The dirty little secret of the Holocaust, which many would
regard as the greatest crime in human history, is that no one was punished
for it.
Of course, "no one" is not literally true.
There were some, at the very top of the Nazi state, who were famously called to account at the Nuremberg trials.
But that amounted to 24 individuals. And it takes more than 24 people to kill six million.
What of the men who operated and policed the death camps, who closed the
doors on the gas chambers, who administered the pellets of lethal Zyklon
B? What of those who manned the ghettos or drove the trains, those who
used rifle butts to herd batch after batch of Jews towards vast pits dug
from the earth, first stripping them naked, then shooting them in the
back, under strict orders to use no more than one bullet per victim, so
that many of those who fell into the pits were not yet dead but buried
alive - so that witnesses later spoke of the pits seeming to move and
writhe, to breathe, for days afterwards?
What of those guilty men?
There were tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of them, and all but a tiny
proportion eluded justice.
Consider this numbing statistic. After the war, allied officials identified 13.2 million men in western Germany alone as eligible for automatic arrest because they had been deemed part of the Nazi apparatus. Fewer than 3.5 million of these were charged and, of those, 2.5 million were released without trial. That left about a million people - and most of them faced no greater sanction than a fine or confiscation of property that they had looted, a temporary restriction on future employment or a brief ban from seeking public office. By 1949, four years after the war, only 300 Nazis were in prison. From an original
wanted list of 13 million, just 300 paid anything like a serious price.
Why were more of the guilty not punished?
"Because it would have been a never-ending task," says David Cesarani, research professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a leading authority on the Holocaust. He cites the British attempt to convict those responsible for the killing at Belsen. The trial took nine months and left the British exhausted.
"That was just one camp and there were, what, 70 camps, with hundreds of
people at each one. To say nothing of the Gestapo officers and the men of
the Einsatzgruppen [the mobile killing units]."
Pursuing all those responsible for the slaughter of the Jews would have meant trying thousands upon thousands of people - and it would have ended in the
jailing of almost the entire adult male population of Germany. "The allies
put their hands up in despair."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008...cond.world.war