Talk about inventing an argument so that you've got something to write to the contrary. Antony Lerman has found a reason for worrying about the Demjanjuk trial. It's that the trial could be 'ratcheting up expectations of some final closure'. Lerman explains:
This, for me, is the major flaw in the process – encouraging people to believe that we have come to the end of dealing with the consequences of the Holocaust. As if history is now done and dusted. Or that closing the door on the last trial makes further reckoning with the past impossible. The hunt for Nazi war criminals, which always attracts huge international attention, has greatly contributed to this distortion of reality. It reduces our image of the Holocaust to the unspeakable acts of the evil criminal, who is then tracked down, exposed and put on trial so that a final reckoning can take place in a public, adversarial confrontation with the memories of Holocaust survivors.
It may satisfy some visceral need to see the individual as the repository of evil, a symbol of the horrors, who is then removed from society, but it's too neat. All the complexities of the Demjanjuk case prove that.
I don't like to overstate things, but what useless verbiage that is. To try an alleged participant in a genocide that killed millions and still stands as a symbol of modern-day barbarism in no way implies expectation of final closure with the trial, or supports a belief that the consequences of that epochal horror will be concluded by it. Who says such a thing? Lerman doesn't tell us. But in any case such trials are in their way, their small way, an attempt at seeing some justice done and they don't carry the burden of a 'finalizing' significance that Lerman alleges without attribution. Likewise, his claim that the hunt for Nazi war criminals reduces our image of the Holocaust to a too-neat explanation in terms of individual evildoers is claptrap. Nazi-hunters and those happy to see Nazi criminals brought to justice can have as sophisticated an understanding as anyone of the bureaucratic mechanisms, the temptations of obedience or promotion or conformity, the anti-Semitic hatreds or the social distance and moral indifference that contributed to the catastrophe which destroyed the Jews of Europe, and still hope to see some of the murderers brought before a court of law. This hope neither depends upon, nor encourages, any particular sociological or other theory of the Nazi genocide in particular or of human wrongdoing in general.
One might just as well say that thinking that prisons continue to be needed implies that there can be no sociological study of crime; or say that going upstairs fosters the illusion that there is no downstairs; or say that insisting on the reality of human life as lived by real human beings implies that there's no such thing as a straw man.