The Seeds of Distrust Among the Victors
Even before the guns fell silent in 1945, the wartime alliance between the Western powers and the Soviet Union was showing dangerous cracks. The famous “Big Three” meetings at Yalta in February 1945 revealed fundamental disagreements about the postwar order, particularly regarding Germany’s future government and Poland’s independence. These tensions were exacerbated by America’s atomic monopoly – a strategic advantage that left Stalin deeply suspicious of his allies’ intentions.
The Western powers essentially conceded Poland and Eastern Europe to Stalin’s sphere of influence in exchange for Soviet acceptance of American dominance in Japan and the Western world. This uneasy compromise set the stage for the Cold War’s division of Europe. As historian David Reynolds notes, “The wartime alliance was always a marriage of convenience rather than affection, held together by the common enemy of Nazi Germany.”
Germany’s Bitter Division and the Amnesty Paradox
The German question proved particularly intractable. By 1949, the nation had formally split into the Western-backed Federal Republic and the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic. Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor, made a fateful bargain – unconditional support for America in the Cold War in exchange for political independence and economic reconstruction.
This arrangement included an unspoken condition: the effective amnesty of German war criminals. As documents reveal, even before the Federal Republic’s establishment, many perpetrators of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes were quietly released. The Nuremberg trials had barely concluded when American and British military commanders began freeing some of the worst offenders. Only about seventy Nazi criminals were executed in the immediate postwar years under Allied court orders.
The Shocking Case of Otto Winkelmann
The case of SS commander Otto Winkelmann illustrates this disturbing trend. As Himmler’s top representative in Hungary during 1944, Winkelmann helped organize the deportation and murder of nearly 500,000 Jews. Captured by Americans at war’s end, he was handed to Hungarian authorities as a witness in war crimes trials before being returned to Western custody. Had Hungary kept him, he certainly would have faced execution. Instead, Winkelmann lived for decades in West Germany, collecting a generous police pension, never prosecuted for his crimes.
West German courts, staffed largely by former Nazi judges, showed little enthusiasm for pursuing war criminals. When forced to act, they typically cited insufficient evidence or handed down symbolic punishments. By late 1956, only a handful of major Nazi criminals remained imprisoned in Western jails. The last high-profile inmate, Rudolf Hess, died by suicide in 1987 at age 93 in Berlin’s Spandau Prison – his death marking the final end of four-power cooperation in Germany.
Operation Paperclip and Scientific Exploitation
Some Nazis found protection from U.S. intelligence agencies who valued their supposed expertise on Soviet politics and terrain. Even more shocking was Operation Paperclip, which brought about 1,000 German scientists to America, including Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team. Few seemed concerned that these scientists had used concentration camp prisoners as slave labor to build underground facilities like Peenemünde, where 20,000 prisoners perished at the Mittelbau-Dora camp alone.
As historian Annie Jacobsen documents, “The U.S. government went to extraordinary lengths to conceal the backgrounds of these scientists, many of whom had been ardent Nazis.” This moral compromise reflected the emerging Cold War mentality – the enemy of my enemy is my friend, regardless of their past crimes.
Postwar Europe’s Divergent Paths
Western Europe underwent thorough denazification without fundamental societal transformation. Within years, with American aid, former collaborators, bystanders, and resistance fighters worked side by side in new capitalist welfare states. Eastern Europe experienced more radical social and ideological changes under Soviet-backed communist regimes.
Stalin’s secret police immediately began arresting non-communist resistance fighters across Eastern Europe. By 1949, even loyal communists weren’t safe, as Stalin’s paranoia turned against his own followers. The infamous Slánský trial in Czechoslovakia saw 11 communist leaders executed in 1952, 10 of them Jewish – only to be posthumously rehabilitated years later by the same regime.
The Cold War Solidifies
A decisive Cold War moment came in September 1947 when Soviet representatives at a meeting of communist parties in Poland ordered intensified “class struggle.” This meant ending Popular Front policies – communists would leave coalition governments in capitalist states while removing non-communists from governments in Soviet-occupied territories. Former anti-Nazi resistance fighters now found themselves on opposite sides of an ideological divide.
Decolonization became another flashpoint. While Britain, France, Belgium and Holland sought to rebuild their empires, both the U.S. and USSR supported independence movements. This tension came to a head during France’s brutal war in Algeria (1954-1962), where former resistance fighters now ordered torture and reprisals against Arab civilians, while Algerian rebels employed terrorist tactics against European settlers.
Late Justice: The 1960s Revival of War Crimes Trials
The Cold War had diverted attention from punishing war criminals until 1960, when Israeli agents captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. His 1961 Jerusalem trial and 1962 execution sparked new prosecutions, including the 1963-65 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Marcel Ophüls’ groundbreaking 1972 documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” exposed widespread French collaboration with German occupiers.
It wasn’t until the late 1970s that Europe seriously reexamined collaboration and Holocaust complicity. Prosecutions continued into the 1990s, always under the charge of crimes against humanity – the only offense without a statute of limitations under UN conventions.
France’s Troubled Reckoning
France’s reckoning came particularly late. Four major cases emerged: Klaus Barbie (“Butcher of Lyon”), Paul Touvier, René Bousquet, and Maurice Papon. Only Barbie wasn’t French – an SS officer who fled to South America with CIA help before being extradited in 1983. He died in French prison in 1991.
Touvier, a Vichy militia commander, became the first Frenchman convicted of crimes against humanity in 1994. Bousquet, who organized the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup of 13,000 Jews, was assassinated in 1993 before his trial concluded. Papon, who sent 1,600 Jews to camps as a Vichy official, later became Paris police chief and ordered the killing of Algerian protesters in 1961. Convicted in 1997 at age 87, he died in 2007.
The Irony of German Success
Historically, Germany’s lack of thorough denazification contrasts sharply with Eastern Europe’s harsh postwar experience. Yet West Germany, which absorbed millions of ethnic German refugees, became a democratic success story and economic powerhouse. As historian Jeffrey Herf notes, “The judges who failed to prosecute Holocaust perpetrators were often former Nazis themselves – they wouldn’t even convict German doctors who killed thousands of disabled同胞.”
The Enduring Legacy
The Nuremberg trials established the principle of individual accountability in international law. While many perpetrators escaped justice, the trials delegitimized fascism and Nazism. Yet postwar retribution also accelerated ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe, with millions of Jews, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and Hungarians killed, deported or forced to flee – a demographic and cultural catastrophe from which the region still hasn’t fully recovered.
The Cold War’s immediate emergence after WWII created moral compromises that still haunt us today. As we grapple with how to judge historical figures, the postwar period offers sobering lessons about the tension between justice and pragmatism in times of geopolitical upheaval.