The Perpetrators section names the senior figures who organised, directed, and personally conducted the Holocaust. Twenty-seven men have their own pages: Hitler at the top, the SS officers who ran the killing programme, the senior Reich civil servants who supplied the legal and bureaucratic apparatus, and a handful of mid-level figures whose post-war prosecutions or escapes have given them a particular place in the historical record.
The pages are arranged alphabetically, with Hitler first as the figure on whose authority the killing was conducted. The categories overlap: a man could be a senior Reich official and an SS officer at the same time. The pages cover what each individual did, on whose orders, with what consequences, and what happened to them after the war. Of the twenty-seven men, fourteen were tried and either executed or imprisoned; eight took their own lives in or shortly after the German collapse; five escaped justice through the post-war ratlines or through the failures of post-war Allied investigation. The full record of what happened to each is on his individual page.
The categories
Hitler stands alone. The Holocaust was conducted on his authority. He gave the broad direction; he did not, on the documentary record, sign a written order to murder the Jews of Europe. The lack of such a document is one of the central facts about how the regime worked: Hitler’s authority was sufficiently established that subordinates inferred his wishes and acted on them, with periodic confirmation in private conversations.
The senior SS leadership was Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer-SS, and his successive deputies Reinhard Heydrich (until his assassination in 1942) and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Below them, the Reich Security Main Office under Adolf Eichmann’s Section IV-B-4 organised the deportations. Heinrich Muller, the head of the Gestapo, supervised the security apparatus. Friedrich Jeckeln and Walter Rauff led major killing operations in the field.
The camp commandants were the men who ran the operations on the ground. Rudolf Höss commanded Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943 and again briefly in 1944. Franz Stangl commanded Sobibor and then Treblinka. Aribert Heim served as a doctor at Mauthausen. Odilo Globocnik ran Operation Reinhard from Lublin.
The senior Reich civil servants provided the legal and bureaucratic framework. Hermann Göring authorised the Final Solution in his July 1941 letter to Heydrich. Hans Frank ran the Generalgouvernement of occupied Poland. Wilhelm Frick was Reich Minister of the Interior in the period when the Nuremberg Laws were drafted. Wilhelm Keitel ran the Wehrmacht High Command. Joachim von Ribbentrop ran the Foreign Ministry. Albert Speer ran the wartime production effort that depended on slave labour. Alfred Rosenberg ran the Reich Ministry for the Eastern Territories. Julius Streicher edited Der Sturmer.
The mid-level perpetrators with particular post-war profiles are Adolf Eichmann (kidnapped from Argentina, tried in Jerusalem, executed in 1962), Klaus Barbie (the Butcher of Lyon, hidden by US intelligence, eventually extradited from Bolivia, tried in Lyon in 1987), Alois Brunner (escaped to Syria, never tried), John Demjanjuk (the Trawniki guard, denaturalised in the United States, tried in Israel and Germany), and Josef Mengele (the Auschwitz doctor, escaped to Argentina and Brazil, drowned in 1979 without ever being tried).
The figure of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, is the only non-European on the list. He spent the war in Berlin as a German ally and contributed to the Bosnian Muslim SS divisions and to anti-Jewish broadcasting in the Middle East. He is included because his role, while peripheral to the main killing operation, has had a long political afterlife in Middle Eastern politics.
The post-war record
The post-war fate of the senior perpetrators is a useful summary of how the Holocaust’s legal accounting worked. Of the twenty-seven men with pages here, the great majority faced consequences of one kind or another, but the consequences were uneven. The most senior figures who survived the war (Göring, Frick, Frank, Rosenberg, Ribbentrop, Streicher, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner) were tried at Nuremberg in 1945 to 1946 and either executed or imprisoned. Several mid-level perpetrators were tried at the subsequent Nuremberg trials of 1946 to 1949 or in national courts in the years immediately following. Others escaped through the post-war ratlines, were tried decades later, or died unprosecuted.
The full Trials section of this site covers the legal accounting in detail. The pages here cover what each man did, not the legal proceedings against him. The two strands together make up the documentary record of the Holocaust’s perpetrators.
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards