When The Nazis Are No More
It might well be considered the last live operation of the Second World War: it is the hunt for Nazi war criminals and Mother Nature is gradually bringing it to a close.
I consume oodles of material regarding the Second World War: no one singular event has so wholly rerouted the course of human history. It gave us modern computing, the age of the rocket, the splitting of the atom, radar, and the welfare state among other things. Some of these gains have been off the back of the unspeakable suffering of the multitudes, from the child whose twin was murdered due to medical experimentation in a German concentration camp, to that scorched ghost on those steps in the city of Hiroshima in the wake of the first-ever tactical nuclear strike. These reasons do indeed bring me back time after time, to scrutinize and examine the war, even if I am but a layman. But something else compels me further. It is the nature of the Holocaust. Regardless of the depth of my knowledge, or the efforts I go to looking for new information, I’m never able to satisfactorily answer the question: why?
Milestones
The 5th of May 2011 marked a milestone in the history of WWI. Claude Stanley Choules, the last of the last combat veterans, died in a nursing home in Western Australia (as reported on by the NY Times). Choules was born on March 3rd, 1901 and was 110 years old. He joined the British Navy and the battleship H.M.S Revenge from which he witnessed the surrender of the German fleet. With his eventual passing, the world saw the combat of the Great War fade from living memory and into history. If we are to assume there is a similar WWII veteran out there somewhere, it might be around 2042 before we see a parallel milestone. And yet, the 75-year hunt for Nazi war criminals is reaching the end of the line.
Infamous Nazis
Amon Göth was a despicable fiend of a man. Made famous primarily by Steven Spielberg’s seminal film Schindler’s List (based on the book Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally), he was the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during WWII. Göth was ultimately executed for personally murdering both individuals and groups of people, mainly Jewish prisoners of the camp itself. The man was a sadist and was one of the first war criminals to pay for his crimes — in September 1946. On the heels of Göth’s demise was that of the remnants of the high ranking Third Reich at the famous Nuremberg Trials. The death sentences of Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Julius Streicher, were carried out on 16th October 1946. Herman Goering committed suicide the preceding day, a last attempt to wrest control from the Allies in a new world that no longer contained the Third Reich. Hitler himself committed suicide in the Fuhrer Bunker on 30th April 1945 as the Red Army was approaching the Chancellery in Berlin. Joseph Goebbels committed suicide the following day — with his wife in tow — but not before they had decided to murder their own children with poison: a world without the Reich was not a world deemed good enough for the Goebbels offspring. Even Heinrich Himmler decided to take his own life and did this on 23rd May 1945. He had been renounced by his peers (Hitler had branded him a traitor) and he had gone into hiding. It was only when he was cornered and then captured that he decided to end it.
Initially, the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis carried the crusade for justice forward under its own momentum. Even though the Allies had at least some of an idea of what the Germans were doing ‘behind closed doors’, the devil truly turned out to be in the detail. Yet, by the close of the war the Nazis had become but an enemy of the past. Decimated, the threat had been neutralized. And after all, tidying up and rebuilding post-fighting had become a preoccupation too. It is easy to commiserate with this policy since the world had seen the two deadliest wars in mankind’s history over a period of just 31 years and only 21 years apart, not to mention throwing a deadly global pandemic in there too for good measure. One could hardly judge the people of that era for wanting to look to the second half of the century as a place of hope and light. Consequently, those Nazis that had seen fit to slip through the slats of the chaos of post-war Europe, were in turn given the chance to disappear into history. And, at least for a time, they did.
Distractions
Another profound distraction manifested itself soon after the war had run its course. During it, the bloodiest confrontation took place on the eastern front when the Axis invaded Russia on 22nd June 1941 in the infamous Operation Barbarossa. For some time, it appeared the Nazis were going to subdue the Russians. Eventually, the Soviets turned the tide but not before the Germans had infiltrated deeply into Russian territory and meted out a brutality the likes of which the world had rarely seen. As the Germans were repelled, the Soviets began the long chase back across eastern Europe. Previously conquered Nazi domains fell like dominoes, and as they did, they immediately fell under the influence of the Russians. It was this unforeseen conversion that led to Winston Churchill’s famous quote: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe”. By the time the dust of WWII had settled, the Russians were firmly ensconced across the continent in countries such as East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Where once they had been essential allies against the Nazi machine, now, they were the communist threat of the future. Europe became a hive of spying and an endless game of one-upmanship that gave rise to the Berlin Wall and the Cold War. Fleeing Nazi war criminals and their collaborators became a low priority if indeed they were considered at all. This created a climate within the chaos through which fleeing Nazis could make their escape.
