High Level Nazis Set Free After World War II To Live Long, Prosperous Lives
Neo-Nazi calls for a “National Day of Hate” against Jews in America have fizzled.
In Bulgaria, the government banned an annual torch-lit march in downtown Sofia in honor of a late general who led the pro-Nazi Union of Bulgarian National Legions during World War II.
And in the Netherlands, a new survey shows that one in four Dutch residents either don’t believe the Holocaust happened or that its horrors were exaggerated.
Anti-Semitism remains a serious threat, nearly eight decades after the defeat of the Nazis in World War II. One of the most dangerous signs, is the growing lack of facts or denial of facts about the Holocaust.
Buried in the millions of pages written about the Nazis and the Holocaust in the years after the war is the relatively little known, sobering fact that many of the worst criminals regained their wealth and standing and today, their heirs continue to wield major influence and power in Germany and around the world.
United States forces arrested almost 100,000 Germans as war criminals, and classified 2,500 as major war criminals, of whom just 177 were tried. Many of the worst offenders were not prosecuted, for logistical or financial or political reasons and lived long and profitable lives after the war.
A number of the high ranking Nazis who were prematurely released from prison owed their freedom to John J. McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany from 1949 to 1952. McCloy also oversaw the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany.
McCloy succumbed to pressure from the West German government and the West German public to commute the sentences of various Nazi criminals. One of them was the infamous, industrialist, Alfred Krupp, whose company, Krupp Industries, was a major supplier of arms to the Nazis.
Krupp was sentenced to 12 years in prison and the forfeiture of all property for crimes against humanity, including using slave labor and child slavery at the Krupp companies. The Krupp enterprises used nearly 100,000 persons in the slave labor program, including 23,000 prisoners of war.
After three years, because of American interest in rebuilding Germany in the face of the threat posed by the Soviet Union, McCloy arranged for Krupp’s pardon and the return of his property, worth millions.
In a published manuscript, Krupp denied any guilt and said that “We thought that Hitler would give us such a healthy environment. Indeed he did do that. … We Krupps never cared much about [political] ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.”
Krupp died at age 60 on July 30, 1967.
Another was Martin Sandberger, a commander with the Einsatzgruppe, the para-military death squads that were responsible for mass murder and had an integral role in the final solution.
McCloy also commuted the sentence of Ernst von Weizsäcker at the urging of Winston Churchill. Weizsäcker was charged with active cooperation with the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz. Weizsäcker, with the aid of his son, the future German President Richard von Weizsäcker, claimed that he had no knowledge of the purpose for which Auschwitz had been designed and believed that Jewish prisoners would face less danger if they were deported to the East.
Weizsäcker was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison but Winston Churchill called his sentence a “deadly error.” McCloy reviewed the case and cut Weizsäcker’s sentence to five years and he was released from the prison in Landsberg in October 1950, after 3 years and 3 months of detention. Weizsäcker died of a stroke on Aug. 4, 1951 at the age of 69.
Another convicted Nazi who was set free by McCloy was Edmund Veesenmayer, a high-ranking German SS functionary and Holocaust-perpetrator during the Nazi era. Veesenmayer significantly contributed to the Holocaust in Hungary and in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). He was a subordinate of Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Joachim von Ribbentrop, and worked with Adolf Eichman, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.
After a trial in 1949, Veesenmayer was sentenced to 20 years in prison for crimes against humanity, slavery and membership in a criminal organization. In 1951, McCloy reduced the sentence to 10 years under pressure from the West German government and public. Veesenmayer was released on Dec. 16, 1951, after serving about two years in prison.
After his release, Veesenmayer worked in Tehran as a representative of Toepfer, a German commodity trading company. He died in 1977 at 56 years old.
McCloy also commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment for Lt. Col. Joachim Peiper, commander of the combat team that massacred 142 unarmed U.S. soldiers who had surrendered at Malmedy in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. McCoy also revised the sentence of former Maj. Gen. Wilhelm Speidel from 20 years to time served. Speidel was convicted of shooting hostages in the Soviet Union. He was the brother of former Lt. Gen. Hans Speidel, a member of the West German committee that was negotiating with Allies on possible German remilitarization.
Following the end of World War II, a series of military tribunals, called the “Trial of the Major War Criminals,” was held by the Allies in Nuremberg, Germany, from Nov. 20, 1945 to Oct. 1, 1946.
