Did he get away with murder while commanding the 707th Security Division in Belarus? How did he escape the hangman? 707th Infantry Division (Wehrmacht) - Wikipedia
His fate was a prime example of how the German justice system dealt with such scum: Bechtolsheim was investigated in 1961 based on the testimony of a former police commander who accused Bechtolsheim of having ordered the murder of Jews. Bechtolsheim denied the accusations, arguing that his division had neither participated in the murders of Jews nor delegated them to police units. The examining magistrate and the public prosecutor's office felt that, according to general experience, the Wehrmacht would not have been involved in „Judenaktionen“, and so the investigation against Bechtolsheim was discontinued in March 1962. This depraved subject profited from an exculpation legend that was widely believed by the masses of the population only too gladly: After sometimes severe punishments had been imposed as part of denazification proceedings in the immediate post-war period, the tide turned in the early 1950s: In the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany, sharp criticism was now levelled at "victors' justice", the "collective guilt" thesis was indignantly rejected (in the opinion of historian Norbert Frei, the Allies had never seriously represented it) The German Bundestag began to enact amnesty laws from which war criminals also profited. This delegitimization of the verdicts passed in the second half of the 1940s contributed to the construction of the image of a "clean Wehrmacht": According to this, the Wehrmacht, in contrast to the police and SS units that carried out criminal murderous actions, remained innocent and fought fairly and according to the provisions of international war law, without having been involved in the crimes of the Nazi state. "[Jews are] no longer human beings in the European sense of culture, but beasts raised to become criminals from youth and trained from adolescence. But beasts must be destroyed. - Status Report (signed Bechtolsheim) of 19 October 1941 "The population here is worth nothing more than to be beaten or shot. - Order of March 8, 1943
His career is detailed here in a post 30/4/2003: The Glorious 707th Infantry Division... - Axis History Forum It ends with this: I see this website refers to him, with a fuller name: and a shorter time as divisional commander: 707. Infanterie-Division He died in Bavaria 25/12/1969: Gustav Maria Benno Von Mauchenheim Genannt... Releasing such a war criminal appears odd, especially for the USSR, but it also happened with those convicted. See the biggest trial which has been held against members of the Einsatzgruppen took place in Nuremberg, Germany from 15 September 1947 until 10 April, 1948; it was the ninth in a series of 12 trials which followed the main trial against the major Nazi war criminals. See the section 'Prosecution of the Culprits' in: Einsatzgruppen - TracesOfWar.com A US book 'After The Blitzkrieg: The German Army’s Transition To Defeat In The East' By Major Bob E. Willis Jr. cites as a reference a German Military Studies booklet / report: D-102 Protection of Lines of Communication September 1941 to February 1943 by him. See: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0b97/458d85455442332397b1e688fc44497e1f80.pdf
