In the Auschwitz trial : When Kurt Schrimm , the director of the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, announced in 2013 the prosecution of 40 former Auschwitz guards for the crime of necessary collaboration in the massacre of the Third Reich, beginning the last attempt in Germany to judge those responsible alive for the crimes committed during the period of the Nazi party. The investigation is still ongoing today and from time to time it continues to make headlines: 'Former ex-Nazi detained in Germany' or 'A 90-year-old former Auschwitz guard sentenced in Germany'.
Thus, even after the 70 years of the liberation of the extermination camp, the German authorities still have not closed the bloodiest chapter in their history, a slab that has weighed on the future of their nation for three generations. Between those 70 years, Germany has gone through the occupation of the victorious powers of the Second World War, Great Britain, the USA and the USSR, the division of its territory into two states: the Federal Republic -FRG-- and the Republic Democratic --RDA--, the subsequent fall of the wall in 1989 and the reunification.
But over the crucial events, the shadow of Auschwitz and the Holocaust have accompanied society, gradually portrayed in thousands of books, movies, novels, memoirs and experiences of the horror of extermination. Why has it taken Germany so long to put an end to it then? The first trial against those who were responsible for the most effective Nazi death camp in terms of mass murder occurred in 1948 in Poland, a year before the person responsible for prosecuting war criminals, Kurt Schrimm .