No-one
would ever suspect the pleasant old man they chat to over
the garden fence could be a former Nazi.
But residents of a quiet elderly community were stunned earlier this year to
find out their 90-year-old neighbour worked at Hitler’s concentration
camps.
Alexander Huryn, now living in Fareham
in Hampshire, was exposed as a guard at the notorious Trawniki
labour camp in occupied Poland where 6,000 Jews were slaughtered
on a single day. There is also evidence he joined Hitler’s
ruthless SS.
This week Nazi hunters launched one
last effort to bring ageing war criminals to justice.
Offering rewards of up to £21,000,
Israel’s Simon Wiesenthal Center wants to prosecute the remaining
offenders while they are still alive.
They have already set up a telephone hotline (+49 1572 494-7407)
in Germany. The discovery of Huryn living in the unlikeliest
of British streets prompts the question: “How many more
slipped into this country and are living in our midst?”
Dr Efraim Zuroff, the center’s top
Nazi-hunter believes there could be “dozens” of ex-SS officers
and concentration camp guards still alive here, quietly living
out their last days unpunished.
He said: “There’s no way of knowing
exactly how many Nazis entered Britain after the end of the
Second World War, but my estimate is in the hundreds. It’s
even harder to say how many are alive today. But we can also
reasonably assume that some have survived into their 90s.”
Dr Zuroff wants three Germans in particular
brought to justice: Klaas Carl Faber, Soreren Kam and Gerhard
Sommer.
Faber served in the SS intelligence
and was part of a squad which executed members of the Dutch
resistance. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison
in 1947 but escaped jail in 1952 and fled to Germany.
Kam murdered a Danish anti-Nazi newspaper
editor in 1943. And Sommer was convicted in absentia in Italy
of murder in the massacre of 560 civilians.
The new search has been prompted by a German court convicting
SS volunteer John Demjanjuk, 91, in May over his role in
the murders of nearly 29,000 Dutch Jews. Named Operation
Last Chance 2, it will seek out war criminals around the
globe.
It is known former servants of the
Third Reich fled here at the end of the war. Many of the
400,000 Germans held in 1,026 PoW camps set up in Britain
during the Second World War did not return to Germany after
VE day and were allowed to continue living here, with no
questions asked about whether they had been involved in Nazi
atrocities.
The only person to have ever been
prosecuted in Britain is Anthony Sawoniuk, a retired British
Rail ticket inspector from Bermondsey, south London, who
was given two life sentences in 1999 after being convicted
of murdering two Jews near his home town of Domachevo, western
Belarus, in 1942. He died in jail in 2005.
Slovakian-born Alexander Schweidler,
78, had a shameful past as a guard at the Mathausen concentration
camp in Austria.
Over 80,000 people died there and
it created some of the most horrific stories of brutality
of the entire war. But his atrocities never came back to
haunt him as he passed himself off as a regular old man wandering
the streets of Milton Keynes, Bucks.
Weeks after his secret past was uncovered
in 2000 he died of a heart attack.
Three years later the neighbours of
Dr Swiatomyr Fostun, 79, a respected academic living in Wimbledon,
south west London, could hardly believe he was a former SS
guard who had been present at two of the worst civilian massacres
of the Second World War.
He helped “liquidate” the Jewish ghettos
in Warsaw and Bialystok in Poland in 1943, which resulted
in the deaths of more than 60,000 men, women and children.
Scotland Yard launched a probe but
a year later he was killed in a road accident in his home
country of Ukraine.
Dr Zuroff believes the effort to track
down the remaining war criminals is still a worthy one.
He says: “The passage of time in no
way diminishes the guilt of the killers.”
mirror.co.uk
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