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THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 9, 2012 17

THE TWO NAZI-HUNTERS

sit across from Dov Weissberg,82, a retired thoracic surgeon

from Rehovot, and ask himabout events that took place 70years ago in Lviv, then in Ger-

man-occupied Poland. Weissberg was 13

years old when 40,000 Jews were deportedto the Belzec death camp in August, 1942,

his mother among them.“Do you have any documents that show

your mother’s birth or marriage?” asks

Thomas Walther, a retired German judge

whose passion since leaving the bench is tobring Nazi criminals to justice. He and his

colleague, Cornelius Nestler, also a lawyer,a possible trial in Germany.

SHULA KOPF meets an unlikely duo of German lawyers whoare dedicated to hunting down the last Nazi war criminals

Last chance for justice

JEWISH WORLD

D O V W E I S S B E R G

BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST: Dov Weissberg’s parents, Israel and Dora, his brother, Marian, and Dov himself (in the middle) in the 1930s



THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 9, 201218

“Of course not,” Weissberg replies. “All I

have are my memories.”And sharp they are, his memories, un-

touched by the dense accumulation of newones over 70 years. In Weissberg the two

may have found the perfect witness. He re-

calls dates, addresses, numbers and detailswith surgical precision. His narrative re-

packed into this words.

“Can you tell us the day when your par-ents were taken away?” asks Walther.

“On the 10th of August, when the actionstarted, a number of German uniformed

men and a few Ukrainians came to ourhome and wanted to take just the children,”

Weissberg responds.“My mother became hysterical. She fell

by his boots and begged him to leave her at

least one of her children. While strugglinggave a short order to his subordinates, and

they all left, leaving us behind. My motherwas a German language teacher and per-

haps her good German and her aestheticappearance caused the commander to sud-

denly make a decision to leave us.”“You said that at that time, your mother

already knew that if they took her childrenaway it was to their death?” Walther gen-

tly probes. Bespectacled, with neck-lengthhair that has gone white and curls slightly

in all directions, Walther looks more thepart of a college professor than the pros-ecutor and judge that he used to be.

His colleague, Cornelius Nestler, a tall,square-jawed, blue-eyed man, concen-

trates on taking notes.“It was quite obvious that if they take

children, it’s not for ‘resettlement.’ Sheknew she was going to lose her children.”

Did she know where they would betaken?

“No. We didn’t know at the time.”The Weissberg family’s reprieve was

short-lived.

“On August 17 they came for us,” theelderly man continues. “This time there

were no discussions, no begging. We allwere gathered in one place, a yard in a pri-

vate apartment house where there was onewide gate and no other exit. There were

several hundred people there.“My mother forced us to run away, ‘I will

come immediately after you,’ she said. Wewere small, and quick. She told us to stay

close to the gate. ‘When they push peo-ple inside, you go between them and get

out.’ Suddenly a new group of Jews camethrough this gate and, between the boots

of the SS men and the legs of the peoplebeing shoved in, we managed to run away,my brother and me.”

He never saw his mother again.Weissberg describes how he was sent

to Warsaw to join his maternal uncleswho were hiding under false papers.

Nestler hands Weissberg a power-of-attorney document to sign, giving the two

lawyers the right to represent him as a co-plaintiff in the eventuality that there willbe a trial. He will not have to pay any fees.

Walther and Nestler are an unlikely pair of Nazi-hunters. Both are German. They rep-

their time or expenses.

Walther is a maverick retired BavarianCircuit Court judge, who helped change

German legal thinking to make it possibleto convict low-level cogs in the Nazi death

machine. Nestler is a professor of criminallaw at the University of Cologne. His wife,

Debbie, is an American Jew from Miami.

