Random Ruthless Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped Justice (14 items)

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  (#6) Heinz Lammerding

  • Dec. at 66 (1905-1971)

  Heinz Lammerding was a Waffen-SS brigadier general and commander of the SS "Das Reich" division, which was stationed in central France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. In conjunction with the Allied invasion, French resistance began attacking German troops throughout the French countryside.

  After a German officer was captured by the French, Lammerding ordered that reprisals be carried out in response. Over 200 civilian residents of Tulle were either hanged or deported to their deaths in Germany as slave laborers. At Oradour, SS troops brutally wiped out over 600 more civilians. The town was then partially destroyed.

  Following WWII, Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of Oradour be permanently preserved as a symbol of Nazi barbarism. Lammerding was convicted in absentia by a French court and sentenced to death in 1953, but first the British, and then the Germans, refused to extradite him. He built a successful engineering business and prospered openly in Dusseldorf until his demise from cancer in 1971 at age 66.
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  (#1) Karl Silberbauer

  • Dec. at 61 (1911-1972)

  Karl Josef Silberbauer was an SS staff sergeant known for his activities in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during WWII. He reported directly to Adolf Eichmann, the head of Department IVB4, the office coordinating the extermination of the Jews.

  In 1963, Silberbauer - by then an inspector with the Vienna police - was exposed as the commander of the 1944 Gestapo raid and arrests of Anne Frank and her fellow fugitives. After arresting the inhabitants of the Secret Annex, Silberbauer removed the contents of Otto Frank's briefcase and tossed them onto the floor, intent on using the case for any discarded valuables. The discarded material included Anne Frank's handwritten diary, which a friend retrieved and returned to Otto Frank, the only Frank family survivor.

  According to the Austrian government, Silberbauer's arrest of the Franks did not rise to the level of a war crime. He did face a disciplinary hearing at the hands of the Vienna police, but retained his position following a hearing.
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  (#11) Artur Axmann

  • Dec. at 83 (1913-1996)

  Artur Axmann was the head of the Hitler Youth from 1940 until 1945. Axmann actively organized fighting units comprised of Hitler Youth during WWII. In the last desperate days, he conscripted children, both boys and girls, as young as 8 years old. Axmann was present in the bunker when Hitler shot himself, extricated the revolver he used, and successfully escaped to the West. After burying the weapon in a Berlin park, he avoided capture until December 1945.

  Placed on trial in 1949, he received a 39-month sentence that was commuted to time served. Aside from a fine from West Germany in 1958, he received no additional punishment. He was buried in a secret location, lest his grave become a neo-Nazi shrine.
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  (#7) Roland Freisler

  • Dec. at 52 (1893-1945)

  Roland Freisler was the Nazi State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of Justice and president of the notorious Volksgerichtshof (people's court). Between 1942 and 1945, he sentenced thousands of people to death.

  His bombastic courtroom screams and sarcastic ripostes were so chilling that films intended for the German people were never shown publicly by the regime. Among his victims were Sophie Scholl, American Mildred Harnack, and numerous July 20th defendants. Freisler escaped justice but not karma when, on February 3, 1945, his courtroom was bombed with an Allied direct hit that crushed him to death.
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  (#10) Erich Koch

  • Dec. at 90 (1896-1986)

  Erich Koch was among the most brutal of the Nazi administrators in Poland and the Soviet Union. He is believed to have been responsible for the deaths of as many as 4 million people and the deportation into forced labor of 2 million others. Although Koch forbade the retreat of German troops from East Prussia into the German heartland, he himself fled to Northern Germany and was not captured until 1949. His British captors turned him over to Poland instead of the USSR and it was eight years before he was sentenced to death.

  Shortly thereafter, Koch's sentence was inexplicably commuted to life imprisonment. His lenient sentence could be explained by Russian suspicion that Koch had knowledge of the whereabouts of the "Amber Room" and other Soviet art treasures. He finally perished in Polish captivity in 1986 at the age of 90.
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  (#14) Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski

  • Dec. at 73 (1899-1972)

  Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was a Waffen-SS general active in the Soviet Union and Poland throughout WWII. Of his operation involving the murder of 35,000 people in the vicinity of Riga, he proclaimed, "There is not a Jew left in Estonia." His most notorious conduct involved the brutal suppression of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, which cost the lives of at least 150,000 civilians and 15,000 members of the Polish underground.

  Bach-Zelewski escaped prosecution by testifying at Nuremberg. In 1951, he received a 10-year home detention for crimes involving the slaying of German political opponents and eventually received additional time for similar behavior, but his war crimes were never prosecuted.

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