Burger operated at the intersection of bureaucratic coordination and direct authority, moving through the machinery of persecution from Vienna to Prague to Brussels before taking command of Theresienstadt. His tenure there produced a single documented episode — ordering some 40,000 prisoners to stand in freezing temperatures for a census — that resulted in roughly 300 deaths from exposure. In Greece he organized deportations that removed over 3,000 Jews from multiple communities. He escaped custody twice after the war, lived under aliases for decades, and died of natural causes in 1991; the alias he used longest, it later emerged, belonged to a prisoner he had personally killed.

Operating from a nominally free state, Crenshaw found legal cover in a government lease that permitted slave labor at the salt works he ran — and then went further, systematically kidnapping free Black people and selling them into slavery in the South. The operation spanned decades and claimed documented victims across multiple states, with families separated and individuals condemned to bondage despite having broken no law. He was indicted twice and convicted never, a outcome that reflects both the limits of legal protection for Black citizens in antebellum America and the economic incentives that shielded men like him from accountability.