A few days before Christmas, in the small northern German city of Itzehoe, a frail 97-year-old woman in a cream-colored coat and beret was wheeled into a courtroom to be told that she had been found guilty of aiding and abetting the Holocaust. Seventy-seven years ago.
Because Irmgard Furchner was only a secretary at the relatively small concentration camp in Stutthof, Poland, and because she was a juvenile when the camp either murdered or sent to their deaths in other camps more than 10,000 people, her sentence was two years. Suspended.
The international news service Reuters reported that the German government is making an extra effort to find and prosecute all surviving officials and functionaries who might have had even the smallest role in the extermination of 6 million Jews during the Nazi era, while any of them can still be found alive. The point is not to exact any more eyes for eyes, but to bring to account, if only on paper, as many of the responsible as possible, so they can say that no one was allowed to get away with it.
The January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol is a nano-blip in comparison to what happened in Germany and Poland three-quarters of a century ago. But the fact that those who seek justice today are still bringing legal cases against everyone involved in the abomination of the 1930s and 1940s can serve as an example as we reach the second anniversary of Donald Trump’s attempt to violently set aside the results of a national election and fraudulently stay in power.
There’s no reason to think we could, or should, still be dragging January 6 traitors into the dock in the year 2098. But the fact that it took two years almost to the day for the House Select Committee to issue its final report on the uprising, and the fact that the FBI, the Department of Justice and new special prosecutor Jack Smith are still gathering string for possible prosecutions that could go all the way up to Trump himself, suggests that we have more work to do.
In just the last few days, we have learned that Utah Sen. Mike Lee was more deeply involved in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election than had been previously known. The report of the January 6 committee — which Republicans are now trying to bury — outlines how Lee wasn’t just wondering about slates of “alternative electors” that Republican legislatures or governors might send to Congress to confuse and delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
The legal fiction that was to be dropped like a bomb in what was supposed to be a solemn, and strictly pro forma, session of Congress was Lee’s idea. But once those alternate slates of electors couldn’t be conjured up, Lee wound up voting to accept the results of the election from each and every state.
Meanwhile, across the violated Capitol that day, half the members of Utah’s delegation to the House of Representatives — newcomer Burgess Owens and veteran Chris Stewart — voted against accepting the lawful returns from Pennsylvania. In doing so they joined a majority of the Republican members of the House in attempting to throw the election. (Utah’s other two House members, Blake Moore and John Curtis, did not take part in that attempt. Neither did our other U.S. senator, Mitt Romney.)
Now that the Republicans have a bare majority in the House, that body will no longer press the case against Trump and his allies. Many of whom are now leaders in the House. The possibility that Owens and Stewart might face expulsion from the House — under the anti-rebel clause of the 14th Amendment that most of us never heard of before it became so horribly relevant — is gone.
We can expect Owens and Stewart — and, to a lesser extent, Moore and Curtis — to try to befuddle the issue by moving to impeach Biden over the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan. Or to spend all their time waiving the bloody wardrobe of hoards of immigrants, Marxism in schools, threats to the Christian domination of America and Hunter Biden’s laptop, rather than pursue traitors or deal with the more mundane problems such as health care, climate and inequality.
America is fortunate that the January 6 committee was able to make its report before Republicans took the House. We are lucky that Democrats held the Senate and that Trumpist election-deniers in Arizona and other states lost their bids for statewide office.
But, like the prosecutors in Germany who continue to chase down crimes that happened before their parents were born, American patriots must never rest in their duty to discover and prosecute the traitors of January 6. No matter what office they may now hold.
George Pyle, reading The New York Times at The Rose Establishment.
George Pyle is the opinion editor of The Salt Lake Tribune. gpyle@sltrib.com
