I keep wondering when we will run out of Nazi to chase. By my math, the youngest people that anyone could reasonable hold accountable for crimes in WW2 are 85 and that assumes it is reasonable to hold 15 year-old people responsible for war crimes. The Danes are now being asked to arrest a 90-year old guy for being at a camp in Belarus.

A leading Nazi hunter visited Copenhagen on Monday to request a police investigation into whether a Danish man was an accomplice in the murder of Jews at a camp in Nazi-occupied Belarus during World War Two.The Dane has admitted to working as a guard at the concentration camp near Babruysk, Belarus in 1943 and witnessing executions of Jews there, according to a Danish police report from 1945 that was published in a book last year.

“He has admitted to being there. He has admitted seeing the atrocities,” Efraim Zuroff, responsible for Nazi war crime investigations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Reuters by telephone from London while en route to Copenhagen.

“He has never been prosecuted and I think he is in good health. There is no reason why it should be ignored.”

There was no immediate Danish police or judicial comment on Zuroff’s request.

Danish media said the man in question was 90 years old and had recently denied wrongdoing when asked about his past by reporters from the newspaper Berlingske Tidende.

The logic of chasing after entry level war criminals has never been strong. If you are an enlisted man ordered to shoot prisoners, you will shoot the prisoners. Self-preservation is immutable. To expect soldiers to disobey orders is crackpottery on stilts. The tell is when the phrase “lawful order” is used. Enlisted men are in no position to make those determinations. To demand otherwise is insanity.

That said, there were plenty of examples if guards who volunteered for the work and chose freely to do monstrous things. Prosecuting them after the war was sensible. I think once you get too far away from the event it becomes impossible to really know who did what to whom. Memories fade and the facts get lost or corrupted. Expecting someone to defend themselves decades after the fact is unjust. Expecting a nonagenarian to defend himself 70 years after the fact is madness.

There’s also the importance of closing the books on the past. The Japanese did many horrible things to American prisoners. We dropped two atomic bombs on them and fire bombed Tokyo. No on bothers talk about any of this anymore. The books have been closed on the issue. It’s probably long overdue to close the books on the Nazis. The Bolsheviks killed far more people are were a far greater threat over a far longer period. If we can close the books on the commies, we can close the books on the Nazis.

But, I suspect that will never happen in my lifetime.