At the Nuremberg Trials and in hundreds of smaller courts throughout liberated Europe, Nazi Party leaders and other perpetrators were tried for the crimes against humanity they had committed during World War II. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Nazi officials, officers, medical personnel, and guards who had participated in the planning and execution of the Holocaust managed to evade arrest and prosecution after the war.
In the chaos of the postwar period, many of these war criminals were able to simply avoid being identified, indicted, or captured. Others, however, escaped punishment due to the onset of the Cold War. Tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States made it increasingly difficult for United Nations prosecutors to collect evidence and extradite individuals who were suspected of war crimes. A great many Nazi criminals managed to escape punishment because they possessed intelligence information on Germany’s former weapons projects and wartime military partners. Consequently, many war criminals were covertly sheltered by the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Some of them ultimately appeared on the payrolls of Cold War intelligence agencies, including those of the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries worldwide which had a use for Nazi intelligence or expertise.
Among the Nazi criminals who escaped prosecution were Dr. Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann’s chief lieutenant Alois Brunner, Franz Stangl, Heinrich Mueller, and Klaus Barbie. Some of these individuals, including Eichmann and Stangl, were later tracked down and brought to justice by such committed “Nazi hunters” as Simon Wiesenthal. However, many managed to live in South America or the United States, some of them openly and under their own names.
