I agree, but to me it seems that sending them to prison would have done the trick just fine.
The degeneration of the political class in Germany had begun in the sixties, accelerated with the advent of the Greens in the late seventies - and reached a pinnacle after the fall of the Wall, when a whole sea of ex-East German political animals was unfrozen.
And it went downhill from there. What we have now is at least as bad as the Obama and Biden administrations.
If the Stasi thugs were sent to prison, they could still organize and would eventually be released. They needed complete extermination.