Justice delayed

John Demjanjuk’s long and mostly prosperous life finally came to an end Saturday. He died in Bavaria, not in prison (as befits a convicted war criminal), but in a nursing home, age 91.

The retired autoworker has spent the last30 years denying his work in Nazi death camps, fighting extradition for trial and then claiming ill-health as a reason to avoid prosecution. Prior to that, he’d had quite a tidy life, arriving in the U.S. in 1952, taking up work and raising a family in suburban Cleveland.

NPR’s story about Demjanjuk’s death has one element that just sticks in my craw. It quotes Professor Michael Scharf as saying that Demjanjuk was probably conscripted into Nazi service but “spent the rest of his life as a model citizen trying to atone for that.”

It’s clear that Demjanjuk did nothing that even approaches the time zone of atonement. The past 70 years were an exercise in hiding, denial and dodging justice.