They have come to Israel to search forco-plaintiffs for a possible trial againsttwo Ukrainian guards, who rounded upJews in Lviv for deportation to the Belzec

death camp. Also on their list are Germanformer concentration camp guards whose

culpability for crimes against humanityhas not diminished over time. But time is,

in fact, the protagonist in this drama. Bothcriminals and witnesses are in their 80s

and 90s, which leaves justice just a slightgap to squeeze through before the window

JEWISH WORLD

A N D R E A S G E B E R T / P O O L / R E U T E R S

IT'S PERSONAL: Cornelius Nestler, professor of criminal law at the University of Cologne

Walther is a retired judgewho helped change

German law to convict

low-level Nazis



THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 9, 2012 19

of opportunity shuts forever.“We’re pretty much running out of

time,” admits Nestler, his voice strainedwith frustration. “The defendant,

witnesses and co-plaintiffs are in an agegroup where you cannot be sure that they

will be among us in a year.” He pauses andputs it bluntly: “This will all be over oncethese people are dead.”

-rael. Walther, 69, keeps a hand-crocheted

yarmulke, white with a blue edge, in hispocket just in case he might visit a syna-

gogue. This is his third visit to Israel.Both say their motivation for pursuing

these old Nazis is to be on the right sideof the issue.

“It’s not just about catching the badguys,” says Walther with thoughtful grav-

ity. “It’s also a chance to prove that our jus-tice system was wrong in the past, which isnow obvious. A trial like this, through the

media attention, is also a history lesson.”

Nestler doesn’t see it that way. The main

issue, he says, is bringing a murderer totrial. The history lesson would be an added

bonus.

Demjanjuk Walther and Nestler met during the 2009

Munich trial of the infamous John Dem- janjuk, a Ukrainian guard at the Sobibor

death camp, who died March 17, aged91, in a German nursing home. Nestler

represented 12 co-plaintiffs, Dutch Jewswhose parents or siblings perished inSobibor during the time that Demjanjuk

served as guard.“In a trial such as this, where the de-

fendant is an elderly, sick man, it is veryimportant to show that there is a face that

represents the victims,” Nestler explains.Walther is the one who introduced the

legal twist that made the trial in Germanypossible. After his retirement from the

bench, instead of enjoying his pension andtaking up a hobby, Walther took a job at

Nazi Crimes in Ludwigsburg, Germany.on the Internet and decided he wanted tohelp bring him to trial.

But there was a problem in putting Dem- janjuk on trial in Germany. According to

German law, the prosecution must haveevidence of an actual act of killing. So

even though Ukrainian guards facilitatedthe mass murder of Jews, they could not be

Walther’s insight put a new spin on

It’s not just aboutcatching bad guys. It’s achance to prove that our

justice system was wrong

THE PERFECT WITNESS: Dov Weissberg today

D O V W E I S S B E R G

F L A S H 9 0

IN MEMORY OF HIS FATHER: Retired German judge Thomas Walther



THE JERUSALEM REPORT APRIL 9, 201220

German legal thinking. He compared the

death camps to a factory and posited thatif a person worked in this “factory” in any

capacity, he bears responsibility for the“product” – in this case, mass murder. It

act of killing. The fact that Demjanjuk wasa guard in Sobibor was enough to convict

him as an accessory to murder. Demjanjuk,91, was found guilty in May 2011 of helping

to murder more than 28,000 Jews at Sobiborreleased pending an appeal and was movedto a nursing home.

Time is of the essenceAccording to Eli Rosenbaum, head of the

Investigation (OSI), the principle that helped

convict Demjanjuk has been recognized in

US courts for more than 30 years.“The European countries could have done

so much more over those three decadesthan has been done,” he tells The Jerusalem

Report . “But the question is what will bedone in the little time that remains? Time

is very much of the essence. It’s an urgentsituation. These cases can be prosecuted and

won in court, as the prosecution proved inthe Demjanjuk case.”

Rosenbaum points out that the vast major-ity of surviving Nazi criminals are not in

North or South America.

“They are where they always have been –in Europe, and in Germany and Austria in

particular,” he says.Nestler agrees.

“Tens of thousands of people participatedin a supporting way to make the Holocaust

possible. There are probably thousands of Germans still alive today who made sure

that system functioned,” he says.

of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, says theGerman legal history that a Nazi war crimi-nal was convicted without evidence being

named.”

