Antisemitism: America Will Pay for Ignoring the Past

Introduction

Most people think they know the story of justice after World War II. The Allies win, the Nazis lose, the criminals are rounded up and marched into courtrooms to face the consequences of the Holocaust and a war of aggression. We’ve seen the black-and-white footage from Nuremberg. We’ve heard the phrase “crimes against humanity.” The emotional takeaway is simple and comforting: evil was punished.

That story is deeply incomplete.

Yes, some of the top leadership of the Nazi regime faced trial and execution. Yes, a handful of doctors, judges, industrialists, and camp officials were brought before tribunals. But when you move past the iconic images and look at the numbers, a very different picture emerges: the vast majority of SS personnel and other Nazi criminals never saw the inside of a courtroom. They went home, resumed their lives, collected pensions, and died as respectable citizens.

You can’t talk honestly about “Never Again” without acknowledging that, for most of the people who made “Again” possible, there was never any justice at all.

The Comfortable Myth of Postwar Justice

The myth runs something like this: once the war was over, the world turned immediately to holding the guilty accountable. Nuremberg established the rules, and then, across Europe, courtrooms filled with perpetrators. Judges pored over evidence, sentences were handed down, and the ledger of history was balanced as best as humanly possible.

It’s a good story. It reassures us that the system, eventually, works.

But it depends on a very selective memory. We remember the handful of major trials and quietly ignore the reality that the Nazi system was enormous, and the legal response was tiny by comparison. We fixate on Göring in the dock and forget about the thousands of guards, policemen, clerks, and bureaucrats who made the Holocaust and the broader machinery of occupation function on a daily basis.

In other words, we mistake a symbolic act for a comprehensive reckoning.

The Scale of the Crime vs. the Scale of the Trials

To see the gap clearly, you have to put the crime and the response side by side.

On the crime side, you have:

• Hundreds of thousands of people who served in the SS, Gestapo, SD, and other units involved in repression and murder.
• Tens of thousands of incarceration sites, from the infamous extermination camps to labor camps, transit camps, sub-camps, and ghettos.
• A continent-wide bureaucracy devoted to identifying, isolating, expropriating, deporting, enslaving, and killing millions of human beings.

On the justice side, you have:

• A few dozen top leaders tried at Nuremberg.
• A series of follow-up tribunals that prosecuted a couple hundred more.
• National courts in West Germany and elsewhere that, over decades, investigated around 140,000 cases but convicted fewer than 7,000 people of Nazi-era crimes, often with light sentences.

Do the math. If you have hundreds of thousands of direct perpetrators and only a few thousand convictions, that means the overwhelming majority of those who made the system work were never held legally accountable. They simply melted back into civilian life.

That’s not a thorough reckoning. That’s a token effort followed by a massive shrug.

Nuremberg: Powerful Symbol, Limited Reach

None of this means Nuremberg was unimportant. The International Military Tribunal did something unprecedented: it put the leaders of a defeated regime on trial in front of the world. It created legal categories like “crimes against humanity” and made it clear that aggressive war, genocide, and systematic persecution were not just “political decisions” but crimes under international law.

The Nuremberg verdicts also generated a vast record. Documents, testimonies, and films created a factual foundation that still underpins Holocaust history to this day. In that sense, Nuremberg was not just about punishment; it was about establishing the truth before the world.

But from day one, the tribunal’s scope was narrow. It went after the top leadership: high-profile party officials, generals, ministers, and ideologues. It did not and could not handle every camp commandant, every Einsatzgruppen officer, every Gestapo interrogator, or every SS guard.

The expectation was that once the big names were dealt with, local and national courts would step in and handle the rest. That expectation ran headfirst into political reality.

Denazification and the Cold War “Reset”

Immediately after the war, the Allies launched denazification programs. The idea, on paper, made sense: identify those who had been active Nazis, remove them from key positions, and prevent the old elite from reappearing under a new label. Millions of Germans filled out questionnaires listing party membership, rank, and wartime roles. People were categorized from “major offenders” down to “exonerated.”

It looked robust. It sounded tough.

And then the Cold War happened.

