The question who is a Nazi is often a dark riddle

CHAPTER XXI Reckonings With the Past

Denazification
"The question who is a Nazi is often a dark riddle," Third Army G-5 reported more than a month after V-E Day, adding, "The question what is a Nazi is also not easy to answer."

It was on the gray fringes of denazification that the question of who and what were Nazis vexed military government, as much after V-E Day as when the first municipal appointments were made around Aachen nine months before. The cases of Reuters and Jansen at Wuerselen and Ragh and Deutzmann at Stolberg were being repeated all over the U.S. zone.

War Crimes Trials

The war crimes trials that were to be conducted under Army auspices in Germany and would last for four years began in early April 1945 in the small Rhineland city of Duren, twenty miles east of Aachen.

Before the international trials began, JCS 1023/10, dated 8 July 1945 but apparently not issued until September, assigned to USFET, the responsibility for trying lesser offenders (all those not tried at Nuremburg) in all four categories of the London Agreement for crimes, committed since 30 January 1933, including racial and religious persecution. In December, Control Council Law No. 10 made the London Agreement's provisions the uniform legal basis for prosecution of war criminals and similar offenders in the four zones and authorized the zone authorities also to try any major criminals not brought before the bar at Nuremberg.

JCS 1023/10, in particular, and Control Council Law No. 10 laid a potentially mountainous new case load on the War Crimes Group. To investigate atrocities and crimes against humanity back to 30 January 1933 alone would probably have required a new organizational effort as least as extensive as that applied to war crimes since 1944; and trying the members of criminal organizations evoked a statistical nightmare. The Theater Judge Advocate, using 100,000 as the approximate number of persons in internment camps and assuming a three judge panel would take only one hour to try each person, figured that trying all the cases would take 375 judges four months. The OMGUS Denazification Policy Board, taking into account the SS, most of whom were held as prisoners of war, and the SA, the party storm troopers of whom only the leadership had so far been arrested, pointed out that the number to be tried might well be 500,000 rather than 100,000.

After two months of often agonizing study in all offices concerned, talks in early December between USFET representatives and the Office, Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality (Justice Jackson's office), resulted in one conclusion, namely, "that literal compliance with JCS 1023/10 is in practice out of the question."

They therefore produced a plan for compliance as far as it was feasible. The USFET War Crimes Group would retain responsibility for the kinds of trials it was conducting, that is, war crimes and concentration camps. The other atrocities since 30 January 1933 would be turned over to German courts as a "test of German regeneration." Jackson's office would prepare and, after the international trials, conduct the cases against the major offenders whom the International Military Tribunal did not try and against the members of criminal organizations. Although the division of responsibility reduced the Army's direct share to a fraction of what it might have been under JCS 1023/10, it was still large and would in the end constitute the majority of the cases actually tried. As of January 1946, the War Crimes Group had referred 81 cases to trial and had 2,438 war crimes and 131 mass atrocity (concentration camp) cases on the docket.