John Demjanjuk – currently standing trial in Munich, accused of complicity in the murder of 27,900 Jews at Sobibor concentration camp in world war two – is 89 years old and apparently in failing health.

Let’s work on the basis that he really did do the wicked things of which he is accused; the prosecution is seemingly confident of its case, even almost 70 years after the killings took place. Is justice really served by putting Demjanjuk in the dock?

That’s the question Holocaust historian David Ceserani asks in the Independent this morning. Ceserani, himself Jewish and the author of a recent book on Eichmann, has previously advocated that perpetrators of Nazi genocide should be brought to book in all circumstances, irrespective of the passage of time. But in this instance, he takes the opposite stance.

Let us grant that if Demjanjuk is as ill as he looks, and not just play acting, than incarceration is out of the question. Banging up elderly and frail individuals – even elderly and frail former death camp guards – is clearly inhumane. The good society extends humanity even towards those who did not show it themselves. What we are still left with is the educative value of the judicial process.

The question of retribution for the horrors of the twentieth century is a live issue in many countries. They handle them in different ways.

The Nuremberg trials were externally imposed on Germany, and subsequent Entnazifizierung was always half-hearted if that. Ceserani rightly details the lenient sentences dealt out to war criminals in West Germany in the immediate post-war decades. His point that Demjanjuk is originally Ukrainian, and thus an ideal scapegoat, is well made.

France prosecuted Vichy collaborators in a series of trials that continued into the 1990s. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission guaranteed kid glove treatment to the architects of apartheid.

In eastern Europe, Stalinist bureaucrats routinely reinvented themselves as democratic politicians. Only in Germany and – to a lesser extent – Poland have many of them suffered real sanction.

Spain, by contrast, has consistently been determined to fudge Franquismo by trying to pretend it never happened. Indeed, a 1977 amnesty law passed during the transition to democracy was a clear indicator that these matters were then judged too sensitive for anybody to be brought to book.

Last year, prosecuting magistrate Baltasar Garzón threatened to bring posthumous charges against those behind the disappearance of 114,000 people over the 15 years following Franco’s rebellion against a democratically elected republican administration, right in the middle of the tensest decade in European history. Opposition from the political right led to the idea being dropped.

What purpose, then, can there be in resurrecting history? Well, firstly there is the argument that some increment of moral satisfaction accrues to surviving victims – or more likely their descendents – of course. Good.

This is a minor consideration. At every level other than the emotional, those so avenged will not be any better off as a result of a formal finding that those they already know to be culpable were indeed guilty.

What is more important is that future generations are not under the impression that atrocity can meet with impunity. It is right to make Demjanjuk stand trial and account for his atrocities, for the historical record alone. Thereafter take him to the hospital, for whatever amount of time he has left.

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