Very quickly, the United States and its allies realized that a stable, economically viable West Germany was essential as a buffer against the Soviet Union. That meant reconstructing industry, government, courts, police, and intelligence services. And where did you find people who knew how to run all those systems? In the same pool of professionals that had run them under Hitler.

The result was a quiet but dramatic shift:

• Many individuals once classified as “offenders” were re-evaluated and allowed back into public life.
• Judges who had enforced Nazi racial laws now administered justice in the new Federal Republic.
• Former party members and bureaucrats were rebranded as experienced administrators needed to rebuild a democratic state.

Officially, no one said, “We’re done with justice.” In practice, the desire for stability, economic growth, and anti-Communist unity outweighed the desire to keep pressing on prosecutions. The list of people who would ever be investigated or charged effectively froze early, and everyone else slid back into normalcy.

The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials and the Limits of Law

There were moments when the curtain was ripped open again and the unfinished business of justice came roaring back into public consciousness. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of the 1960s were one of those moments.

German prosecutors assembled evidence against a group of former Auschwitz personnel. These were not top-level policymakers; they were the men who had physically worked at the camp—overseeing transports, standing on the selection ramp, guarding prisoners, administering beatings.

Survivors testified in harrowing detail about what had happened: the gas chambers, the brutality, the arbitrary murders. German society, by then enjoying its postwar “economic miracle,” was forced to look yet again at what had been done in its name.

And yet, the trials also revealed deep problems in how the law approached these crimes:

• Only a couple dozen defendants were brought to trial out of the many hundreds who had served at Auschwitz.
• Convictions were won, but sentences often seemed painfully small compared to the scale of the suffering. A handful of life terms, plus many shorter sentences or suspended terms.
• Courts demanded very specific proof of individual acts of murder—who was shot, on which day, under which circumstances—rather than treating service in a death camp as intrinsically criminal.

That last point was crucial. In a system of industrialized murder, insisting on a one-to-one match between a defendant and a particular victim decades later is almost a guarantee of acquittal. Records were incomplete. Many witnesses were dead or scattered. Memories had faded. The law’s strict standards of evidence, applied in a conventional way, ended up functioning as a shield for many perpetrators rather than as a sword of justice.

Everyday Life After Genocide

Beyond the courtroom, there is the more uncomfortable reality of daily life. What happened to the people who had once worn SS uniforms, who had signed deportation lists, who had patrolled ghettos or stood guard at camps?

Most of them went home and built new lives.

They became shopkeepers, factory workers, civil servants, and small-town professionals. They joined choirs, volunteered in clubs, and raised families. In many cases, their children and grandchildren had only the vaguest idea of what they had done during the war. The family story was often something like “he was in the army” or “he worked in an office,” full stop.

For survivors and for the families of those who never came back, that everyday normality was its own kind of cruelty. It meant that the people who had enforced their degradation or watched their loved ones marched away now lived out peaceful, ordinary lives, never once required to stand before a judge and answer for any of it.

The state, for its part, paid pensions to many former civil servants and soldiers. In some cases, benefits were more generous to people who had served the regime than to those who had survived its camps. Morally, it was upside down.

Late-Life Trials: Justice on a Walker

Starting in the 2000s, German courts began to shift their approach. A key change was the recognition that mere service in an extermination camp—keeping the machine running—was enough to constitute criminal complicity, even without proof of a specific murder. That opened the door to new prosecutions.

Cases like those against John Demjanjuk, Oskar Gröning, and others followed. Former camp guards and staff, now in their eighties and nineties, were brought into court in wheelchairs, leaning on walkers, often in frail health. Many were found guilty as accessories to mass murder.

On one level, these trials were important. They sent a message that there is no expiration date on crimes against humanity. They affirmed that you cannot hide behind the idea of being “just a guard” or “just a clerk” if the institution you served was designed for mass killing.

But on another level, they underscored how thoroughly justice had been delayed. For decades, these people lived undisturbed. They held jobs, drew salaries, and aged in peace. Only at the end of their lives did the law finally catch up with them, and even then, sentences were often symbolic. Some died during appeals. Others received suspended sentences they would never actually serve.

