Week Four—Justice and Accountability
By Raymond Millen, PKSOI
The reason the world knows so much about the Holocaust is due to the meticulous records
preserved by the Nazi bureaucracy. Everyone involved in the Holocaust system of systems was
proud of his and her contribution so secrecy was not a factor. The average German could claim
ignorance of the crimes, but it was willful ignorance—they were content not to speculate about
what went on in the camps. Nonetheless, the evidence collected for the International Military
Tribunal was vast and damning for the Nazi hierarchy.
Chief among the various war crime
trials, the Nuremburg Trials
attended to the crimes perpetrated
by the principal Nazi leaders.
Presiding over the trials from 1945
to 1946, American, British, French,
and Soviet judges tried 22 war
criminals, sentencing twelve to
death and seven defendants to
various terms in prison (three were
acquitted). Of course, Adolf Hitler,
Heinrich Himmler, and Josef
Goebbels committed suicide in the
closing days of the war, escaping
the hangman’s noose, but justice
had been served nonetheless. The
host of the Wannsee Conference,
Reinhardt Heydrich was
assassinated during the war, so he
too met justice. Sentenced to death,
Hermann Goering committed
suicide the night before his
execution but his fellow
conspirators were hanged promptly
on 16 October 1946. 1
1
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the following officials were executed: “Joachim von
Ribbentrop (foreign minister), Wilhelm Keitel (head of the armed forces), Wilhelm Frick (minister of the interior),
Ernst Kaltenbrunner (head of security forces), Hans Frank (governor-general of occupied Poland), Alfred Jodl
(armed forces command), Alfred Rosenberg (minister for occupied eastern territories), Julius Streicher (radical Nazi
antisemitic publisher), Fritz Sauckel (head of forced-labor allocation), and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (commissioner for
the occupied Netherlands). Martin Bormann (Hitler's adjutant) was tried in absentia (Germany declared him legally
dead after the war). The following received life sentences: Rudolf Hess (deputy leader of the Nazi party), Erich
Raeder (head of the navy), and Walther Funk (minister of economics). The following received 10 to 20 years: Karl