Introduction: The Late Prosecution of Nazi Crimes

Stretching over almost 80 years, the prosecution of Nazi crimes by the German judiciary will undoubtedly be remembered with ambivalence. While proceedings such as the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial (1958) and the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963–1965) stand as milestones on Germany’s path to addressing the horrors of its past, an overwhelming number of perpetrators received only lenient sentences or escaped punishment altogether. While the necessary legal preconditions to at least carry on with the prosecution of first-degree murder as defined in Section 211 of the German Criminal Code were created in 1979 with the crime’s exclusion from the statute of limitations, the German judiciary’s efforts in this regard remained quite limited—in no small measure as a result of the high standard of proof it had previously imposed on itself.