The arithmetic of the Holocaust is the arithmetic of who killed and who was killed. The killers numbered, by the most conservative serious estimate, between two hundred thousand and two hundred and fifty thousand men and women in operational roles: SS officers and rank and file, Order Police battalions, Wehrmacht security personnel, Trawniki-trained auxiliaries, camp guards, ghetto administrators, deportation officials, medical personnel involved in the experiments and the killings, judges and prosecutors of the racial courts, civilian functionaries of the deportation and looting bureaucracies. The number tried in any court between 1945 and 2026 amounts to perhaps six thousand, on the most generous reckoning that includes the lower-level prosecutions in Communist Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. The number tried in courts whose proceedings were professionally adequate is smaller, perhaps two thousand. The number who served sentences proportionate to their conduct, on any reasonable measure, is smaller still. The men and women on this page, the named figures who escaped or substantially evaded the consequences of what they had done, stand for the much larger group whose names are not known and who passed entirely beneath the radar of any postwar legal proceeding. They are the rule, not the exception. The trials were the exception.
The men who reached safe havens
The principal architects of the killing of European Jewry, with the exception of those who died in 1945 (Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Heydrich) or were tried at Nuremberg or its successor proceedings, mostly did not face courts. The pattern was the same. They reached a safe haven, usually in South America or the Middle East, sometimes in Spain or Portugal, occasionally in the United States or Canada under false identities, and lived their lives.
The most famous case is Josef Mengele, the doctor of Auschwitz who had selected on the ramps and conducted his experiments on twins, dwarfs and other categories of prisoners selected for the work. Mengele had escaped through the Vatican ratlines in 1949 to Argentina under the false name Helmut Gregor. He had moved to Paraguay in 1959 when Israeli pressure on the Argentine government threatened his security, and to Brazil in 1960 when Adolf Eichmann’s seizure produced a regional intelligence panic among the resident Nazi exiles. He had lived in Brazil under various false identities for the next nineteen years, supported by his family in Germany and by a small network of fellow exiles. He had drowned at the Bertioga beach near São Paulo on 7 February 1979 of a stroke while swimming. He was sixty-seven. He was buried under a false name. Israeli, American, German and Brazilian investigators continued to search for him for the next six years, unaware of his death. The remains were exhumed in June 1985 after a tip from a fellow exile who had broken with the family, and were identified by a forensic team using dental records and skull morphology in a public examination conducted in São Paulo. DNA testing in 1992 confirmed the identification. Mengele had died unaware that he had been the most wanted Nazi in the world.
Walter Rauff, the SS officer who had supervised the development and operational deployment of the gas vans (Gaswagen) used to kill perhaps a hundred thousand people in occupied Soviet territory and Yugoslavia in 1941 to 1942, lived in Punta Arenas in southern Chile from 1958 onwards. He ran a fish-canning factory and lived openly under his own name. The German government requested his extradition in 1962 and several times subsequently; the Chilean Supreme Court declined to extradite him on the basis that the German statute of limitations on murder had run by the time the request was filed (an interpretation that was wrong on the facts but was politically convenient). The Pinochet government after 1973 actively protected him. He died of natural causes in Santiago on 14 May 1984 at the age of seventy-seven. Several SS-themed funeral oration speeches were delivered at his graveside. The German consul attended.
Alois Brunner, who had served as Adolf Eichmann’s deputy at Department IV B 4 and had personally supervised the deportations of Jews from Vienna (1938 to 1939), Salonika (1943), Drancy (1943 to 1944), Bratislava (1944 to 1945), and other locations, lived in Damascus from 1954 onwards under the protection of Syrian intelligence. The Syrian governments under successive presidents, Hafez al-Assad and Bashar al-Assad, refused every extradition request from West Germany, France and Austria. Brunner advised the Syrian regimes on intelligence techniques and on the management of dissident populations; he is reported, in some accounts, to have personally trained Syrian interrogators. The Mossad sent him letter bombs in 1961 and 1980; one took an eye, the other took several fingers; neither killed him. He died, the Syrian government has confirmed in oblique statements, somewhere between 2010 and 2012, at the age of approximately ninety-eight. The exact date and the place of his burial have never been disclosed.