The chill of the Cold War went on to seep into every corner of the globe. Countries that were politically exposed became satellite arenas for the US and the Russians to battle amidst the relative stability of the threat of nuclear weapons. While this was happening, anxious war criminals were either avoiding the radar in Europe or were fleeing to places like the Middle East and Latin America, and even had the help of the Vatican and the Red Cross. Some worthy Nazis were classified as intellectual assets and were snapped up by the US army and taken to America. One such person was Werner von Braun. Debonair and with an intellect to match, Braun was a rocket scientist who was instrumental in the development of the V1 and V2 rocket bombs that so plagued the British during the war. Braun’s involvement in the Holocaust using slave labor is opaque. Regardless, the Americans plucked him from the post-European theatre of war and gave him a job in the US. He was ultimately assimilated into NASA and became an integral part of America’s space program.
Hunters
So somewhat understandably and inevitably, the post-Reich war criminals and their confederates slipped backstage and out through the fire escape. But not everyone’s attention was directed elsewhere. In the years following the war, there emerged a unique type of investigator that became dramatically known as the Nazi hunter. The most well-known are Efraim Zuroff, Tuviah Friedman, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, Simon Wiesenthal, Ian Sayer, Elliot Welles, and Yaron Svoray. How they came to be pursuers of war criminals is varied. Wiesenthal, Friedman, and Welles were all survivors of the Holocaust, the crimes of which gave them an insatiable appetite for justice. Serge Klarsfeld was witness to his own father being swallowed up by Auschwitz. Interestingly, Beate Klarsfeld’s parents (Beate is Serge’s wife) appear to have been Hitler advocates if not out and out Nazis. Zuroff and Sayer developed a more academic approach to the Shoah (although this is not to completely disregard the fact that Zuroff is Jewish). Svoray himself was born just after the war. His father moved to Palestine just before it and dodged the hatred of the Third Reich, but his wider family was swept up. Svoray’s mother also ended up in Palestine but a little later and was a direct witness to the hatred of the Reich. She too saw her wider family lost to it. Svoray, not incidentally, is a former police detective.
Much like the criminals themselves, the Nazi-hunting Holocaust survivors have fallen subject to the laws of nature. Wiesenthal at the age of 96 in 2005, Welles in 2006 at the age of 79, and Friedman in 2011 at the age of 88. The remaining crusaders are also feeling the hand of father time on their respective shoulders: Serge Klarsfeld is 84, Beate is 81, Ian Sayer is 75, Ephraim Zuroff is 71, and even Yaron Svoray is a ripely 66 years old. Historically, their cause has been exceptional and perhaps illustrates a transition in the society’s disposition in how we perceive those people who endeavor to warmonger.
The Leftovers
Gerhard Sommer was born on 24th June 1921. This year he turned 99 years old. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he would have been 18. When the East German government effectively announced the demise of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Sommer was 68 years old. Sommer was on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals, for his involvement in the massacre of 560 people in the Italian village of Sant’ Anna di Stazzema on 12th August 1944. But Sommer, regardless of his longevity, will never be prosecuted for his crimes for he has been declared unfit to stand trial (as reported by the BBC in 2015). His affliction is dementia which means he is unable to defend himself against the charges leveled at him. As far as this writer can tell, at the time of writing, Sommer is still alive and being judicially unmolested for his sins.
Perhaps to be one of the very last cases in the hunt for Nazi war criminals is that of Bruno Dey. On 6th July 2020, prosecutors in Germany were demanding that the 93-year-old be sent to prison (The Times of Israel) for three years for his role in the extermination of over 5000 people at the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig, Poland. As seems to be the case with many war criminals from that era, their go-to defense is denial. That denial can be nuanced though. Dey, for example, admitted in court in Hamburg in 2019 that he was present at Stutthof. But his knowledge of what was really happening at the camp appears to be limited, as ludicrous as that sounds. The veil of time makes it possible for these criminals to adopt such stances. Evidence tends to have been lost or destroyed and the memory of witnesses can be easily undermined.
