Miete was arrested in 1960 and tried in West Germany for participating in the mass murder of at least 300,000 people; in 1965, he was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment.

The local Münster agriculture chamber advised Miete about a job at Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre, and he accepted an offer to work on the farm that was attached to this killing center.

[1] At the end of June 1942, he was transferred to occupied Poland in order to take part in Operation Reinhard, and dispatched to Treblinka.

Miete was in charge of the fake infirmary known as Lazaret, a small barracks surrounded by the barbed wire fence where the sick, elderly and difficult prisoners were taken away from view directly from newly arrived transports.

Miete would stand each man near a pit where a fire was constantly burning, calmly aim his gun and shoot them.

In events where Miete found nothing incriminating, he would still fabricate a reason to beat the prisoner and bring him to the Lazaret.

They included men and women, young and old, and also children.... — August Miete[8][9]Miete also sought out victims from other parts of the camp to be brought to the Lazaret and shot; victims whom Kurt Franz had injured with his hunting rifle or boxing gloves, prisoners who had been whipped for various "crimes" or other reasons.

Thereafter, Miete worked in the family's farming/milling business until 1950, and then as Managing Director of the Savings and Loan Association in Lotte.

On February 27, 1985, Miete was conditionally released from prison, and retired near Osnabrück, into his own Tyrolean house bought with the loot from Treblinka.