Why have it taken so long to prosecute former Nazi’s, that we still see cases popping up today?
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Because a lot of them went into hiding, changed their identity, moved to other countries, so that they would not be prosecuted. It took the work of private groups to track them down and actually bring them to court. They did not just sit around waiting to get arrested as the Allied forces closed in on them.
When town hall was bombed to bits, it’s very easy to change your name and simply lie. Many did. Thenpeople who are left on the run these days had such minor parts it’s not even worth punishing them.
The end of WW2 was chaos, feeding people and housing them along with demobilising the large armies were high priorities, while people were looking for the senior Nazis and putting them on trial, some of the commanders and guards of concentration camps managed to run away and hide, with so many soldiers deserting the German army at the end there were lot of people without identification a nd sorting out who was who was not something armies which had been concentrating on shooting people and not getting shot were great at.
Yea there was this guy who just got deported back to Germany because he was a guard at a camp. This was a couple years ago and he was in his 90’s living in the US
Its not that it took so long. Germany changed it’s law, which enabled it to prosecute them. Yes, that’s correct, they changed law and retroactively prosecuted based on a new law. People give it a pass because it’s being used to prosecute Nazi adjacents.
West Germany basically pardoned every mid-level to low-level war criminal after a couple of years. Only the high-ups were given death sentences (except Speer and Hess). So most died of old age because building a anti-communist bulwark was considered more important than justice for the victims.
There are a few reasons. A lot of former Nazis hid their identities and escaped to countries where they were not easy to identify, such as Argentina. However, the main reason for the recent prosecutions is that Germany changed what had to be proven to convict someone. Between 1949 and 1985, there were 200,000 investigations and 120,000 indictments of former Nazis in Germany, but less than 7,000 convictions. Those convictions required that a prosecutor prove a person’s role in a specific murder.
The German government changed its policy on Nazi war criminals around the year 2000, allowing prosecutions of Nazis who served in death camps or mobile killing units, based on their service alone, and not their role in any specific murder. As a result, former Nazis would couldn’t be convicted before can be convicted now.
So a number of people who were investigated and cleared are now being prosecuted because of this lower burden of proof. As far as identifying former Nazis who escaped, that happens at an increasingly less frequent rate because the majority have died at this point.
If I remember correctly, up till quite recently lower-level Nazi employees such as guards weren’t deemed important enough to be considered accessory to murder. However in a recent case, a german court declared that being employed in a concentration camp implied that said person was guilty of murder. This was a landmark judgement and is being used a precedent for other prosecutions as well
Allied powers prosecuted top-level German officials. It was rather aimed to solidify post-war order and eliminate the possibility of regaining strength by them than serving justice (like in the case of Karl Dönitz).
In the case of lower-level war criminals and officials, the situation had been different in the east and west (and even between occupants). Most of the responsibility was on post-war Germany itself. In the western part, there was no strong determination to prosecute vast elites who were vital to Nazi rule and were seen as important to develop the post-war Federal Republic, its institutions, and its economy. There are some quite disturbing cases like Heinz Reinefarth ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Reinefarth ) who was responsible for tens of thousands of civilian deaths in occupied Poland but was protected from prosecution and extradition by German courts (with shocking argumentation that genocide was not in Nazi-Germany criminal code). In 1951 had become a major in a small town.
USA / CIA actively helped former Nazis if they believed they were anti-communist or could help USA space program Operation Paperclip, or give information against Iron Curtain countries…I don’t think the USA was alone in this too
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