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These things are never easy and straightforward. No one was "drafted" into concentration camp duty, that function was filled by the Waffen SS. But not all of those units participated. One such was detailed in Johann Voss's Black Edelweiss, a mountain division that never left Finland until just before the end of the war. The author relates his shock at how they were treated by the Belgians when finally the went to a POW camp and why the inmates made him exchange his tunic for an ordinary Wehrmacht tunic immediately upon arrival. Then he was assigned as a translator to the Nuremberg prosecution committee and he found out from raw evidence he had to process. What it was like for him to learn that after denial made for a very interesting book.

Others were strictly war fighters but could be assigned to the camps at any time. When the U.S. troops liberated the horror show that was Dachau they lined up the SS men they had at hand against a wall and shot the lot of them without a trial, a rather understandable reaction given the boxcars of corpses they had just seen. Unfortunately those men weren't the guards responsible. Those guards had fled the scene a day before leaving the new arrivals there to hold the bag.

The real problem was that relatively few of the ones truly responsible were punished. Certain high-profile culprits such as Rudolf Hoess and Hans Frank were, but Nikolaus Wachsmann estimates that only about 15% of the commandants and guards who actually committed the atrocities were punished.

Through Wachsmann's KL and Arad's Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka I have come to harden my attitude quite a bit. Hound these men into their old age? Yes. Because so many of them earned it.