Random Ruthless Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped Justice (14 items)

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  (#4) Hermann Stieve

  • Dec. at 66 (1886-1952)

  Hermann Stieve was a German physician and anatomist who became interested in studying the effects of extreme stress and terror on the female reproductive system. Like many German doctors, Stieve worked closely with the Nazi regime to obtain the cadavers of executed victims of the Reich. Based in Berlin, he got his "material," as he referred to it, from Plötzensee Prison, the local execution chamber for convicted political criminals and dissidents.

  Following dissection, Stieve typically had the bodies cremated and the ashes discarded, despite the frantic attempt by relatives to locate the remains for proper burial. When officials began executing victims at night, Stieve successfully convinced prison authorities to perform executions during the day so he could complete his dissection process more efficiently.

  Only one of his subjects was ever returned to relatives, the ashes of Mildred Harnack, an American related to one of Stieve's students and the only victim of Stieve's to receive any semblance of a proper burial. Stieve was never sanctioned for his behavior; in fact, like many other Nazi physicians, he was honored for work completed in his field before he perished of a stroke in 1952.
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  (#11) Artur Axmann

  • Dec. at 83 (1913-1996)

  Artur Axmann was the head of the Hitler Youth from 1940 until 1945. Axmann actively organized fighting units comprised of Hitler Youth during WWII. In the last desperate days, he conscripted children, both boys and girls, as young as 8 years old. Axmann was present in the bunker when Hitler shot himself, extricated the revolver he used, and successfully escaped to the West. After burying the weapon in a Berlin park, he avoided capture until December 1945.

  Placed on trial in 1949, he received a 39-month sentence that was commuted to time served. Aside from a fine from West Germany in 1958, he received no additional punishment. He was buried in a secret location, lest his grave become a neo-Nazi shrine.
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  (#9) Kurt Franz

  • Dec. at 84 (1914-1998)

  Kurt Franz was an SS officer and early participant in the Nazi T4 euthanasia program and was ultimately ordered into the Nazi extermination camp apparatus. Initially posted to Belzec, Franz was transferred to Treblinka, where he initially supervised the unloading of transports and the extermination process. He was eventually promoted to camp commandant in August 1943. For his rather boyish-looking face, Franz was nicknamed "Lalke" ("doll" in Yiddish), but this had no bearing on his behavior. He would indiscriminately set his huge St. Bernard on prisoners and then laughingly shoot them if they survived the dog's mauling.

  When he was finally arrested in 1959, his home contained a photo album from Treblinka entitled "Beautiful Years." In 1965, he was convicted in Germany of the deaths of over 300,000 people, but was eventually freed for "health reasons." He passed at age 84 as a free man in Wuppertal, Germany.
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  (#5) Joachim Peiper

  • Dec. at 61 (1915-1976)

  Colonel Joachim Peiper was an officer in the Waffen-SS during WWII. He fought on both the Eastern and Western Fronts and was awarded the Knight's Cross to recognize extreme battlefield bravery. However, following Germany's surrender, Peiper was prosecuted for the massacre of captured American soldiers at Malmedy, Belgium. He and 42 other defendants were convicted and sentenced to death. But the controversy over the prosecution and numerous death sentences caused an uproar in Germany and within the American government, which launched an investigation into possible torture.

  Ultimately, all of the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment and then time served. Peiper was released after serving almost 12 years in prison. Despite allegations of similar behavior on the Eastern Front and Italy, Peiper escaped further official justice. On Bastille Day 1976, his attempt to live quietly in rural France came to an end when he was shot to death and his home was firebombed by outraged neighbors who discovered his true identity.
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  (#2) Aribert Heim

  • Dec. at 78 (1914-1992)

  Nazi war criminal and Austrian doctor Aribert Heim was known as "Dr. Death" because of his horrific medical experiments on Jews at the Mauthausen concentration camp during WWII. He was captured by US soldiers in 1945, but was later released.

  One day in 1962, after learning the police were waiting for him at his home, he vanished. Many believe Heim lived in Egypt under an assumed name (Tarek Farid Hussein). The New York Times reported that he perished of cancer in Cairo in 1992.
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  (#6) Heinz Lammerding

  • Dec. at 66 (1905-1971)

  Heinz Lammerding was a Waffen-SS brigadier general and commander of the SS "Das Reich" division, which was stationed in central France on D-Day, June 6, 1944. In conjunction with the Allied invasion, French resistance began attacking German troops throughout the French countryside.

  After a German officer was captured by the French, Lammerding ordered that reprisals be carried out in response. Over 200 civilian residents of Tulle were either hanged or deported to their deaths in Germany as slave laborers. At Oradour, SS troops brutally wiped out over 600 more civilians. The town was then partially destroyed.

  Following WWII, Charles de Gaulle ordered that the ruins of Oradour be permanently preserved as a symbol of Nazi barbarism. Lammerding was convicted in absentia by a French court and sentenced to death in 1953, but first the British, and then the Germans, refused to extradite him. He built a successful engineering business and prospered openly in Dusseldorf until his demise from cancer in 1971 at age 66.

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