Evil's Expiry Date

Does evil have an expiry date? That question resurfaces for me every time I see a story about the identification of a perpetrator of evil years, even decades, after their crimes. Last week an elderly German was charged with murder for his role as a guard at the Auschwitz death camp.

A 93-year-old man has been charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder for serving as an SS guard at the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp, prosecutors said Monday. Oskar Groening is accused of helping operate the death camp in occupied Poland between May and June 1944, when some 425,000 Jews from Hungary were brought there and at least 300,000 almost immediately gassed to death. In his job dealing with the belongings stolen from camp victims, prosecutors said among other things he was charged with helping collect and tally money that was found.  "He helped the Nazi regime benefit economically, and supported the systematic killings,” state prosecutors in the city of Hannover said in a statement.

On the one hand I am convinced that we should do everything possible to keep the memory of the Nazi atrocities alive. Anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head and earlier in September there was a rally in Germany attended by religious leaders as well as Chancellor Angela Merkel entitled 'Stand Up! Jew Hatred - Never Again!' It was a response to the rise of anti-Jewish incidents out of the conflict in Israel/Palestine.



On the other, what will be accomplished by the trial of a very old man? Three others have been charged in the last year, but two are mentally incompetent and the third died. I am not a victim of these atrocities or the descendent of someone who was so I don't know what satisfaction would come from these charges and a conviction.

What do you think?  To my mind there is never an expiry date on evil, but does the time come when bringing a person to conventional justice no longer makes sense, or has effect?