War Criminal on Trial - The Rauca Case

War Criminal on Trial - The Rauca Case
by Sol Littman, Lester & Orpen Denys Limited,
Toronto, c.1983, 195 pp., $17.94

This book, by Toronto journalist and community affairs specialist for CBC's Newshour, Sol Littman, was born out of a collection of articles originally produced by the author for publication in Saturday Night magazine. The book is dedicated:

"To the courageous Jews of the Kaunas ghetto - the few who survived and the many who were slain."

In a sense, this book is their story; that of the Jews who lived throughout the Nazi years in all of the Nazi-occupied countries of Europe. Mr. Littman has documented his book thoroughly, travelling extensively to interview survivors of the Kaunas ghetto in Israel and elsewhere. This is a book well worth reading. What one reads here of the horrific impossibility of existence as a Jewish adult, child or octogenarian is a reflection of what occurred elsewhere in Europe from 1939 to 1945. Survival of a handful of Europe's Jewry, under the obscene conditions which existed for them, was nothing less than miraculous.

That such unbelievable conditions could occur anywhere on this Earth, singling out any specific group of people is the horror of our time. That the perpetrators and indeed the initiators of many of the atrocities described in this book, as in many others, would themselves survive - time and justice - and indeed, thrive in their newfound homelands, be they cities in Canada or somewhere in South America, is just as unbelievable as the crimes that they committed against humanity.

Mt. Littman points out at the conclusion of his book (chapter 17), that there are currently over one thousand Nazi collaborators living in Canada. Over the past decades there have been over one hundred requests for extradition of alleged war criminals from such democratic Western countries as France, Holland, Belgium, Norway and Germany, received by Canadian authorities. Additional extradition requests have been received in Canada from Eastern Bloc countries, all of which wish to bring these criminals to justice. Canada has a policy of unwillingness to comply with such requests from Iron Curtain countries; there is a certain sensitivity toward these alleged war criminals - we would not, as civilized, democratic people, wish to return them to communist countries, would we? Heaven knows, they might be found guilty and punished for their imputed crimes.

Needless to say, Canada has not been diligent in responding to requests from the Western democratic countries, any more than she had to Iron Curtain countries. The Rauca case marked the first time Canada actually moved itself to accede to such a request.

Through this book we are taken on a journey. We are first introduced to Helmut Rauca, Canadian senior citizen and respected member of his suburban Toronto community, when three members of the RCMP politely arrest the then-73-year-old German-born man. Taken into custody at RCMP regional headquarters in downtown Toronto, Rauca is fingerprinted, photographed, and appears before Associate Chief Justice William Parker of the Supreme Court of Ontario, to be charged. He is taken then to the Toronto Don Jail after his arrest, charged with "aiding and abetting the murder of 10,500 persons on or about the 28th day of October, 1941, at Kaunas, Lithuania."

Albert Helmut Rauca was part of an SS security unit termed "Einsatzgruppe", stationed in Kaunas from July 1941 to July of 1944. He was an SS master sergeant and member of the command headquarters of the Security Police and the SS Security Service for the General District of Lithuania. Rauca was proud of his position with the SS. He was feared and despised by the inmates of the Kaunas ghetto; well known to them all for his predilection for unpredictable and violent action.

Much as was done in other large European cities under German occupation, the capital city of Kaunas, through its civil administration under the Nazis, collected its Jewish population in a small geographic area set aside for that purpose as a collection point; a place where the Jewish men, women and children could be held, apart from the general population, and the young and strong could be used for slave labour while gradually culling the old, the ill and the very young through Aktionen whereby firstly the young intellectual males were collected under the pretext of an offer of 'good jobs', and taken instead to a nearby fort and murdered.

This select group was culled initially because it was feared that insurrection or insubordination might be initiated from among their ranks. Next came a round-up of the children of the ghetto where stormtroopers and eagerly helpful Lithuanians rooted out children of all ages wherever they had been hidden so that they too might be taken to one of the forts surrounding the capital city and summarily executed.

The third (and near final) roundup, termed the 'Grosse Aktion', was one in which all the inhabitants of the ghetto were commanded to appear at a central meeting place and at that time, Rauca busied himself separating the people who appeared before him in turn; singly and in family groupings they were separated into groups of those who were still desirable as slave labour, and those who were more immediately expendable. An indication to join those grouped on the right was a death sentence, an order to join those assembled to the left meant a brief respite at least until weary, starved bodies could no longer be pushed to produce and they too would be eliminated.

This scenario was repeated in many other ghettos, with others, among them the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele, playing the role of god, choosing those who would die more immediately than others.

The Judenrat in Kaunas was, however, quite different than that which existed in most other ghettos of the time. Its head, a highly respected elderly physician who spared no efforts at attempting to save his people, was Dr. Eichanan Elkes. Dr. Elkes' desperate attempts to persuade the Lithuanian civil authority (many of whom had been former colleagues and brother military officers) to relent in their acquiescent prosecution of Nazi directives, and his unflinching accusations, face-to-face, directed at the Nazi officers that they would one day 'pay' for their horrible crimes place him in a different sphere altogether.

Similarly, the other members of the Altestenrat (Council of Elders) conspired, not with the Nazis to save their own skins, but actively against them. Also in Kaunas the Jewish ghetto police, that group of Jewish men who in other ghettos acted more as Nazi collaborators than Jews, were vastly different under Dr. Elkes and his Council. Proud young Jewish men who had been responsible youth leaders, athletes and intellectuals were chosen and this group of ghetto policemen collaborated with their own, many of them also being active in the ghetto underground.

This book details their daily living conditions, their ferocious fears of their short-lived futures, and the gruelling work to which they were submitted, to survive. The horrors experienced by the ghetto during the various roundups, and in the final trial through the burning of the ghetto are unforgettably re-lived here.

If anyone, pacifist-forgiving Jew, or uncomprehendingly removed Gentile, might ever be assailed by a sense of misgiving about the rightfulness of pressing for prosecution of war criminals at however much a distance in time 1984 represents, this book should be required reading.

The performance of the government of Canada, aside from the honourable performance of a few of its servants like Corporal Fred Yetter of the RCMP, and Christopher Amerasinghe who acted as crown prosecutor for the Attorney-General of Canada, is appalling, dismal and totally uncreditworthy. With a little bit of diligence, Rauca's records in Germany might have been perused and his entry to Canada would have been denied initially, back in the 50s. But reality is that the Government of Canada was far more anxious throughout the 30s, 40s and 50s to keep European Jews out of Canada than it was any other European nationals.

Our country has much to answer for, but it continues to appear as though this represents simply another incident to be buried, and lip-service will continue to be paid to human rights while the actuality of actively pursuing those goals are but a dream.

An end-quote from Dr. Emil Fackenheim of the University of Toronto appears most apt at the conclusion of this book. When asked why Jews cannot 'forgive and forget' (an infuriatingly impossible question), Dr. Fackenheim replies: "It is not out of revenge that we demand the prosecution of war criminals, but out of a sense of universal justice. The Holocaust was a tragedy inflicted on the Jews, but it was also an act of pure evil that affects all mankind." No more need be said.

c. 1985 Rita Rosenfeld
published in Canadian Jewish Outlook, Volume 23, No.1-2