Berlin Trip : Topography of Terror Museum (Josef “Sepp” Dietrich and other War Criminals)

This museum was large in size and I didn’t get a chance to read everything, although I did my best to try in a way that my friend Susanna would have been proud of. This is a photo of the war criminal Josef “Sepp” Dietrich (1892-1966), who was an early member of the Nazi Party and he served as Hitler’s bodyguard before going on to command numerous SS units. He’s the one on the left and he was a war criminal who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1946 for his crimes against humanity, but which was reduced to 25 years in 1951 and they then decided to just let him out in 1955. He never repented for his crimes and bands of people who meet up to reminiscence happily about ‘the good old days’ of the Nazis. He was arrested for more crimes in 1956 and then faced a further three years in prison, but he still had many supporters as 6,000 former SS men turned up to his funeral. There are rumours in places on-line that this man received a state funeral, but he absolutely didn’t as he was one of the worst war criminals the country had seen.

An organisation called HIAG (Mutual Aid Association of Former Waffen-SS Members) was established to try and advocate for former SS officers, suggesting that they had made military achievements and were soldiers and not war criminals. Meetings of former officers were common and the museum tackles this as one of the challenging realities in Germany. There’s an interesting page on Wikipedia about how the German authorities dealt with this situation in the post-war period.