Between prosecution and integration

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Few of the 15 people attending the Wannsee Conference ever had to answer for their actions in court. Some died during the war. Eberhardt Schöngarth was sentenced to death soon after the war, though the sentence was not related to his role in the Holocaust. Josef Bühler was extradited to Poland and tried for crimes he committed there. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1948.

Six of the remaining participants at the meeting in Wannsee were interrogated during the Nuremberg Trials. In those trials, only Hofmann and Stuckart were accused and sentenced, though participation at the meeting only played a role in Stuckart’s case. Moreover, during the trial Stuckart successfully attempted to portray his attitude in the so-called ‘Mischling question’ as trying to restrict the circle of victims. His comparatively short term of imprisonment of just under four years was deemed to have been served by his time in Allied custody since May 1945. After the Nuremberg Trials, a denazification tribunal in Hanover classified him as a ‘follower’, and merely imposed a fine of 500 Deutschmarks. Later, efforts were made to bring him to another denazification trial, but Stuckart was killed in a traffic accident before a final, legally binding decision could be reached.

Otto Hofmann, sentenced in Nuremberg to 25 years in prison, was pardoned after just a few years. From the 1950s, Gerhard Klopfer and Georg Leibbrandt lived a normal civilian life in West Germany. The criminal proceedings against them were suspended and the cases dropped. All three of them – Hofmann, Klopfer and Leibbrandt – lived into the 1980s.

Many of those persecuted had to wait for years, sometimes decades, to receive a small sum in compensation, while in some cases the relatives of those taking part in the meeting at Wannsee enjoyed lavish pensions.