MICHAEL SCHMIDT: We must not allow SA’s war criminals to keep planting their flowers

MICHAEL SCHMIDT: We must not allow SA’s war criminals to keep planting their flowers

Proper research into genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity is vital not only for prosecutions of perpetrators but to create a body of knowledge within the minds of the public

Seventy-seven years ago this week, the enormous slave labour and death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by the Soviet Army, indisputably revealing the scale and depravity of Nazi atrocities. The memory of its horrors still guides prosecutions of the worst crimes in the world today.

Likewise, D40, the SA Special Forces unit that murdered perhaps 420 anti-apartheid detainees and suspected traitors between 1979 and 1987 by dumping them in the oceans from light aircraft, Argentine-style, spoke obliquely of the “disposal” of “packages,” or of bringing the doomed detainees “into the system”. The SA intent was not grand-scale genocide, and we know of no Wannsee-like meeting of the State Security Council under first PW Botha then FW de Klerk, at which an