Eduard Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga, who had run the Riga ghetto in 1942 and 1943 and who had supervised the killing of the Riga Jews, lived in Argentina from 1948 onwards under the false name Federico Wegener. The publication of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Odessa File in 1972 made him sufficiently notorious that the Argentine government could no longer ignore West German extradition requests. He fled Argentina in 1977 for Paraguay and died there in August 1977 of a heart attack at the age of sixty-eight, two months after his arrival. The Paraguayan authorities buried him in an unmarked grave at Asunción.
Aribert Heim, the Butcher of Mauthausen, who had killed prisoners at Mauthausen by injecting petrol into their hearts and had run a substantial set of medical experiments on camp inmates, fled West Germany in 1962 when the German authorities began closing in on him after a tip from a former Mauthausen inmate. He travelled via various routes to Cairo, where he settled in 1963 under the false name Tarek Hussein Farid, having converted publicly to Islam. He lived in Cairo for thirty years, ran a hotel near Tahrir Square, and died of cancer in August 1992 at the age of seventy-eight. The fact of his death was not established for sixteen years; the Egyptian authorities, German prosecutors and the Wiesenthal Centre believed he was still alive until 2009, when investigations by the New York Times, ZDF and Efraim Zuroff established the death definitively. Heim was the last of the major still-presumed-living Nazi war criminals. The closure of his case in 2009 effectively closed the senior-perpetrator era.
The men whose names were never known
The figures above are the named cases. The unnamed cases are the harder problem. Approximately five hundred thousand foreign auxiliaries had served in the killing apparatus across occupied Eastern Europe: Trawniki-trained Soviet POWs at the death camps, Lithuanian Ypatingasis Burys members at the Ponary killings, Latvian Arajs Kommando members at the Rumbula killings, Ukrainian auxiliaries throughout the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, Hungarian gendarmerie members during the 1944 deportations, Romanian gendarmerie at Iasi and Odessa, Croatian Ustaše at Jasenovac, Slovak Hlinka Guards at the deportations, the Polish Blue Police, the Belorussian auxiliaries. They had killed, at the most conservative estimate, several hundred thousand people. Most went home at the end of the war and resumed their previous lives. Some emigrated to the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and lived as ordinary postwar immigrants for the rest of their lives.
The Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice, established in 1979 under the Holtzman Amendment, identified, denaturalised and deported approximately 107 such individuals between 1979 and 2010. Canada operated a parallel programme that produced a smaller number of denaturalisations and deportations. Britain conducted a small number of investigations under the War Crimes Act 1991, none of which produced a successful prosecution. Australia conducted three prosecutions in the early 1990s, all of which failed. The largest single concentration of escaped killers had reached the United States; the OSI’s work, mostly conducted under Eli Rosenbaum’s directorship, addressed the largest number of cases of any single national programme.
The 107 figure is small against the actual number of foreign auxiliaries who had reached the United States. The OSI’s working estimate, set out in the Rosenbaum testimony to Congress in 2002, was that approximately 10,000 individuals had been admitted to the United States after the war who had served in some operational role in the killing or in collaborating regimes. The OSI’s caseload was constrained by the available evidence. Most of the 10,000 were never identified as perpetrators in their lifetimes. They had assumed new names, married into local communities, raised children and grandchildren, and died as American citizens. Their grandchildren now do not know.
The Communist trials
The Eastern European Communist regimes conducted substantial numbers of war crimes prosecutions in the late 1940s. The Polish trials at Kraków and Lublin had hanged Rudolf Höss in 1947 and Amon Göth, the commandant of Płaszów, in 1946. The Soviet trials at Krasnodar in 1943 and Kharkov in 1943 had handed down death sentences against German army personnel and Soviet collaborators. The Hungarian trials of the immediate postwar period had hanged the senior Arrow Cross leadership and Ferenc Szálasi himself.
The trials in the Communist countries are sometimes dismissed in Western historiography as show trials. The dismissal is unfair to the underlying fact pattern. The trials had real defendants who had committed real crimes; the proceedings, while not meeting Western standards of due process, did produce convictions on documented evidence. They also, particularly in Poland, conducted serious investigative work that has produced a substantial documentary record still used by historians. The Polish trials of Höss in 1947 and of Höss’s deputy Arthur Liebehenschel in 1947 produced detailed sworn testimony on the workings of Auschwitz that became the foundation of subsequent scholarship.
