Nazi criminals, convicted decades later. Is justice served?
When Josef Schuetz was convicted this summer of being an accessory to murder at the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp, it made headlines worldwide. But just as important to generating interest in Nazi war crimes was Mr. Schuetz’s age at conviction: 101 years old.
The judgment against Mr. Schuetz was made possible by legal changes that happened only in the last decade. Those changes similarly resulted in sentences against Nazi extermination camp guard John Demjanjuk at age 91 in 2011 and Oskar Gröning, the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” at 93 in 2015.
But the fact that these prosecutions and convictions are only occurring now, roughly seven decades after the Holocaust ended, raises some basic questions: What took so long? And is there justice to be had
