e SS guards in shooting prisoners along the way, these evacuations continued until the very end of the war, contributing significantly to the dreadful death toll.
Nor were the inmates of Gestapo and Kripo prisons spared. As Soviet troops overran German positions in the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Reich itself, Security Police officials often slaughtered the remaining prisoners—Jews and non-Jews—before moving west themselves. Often the result of local initiative driven by racial hatred, revenge, or fear, such massacres continued until the last days of the war. There are insufficient records to fully document these killings or to even attempt an estimate of total numbers of victims.
SS Members after World War II
On May 6, 1945, Hitler's successor, Reich President and Admiral Karl Dönitz, formally relieved Himmler of his duties, in accordance with Hitler's orders. Despite his promise to all SS men that he would assume full responsibility for their actions, the former SS chief intended to disappear, donning the uniform of a Secret Field Police and carrying papers in name of Heinrich Hitzinger. On May 20, Soviet troops captured “Hitzinger” and turned him over to the British, to whom Himmler confessed his identity. As his captors attempted a body search, Himmler committed suicide by biting down on a cyanide capsule.
Several other top SS leaders followed Himmler's example, including Odilo Globocnik, the mastermind of Operation "Reinhard.” Others disappeared into Soviet captivity, or into assumed identities in occupied Germany, or by emigrating to the Americas. Adolf Eichmann, who coordinated the deportation of the central and west European Jews to the east for the RSHA, emigrated under false papers to Argentina after the war. Allied authorities sent some SS leaders back to the scenes of their crimes to stand trial and, after conviction, to face execution, as in the case of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who was prosecuted and executed in Poland. In awareness of SS criminal activity, Allied commanders subjected 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.