The first of the Auschwitz commanders who was sentenced to death in 1947, and hanged at the gates of the same camp
Then, it was the Polish authorities who tried forty who were responsible, because it was a field on their territory. Among them was one of the camp commanders, Arthur
Liebehenschel , as well as bosses, middle managers, and guards were death sentenced or were half or life imprisoned . The most significant of the Auschwitz commanders , Rudolf Hoss , was tried and sentenced to death a year earlier, in 1947, and hanged at the gates of the same camp. In 1945, the allies had tried in Nuremberg , the main Nazi leaders captured alive after the collapse of the Third Reich, but both the Nuremberg and Auschwitz trials , or those of Bergen- Belsen and Dachau , were carried out by the countries that had occupied their territory, not by the Germans.
After the occupation ended, during the harsh post-war period and the reconstruction of the country, in the two new states, the FRG and the GDR -a satellite government of the USSR- the persecution at the beginning of the 50s practically stopped. The reasons were diverse, on the one hand a new world order, polarized between the USSR and Western democracies, had followed the collapse of the Nazis. The US was no longer interested in the past and West Germany was immersed in the "economic miracle" of the 1950s. The war was over, the former Nazi leaders had been condemned and the German people, as a whole, did not consider themselves complicit in the massacre: those who remained alive and had not been captured by the victors had, in any case, continued , orders and therefore were not responsible. During the post-war years it had been necessary to fabricate an innocuous version of one's biography, in which any unpleasant events were carefully removed, a biography fit for a social gathering.