U.S. Army Prosecutor Reports on Leniency Policy Toward Nazis Who Annihilated Jews

Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor, chief U.S. Army prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, admitted today that the denazification program in Germany has failed and that Nazi criminals who exterminated millions of Jews have not been punished.

He reported today to the Secretary of the Army that there is in Germany “an alarming resurgence of authoritarianism.” The prevailing trend and climate of political opinion in Germany makes it “quite unlikely” that the German authorities will eagerly pursue the task of bringing Nazis to justice, he stated.

“But if the situation in Germany is indeed such that the Germans will not bring to trial men such as those who were deeply implicated in the extermination of European Jewry, the sooner the fact is apparent and generally understood, the better it will be for all concerned,” Gen. Taylor emphasized in his report. “Any attempt to softpedal. Nurnberg will inevitably play into the hands of those Germans who do not want a democratic Germany,” he said.

Nazi officials “who were clearly connected with the program for extermination of Jews known as the ‘final solution of the Jewish problem,'” were eliminated from the list of Nazis to be persecuted, Gen. Taylor pointed out. He said that owing to changes in the international situation between East and West many Nazis who were to be sent to Eastern European countries for trial “have never been brought to trial at all.”