Post War Perpetrator Lives

The post-war fate of the senior perpetrators of the Holocaust is a separate chapter of the historical record. Around twenty senior figures, the Nuremberg lead defendants, were tried and either executed or imprisoned in 1946 and 1947. The remaining several hundred mid-level senior perpetrators, the men who had personally commanded the killing operations on the ground, took widely varying paths. Some were tried at the Nuremberg subsequent trials of 1946 to 1949, or in Polish, Soviet, French and Yugoslav courts in the immediate post-war years. Some escaped through the post-war ratlines to South America, the Middle East and elsewhere. Some hid in Germany under false names. Some were quietly absorbed back into West German public life, particularly the legal and police professions, after a brief denazification process. Some were never even investigated. This page sets out the patterns.

The escape routes

Two main escape routes operated in the post-war period. The Catholic ratline, organised principally by Bishop Alois Hudal at the Pontificio Collegio Teutonico in Rome and by Croatian Catholic priests at the College of San Girolamo in Rome, supplied false identity papers, Vatican-issued Red Cross travel documents, and onward shipping arrangements through Italian ports to Argentina and other South American destinations. Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl, Wagner, Rauff and dozens of others used the Catholic ratline. The route is covered in detail on the Ratlines pages in The Trials section.

The second main route operated through Spain and from there to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Egypt and Syria. The Argentine government under Juan Perón actively recruited German technical and military specialists in the late 1940s and protected them from extradition through the 1950s. The Egyptian and Syrian governments protected several senior perpetrators in the 1950s and 1960s, in some cases using them as advisers to local intelligence services.

The fugitives

The most-cited fugitives are Eichmann (kidnapped from Argentina in 1960, tried in Israel, hanged in 1962), Mengele (drowned in Brazil in 1979, never tried), Stangl (extradited from Brazil in 1967, tried in Düsseldorf, died in prison in 1971), Klaus Barbie (extradited from Bolivia in 1983 with US apologies for previous protection, tried in Lyon, died in prison in 1991), Aribert Heim (died in Cairo in 1992, never tried), Walter Rauff (died in Chile in 1984, never tried), Alois Brunner (died in Damascus around 2001, never tried). Each is on his own page in this section. The full list of senior perpetrators who reached safety abroad is around fifty to sixty named figures.

The hanged at Nuremberg

The men who hanged in the early hours of 16 October 1946 at Nuremberg were Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Julius Streicher. Hermann Göring killed himself with cyanide in his cell two hours before he was due to be hanged. Martin Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia and was almost certainly already dead, killed in the Berlin street fighting of May 1945, although his death was not confirmed until 1972. Robert Ley had killed himself before the trial began. Hjalmar Schacht and Franz von Papen were acquitted.

The Spandau seven

Seven of the Nuremberg defendants received prison sentences and were held jointly at the four-power Spandau Prison in West Berlin. They were Karl Dönitz (10 years), Walther Funk (life, released 1957), Rudolf Hess (life, served his full sentence and died in Spandau in 1987), Konstantin von Neurath (15 years), Erich Raeder (life, released 1955), Baldur von Schirach (20 years), and Albert Speer (20 years). Hess was the last prisoner held at Spandau and the prison was demolished after his death.

The post-war German absorption

The most uncomfortable single piece of the post-war perpetrator record is the West German legal and administrative absorption of mid-level perpetrators. Many former SS officers and senior Nazi officials returned to public life in West Germany after a brief denazification process. The 1949 amnesty laws regularised the status of around 800,000 former Nazi Party members and SS men. The West German judiciary of the 1950s and 1960s included substantial numbers of former Nazi-era judges. The West German foreign ministry, the police, the universities, and the federal civil service contained large numbers of mid-level former perpetrators in their senior ranks through the 1960s. The 2010 Independent Historical Commission on the Foreign Office, established by the foreign minister Joschka Fischer in 2005, documented the extent of the absorption in detail. The pattern was repeated, in varying forms, across most of the West German institutional landscape.

The shift began in the 1960s with the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial of 1963 to 1965 and the Eichmann Trial of 1961, which together produced a generational shift in West German public attitudes toward the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators. The post-1968 generation of West German prosecutors, judges, journalists and historians began to reopen cases that had previously been treated as settled. The pace of late prosecutions accelerated through the 1970s and 1980s and produced the Demjanjuk-pattern late prosecutions of camp guards in the 2010s.

See also

Sources

  • Independent Historical Commission, Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, Karl Blessing, 2010
  • Daniel Stahl, Nazi-Jagd: Südamerikas Diktaturen und die Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen, Wallstein, 2013
  • Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory, Oxford University Press, 2001
  • Devin Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963-1965, Cambridge University Press, 2006
  • USHMM: Post-War Trials