.
One can't very well "revisit" a great war without questioning whether it was necessary or inevitable for the U.S. to participate. Next to that question, all else pales into the category of petty squabbles over policies, strategies, tactics, etc.; in short, a waste of time.
I think there is a generational divide at work here, as well. Those born after, say, 1960, can't really fathom the depth of the historical fog, the intensity of the indoctrination in the myth of our virtuosity us older ones have to work ourselves out from under. You have to have grown up going to 50's war movies and joining in the audience's hurrahs when the glorious, invincible American army, full of tough but lovable G.I.s showed up (I'm getting a lump in my throat as I recall it) and put the evil nazis and Japs to flight, always stopping to liberate adoring locals and pat little boys on the head along the way. In addition to the emotional burden, it is serious intellectual heavy lifting for those of us not educated in the light of the more recent and rational scholarship just to work through the facts, a labor us older souls can only undertake in short bursts, followed by a need to rest and contemplate at ease.
The diminishing returns you speak of may operate for your generation, but for mine, not so, especially as we have still to educate our grandchildren (or in my case, children) on these great questions.