Torture on Trial: Prosecuting Sadists and the Obfuscation of Systemic Crime
Authors: Wittmann Rebecca 
Published: April 2007

"Torture on Trial: Prosecuting Sadists and the Obfuscation of Systemic Crime": With war come war crimes. There is no documented war in which atrocities, torture, and excessive cruelty upon innocent civilians did not accompany it. To be sure, some cases are worse than others. In the case of Nazi Germany, war also included a systematic genocide, whose machinery of destruction took almost 6 millions lives outside of the framework of the blitzkrieg and the front. Rightfully, the crime of the Holocaust became the focus of criminal prosecution after the war, not only by the Allies but also by the West Germans. Some 6500 former Nazis were brought to trial in West Germany for their participation in the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," as camp guards, members of killing squads, and desk killers. State attorney's offices had high hopes for these trials; at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, Attorney General of Hess Fritz Bauer intended to put the whole "Auschwitz Complex" on trial; the Berlin prosecutors of the planned RSHA (Main Reich Security Office) trial hoped to have a massive proceeding against the bureaucrats in charge of the Holocaust, whose pen strokes and signatures sanctioned the murder of millions. And yet, the trials changed course and soon only the most sadistic crimes of torture were the focus of the law, the press coverage, and the public's interest. The real crime, the methodical murder of innocent men, women, and children in the gas chambers and by the killing commandos, receded into the background, while the full force of the law came down only on the devils and monsters on the stand who created their own instruments of torture, lived out their evil fantasies, and committed crimes so heinous that even the Nazis investigated and punished them for their excessive cruelty. Forgotten by the law and the courts was the system which had allowed these men and women to flourish; in the end, only those who had gone above and beyond the call of duty under the Nazi system were convicted of serious crimes in postwar West Germany. The public learned to gasp in horror at the sick crimes of a few sadists, while distancing themselves from the whole system in which so many were enmeshed. What relevance does this have for current discussions of torture and war crimes? When we take as the prison guards at Abu Ghraib, we are not dealing with soldiers within a genocidal dictatorship, volunteers working at death camps designed especially for extermination. But the soldiers who engaged in the tortuous crimes at that prison have been demonized and held up as monstrous animals whom we condemn for their brutality and inhumanity. The US military publicly prosecutes them as examples of exactly what it does not want among its ranks. They will be punished, justice will be served, and the good war can go on. And yet these soldiers did not appear out of nowhere; they are fighters in an ideological battle against "evil." There is a lesson to be learned here about the tendency, in democratic societies, to condemn only the most extreme perpetrators of violence and torture and to turn a blind eye to the system that created them. The decision to support war will always, ultimately, be a decision to support war crimes. It makes no sense to imagine that torture is only the provenance of a few "bad apples"—it is a fundamental element of war in which "we" attempt to understand, undermine, and eradicate "them." To relegate torture to the margins, to the exceptional, and to the crime of a few sadists is to willfully ignore the nature of war.