During the years after the Second World War, the nations of the victors and the vanquished concentrated on rebuilding their economic and political infrastructures. They did too little to bring the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust and their accomplices to account. In large part, regrets for the murder of some six million Jews were crocodile tears. Europe continues to suffer today from this failure to rebuild the moral foundations of our civilisation.

 
Lodz ghetto, 1942: Toepfer profited from trade with Nazi administrators, seen here tormenting a Jewish victim (BPK)

This failure is a tragedy for the survivors, who now are in the final years of their lives and see a world and a European continent in which anti-Semitism is very much alive. According to a poll published in March 2011 by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, 49 per cent of respondents in Germany agreed with the statement that "Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era." In Hungary, Poland and Portugal, the percentage was even higher.

All the peoples of the Continent, especially the communities of the perpetrators, are the losers from such feelings. Without justice for the victims of the Holocaust there is little hope for a sustainable ethical and legal order. Declarations such as the European Convention on Human Rights will mean very little if they are a facade for the reality that political, economic and religious leaders of the European Continent connived at allowing most of the mass murderers of the Jews to escape scot free.

On May 5, 1949, the British authorities put their signatures to the Statute of the Council of Europe with its public commitment to justice and the rule of law. At that very time, they were privately protecting high-level Nazis because they were useful as anti-Soviet spies.

 The price for bringing West Germany into the family of democratic nations was to grant an early release to those convicted of butchery. The election of Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor depended on his success in persuading the US and the UK to agree to the large-scale rehabilitation of generals, senior functionaries, businessmen, bankers, academics and doctors who had been active in the service of Hitler.

So the war crimes trials of Nazis were effectively abandoned under the pressures of the Cold War. Tom Bower has documented this in his devastating book Blind Eye to Murder.