‘COALITION OF THE UNWILLING’: FRANCE, WEST GERMANY AND SOUTH AMERICAN DICTATORSHIPS

Why would they want to go after Nazi war crimes fugitives? After all, these Nazis only killed a bunch of damn Jews, and if they had not lost the war, they would have been hailed as heroes.

NAZIS ON THE RUN AFTER WORLD WAR II ESCAPED CAPTURE AS COUNTRIES AROUND THE WORLD WERE NOT WILLING TO HELP THE HUNT, CLAIMS NEW BOOK
Half-hearted efforts to capture leading Nazis allowed many like death camp chiefs Josef Mengele and Gustav Wagner to escape to South America

By Allan Hall

Mail Online
January 25, 2013

A new book about Nazis on the run after WW2 shows how governments around the world torpedoed efforts to hunt down the worst of the Holocaust murderers for decades out of 'vested interests'.

'Nazi Hunt: South America's Dictatorships and the Avenging of Nazi Crimes,' by German historian Daniel Stahl, calls the half-hearted efforts of postwar governments a 'coalition of the unwilling.'

He says the French feared prosecutions would expose mass collaboration with the Nazis, the South Americans feared a spotlight on their own murderous regimes and the West Germans wanted to help 'old comrades' get away.

These were not the 'little fish' of the Nazi extermination programme but people like 'Angel of Death' Josef Mengele, who chose victims for the gas chambers, and Gustav Wagner, responsible for 150,000 deaths at the Nazi extermination camp of Sobibor.

While a physician at Auschwitz, Mengele consigned arrivals to the gas chambers and carried out appalling experiments on Jews, most of whom died in agony without anaesthetic.

Another one that governments conspired together to keep free was S.S. Colonel Walther Rauff, one of the developers of the mobile 'gas vans' used to kill Jews before the static death camp gulag was built.

Stahl found documents in German archives which showed that an official of the German foreign ministry deliberately delayed his own government's request for his extradition from Chile for 14 months in order for him to prepare to flee elsewhere.

'The West German judiciary in particular was guilty of serious lapses,' said Stahl, a history professor who trawled through long-sealed archives to prove the extent of collusion in keeping history's greatest war criminals at large.

S.S. murderer Rauff was even able to travel between South America and Germany as a company rep without hinderance.

It wasn't until 1961 that he was indicted for 100,000 murders but he never faced justice, dying from a heart attack in Chile instead after his adopted government refused an extradition request.

Damning minutes of an Interpol executive committee meeting in 1962 shows up the French attitude to the killers.

Interpol secretary general Marcel Sicot, responding to a request from Jewish organisations to more vigorously track them down, stormed: 'Why should war criminals be prosecuted since the victor always imposes his laws, anyway?

'No international entity defines the term "war criminal.'" Sicot said he regarded the criminal prosecution of Nazi crimes as 'victor's justice.'

'As henchmen of the Vichy regime, the French collaborated with the Nazis until 1944,' said Stahl. 'They stood opposed to the criminal prosecution of Nazi crimes.'

His book will be published in English later this year.