You can call that “better late than never.” You cannot honestly call it full justice.

What This Failure Teaches Us About Justice

The story of how few Nazi criminals were punished is not just a depressing historical detail. It has real implications for how we think about justice and responsibility today.

First, it shows that the legal system is not automatically capable of dealing with mass crime. Laws are designed for individual cases: one defendant, one victim, one act. When an entire state apparatus commits atrocities, the scale simply overwhelms the machinery. Without extraordinary political will, and a willingness to stretch or rethink legal categories, the normal system will process a small fraction of cases and leave the rest untouched.

Second, it exposes the danger of the “just following orders” mindset. For years, many courts treated decision-makers as real criminals and everyone else as accessories at worst. That framing fits a comforting narrative: the evil is concentrated at the top, and the rest of the population was basically misled. But in reality, it takes thousands of obedient “nobodies” to make a death factory run. If those people know that odds are they’ll never be prosecuted, even if their side loses, the deterrent value of international law is pretty weak.

Third, it reminds us that time itself is a kind of amnesty. Every year that passes after an atrocity reduces the chance of serious accountability. Witnesses die, documents disappear, societies lose interest. Eventually, the perpetrators are old, frail, and easy to pity. Courts start to weigh mercy for the accused more heavily than justice for the dead. Justice delayed becomes justice softened, then justice abandoned.

Why Remembering Impunity Matters

When we talk about the Holocaust today, we rightly focus on the victims and the sheer scale of the crime. But the story of impunity after the war is just as important if we are serious about learning anything from that era.

If all people hear is “we defeated the Nazis and then prosecuted the criminals,” they walk away with a dangerously optimistic idea of how the world responds to evil. They may believe that the system, in the end, does the right thing. They may believe that those who commit atrocities will “eventually” be punished.

History says otherwise.

The reality is that most SS men, most camp guards, most local collaborators, and most functionaries in the machinery of genocide never faced any legal consequences. They lived long, normal lives. Their names never appeared in headlines. Their neighbors may never have known what they did. They died quietly, while the people they helped murder lay in mass graves or vanished up chimneys decades earlier.

Remembering that fact isn’t about wallowing in guilt or cynicism. It’s about being honest. It’s about cutting through the comforting myth that justice is somehow automatic. And it’s about recognizing just how much effort it really takes to even get partial accountability when a regime turns murder into policy.

Conclusion

The phrase “Never Again” is one of the most overused slogans in modern history. It has been invoked after the Holocaust, after Rwanda, after Srebrenica, after Syria, and in many other contexts. It sounds resolute. It sounds moral.

But if “Never Again” is going to mean anything, it has to sit next to an uncomfortable truth: after the worst crime in modern history, the world prosecuted only a small fraction of the people who made that crime possible. The vast majority of SS personnel and other Nazi perpetrators escaped punishment. That is the real historical record.

We should remember the crimes themselves, and we should remember the courage of survivors who testified and rebuilt their lives. But we should also remember the impunity, because that is what future perpetrators are likely to notice. They watch what really happens, not what we say at memorials.

If we want a world where mass murder is truly risky for those who carry it out—not just morally, but personally and legally—we have to stop telling ourselves comforting stories. We have to look honestly at the example that still looms over the modern era: a regime that murdered millions, followed by a postwar order that punished a few, tolerated many, and quietly absorbed the rest.

That is not the justice we like to imagine. But it’s the truth we need to face.

References

Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.

Bloxham, D. (2001). Genocide on trial: War crimes trials and the formation of Holocaust history and memory. Oxford University Press.

Gellately, R. (2001). Backing Hitler: Consent and coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford University Press.

Pendas, D. O. (2010). The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, history, and the limits of the law. Cambridge University Press.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (n.d.). Bringing Nazi criminals to justice after the Holocaust. Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org

Wiesenthal, S. (1989). Justice, not vengeance. Grove Press.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this post are opinions of the author for educational and commentary purposes only. They are not statements of fact about any individual or organization, and should not be construed as legal, medical, or financial advice. References to public figures and institutions are based on publicly available sources cited in the article. Any resemblance beyond these references is coincidental.