Rauter is sentenced to death

The trial of Hanns Albin Rauter started on 1 April 1948. After a month, he was sentenced to death, mainly because he had been in charge of the deportation of 110,000 Dutch Jews. He claimed that he had not known that the Jews would be killed, but this was not true. On 25 March 1949, Rauter was shot by a firing squad on the Waalsdorpervlakte, an execution site in the Scheveningen dunes that had also been used by the Germans during the war.

Rauter, an Austrian Nazi, had been the highest-ranking SS officer in the Netherlands. As the Generalkommissar für das Sicherheitswesen, he was responsible for public order in the Netherlands. He commanded the police and was responsible for the deportation of the Dutch Jews. Finally, Rauter was closely involved in the fight against the resistance.

On the night of 6 March 1945, Rauter was seriously injured in a resistance attack. A day later, the Germans executed 263 political prisoners in retaliation. When the war ended, Rauter was still recovering in a German hospital, where he was arrested by the British. In 1946, he was extradited to the Netherlands to face trial.