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'via Blog this'Most of the top officials were captured and tried. In November 1945, at the famousNuremberg Trials, 22 men were tried -- one in absentia. In October 1946, the verdicts were handed down: Three were acquitted, the other 18 present were found guilty. Eleven of those 18 were sentenced to hang; the rest were sentenced to prison.
While the prosecutors at Nuremberg were largely successful, the Allied leaders remained acutely aware that a great many war criminals remained at large. After all, it took many more than 22 men to run the death camps, conduct ghastly experiments and exterminate millions of people.
Uploaded on Mar 2, 2009
A rare interview with nazi ss officer franz suchomel (Capitalization purposely unused), discussing his experience as an ss officer at treblinka concentration camp August 1942 - October 1943, thereafter sobibor. trieste 1944.
Sentenced to 6 years in 1965. Released in 1969.
suchomel was unaware that the interview was being remotely videotaped by the interviewer Claude Lanzmann's assistants in the Volkswagen bus shown at the beginning of Part 1 of the video.
Sentenced to 6 years in 1965. Released in 1969.
suchomel was unaware that the interview was being remotely videotaped by the interviewer Claude Lanzmann's assistants in the Volkswagen bus shown at the beginning of Part 1 of the video.
Maass: At that time, the courts tended to pursue the principle that the last links in the chain of command were not to be charged. We have more comprehensive information today, such as data from Eastern European archives. Accounting for East German injustices has also given us greater insight into how much leeway existed in a dictatorship. In a groundbreaking 1995 decision, the Federal Court of Justice decided, for example, that the stricter standards that West German courts had applied to East German judges should also have been applied to Nazi judges.
SPIEGEL: But by then the Nazi judges had already died without ever being charged, like many organizers of the genocide. Now the courts are only prosecuting perpetrators at the lower end. Is that fair?
Maass: Of course not. The Allies released many of the main perpetrators after only a few years in prison, and the German courts could no longer touch them. In other cases, doctors were found who would declare 60-year-olds unfit to stand trial and issue the necessary documents, which stated that they suffered from ailments like heart problems, cirrhosis of the liver and silicosis. This doesn't fly anymore today.
SPIEGEL: How did you cope with this injustice?
Maass: You feel a certain queasiness, perhaps comparable with the feeling one has when shoplifters are caught while the big economic fraudsters manage to get away scot-free. But the alternative cannot be to let the shoplifters go, too.
SPIEGEL: Was the German judiciary persistent enough in investigating Nazi perpetrators?
Maass: Fortunately North Rhine-Westphalia decided to establish a specialized prosecution agency. But justice happens to be a matter for the states to decide …
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