David Nicholas Wilkinson’s epic investigation into the Nazis who escaped a postwar reckoning shows the difficulty of prosecuting this technocratic atrocity
Here is an epic documentary investigation from director David Nicholas Wilkinson into something that could be called the great unpunishment: after the second world war, though many chief perpetrators of the Nazi
Holocaust were convicted, the vast majority went free. The
American prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz reflects on the fact the number of Nuremberg defendants was effectively limited by the courtroom’s size.
This was not merely a matter of minor camp guards or low-ranking officers, but serious politicians, civil servants and public figures. There was postwar exhaustion; collaborators all over Europe did not care to rake the subject up. With the cold war, the real enemy was felt to be the Soviet Union and a leniently treated and rehabilitated
Germany (though divided) was needed as a bulwark against the communists. (Wilkinson doesn’t reflect on the point, but the establishment of the state of Israel was perhaps treated by many as an alibi for inaction.) Later, there was also a persistent ruling-class distaste for the Nazi hunters in the 1980s and 90s: Wilkinson and Philip Rubenstein, former director of the All-Party Parliamentary War Crimes Group, read aloud some very unfortunate leading articles from the Times and the Telegraph on this theme, unsubtly contrasting supposed Old Testament vengefulness with New Testament compassion.