re: #11 Sergey Romanov

Thanks for your explanation. It seems to me that with the exception of a few big fish, Nazi Germany and its collaborators got away with the Holocaust. All the tattle-tail neighbors, the train logistics planners, the war profiteer corporations, and most SS vets went back to normal life and some are collecting pensions to this day. Why lock up your neighbors and sons when they can get back to work? More trials means more resources being spent, more crimes getting revealed that hurt national pride and the rebuilding effort, and politicians not getting reelected.

What’s particularly horrifying about this is the lesson it conveys - that once a society commits to genocide, only a few top dogs will get punished, and everyone else who participated peripherally will be OK. All the cog needs to do is keep doing his lowly work in the machine, and then since there are so many cogs, there’s safety in numbers. This lowers the risk for future low-mid level perpetrators.

Add to that a relatively small reparations deal with Israel (in comparison to the amount stolen) to calm the German national conscience, and you have a society ready to rebuild.