Beasts. Czechoslovakia and the Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals

The extent of war crimes committed by Nazi Germany during the Second World War and the domestic collaborationists in occupied Czechoslovakia reached unprecedented numbers and variability. The existing legal systems of the European countries were not prepared for the mass murders and the variety of their execution. Only the defeat of the Nazis and return to the legal states allowed investigation of the crimes and conviction of their perpetrators. The mass murders of civilian population, children, pregnant women, the sick and disabled, but also the prisoners, wounded or just the opponents of the regime provoked a legitimate demand to punish all war criminals. The estimated overall losses in Czechoslovakia are between 340 and 370 thousand people where only a minimum died in armed fight as the combatants. 195 thousand people were directly murdered or tortured to death in concentration camps and 118 thousand died because of their ethnic origin. Another almost 75 thousand people returned with seriously damaged health. International pacts regarding prosecution and punishment of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity expressed the decision of the governments to take all the perpetrators before competent courts and rightfully punish them.
From the early 1960s, criminal prosecution of Nazi war criminals became an important political and diplomatic tool of the Eastern Bloc countries in their ideological fight against the West German republic. The communist regime based its justification on the eradication of Nazism not only in the area of its influence. The Czechoslovak Government Commission for the Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals became an inter-departmental institution, which connected criminal investigators, lawyers and politicians with the survivors, bereaved persons, historians and journalists. The Commission became an intersection of diverse interests, which were to be united and utilized in a broad range of objectives where justice played only one of the roles. The unpunished perpetrators of the Nazi and war crimes were elevated to the position of the main themes in the mutual relations between Czechoslovakia, Austria, East Germany and in particular West Germany, which affected the mutual relations until the new millennium.