THE NEVERENDING OBERLANDER SAGA

Today's Waterloo Region Record carrys this story titled "Oberlander wins back citizenship". Twenty full years the Canadian government has been trying to revoke Helmut Oberlander's citizenship and deport him. They've won and they've lost multiple times in court and Mr. Oberlander at age 92 is still with us and still a Canadian citizen. For me it's always been about the math. That plus a recent article I recently read that described the horrors of the Adolf Eichman trial shortly after the war. The biggest horror wasn't the already known genocide and ethnic cleansing; it was the utter normalacy of Eichman and his contemporaries prior to and during the early part of the second World War. That was the real horror how someone with a normal upbringing could blindly follow rules, regulations and even orders resulting in mass murder.

Perhaps as a smaller comparison would could look at otherwise decent whitefolk in certain southern states who as late as the 1960s honestly believed that negroes weren't really human and thus hanging and worse wasn't a crime. Getting back to my comment in the first paragraph about doing the math; simply subtract the years since 1945 (end of the war) from Oberlanders's current age of 92. The war ended 71 years ago hence Oberlander was 21 years old at the END of the war. At the start (1939) he was 16 years old. While someone that age certainly knows right from wrong I simply can't believe that he was either giving orders or on his own initiative assisting in genocide. In fact that age (16 or 17) speaks more to a child soldier than an adult. No one that age should be within 1000 miles of a war front or be put in any position dealing with prisoners of war or incarcerated civilians.

His story while dramatically different than Omar Khadr's does have some similarities. The biggest one is the ongoing Conservative Party attack upon child soldiers and trying to hold them to account for the barbarity of war. Hopefully our new Liberal federal government will take a totally different approach to Mr. Oberlander as they appear to be doing with Mr. Khadr.