Herbert Hagen

On 13 May 1945, Hagen was captured by the British in Klagenfurt. He was handed by the British to the French occupation forces in November 1946, but was released on 4 March 1948. Because he belonged to the SS and SD, Hagen was sentenced to one and a half years in prison on 5 May 1948, which was considered served due to his time in internment. He managed to convince the court that he had only been active in intelligence analysis and espionage and denied knowing what was happening to those deported. The Law on Exemption from Punishment (amnesty law) of 1954 allowed him to find employment at a Cologne company and start a new career in industry.^[4] On 18 March 1955, in light of new evidence, a military court in Paris found him guilty of being instrumental in the deportation of the Jews from France, he was sentenced (in absentia) to lifelong forced labour.^[2] In 1964 he became managing director of a respected apparatus, equipment and service company in Warstein.^[4]

French lawyer and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, whose own father had been an Auschwitz victim, managed to track him down, alongside two other Nazi war criminals, after years of investigation. In 1980, after 15 months of trial, Herbert Hagen was tried and convicted by the 15th criminal chamber of the Cologne Higher Regional Court and sentenced to twelve years in prison on charges of ordering and administrating the deportation of Jews. During the trial, Klarsfeld, who had amassed thirteen volumes of documents linking the defendants to individual deportations, represented the French victims.^[5] The court learned that Hagen knew about the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews, was a central figure in its implementation and was heavily involved in the deportation of Jews from Occupied France.^[a] It was concluded that during his period in command, 70,790 Jews were sent to concentration camps where at least 35,000 were murdered in the gas chamber.^[2]

Herbert Hagen served only four years of his twelve years sentence in prison before being set free,^[4] he died on 7 August 1999, in Rüthen.^[7]

• Akens (n.d.). "Akens Informationen 33/34, Paul: "Von Judenangelegenheiten hatte er bis dahin keine Ahnung". Akens (in German).
• Bartrop, P.R.; Grimm, E.E. (2019). Perpetrating the Holocaust: Leaders, Enablers, and Collaborators. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-4408-5897-0.
• Graham, Bradley (1980-02-12). "West German Court Sentences three who Sent Jews to Death Camps". Washington Post.
• Megargee, G.P.; White, J. (2018). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, Volume III: Camps and Ghettos under European Regimes Aligned with Nazi Germany. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-253-02386-5.
• Stover, E.; Peskin, V.; Koenig, A. (2016). Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-27805-9.
• Wistrich, R.S. (2013). Who's Who in Nazi Germany. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-136-41381-0.