The Communist prosecutions did, however, often serve political purposes alongside their judicial purposes. Local collaborators were sometimes selected for prosecution on the basis of their postwar political stance rather than the seriousness of their wartime conduct. Many Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Slovak perpetrators escaped prosecution in their own countries because they had become Communist Party members after the war. The selectivity is one of the reasons why so many lower-level perpetrators in those countries lived out their lives undisturbed.
The amnesties
The West German state under Konrad Adenauer pursued, throughout the 1950s, a policy of effective amnesty for the foot soldiers of the killing. The 1949 amnesty law, the 1954 amnesty law, and the 1968 reform of the criminal code (which by an apparent drafting error effectively foreclosed prosecution of most lower-level perpetrators on the basis of statutory limitations) together produced a legal regime in which the great majority of German participants in the killing could not be prosecuted in West German courts. The 1968 reform was not corrected for fifteen years. Its effect was that the prosecution of camp guards in West Germany essentially stopped between 1968 and the early 2000s, when the Demjanjuk principle finally allowed it to resume.
Austria pursued a parallel policy and was, throughout the postwar period, the more determinedly forgetful of the two German-speaking states. Austria’s official postwar self-presentation as Hitler’s first victim, codified in the Moscow Declaration of 1943 and adopted as state ideology after 1945, made any sustained reckoning with Austrian participation in the killing politically difficult. Major Austrian perpetrators including Ernst Kaltenbrunner had been tried at Nuremberg; lesser figures had largely been let alone. The 1986 election of Kurt Waldheim, who had served as a Wehrmacht intelligence officer in occupied Yugoslavia and Greece in 1942 to 1943 and whose service record had been concealed in his postwar career, brought the Austrian situation to international attention. The Austrian state subsequently undertook a more sustained engagement with its wartime past, but the legal accountability for individual perpetrators was effectively over.
What the escapes show
The men listed on this page are the named escapes. They stand for the much larger unnamed escapes. The honest assessment of the postwar reckoning with the perpetrators of the Holocaust is that it was, by a substantial margin, more failure than success. Approximately one in fifty of the operational killers ever faced any court. Approximately one in two hundred received a sentence proportionate to what he or she had done. The remaining ones lived out their lives, married, raised children, drew pensions, attended church and synagogue and mosque, and died in their beds. Most of their family members did not know what they had done. Some did know and chose not to speak. A small number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren are now learning, from declassified files and from the work of historians, what their grandfathers and great-uncles had done.
The reckoning that did happen, the trials at Nuremberg and Frankfurt and Jerusalem and Lyon, the prosecutions in the Communist countries, the work of the OSI and its equivalents, the late prosecutions in Germany after 2011, was real and was important. It established the legal record. It produced the documents on which all subsequent Holocaust historiography rests. It was not, however, justice in the sense that proportionate punishment for the individual killers had been achieved. That was not, after the closing of the Nuremberg Subsequent Proceedings in 1949 and the Cold War rearrangement of European politics that followed, ever possible. The scale of the killing had been too large and the political will to pursue the killers had been too small. The men who ran the camps and the Einsatzgruppen and the deportation offices, with the exception of the few hundred who reached courts, were free. They are now, almost without exception, dead. The accounting that was not done is now permanently undone.
See also
- Argentina Brazil and Paraguay as Nazi Destinations
- Adolf Eichmann
- Rudolf Höss
- Josef Mengele
- Yugoslavia
- Adolf Hitler
Sources
- Gerald L. Posner and John Ware, Mengele: The Complete Story, McGraw-Hill, 1986
- Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice, Oxford University Press, 2018
- Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration, Columbia University Press, 2002
- Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963 to 1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law, Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Daniel Stahl, Nazi-Jagd: Südamerikas Diktaturen und die Ahndung von NS-Verbrechen, Wallstein, 2013
- Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988
- Guy Walters, Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped and the Quest to Bring Them to Justice, Bantam, 2009
- Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish, The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim, Doubleday, 2014