The first trial involved 22 high level Nazis although the Nazi leadership, Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels, were spared as they had committed suicide. All 22 defendants were charged with war crimes including wholesale enslavement, plunder, and murder. Twelve were convicted and were sentenced to death. One, Herman Goring, the most powerful figure in the Nazi party, committed suicide the day before his planned hanging.
A total of 12 subsequent military trials were held from 1946 through 1949 involving significant, though less powerful members of the Nazi regime. The trials were for various war crimes and crimes against humanity, and focused on industrial figures involved in slave labor, doctors who conducted human experimentation and “racial cleansing” and military figures charged with murder, hostage taking, imprisonment, torture, deployment of mobile death squads and government ministers.
Eight defendants got relatively lenient punishments or had their sentences commuted.
Martin Sandberger, head of Gestapo in Verona, was responsible for the detainment and murder of thousands of Jews, communists, Roma and mentally ill. Sandberger was sentenced to death but was reprieved and pardoned by McCloy and released in 1958, after serving nine years in prison. Sandberger died in 2010 at the age of 98.
Industrialist, Friedrich Flick, was arrested on June 13, 1945, and charged with promoting slave labor and plundering. He denied any guilt but was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, with consideration for time served. He was released from prison five years later because of good time credits. Flick died in 1972 at age 89.
Flick had amassed a fortune during World War I in the coal and steel industries. He was a major financial supporter of the Nazis and his businesses profited greatly when Jews were forced to sell their businesses, sometimes at a fraction of their market worth. During World War II, Flick’s companies employed an estimated 48,000 forced laborers in coal mines, steel plants and munitions works. It is estimated that 80 percent of the workers died as slave laborers. Flick’s wealth during the war was estimated at $1 billion.
After his release, Flick reconstituted his business and became one of the richest people in West Germany. He was largest shareholder of Daimler-Benz, then Germany’s largest carmaker. In 1985, Deutsche Bank bought the Flick conglomerate, making Flick’s descendants billionaires.
Daimler-Benz is best known for its Mercedes-Benz automobiles. During World War II, the company also created engines for German aircraft, tanks, and submarines and its cars were the choice of many Nazi, Fascist Italian, and Japanese officials. During World War II, Daimler-Benz used more than 60,000 concentration camp prisoners and other forced laborers to build machinery. In 2022, Daimler was renamed Mercedes-Benz Group. Daimler-Benz and the Chrysler Corporation merged in 1998.
Flick also significant shares in Feldmühle, a paper manufacturing company; Dynamit Nobel, a chemical and weapons company founded in 1865 by Alfred Nobel, after whom the Nobel Prize was named; Buderus, a commercial heating and air conditioning company; and Krauss-Maffei, a manufacturer of injection molding equipment, locomotives and military tanks.
During his lifetime, Flick was awarded numerous honors, including the Grand Cross with Star and Sash of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1963 and the Bavarian Order of Merit, and was an honorary senator of the Technical University of Berlin. At the time of his death, his industrial conglomerate included 330 companies and around 300,000 employees.
A current branch of the Flick dynasty, worth about $4 billion, maintains a private foundation in Düsseldorf named after Friedrich Flick. The foundation has a seat on a board of one of Germany’s most prestigious universities and directs money to educational, medical and cultural causes, primarily in Germany and Austria.
The foundation’s website makes no mention of Flick’s Nazi past and neither does the Daimler-Benz website.
Yet another Nazi who gained early freedom was Fritz ter Meer, a board member of chemical conglomerate IG Farben. The IG Farben cartel included BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, and other German chemical and pharmaceutical companies. IG Farben´s subsidiary company, the German Corporation for Pest Control, shortened to Degesch, created the Zyklon B gas used in the gas chambers to kill millions of Jews, Gypsies and other people .
Meer helped plan the Monowitz concentration camp, a satellite camp of Auschwitz, which conducted human experiments and held around 25,000 slave laborers. In 1948, Meer was sentenced to seven years in prison for looting and enslavement at Auschwitz. He was released two years later and in 1956, became chairman of Bayer AG (formerly part of IG Farben). In 1956, Meer was elected to lead Bayer AG’s supervisory board and served until 1964. He died on Oct. 27, 1967, at the age of 83.
In 1947, the U.S. government put 24 of IG Farben’s directors on trial for various war crimes including participating in slave labor. All defendants who were sentenced to prison received early release. Most were quickly restored to their directorships and other positions in post-war companies, and some were honored by the West German government.
