Georg Konrad Morgen was able to secure convictions against multiple members of the SS for mistreating prisoners

This is an amazing story by itself, but it also reveals something that i knew but most fail to understand.  Those extermination camps were a state secret and were kept that way.  That Georg had to actually use his position to inspect one  of them shows as much.  This was not public knowledge.

In the end he did his job which now included building safer cases against the worst offenders.

It turns out that he was very successful.  This also meant that all the perps after the war could not skate away at all.  He had the work done.
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Georg Konrad Morgen was able to secure convictions against multiple members of the SS for mistreating prisoners, and even sought an indictment of Adolf Eichmann. How was he able to do this without being imprisoned or executed?3

You see, Morgen was a crafty fellow.

Before the war began, Morgen was a graduate of the Hague Academy and a judge in Stettin, but in 1939 he was dismissed because of one of his decisions in a case connected to the Hitlerjugend. No longer a judge, Morgen enlisted in the Waffen-SS, and served as a soldier in France, before someone sufficiently high up realized ‘hold on, guys, we have a graduate of the Hague Academy and we’re sending him to the frontline?’

Thus, Morgen returned to practicing law - this time as an SS judge. The SS as an organization existed separate from German civilian law, just like the military: it had its own courts and legal apparatus.

Now settled in Krakow, Morgen began to hunt for corruption that had already started to grow rampant in the SS, and soon found a very severe case indeed. Everything revolved around Apfelbaum, a major Jewish-owned fur company whose owner had fled Poland after the German invasion and left the company in the hands of his mistress, the daughter of a German and a Russian emigre.

Jaroslawa Mirowska, said mistress, had then proceeded to get involved romantically with a Waffen-SS cavalry officer, Albert Fassbender, who brought the commander of his brigade, Hermann Fegelein into a plot the three of them concocted to pretty much embezzle everything that the company owned.

But they didn’t expect Morgen. The man hunted the trail like a bloodhound, and eventually went before Himmler with not one but two secrets: not only was this trio embezzling confiscated state property, but also Mirowska, who as a declared volksdeutsche and Fassbender’s mistress had been such a common sight among the SS, was not merely wholly Polish but also almost certainly a spy for the Polish underground.

It, however, didn’t go as planned. Fegelein was one of the Reichsführer’s favorites, and Himmler completely buried the whole affair, and Morgen was sent again to the frontline as part of the Wiking division.

But while Morgen spent several brutal months in the East, Himmler began to realize just how severe corruption in the SS system was becoming, especially with regards to confiscated properties, and eventually had Morgen recalled from the front and basically told him to dig out corruption.

And he dug- not merely for corruption, but also for other illegal activities, One of his first big catchs was Buchenwald’s former commandant, Karl-Otto Koch, which he began to investigate after Josias Erbprinz zu Waldeck und Pyrmont, a ranking SS and Police general began to find evidence that Koch had prisoners murdered in Buchenwald.

Buchenwald was a concentration camp: while conditions in it were abysmal, and prisoners dying from such conditions were ‘acceptable’(legally speaking), murdering them wasn’t: indeed, after an eight month pursuit, Morgen would eventually nail Koch on a number of murder and corruption charges, leading to the man being executed in the same camp he once commanded one week before American forces captured the camp grounds.

Now, so far, Morgen is more or less doing his job. But things are about to change.

Morgen in his SS uniform, earlier in the war- wearing the insignia of a mere SS-Oberscharführer. By the time the following events happen, Morgen was an SS-Sturmbannführer: equivalent to Major.

Morgen wouldn’t actually have managed to peer behind the curtain, if not for a lucky turn of events that saw a small package of unusual weight confiscated in military mail and brought to his attention. The package contained three lumps of crudely smelted together dental gold, weighing several kilograms in total.

That dead prisoners would have any gold fillings removed and sent back to the Reichsbank wasn’t a secret-though this package was headed for a private address, so, clearly the result of someone embezzling gold. With that evidence, Morgen could just have the Kriminalpolizei arrest the offending thief, and pat himself on the back for another corruption case cleared.

But this amount of gold meant at least several thousand deaths even if everyone had a filling, and realistically, a couple orders of magnitude more than ‘several thousand’. Far beyond accident, poor conditions, or even a typhus outbreak.

Morgen decided to investigate, and led a special commission to Auschwitz camp network, touring the entire camp.

What he found was horrifying.

Morgen had been aware of the simple existence of concentration camps, of course, but these constructs, the extermination camps, were a whole new thing. Even as a high-ranking SS judge he’d been, as many were, unaware of it. At first, he tried to take that to his superiors, including chief of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller, only to realize this had official backing. Official backing that went very, very far.

He might’ve had Himmler’s personal backing to investigate corruption in the SS, but even that backing had its limits. Even that backing wouldn’t let him arrest people for doing official state business, and given this, as far as he could tell, probably traced back to the Reichsführer himself, if he were to try he’d certainly lose that backing very quickly and wouldn’t be lucky enough to just be sent to the East.

So, Morgen got crafty. He couldn’t nail these people for the extermination he’d so recently learned of… but he could nail them, those involved in extermination or concentration camps, on a whole number of other crimes. And so, he fell on the trail like a bloodhound.

Koch wouldn’t be Morgen’s only target. His list included:

• Hermann Florstedt, Commandant of Majdanek, charged with corruption and executed,
• Amon Göth, Commandant of Plaszow, charged with corruption, violation of regulations regarding treatment of prisoners and failure to provide adequate food to inmates, ruled insane by medical team and placed in an SS mental health institution,
• Karl Küntsler, Commandant of Flossenbürg, charged with drunkenness and debauchery, dismissed from his post,
• Maximilian Grabner, Auschwitz’s Gestapo chief, charged with corruption and murder, dismissed from his post,
• Adam Grünewald, Commandant of Herzogenbusch, charged with maltreatment of prisoners and excess cruelty, sentenced to 15 years in prison, later posted to a penal unit and died there,
• Gerhard Palitzsch, Auschwitz personnel, charged with theft and Rassenschande, sentenced to death, sentence commuted to penal service and expelled from the SS,
• Hans Aumeier, Auschwitz economic officer, charged with corruption and dismissed from his post,
• Waldemar Hoven, Buchenwald physician, charged with murder of an SS officer who was a witness in one of Morgen’s investigations, sentenced to death, released in 1945 because of a severe shortage of doctors,
• Alexander Piorkowski, Commandant of Dachau, charged with corruption, dismissed from service,
• Martin Sommer, Buchenwald guard, charged with excessive brutality, sent to a penal unit,
• and Hermann Hackmann, Majdanek guard officer, charged with murder, sentenced to death, but sent to a penal unit.

He even charged Adolf Eichmann with corruption, but Eichmann had enough friends in high places, and Morgen never managed to secure an arrest warrant for him.

Morgen would end up doing more than that: after the war, the former SS judge served as a witness in the main Nuremberg trials, then at several lesser trials(most notably the Pohl trial against members of the SS-Wirtschafts-und Verwaltungshauptamt), and the 1965 Frankfurt trials against former Auschwitz staff. 

During the Nuremberg and accessory trials, he was severely beaten twice(both during the Ilse Koch trial) to force him to make a false testimony, which he steadfastly refused to, but his actual testimony still nonetheless proved valuable.

How did Morgen manage to get away with all that?

Because the man was clever enough to know what charges he couldn’t bring against those he targeted, even though he wanted, and so, he made care to dig out evidence for charges he could bring.