The Germans have arrested three former Nazis on charges they were prison guards. Not just prison guards, but guards at Auschwitz.

German police on Thursday raided the homes of nine elderly men suspected of serving as SS guards at the Auschwitz death camp and arrested three of them on allegations of accessory to murder.

The arrests came five months after federal authorities announced they would investigate former guards at Auschwitz and other Nazi-era death camps. Their effort was inspired by the precedent-setting trial of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died in 2012 in a Bavarian nursing home while appealing his conviction on charges he served at the Sobibor camp.

“This is a major step,” said Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, when told of the arrests. “Given the advanced age of the defendants, every effort should be made to expedite their prosecution.”

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was the first person convicted in Germany solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in any specific killing.

Munich prosecutors successfully argued that anyone who was involved in operating a death camp was an accessory to murder. Demjanjuk maintained he had been mistaken for someone else and never served as a guard.

Reading the story, my only thought was about the ages of these guys. Simple math says the youngest camp guards are now well over 80 years old. Let’s say you were a true believer, volunteered at 15 and got assigned to a death camp at the end of the war, you are 84 years old now.

The three men arrested, aged 88, 92 and 94, all live in state of Baden Wuerttemberg in southwest Germany. They were taken to a prison hospital, Stuttgart prosecutors’ spokeswoman Claudia Krauth said.

Krauth said officials had yet to uncover enough evidence to merit the arrests of three other suspects aged 94, 91 and 90.

She said authorities seized “diverse papers and documents from the Nazi era” from the suspects’ homes. She declined to provide details.

Five men made no statements, while the 88-year-old admitted being a guard at Auschwitz but denied committing any crimes, Krauth said.

Prosecutors in Frankfurt said more documents and photographs were seized during raids on the homes of two men aged 89 and 92 in the neighboring state of Hesse. A spokeswoman, Doris Mueller-Scheu, said neither suspect was arrested nor made statements.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, state police said they raided the apartment of a 92-year-old man who admitted being an Auschwitz guard but denied participating in any crimes. They found no incriminating material during the search.

I’m at a loss as the the value of rounding up old men from nursing homes. I like how the police “raided” the homes. I’ve seen some feisty nanogenerians, but merely being alive at that age is feisty. I guess the argument is that it sends a message to future Nazis with plans to build concentration camps. Perhaps the argument is it prevents these guys from dying before their families knew the truth about them. I do know that we are running out of Nazis to hunt. At some point, the guys at the Simon Wiesenthal Center will need to find work.

This reminds me of something. I’ve always wondered why the West has treated Nazism like some alien force that descended on humanity. A whole lot of Western intellectuals agreed with much of what the fascists were saying and doing. Mussolini was very popular in the United States. So much so his son came to Hollywood to learn the film business. Herbert Croly, the founder of The New Republic, a liberal journal, was a big fan of Mussolini. Of course, the modern Democratic party and large chunks of the Republican party embrace the fundamentals of fascism today. When you hear “public-private partnership” think “Porsche-Hitler” partnership.

That last bit is why Nazism in particular and fascism in general causes the modern ruling class to shiver. At some level, they know they have embraced the principles that animate fascism in all its forms. We tend to hate in others the things will dislike about ourselves. Maybe the Germans think if they can arrest every last Nazi still alive, they can step out of their own shadow.

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