Among the IG Farben directors who were found guilty of war crimes was Carl Krauch. He was sentenced to six years in prison but was released after just three years. Krauch later became a member of the supervisory board of the Bunawerke Hüls GmbH, a manufacturer of synthetic rubber. Krauch died on Feb. 3, 1968, at the age of 81.
Industrialist Hermann Schmitz was convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity through the plundering and spoliation of occupied territories. After three years in prison, Schmitz was released in 1950 and went on to become a member of the administrators’ council of Deutsche Bank in Berlin, as well as the honorary president of Rheinische Stahlwerke AG, an industrial conglomerate that produced coal, iron, and steel before and during World War II.
Schmitz died on Oct. 8, 1960. He was 79.
Otto Ambros was a chemist and Nazi war criminal who developed the nerve agents sarin and tabun. He was convicted of crimes against humanity for his use of slave labor from the Auschwitz III–Monowitz concentration camp. Ambros managed the IG Farben factories at Dyhernfurth, which produced tabun and at Gendorf, which produced mustard gas. The factory included a slave labor concentration camp with about 3,000 prisoners who were used for the most dangerous work at the plant, and as human guinea pigs in nerve gas experiments.
Ambros was found guilty of using slave-labor and was sentenced to eight years in prison. Three years later, in 1951, he was released from Landsberg Prison. Ambros died on July 23, 1990 at the age of 89.
After his release from prison, Ambros was an adviser to chemical companies such as W. R. Grace, Dow Chemical, as well as the U.S. Army Chemical Corps, and West German President Konrad Adenauer. Ambros also was an advisor for the Chemie Grünenthal drug company which gained infamy for the development of thalidomide.
Thalidomide is an oral medication used to treat a number of cancers and skin conditions. It was marketed as a “wonder drug” between 1957 and 1962, and aggressively marketed in 46 countries using more than 39 brand names, including the most widely known “Contergan.” Within four years of its marketing, an estimated 100,000 pregnant women and their unborn babies suffered catastrophic harm from Thalidomide.
Heinrich Bütefisch was a chemist, manager at IG Farben, SS officer and Nazi war criminal. Bütefisch was head of production at the Bunawerke facility at Monowitz, part of the Auschwitz complex of slave labor camps. An estimated 10,000 Auschwitz concentration camp prisoners lost their lives working for IG Farben. The life expectancy of Jewish workers at Buna Werke was three to four months; for those working in the outlying mines, only one month.
Bütefisch was sentenced to six years in prison and served three years in Landsberg Prison before he was released in 1951.
In 1952, Bütefisch became a member of the supervisory boards for Deutsche Gasolin AG, an oil and gas company; Feldmühle, a paper manufacturing company largely controlled by convicted Nazi Friedrich Flick; and paper mill, Papier- und Zellstoffwerke AG. He also was a consultant for the chemical company, Ruhrchemie AG Oberhausen, joining its supervisory board in 1952. In 1964, he was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Großes Verdienstkreuz), given for special achievements in political, economic, cultural, intellectual or honorary fields. After extensive protests, President Heinrich Lübke asked Bütefisch to return the award. He died on Sept. 5, 1969 at the age of 75.
Georg von Schnitzler was a member of the board at IG Farben and a Nazi war criminal. In 1942, he was named one of the Nazi regime’s war economy leaders. After the war ended, he was arrested and charged with “plunder and spoliation.” On July 30, 1948, he was sentenced to five years in prison and was released one year later. He later served as president of the Deutsch-Ibero-Amerikanische Gesellschaft. Schnitzler died on May 24, 1962. He was 77.
Max Ilgner was arrested, convicted and sentenced in 1948 to three years in prison for “plunder and spoliation.” He was released the same year with credit for time served in internment. In prison, he announced his conversion to Christianity and vowed to follow a missionary path following his release. For a time he worked on behalf of the Evangelical Church of Westphalia but soon became a professional political lobbyist. In 1955 he was appointed the chairman of the board at a chemical company in Zug, Switzerland. Ilgner died on March 28, 1966. He was 67.
Heinrich Oster was a chemist, executive at BASF and IG Farben and convicted Nazi war criminal. He was one of the first leading figures in IG Farben to advocate close co-operation with Hitler’s movement. Oster was arrested in 1946 and was charged with war crimes as part of the IG Farben trial. In 1948 he was sentenced to two years imprisonment for “plunder and spoliation.” A year later, Oster was a free man and took on a position on the board at Gelsenberg AG, a chemical company and now a member of the BP group.