Some of the names are unfamiliar; some are vaguely familiar, but we don’t necessarily know off the top of our heads what the person did. And some are infamous.
Nazi leadership in 1930 in Bad Elster. Front row l. to r.; Wilhelm Frick, Adolf Hitler, Fritz von Epp, Hermann Goering. Back row; Heinrich Himmler, Martin Mutschmann, Otto Strasser, Joseph Goebbels, Julius Schaub
Wilhelm Frick was responsible for many of the laws that consolidated the Nazi regime. Shortly after the passage of the Enabling Act, Frick helped create a law taking power from individual state governments in Germany, thus federalizing power under Hitler. This accomplished, Frick played an important role in the racial policy of Nazi Germany, helping to create laws against German Jewish. For all this, he was determined enormously responsible for the existence of concentration camps and was hung.
Fritz von Epp abolished the government of Bavaria on Hitler’s and Frick’s orders and set up a Nazi government. He died of natural causes while in Allied custody.
Martin Mutschmann was the Nazi governor of Saxon and was shot by the Russians in Moscow in 1947.
Julius Schaub was chief aide and adjutant and was responsible for destroying all of Hitler’s personal belongings and papers. He died in Munich in 1967.
Otto Strasser is something of an anomaly in this picture. He considered himself a leftist Nazi, and lacked the virulent anti-Semitism of the rest of the group. Hitler expelled him from the Nazi Party, and he helped form the Black Front, an attempt to split the Nazi Party. He spent the war outside of German, eventually settling in Canada. Goebbels declared that Strasser was the Nazis’ “Public Enemy Number One” and put a price of $500,000 on his head. He returned to Germany in the fifties and died in Munich in 1974, all the while calling for a renewed Nazi party.
Those are the men we don’t know. The other four are arguably among the most evilly influential men of the twentieth century, responsible for the deaths of millions upon millions upon millions. Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels constituted the very upper echelon of the Nazi party, and as such, are responsible for the Second World War, the Holocaust, and in a very real way, the Cold War. And not a single one of them faced justice of any kind. All four committed suicide, Hitler and Goebbels killing themselves (and their wives, and in Goebbels’s case, children) before the fall of Berlin, and Goering and Himmler committing suicide after their capture.
Yet the past threatens to become our future as well. Gudrun Burwitz, daughter of Himmler, is an unrepentant neo-Nazi and works hard for years to help the remaining war criminals escape justice. It’s people like that who feel that Hitler didn’t go far enough, mourn the fact that Jews still exist, and cheer at the thought of Iran following through with its threat against Israel. “Have we learned nothing?” is the only thing that comes to mind in situations like that.