Transitional justice is a difficult task. Taiwanese are being asked to watch painful events replayed before them.
One does wonder whether re-examining the truth of past events, allotting responsibility, attempting to right the wrongs, finding compensation where compensation is due, rewriting the history books to reflect the truth and deciding just how far this process should be pursued will be able to heal old wounds and deliver some closure — or whether it will just be rubbing salt on those wounds, forcing victims and their families to relive painful memories. It is on decisions such as these that the success or failure of transitional justice depends.
In 2015, seven decades after the end of World War II, the then-93-year-old former Nazi SS junior squad leader Oskar Groening, who had been stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp where he was between 1942 and 1944 responsible for counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners was prosecuted by German authorities, accused of 300,000 cases of being an accessory to murder.
During the trial at Lueneburg Regional Court, Groening accepted moral guilt, but said that he was a “small cog in the gears” of the machine, an involuntary participant in the events and, strictly speaking, innocent in the eyes of the law.
Present in the courtroom were more than 70 Holocaust survivors and relatives of the victims — some of whom forgave the accused.
On the day of the verdict, the presiding judge said that as Auschwitz had been a killing machine, any Nazi who worked there had to take responsibility for being an accessory to murder.
Groening did not accuse the authorities of being worse than the Nazis, scream political murder and claim the government was seeking to settle accounts, or announce that he would fight back — nor was there a public outcry that Germany should only look to the future, not the past.
The point is that precisely because this clear decision has been made, precisely because the remains of the Nazi regime are still being pursued 70 years after the end of the war, Germany is able to be given its due, and the Nazis theirs, and the country is able to divest itself of the Nazis’ sins and continue to move forward, its head held high.
Matters concerning money are relatively easy to resolve, and yet, as Taiwan takes its first tentative steps toward transitional justice, issues such as the pursuit of ill-gotten assets of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), the China Youth Corps and the National Women’s League have been met with stubborn resistance. Matters such as judicial reform — the White Terror era — and historical transitional justice are going to be so much tougher to deal with.
Transitional justice in Germany has worked because it is underpinned with an admission of wrongdoing and an acknowledgement of guilt among the people. That is, the German national character understands the concepts of shame and disgrace.
In a nation lacking this trait, an oppressed and enslaved people do not know how to fight back, and choose to remain silent, even when having been dashed to the ground.
Some might feel an association with the system that perpetrated the crimes, and are blind to the guilt, while the perpetrators themselves are deaf to the protests, and perhaps even mistake the clamor as the sound of praise.
Groening could acknowledge guilt and seek forgiveness. Where are Taiwan’s Groenings?
Chang Kuo-tsai is a retired associate professor at National Hsinchu University of Education and a former deputy secretary-general of the Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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