Immediately after the war Hermann, like countless other women guards, had escaped arrest and by the 1950s was living safely in East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. By the early 1960s she must have thought she had got off scot-free, only to be arrested by the Stasi, the East German secret police, who had begun their own Nazi war crimes investigations and trials, fifteen years after the end of the war. Scornful of the paltry number of convictions secured by the West, the East German trials were partly devised to score a Cold War propaganda coup against the ‘fascists’, but also to bring to
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