The pursuit of Nazi collaborators refers to the post-World War II pursuit and apprehension of individuals who were not citizens of the Third Reich at the outbreak of World War II but collaborated with the Nazi regime during the war. Hence, this article does not cover former members of the NSDAP and their fates after the war.
Landsberg Prison is a prison in the town of Landsberg am Lech in the southwest of the German state of Bavaria, about 65 kilometres (40 mi) west-southwest of Munich and 35 kilometres (22 mi) south of Augsburg. It is best known as the prison where Adolf Hitler was held in 1924, after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, and where he dictated his memoirs Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess.
The Einsatzgruppen trial was the ninth of the twelve trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity that the US authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II. These twelve trials were all held before US military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal. They took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The twelve US trials are collectively known as the "Subsequent Nuremberg trials" or, more formally, as the "Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals" (NMT).
The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.
Capital punishment in Denmark was abolished in 1933, with no death sentences having been carried out since 1892, but restored from 1945 to 1950 in order to execute Nazi collaborators. Capital punishment for most instances of war crimes was abolished in 1978. The last execution was carried out in June 1950.
A kapo was one of prisoner functionaries, a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Capital punishment is forbidden by the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms of the Czech Republic and is simultaneously prohibited by international legal obligations arising from the Czech Republic's membership of both the Council of Europe and the European Union.
Capital punishment in Germany has been abolished for all crimes, and is now explicitly prohibited by the constitution. It was abolished in West Germany in 1949, in the Saarland in 1956, and East Germany in 1987. The last person executed in Germany was the East German Werner Teske, who was executed at Leipzig Prison in 1981.
The legal purge in Norway after World War II took place between May 1945 and August 1948 against anyone who was found to have collaborated with the German occupation of the country. Several thousand Norwegians and foreign citizens were tried and convicted for crimes committed in Scandinavia during World War II. However, the scope, legal basis, and fairness of these trials has since been a matter of some debate. A total of 40 people—including Vidkun Quisling, the self-proclaimed and Nazi-supported Minister President of Norway during the occupation—were executed after capital punishment was reinstated in Norway. Thirty-seven of those executed were executed under Norwegian law, while the other three were executed under Allied military law.
The épuration légale was the wave of official trials that followed the Liberation of France and the fall of the Vichy regime. The trials were largely conducted from 1944 to 1949, with subsequent legal action continuing for decades afterward.
A number of war crimes trials were held during the Soviet occupation of Estonia (1944–1991). The best-known trial was brought in 1961, by the Soviet authorities against local collaborators who had participated in the Holocaust during the German occupation (1941–1944). The accused were charged with murdering up to 5,000 German and Czechoslovakian Jews and Romani people near the Jägala concentration camp in 1942–1943. The public trial by the Supreme Court of the Estonian SSR was held in the auditorium of the Navy Officers Club in Tallinn and attended by a mass audience. All three defendants were convicted and sentenced to death, one in absentia. The two defendants present for the trial were executed shortly after. The third defendant, Ain-Ervin Mere, was not available for execution.
The Stutthof trials were a series of war crime tribunals held in postwar Poland for the prosecution of Stutthof concentration camp staff and officials, responsible for the murder of up to 85,000 prisoners during the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany in World War II. None of the Stutthof commandants were ever tried in Poland. SS-Sturmbannführer Max Pauly was put on trial by a British military court in Germany but not for the crimes committed at Stutthof; only as the commandant of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg. Nevertheless, Pauly was executed in 1946.
Capital punishment in Lithuania was ruled unconstitutional and abolished for all crimes on 9 December 1998. Lithuania is a member of the Council of Europe and has signed and ratified Protocol 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights on complete abolition of death penalty. From March 1990 to December 1998, Lithuania executed seven people, all men. The last execution in the country occurred in July 1995, when Lithuanian mafia boss Boris Dekanidze was executed.
Andries Jan Pieters was a Dutch war criminal and, together with Artur Albrecht, was one of the last two people to be executed in the Netherlands. Pieters served as a volunteer for Nazi Germany on the Eastern Front. When he was wounded he returned to the Netherlands and in the final months of World War II he led a SS commando in the Netherlands, which tortured and executed resistance members and others.
The Schio massacre was a mass prisoner killing carried out by former Italian partisans of the Garibaldi Brigade and officers of the Auxiliary Partisan Police in the city jail of Schio on the night of 6–7 July 1945. Of the 54 people who were killed, only 27 of them were fascist supporters or had collaborated with the Germans. The massacre was investigated by the Allies and two trials with convictions followed.
The Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law is a 1950 Israeli law passed by the First Knesset that provides a legal framework for the prosecution of crimes against Jews and other persecuted people committed in Nazi Germany, German-occupied Europe, or territory under the control of another Axis power between 1933 and 1945. The law's primary target was Jewish Holocaust survivors alleged to have collaborated with the Nazis, in particular prisoner functionaries ("kapos") and the Jewish Ghetto Police. It was motivated by the anger of survivors against perceived collaborators and a desire to "purify" the community.
The French Permanent Military Tribunal in Saigon, also known as Saigon Trials was a war crimes tribunal which held 39 separate trials against suspected Japanese war criminals between October 1946 and March 1950. Its scope was limited to war crimes committed against the French population of French Indochina after the Japanese coup d'état in French Indochina. Shifts in French foreign policy during the Cold War and disruptions caused by the First Indochina War caused the number of convictions to dwindle as judges opted to discontinue criminal charges against the defendants or commuted their sentences.
Capital punishment is a legal penalty in Cameroon. However, the country not carried out any official executions since 1997, making it de facto abolitionist, since it also has a moratorium.
