Josef Rudolf Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II. Nicknamed the "Angel of Death", he performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
John Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian-American who served as a Trawniki man and Nazi camp guard at Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg. Demjanjuk became the center of global media attention in the 1980s, when he was tried and convicted in Israel after being misidentified as "Ivan the Terrible", a notoriously cruel watchman at Treblinka extermination camp. In 1993 the verdict was overturned. Shortly before his death, he was tried and convicted in the Federal Republic of Germany as an accessory to the 28,060 murders that occurred during his service at Sobibor.
Schtonk! is a 1992 German satirical film which retells the story of the 1983 Hitler Diaries hoax. It was written and directed by Helmut Dietl.
Frederick McCarthy Forsyth is an English novelist and journalist. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, The Fourth Protocol, The Dogs of War, The Devil's Alternative, The Fist of God, Icon, The Veteran, Avenger, The Afghan, The Cobra and The Kill List. Forsyth's works frequently appear on best-sellers lists and more than a dozen of his titles have been adapted to film. By 2006, he had sold more than 70 million books in more than 30 languages.
Alois Brunner was an Austrian officer who held the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) during World War II. Brunner played a significant role in the implementation of the Holocaust through rounding up and deporting Jews in occupied Austria, Greece, Macedonia, France, and Slovakia. He was known as Final Solution architect Adolf Eichmann's right-hand man.
Hans Aumeier was an SS commander during the Nazi era who was the commandant of Vaivara concentration camp and the deputy commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. One of the most important criminals at Auschwitz, Aumeier was extradited to Poland, where he was convicted and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1948.
ODESSA is an American codename coined in 1946 to cover Nazi underground escape-plans made at the end of World War II by a group of SS officers with the aim of facilitating secret escape routes, and any directly ensuing arrangements. The concept of the existence of an actual ODESSA organisation has circulated widely in fictional spy novels and movies, including Frederick Forsyth's best-selling 1972 thriller The Odessa File. The escape-routes have become known as "ratlines". Known goals of elements within the SS included allowing SS members to escape to Argentina or to the Middle East under false passports.
The ratlines were systems of escape routes for German Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe from 1945 onwards in the aftermath of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, though also in Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Bolivia, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, Spain, and Switzerland.
A Nazi hunter is an individual who tracks down and gathers information on alleged former Nazis, or SS members, and Nazi collaborators who were involved in the Holocaust, typically for use at trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Prominent Nazi hunters include Simon Wiesenthal, Tuviah Friedman, Serge Klarsfeld, Beate Klarsfeld, Ian Sayer, Yaron Svoray, Elliot Welles, and Efraim Zuroff.
The ArajsKommando, led by SS commander and Nazi collaborator Viktors Arājs, was a unit of Latvian Auxiliary Police subordinated to the German Sicherheitsdienst (SD). It was a notorious killing unit during the Holocaust.
Simon Wiesenthal was a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor, Nazi hunter, and writer. He studied architecture and was living in Lwów at the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Janowska concentration camp, the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, a death march to Chemnitz, Buchenwald, and the Mauthausen concentration camp.
Richard Glücks was a high-ranking German Nazi official in the SS. From November 1939 until the end of World War II, he was Concentration Camps Inspector (CCI), which became Amt D: Konzentrationslagerwesen under the WVHA in Nazi Germany. As a direct subordinate of Heinrich Himmler, he was responsible for the forced labour of the camp inmates and was also the supervisor for the medical practices in the camps, ranging from human experimentation to the implementation of the "Final Solution", in particular the mass murder of inmates with Zyklon B gas. After Germany capitulated, Glücks committed suicide by swallowing a potassium cyanide capsule.
A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
Hinrich Lohse was a German Nazi Party politician and a convicted war criminal, best known for his rule of the Reichskommissariat Ostland, during World War II. Reichskommissariat Ostland comprised the states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and parts of modern day Belarus.
Herberts Albert Cukurs was a Latvian aviator and Nazi collaborator. He served as the deputy commander of the Arajs Kommando, a collaborationist unit that carried out the largest mass murders of Latvian Jews during the Holocaust. Although Cukurs never stood trial, the accounts of multiple Holocaust survivors, including Zelma Shepshelovitz, credibly link him to personally supervising and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity for the duration of the German occupation of Latvia. His crimes included shooting Jewish children and babies in captivity, burning Jews alive, and sexually assaulting Jewish women.
Hans-Adolf Prützmann was among the highest-ranking German SS officials during the Nazi era. From June 1941 to September 1944, he served as a Higher SS and Police Leader in the occupied Soviet Union, and from November 1943 was the Supreme SS and Police Leader in Ukraine. He oversaw the activities of the Einsatzgruppen detachments that perpetrated the Holocaust in the Baltic States and Ukraine. After being captured at the end of the Second World War, he committed suicide.
Eduard Roschmann was an Austrian Nazi SS-Obersturmführer and commandant of the Riga Ghetto during 1943. He was responsible for numerous murders and other atrocities. As a result of a fictionalized portrayal in the novel The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth and its subsequent film adaptation, Roschmann came to be known as the "Butcher of Riga".
Franz Oppenhoff was a German lawyer who was appointed mayor of the city of Aachen after its capture by Allied forces in World War II. He was subsequently assassinated on the order of Heinrich Himmler.
The Odessa File is an 1974 thriller film, adapted from the 1972 novel of the same name by Frederick Forsyth, about a reporter's investigation of a neo-Nazi political-industrial network in post-Second World War West Germany. The film stars Jon Voight, Mary Tamm, Maximilian Schell and Maria Schell and was directed by Ronald Neame, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It was the only film that the Schell siblings made together.
Riga Ghetto was a small area in Maskavas Forštate, a neighbourhood of Riga, Latvia, where Nazis forced Jews from Latvia, and later from Germany, to live during World War II. On October 25, 1941, the Nazis relocated all Jews from Riga and its vicinity to the ghetto and its non-Jewish inhabitants were evicted. Most Latvian Jews were killed on November 30 or December 8, 1941, in the Rumbula massacre. The Nazis transported a large number of German Jews to the ghetto; most of them were later killed in massacres.
