page_title: Responsibility for the Holocaust
section_title: Flight from justice and other obfuscations
hierarchical_section_title: Responsibility for the Holocaust / Legal proceedings against Nazis / Flight from justice and other obfuscations
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Александр Лилейкис
context_page_description: Responsibility for the Holocaust is the subject of an ongoing historical debate that has spanned several decades. The debate about the origins of the Holocaust is known as functionalism versus intentionalism. Intentionalists such as Lucy Dawidowicz argue that Adolf Hitler planned the extermination of the Jewish people as early as 1918, and personally oversaw its execution. However, functionalists such as Raul Hilberg argue that the extermination plans evolved in stages, as a result of initiatives which were taken by bureaucrats in response to other policy failures. To a large degree, the debate has been settled because historians have conceded that both positions have merit.
  The primary responsibility for the Holocaust rests on Hitler and the Nazi Party leadership, but operations to persecute Jews, Gypsies, and others were also perpetrated by the Schutzstaffel, the Wehrmacht, and ordinary German citizens as well as by collaborationist members of various European governments, including their soldiers and civilians.
context_section_description: Some former Nazis escaped any charges. For example, Reinhard Gehlen, a former intelligence officer of the Wehrmacht, managed to turn around and work for the CIA, and created what informally became known as the Gehlen Organization. He recruited ex–intelligence-officers of the Wehrmacht and Nazis from the SS and SD to work for him. On 1 April 1956, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND; the German intelligence agency) was created from the Gehlen Organization, and transferred to the West German government. Reinhard Gehlen became President of the BND and remained its head until 1968.
  Klaus Barbie, known as "the Butcher of Lyon" for his role at the head of the Gestapo, was protected from 1945 to 1955 by MI5 and the CIA, before fleeing to South America where he had a hand in Luis García Meza Tejada's 1980 Cocaine Coup in Bolivia. Barbie was finally arrested in 1983 and sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity in 1987.
caption: Aleksandras Lileikis was involved in the murder of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania. He later worked for the CIA. [ac]
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