An Atlanta man who, at age 19, was employed as an SS Guard with the Hitler Youth is facing possible deportation. The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations wants to deport this man, now 85 and a resident of this country since 1955, based upon the fact that he trained war dogs and purportedly worked at a guard at a concentration camp. He is elderly, married, and with a grown daughter.

Shouldn’t the punishment be relative to the nature of the crime?

This man was 19, and living in an authoritarian and conformist culture where any rebellion would have had you killed. We can be moral and upright and disgusted and say “I’d rather be dead than have done that!!!” but the truth is….NO YOU WOULDN’T!! If it meant saving yourself, and your friends and family, the death of strangers is nothing to protect loved ones.

He was a guard. A prison guard. He wasn’t the one known as “Ivan the Terrible”. He wasn’t Mengele. He wasn’t Hitler or Himmler or any one of the anonymous Germans who were responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and anyone else who didn’t fit in to the ideal of the perfect nation.

Granted, he was a prison guard who trained attack dogs. Who knows if his statement is true (he was told he was training war dogs for the front line) or not? Did the records surviving the collapse of the Reich really detail the training plans for a 19 year old Waffen SS (child, really)?

I’m saying this: the man is 85. I’d say he’s not in the best of health. Now that he’s been “outed”, his life will never be the same. The public will continue to punish him; no word on whether or not he punishes himself. He is nearing the end of his natural life span. What crime would you charge him with? A warcrime? A crime against humanity? Where is your proof? Where are your photos, your statements, your evidence, your confession? You would deport someone based on an association and a presence alone? Where would you deport him to? Israel, who would execute him? Germany, who would be forced to repatriate him? His daughter is a U.S. Citizen – can you imagine how she will feel, knowing that she is also being punished for a sin that is not hers?

How scary is that…so….in twenty more years when we decide that everyone held in Gitmo was held illegally and tortured…would everyone who worked there, every soldier, every medic, every man of religious conviction, be held guilty and charged with a crime by association?

It’s a fine line, I think, to charge a man to say “you have to follow orders, but you must do what is morally right”. What is morally right to you may not be what is morally right to the masses! What is morally right to you may result in the death of everyone you know; and only you can decide how you reconcile your morality with your faith. And as we see all too frequently with the Iraqdebacle, what sits right with you morally might get you in the pokey, or dishonorably discharged.

This man needs to be left alone. His family needs to be left alone. I’ve read the comments of many folks of Jewish descent and survivors of the death camps, and their hatred is astounding. How can you so passionately hate someone whom you’ve never met? How can you hate someone who did nothing to you personally (presumably)? You hate a symbol, you seek an outlet and a focus for your pain, and this I can understand.

Punishing one man doesn’t bring back the millions who died.