Safe Haven: The United Kingdom's Investigations Into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice by Jon Silverman & Robert Sherwood

Author:Jon Silverman & Robert Sherwood [Silverman, Jon & Sherwood, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, General, Europe, Law, Legal History
ISBN: 9780192667342
Google: 5zzWEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-09-05T00:24:54+00:00

Conclusion

Given the longevity of the OSI’s involvement with the Gecas case, it is perhaps unsurprising that Eli Rosenbaum continues (at the time of writing in 2022) ‘to be incredulous that the Scots didn’t prosecute Gecas’.74 But that view is also reflective of the institutional ‘stamina’ of the OSI which is still actively engaged in tracking down Nazi collaborators more than four decades after it was founded.75

The elements of the Gecas case have a depressing familiarity: the ease with which a war criminal could launder his past on entering the UK in the 1940s, the mistrust by the legal authorities of Soviet-sourced evidence, the weary acceptance at the end that age and illness would replace a judicial forum for a verdict on man’s criminality. But somehow, the Gecas story carries a significance greater than the sum of its parts because of the frustrated hopes in the early 1990s that his would be the first UK war crimes trial and thus an encouragement to the prosecutors in England and Wales to pursue their own suspects with vigour.

Efraim Zuroff, who travelled to Gecas’s home in Edinburgh in July 1987 with the intention of confronting him, argues that although the failure to prosecute stands as an indictment of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, at least the pressure from the Wiesenthal Center catalysed a law change:

When we began our campaign to convince countries to take action about the Nazis in their midst, we did so in the belief that if we could trust the judicial system of a country, such as Scotland, Canada or Australia, we could hand the problem over to their authorities. This is why we invested such time and effort in lobbying some of these key Western democracies. It is very disappointing that Gecas wasn’t prosecuted but imagine if the War Crimes Act hadn’t been passed. What would that have said about the UK’s attitude to the Nazis living openly and the issue of impunity?76

But in summation, the only unqualified credit goes to Scottish Television for their exposure of the crimes and having the bravery to defend Gecas’s action for defamation: the one trial he was subjected to.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.