Probably a lot more could have been done, and should have been done in the 40s and 50s to chase down important Nazis, but I have to agree with OmegaPaladin’s post that hunting for people who, if still alive, have already lived beyond their natural lifespan does NOT seem worthwhile. I also agree with those who have mentioned that the henchmen of Stalin, Pol Pot and others have not been sought after in this way.
The U.S. servicemen who fought in WWII were not fighting to end the final solution — the average G.I. Joe was more interested in killing Japanese than Germans, and the Nazi Final Solution didn’t really begin in earnest until the U.S. had already entered the war. The reality and scope of the Final Solution wasn’t clear until the final months of the war.
If few people in recent years could be interested in preventing CONTEMPORARY genocide, such as the one in Rwanda, then nobody is going to spend time and money hunting for the guilty Rwandans 50 years from now. It would be better to try to prevent current atrocities than to try to “bring to justice” senile and frail elderly Nazis. Every day, criminals kill in cold blood and take the victim’s ATM card to the bank WHILE CCTV CAMERAS RECORD THEIR EVERY MOVE. A lot of people simply do not think ahead, and looking for those who committed crimes 63+ years ago on the theory that it will make other criminals think ahead is foolish self-justification.
The motive for the Nazi-hunters at this point is simply revenge, and I don’t believe that there are “hundreds or thousands” of important Nazis still at large. If you assume that most of the “important Nazis” would have been at least 35 years old in 1945 when the war ended, then those people would be AT LEAST 98 years old by now. Simon Wiesenthal’s group is now going after the small fry. The big fish are all dead by now — some of them were hanged at Nuremberg, and rightly so, and others died peacefully in their beds, but they are ALL DEAD.
