David Crowe, a professor of history and author of books on Oskar Schindler and World War II, spoke with Katie Engelhart at Maclean's magazine in Canada for a feature story this month on an elderly man charged with war crimes for his role as a guard in a Nazi concentration camp six decades ago.
Maclean’s is Canada’s only national weekly current affairs magazine. From the article, ‘The last great Nazi trial,’ published Nov. 10, 2009:
Did he have a choice? Crowe, for one, cautions those who defend Demjanjuk’s alleged defection to the Nazis on the basis that he may have been coerced. POWs suffered extreme brutality in German hands, Crowe concedes, but Demjanjuk “had a choice. There were an awful lot of Russian and Ukrainian POWs who did not volunteer. You had to make a substantial moral decision to be a turncoat against your own side.” Crowe says that Demjanjuk willingly underwent aggressive Nazi training, and continued working at Sobibor—rather than escaping, as others did. “He was both victim and participant in German war crimes,” the Berliner Zeitung has written. “But that doesn’t excuse him.”
Crowe is currently on sabbatical for research on a new book titled “War Crimes, Genocide, and the Quest for Justice since the Enlightenment.”
One of Elon’s most prolific scholars, Crowe was named the first recipient of the Distinguished Scholar Award in 2000. His biography of Oskar Schindler in 2004 received worldwide acclaim for its groundbreaking view of a historical figure. He has also written “A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia” and “The Baltic States and the Great Powers: Foreign Relations, 1938-1940.”
To read the full article, click on the link to the right.