As far as Zuroff knows, other than him-self, Walther and Nestler are the only non-

government persons working today to bringNazi criminals to justice.

“The verdict changes the game completely.In theory, it opens up tremendous potential

in terms of the prosecution of Nazi crimi-nals,” says Zuroff.

It is this potential for new trials that

prompted Walther and Nestler to arrive in

Israel in February to interview witnesses,hoping to pressure the prosecutors in Mu-

nich to open new cases. In their crosshairsare two alleged Nazi collaborators now

living in the US.

They decline to divulge the name of oneThe other is Ivan (John) Kalymon, 90, who

served in the Ukrainian auxiliary police inLviv, then German-occupied Poland, today

Ukraine.

He is on Zuroff’s list of “the ten most want-ed Nazi criminals.”

According to the US Justice Department,Kalymon participated in the murder, round-

up and deportation of Jews to Belzec, thesame action in which Weissberg’s mother

was deported.

Self-incriminatedKalymon, who immigrated to the US after

the war, was incriminated by his own record-keeping. US Justice Department investiga-

tors found Nazi documents in Soviet archivesin which Kalymon matter-of-factly reported

-ing one Jew and wounding another. The re-ports also said his unit delivered 2,128 Jews

to an assembly point in Lviv, where 12 were“killed while escaping.”

Kalymon, a retired Chrysler auto engineerfrom Troy, Michigan, was stripped of his US

citizenship in 2007 and a judge has orderedhis deportation.

A 200-page report against Kalymon is sit-ting on the desk of the single special prosecu-

tor for Nazi crimes in Munich.

Nestler is frustrated at the slow pace of events. “The problem is that the Prosecutor’smanpower and no political drive to do it,” he

says.According to the Justice Department

spokesman in Munich, they are aware of Kalymon’s age but cannot say when the in-

vestigation into his case will be concludedand if an arrest warrant will be issued. They

declined to comment any further on the case.

in capital cases in accordance with the re-

quirements of jurisdiction are very exten-sive, and long-ago deeds make it extremely

a spokesperson for the German JusticeDepartment.

Walther, who has worked both as a pros-ecutor and a judge, believes the prosecution

would rather let time take its course.“It’s a lot of work and these are old men

who will die out. If we wait two years it willbe all over,” he says.

Walther and Nestler hope that Israeli co-plaintiffs willing to testify might add urgen-

cy to the cases. German criminal procedurepermits victims and their families to attachthemselves to prosecutors as co-plaintiffs.

“It will be extremely helpful if we can saythat there are co-plaintiffs, who have lost

family members, and we have to go forward

in the interest of those people who live in Is-rael,” says Walther.

Both men say they have personal reasons

so many years after the end of the war.

For Walther it is his father, Rudolf, whocenter of Germany, and had built factoriesfor Jewish clients. He hid two Jewish fami-

lies during the Kristallnacht riots in 1938 andlater helped them get out of Germany. For 20years, Walther kept a pen one of the families

had sent him as a gift from Paraguay.

“My father has passed away but I am fol-lowing in his footsteps. I do it for him a littlebit,” he tells The Report .

Walther says that his life began just asmany Jewish lives were snuffed out. When

researching the Demjanjuk case, he says, heavoided looking at the list of transportation

trains to Sobibor on June 22, 1943. He didn’twant to see who had died on the day that he

was born.For Nestler, the personal connection is

through his wife.

“We visited Auschwitz together. After youwalk though the gate, there are buildings

made of bricks to the left. She bent down,picked up a couple of stones and placed them

on a low wall, as is the Jewish custom in acemetery.

“I then realized the distinction betweenus. From then on, every time something

from the Holocaust came up, it was differentfor me than before. This concept of denying

the right to live for every Jew translated todenying the right to live for someone likeher. It had a face. It made it different. It

became personal.”

JEWISH WORLD

Criminals and witnesses

are in their 80s and 90s.

Soon the window

will shut forever

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