There was Klaus Barbie, head of the Gestapo in Lyon from 1942 to 1944, who came to be known as the “Butcher of Lyon” for his cruelty. There was also Kurt Lischka and Herbert Hagen, who were responsible for the deportation of 76,000 Jews from France to extermination camps, among them 11,400 children. These are just three of the many Nazi war criminals and collaborators who have been tracked down by well-known Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld.
Their life’s work has ensured that these three perpetrators were convicted of their crimes, yet so many other Nazis have, despite committing many atrocities, managed to live out their lives in peace.
Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer and survivor himself, described their investigative strategy in simple terms: “We only pursued the criminals who had made decisions about the fate of masses of Jews,” he wrote to DW. “We only pursued the leaders of the Final Solution. Our search for and involvement in the arrest of Barbie after a 12-year struggle from 1971 to 1983 earned us great acclaim in France.”
The spectacular discovery of Barbie in Bolivia was also lauded in Germany, which for decades had limited its search for perpetrators of the Holocaust to just a few leading figures. The Klarsfelds later for their commitment to bringing Nazis to justice.
In doing so, they laid the foundation for a historic parliamentary decision on July 3, 1979: After nearly 20 years of debate over how to prosecute Nazi crimes, the Bundestag agreed that murder and genocide should no longer be subject to a statute of limitations.
“If the Germans had adopted the 1979 law in 1954, the cases of thousands of Nazi criminals would have been examined by public prosecutors and finally by the courts. But many judges were in the Nazi party and would have been lenient towards them,” Klarsfeld said.
A symbol of late justice
Many small cogs in the Nazi murder machine have also hoped for leniency in more recent years. Like , who died this January at the age of 99. The former secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp was found guilty in 2022 of aiding and abetting murder in over 10,000 cases.
The proceedings were initiated by senior public prosecutor Thomas Will, who has been head of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg for five years.
“Our mission is still to find people who can be brought to trial,” he told DW. “We are still investigating . For each camp, there are numerous people who may still be alive that we have not yet been able to find.” But only those born in certain years are likely to still be alive to face prosecution. “Realistically, only 1925 to 1927 or 1928 come into consideration,” he said.
A worldwide effort
A 100-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp is on trial at Hanau District Court for aiding and abetting murder in over 3,300 cases. Tracking down these Nazi perpetrators 80 years after the end of the Second World War is a Herculean task for Will and his team. Finding complete personal data, including place and date of birth, is the exception rather than the rule. And the less data there is, the less likely a successful prosecution will be. “Finding a Karl Müller, for example, without any additional information, is an impossibility,” Will said.
Since his organization began its work on December 1, 1958, it has accumulated some 1.78 million index cards documenting individuals and crime scenes. Almost 19,000 proceedings have been initiated at public prosecutors’ offices and courts across Germany. But, because many Nazi perpetrators have emigrated, searches are also being conducted worldwide, with the help of the Schengen Information System and Interpol.
Justice delayed
But how much sense does it still make to take centenarians, who are often declared unfit for questioning, to court? Will has a clear answer: “The guilty verdict alone, albeit late, is very important because it establishes criminal responsibility and guilt. The importance of this is for the relatives of victims cannot be overestimated.”
Will is critical of the fact that there have been so few convictions against Nazi perpetrators in Germany since the end of the . One reason for this was a general criminal law that was not designed to prosecute state-ordered mass crimes, he said. Furthermore, the attitude was initially to make a distinction between the main perpetrators who were seen to bear responsibility for everything, and those who were supposedly misguided accomplices of .
“Social conditions first had to change. But there is no doubt that even with this, there could and should have been more convictions,” Will said. “That’s why it’s also important to understand the work of the Central Office and the many documents that have emerged since then as evidence of how post-war society dealt with its Nazi past.”
This article was originally written in German.
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