ted all SS personnel in occupied Germany to automatic arrest.
With Himmler and Heydrich dead, the victorious Allies selected Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich's successor as chief of the RSHA, to represent the SS and all of its crimes at the trial of the major war criminals in Nuremberg, which opened in November 1945. The tribunal prosecutors also indicted and convicted the SS and the Gestapo-SD collectively as criminal organizations. Leaders of three key SS organizations—the concentration camp administration, the Einsatzgruppen, and the Himmler's Reich Commissariat for Strengthening German Racial Stock—were tried in three subsequent Nuremberg trials under the auspices of the International Military Tribunal.
Each of the victorious Allied powers and each of the governments reconstituted after liberation from German occupation tried hundreds of mid-level and lower-level SS officials. Though members of the SS continued to stand in defendant's docks in the Federal Republic of Germany and elsewhere after the end of World War II—even up to the present day—the vast majority of SS and police were never called to account for their crimes.