After World War II, many Nazi leaders, soldiers, and camp guards were prosecuted for crimes and sentenced to life in prison. Are any of them still alive and serving their sentence? SS Hauptsturmführer Hermann Hackmann perhaps? (Wikipedia doesn’t list a date of death, but I’m not sure if that’s because he’s still alive or because his date of death is unknown.)
SS officer Erich Priebke escaped after the war and was convicted only in the 1990s. The Wikipedia article is unclear, but I think he is still in Italian custody, under house arrest rather than in a regular prison. His co-defendant Karl Hass died a few years ago.
Danish SS officer Søren Kam was wanted by Denmark for many years and was just recently arrested in Germany.
Is John Demjanjuk still in prison?
A google search reveals scads of stories about Nazi war criminals still being uncovered, including this one from last summer or this one from December.
Also found this relavant quote from Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal’s wikipedia entry
Yes, I know that many war criminals escaped detection after the war, and have been hunted down ever since. However, I’m more interested in those who were apprehended and tried immediately after the war, and who are still serving a life sentence. I suspect that there may still be such prisoners around. For example Rudolf Hess was 92 when he died (and prematurely at that) in 1987 while serving a life sentence at Spandau; there are plenty of war criminals younger than him who, if they are still alive, would be about Hess’s age now.
None of the people sentenced at the various Nuremberg trials (1946-49) are still imprisoned. Some of those who received life sentences are still alive but have had their sentences commuted or have been released for health reasons.
Just as a follow up… there were approximately 160 people convicted at the various Nuremberg trials. Of those who were not sentenced to death, the majority had their sentences commuted or were released for health reasons during the 1950s.
I’m not positive (it wouldn’t be too hard to check), but I think that other than Hess, the longest prison term served by a Nuremberg convict was Albert Speer, who served 17 years of a 20 year sentence and was released in 1966.
Thanks for the info. Any word on those convicted immediately after the war, but at a non-Nuremburg trial?
Wiki list of living Nazi’s:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_living_Nazis#Known_to_be_alive
There were dozens of concentration camp trials… 1600 were tried at Dachau in 1947, and much smaller numbers – usually 40-60 at a time – were tried at Belsen (1945), Auschwitz (1947), and Ravensbruck (1948). But as I mentioned earlier, most of the convicted war criminals who were imprisoned in Germany were released as part of an amnesty program in the early 1950s.
The Nuremberg prisoners were in a different category because they were held at Spandau Prison, which was controlled by the Allies. Hess died in 1987, Speer and Baldur von Schirach were released in 1966. They were the only Nuremburg convicts still in prison after 1957.
To summarize, if the question is whether there were any Nazi war criminals who were caught and convicted before 1950 who are still in prison – I’m nearly positive that the answer is no, and that the last three to be in captivity are the three men I mentioned above from Spandau Prison.