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”.
Wulf committed suicide in 1974, writing in despair to his son: “You can document everything to death for the Germans. There is a democratic regime in Bonn. Yet the mass murderers walk around free, live in their little houses and grow flowers.” There is a democratic regime in Pretoria. Yet in ultra-secret negotiations between 1997 and 2003, the ANC’s very top leadership plotted with the former apartheid war chiefs to ensure our own war criminals would continue to plant their flowers.
By comparison, in Argentina the 1985 “Trial of the Juntas” resulted in convictions and life sentences for former heads of state Adm Emilio Massera and Gen Jorge Videla, and prison terms for three of their compatriots; pardoned by a later president, the laws shielding “Dirty War” perpetrators from prosecution were overturned by the Argentine supreme court in 2005.
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