For my part, I attempted to identify a live list somewhere on the web of those war criminals that are still out there, still alive, and still going about their business (it became apparent to me that the official list of wanted Nazis as per the Simon Wiesenthal Center is not as up to date as I thought it might be). I was unsuccessful although that is not to say that there isn’t one. Some piecemeal sleuthing does identify an assortment of individuals who’d likely be happy to be forgotten by history. All indications are these absconders from justice are still alive at the time of writing: Friedrich Berger (a guard at the Neuengamme concentration camp), Kurt Gosdek (allegedly played a part in the Baba Yar Massacre), Willhelm Hoffmeister (suspected of serving in an Einsatzgruppen death squad), Helma Maas (a guard at various concentration camps), and Helmut Oberlander (another alleged Einsatzgruppen member). The youngest of these is Berger at 94 years old. It is ambitious to think that any of these people are going to face any significant justice. Bigger question marks hang over the names of Orest Galan (a member of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police), Martin Hartmann (a guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp), Wasyl Lytwyn (a guard at Trawniki concentration camp), Janos Naujalis (a Lance Corporal 2nd in the Auxiliary Police Battalion attached to German 11th Police Reserve Battalion), and George Theodorovich (a member of Nazi-controlled police force in Ukraine). The web is less sure of whether or not these people still live, but if they do, the joint youngest are Lytwyn and Theodorovich at a ponderous 99 years old. If Hartmann still lives, he is 101.
Mother nature has spared many war criminals from justice. Consider the case of Dr Aribert Heim. Known as ‘Dr Death’ and the ‘Butcher of Mauthausen’, Heim is known to have conducted appalling medical procedures on Holocaust victims during the war, very much along the same lines as Josef Mengele. Ultimately, Heim fled to Cairo where he converted to Islam and changed his name to Tarek Farid Hussein. His most likely eventual fate is to have died there of intestinal cancer in 1992. There are those that contest this, however. Either way, luck, ingenuity, and nature, all came together to keep Heim from answering for his crimes. Next to his name in a list I have created, is the label ‘escaped prosecution’. So very many individuals on my list have the same sobriquet. For the most part, they were not brought before a court simply because their health no longer permitted it — they were either unable to mentally understand the charges against them, were so physically fragile it was impossible to relocate them, or they died during judicial proceedings. Examples are Rosemarie Albrecht (a German ear, nose, and throat doctor involved in euthanasia practices), Johanne Breyer (a member of the SS and a guard at more than one concentration camp), Kazys Gimzauskas (a member of the Lithuanian Police), Ivan ‘John’ Demjanjuk (a guard labeled ‘Ivan the Terrible’ at Treblinka concentration camp), Anton Greiser (a Yugoslav-born member of the SS-Totenkopfverbände), Sergis Hutyrczyk (a guard at Koldyczewo concentration camp), Michael Karkoc (allegedly served in the Ukrainian Self Defence Legion and then later the Waffen SS), Mikelis Kirsteins (a member of Arajs Kommando military unit in Nazi-occupied Latvia), and Josias Kumpf ( aguard at Sachsenhausen and Trawniki concentration camps), to name but some.
One wonders what the Nazi hunters could have achieved had the technological revolution come sooner. It is hard to imagine how a fleeing Nazi could have remained incognito under the relentless glare of social media and mass communication networks. A vague sighting in Buenos Aires could have been casually transmitted to Mr. Wiesenthal in seconds rather than the lethargic days, or even weeks, it might have taken for the information to cross the planet. By the time an investigator could marshal his or her resources, it is no wonder the fugitive had managed to steal away, out, and into, the night. By the time the internet began to make its mark on the world, the criminals of the Second World War had seen all their vitality draining away. It is the reason it is so hard to perceive of these merciless killers: the ones still alive are sunken, weather-beaten, and enervated. And perhaps it is for this reason I am unable to grasp how the Holocaust could have come to be. I think it is critical too, to keep searching for that understanding. This is because one day in the not too distant future, everyone will be gone: the perpetrators, the witnesses, and even the investigators. And then all we will have is the dispassionate light of history to try and unpick the rationale behind the hate.
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KG Abbot is a freelance writer for hire offering copywriting, blogging services, and article creation. He creates content that ranks powerfully in online searches and social media attraction. Specializing in technological and environmental issues, he utilizes his ongoing master’s degree in creative writing to compose compelling material.
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