For ‘Mrs. Tilton’, I believe the success of the Nazi community in incorporating a great percentage of the public into their activities made it extremely difficult postwar for the U.S. and Allied governments to functionally punish. Imagine the large memberships in youth organizations such as the Hitler Youth (HJ) or the BDM (Womens League). Should they have been punished too? What about all of the German police force (they were certainely involved with roundups, etc). Indeniably, the victors were fearful of throwing too many in jail, of removing too many elements that could contribute towards a new governmental structure.

The German model of a contorted mix of acceptance and passive attempts to forget made the public at large too consenting (as they had been since the early ’30s to actively seek an improvement. The question is, where does the typical flow of natural transition between two governments end, and something more sinister begin?

my personal view is that the victorious occupiers and the postwar German government should have made voluntary membership in the SS per se punishable (I wouldn’t include conscripted members of the Waffen-SS here). Postwar Germany did rule both the SS and the NSDAP criminal organisations, but did not impose personal criminal liability for belonging to them. They should have done, and the consequences for voluntary SS membership (and for membership in the NSDAP as well) should have included an absolute exclusion from politics (no membership in political parties, no eligibility to public office, no right to vote) as well as forfeiture of all assets and exclusion from economic activities other than menial labour.

But that’s just my own admittedly hard line. Nonetheless, Schleyer was an SS officer with a responsible position in the occupation administration of Prague. It’s not a huge stretch to think it likely he was complicit in war crimes, including murder. (And given his role in Prague — chief of staff to the president of the Central Industry Association of Bohemia and Moravia — it would seem well-nigh impossible he was not complicit in, at minimum, the nazi use of slave labour.) A priority of the new German state ought to have been to try him (and every single person like him) and, assuming a conviction, to have put them away for good. Instead, Schleyer was permitted to rise to the very top of the postwar establishment. That he and people like him prospered in postwar Germany is an indelible stain on the country’s history.

One of the best anecdotes about Schleyer was that he, an ex-SS man, sat in the front ranks of the employers’ association, while some of those on the unions’ side were ex-concentration camp inmates.

But I’m sure it’s not the only place comparable or somewhat comparable things have happened, not by a long way.

Utter nonsense, of course. The RAF’s murder of Schleyer is to be condemned, because murder is always bad and the state must have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Pretty much the only reasons to condemn it, though. The murders of two policemen and his driver, killed during his kidnapping, are much more to be regretted. What’s regrettable (as opposed to condemnable) about Schleyer’s death is that it wasn’t in a prison cell.