[11] One person – Yehezkel Jungster – was convicted of crimes against humanity, which carried a mandatory death penalty, but the sentence was commuted[12][11] to two years in prison.
[13][14] According to teacher and researcher Dan Porat,[15] the way in which former kapos were officially viewed – and tried – by the state of Israel went through four distinct phases.
During the first stage described by Porat (August 1950 – January 1952), those alleged to have served or to have collaborated with the Nazis were placed on an equal footing with their captors, with some measure of leniency appearing only in the sentencing phase for some cases.
By 1958, when the third phase began (lasting until 1962), the legal system had begun to view kapos as having committed wrongs but with good intentions.
The fourth phase (1963 – 1972) was marked by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the principal architects of the Final Solution, and of Hirsch Barenblat two years later.
Found guilty of helping the Nazis by ensuring that Jews selected for the death camps did not escape, Barenblat was sentenced to five years in prison.
[17] The acquittal may have been due to the court’s aim of putting an end to the trials against kapos and other alleged Nazi collaborators.
[19] German historian Karin Orth wrote that there was hardly a measure so perfidious as the SS attempt to delegate the implementation of terror and violence to the victims themselves.
[21] The term kapo has been used as a slur in the twenty-first century, particularly for Jews deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel or Zionism.
In 2017, David Friedman, soon to become US ambassador to Israel, apologized for referring to supporters of the J Street advocacy group as "far worse than kapos".