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.
The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the U.S Justice Department was created in 1979 to identify and expel, from the United States, those who assisted Nazis in persecuting "any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion." This involved gathering, verifying, and presenting in court eyewitness and documentary evidence of decades-old crimes. The evidence was incomplete and scattered around the world. Much of it was then in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain. Nonetheless, the OSI investigated 1,700 persons suspected of being involved in Nazi war crimes. Over 300 have been prosecuted with at least 100 stripped of their U.S. citizenship and 70 deported, the most recent in 2021. Others have left voluntarily, fled, or have been blocked from entering the U.S.
The Holocaust—the murder of about six million Jews by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945—is the best-documented genocide in history. Although there is no single document which lists all Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, there is conclusive evidence that about six million were murdered. There is also conclusive evidence that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Operation Reinhard extermination camps, and in gas vans, and that there was a systematic plan by the Nazi leadership to murder them.
The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, known in German as Der Auschwitz-Prozess, or Der zweite Auschwitz-Prozess, was a series of trials running from 20 December 1963 to 19 August 1965, charging 22 defendants under German criminal law for their roles in the Holocaust as mid- to lower-level officials in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camp complex. Hans Hofmeyer led as Chief Judge the "criminal case against Mulka and others".
Operation Last Chance was launched July 2002 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center with its mission statement being to track down ex-Nazis still in hiding. Most of them were nearing the end of their lifetimes, hence the operation's name. Efraim Zuroff is director of the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem who serves as the Israeli liaison as well as overseer of this project, the focus of which is an investigation, prosecution, and conviction of the last remaining Nazi war criminals and collaborators. Many have obtained citizenship in Canada and the United States under false pretenses; usually by misrepresentation, omission, or falsification of their criminal past, specifically, war crimes which rose to the level of crimes against humanity.
Eli M. Rosenbaum is an American lawyer and the former Director of the United States Department of Justice, Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which was primarily responsible for identifying, denaturalizing, and deporting Nazi war criminals, from 1994 to 2010, when OSI was merged into the new Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section. He is now the Director of Human Rights Enforcement Strategy and Policy in that section. He has been termed a "legendary Nazi hunter."
Oskar Gröning was a German SS Unterscharführer who was stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. His responsibilities included counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners, and he was in charge of the personal property of arriving prisoners. On a few occasions he witnessed the procedures of mass killing in the camp. After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning surrendered to the British at the end of the war; his role in the SS was not discovered. He was eventually transferred to the UK as a prisoner of war and worked as a farm labourer.
Allan A. Ryan Jr. was an American attorney, author and a law school professor at Harvard University, where he was teaching from 1985 until his passing. He is best known for his work as a Justice Department lawyer who in the early 1980s identified and prosecuted dozens of Nazi collaborators living in the United States, earning him a reputation as America's foremost Nazi hunter.
"Ivan the Terrible" is the nickname given to a notorious Ukrainian guard at the Treblinka extermination camp during the Holocaust. The moniker alluded to Ivan IV, also known as Ivan the Terrible, the infamous Tsar of Russia. "Ivan the Terrible" gained international recognition following the 1986 John Demjanjuk case. By 1944, a cruel guard named "Ivan", sharing his distinct duties and extremely violent behavior with a guard named "Nicholas", was mentioned in survivor literature. Ukrainian American John Demjanjuk was first accused of being Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka concentration camp. Demjanjuk was found guilty of war crimes and was sentenced to death by hanging. Exculpatory material in the form of conflicting identifications from Soviet archives was subsequently released, identifying Ivan the Terrible as one Ivan Marchenko, leading the Supreme Court of Israel to acquit Demjanjuk in 1993 because of reasonable doubt. Demjanjuk was later extradited to Germany where he was convicted in 2011 of war crimes for having served at Sobibor extermination camp.
Chil (Enrique) Meyer Rajchman a.k.a. Henryk Reichman, nom de guerre Henryk Ruminowski was one of about 70 Jewish prisoners who survived the Holocaust after participating in the August 2, 1943, revolt at the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. He reached Warsaw, where he participated in the resistance in the city, before it was captured by the Soviet Union.
Kalman Taigman also Teigman Hebrew: קלמן טייגמן was an Israeli citizen who was born and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. One of the former members of the Jewish Sonderkommando who escaped from the Treblinka extermination camp during the prisoner uprising of August 1943, Taigman later testified at the 1961 Eichmann Trial held in Jerusalem.
During World War II, Trawniki men were Central and Eastern European Nazi collaborators, consisting of either volunteers or recruits from prisoner-of-war camps set up by Nazi Germany for Soviet Red Army soldiers captured in the border regions during Operation Barbarossa launched in June 1941. Thousands of these volunteers served in the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland until the end of World War II. Trawnikis belonged to a category of Hiwis, Nazi auxiliary forces recruited from native subjects serving in various jobs such as concentration camp guards.
Reinhold Hanning was an SS guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp in occupied Poland.
Max T. Eisen was a Slovak author, public speaker, and Holocaust educator. He travelled throughout Canada giving talks about his experiences as a concentration camp survivor, to students, teachers, universities, law enforcement personnel, and the community at large.
Hubert Zafke was a Nazi S.S. medic who served in several concentration camps during the second world war. After serving four years in prison following the war, Zafke settled in Gnevkow, Germany where he married and raised four sons and worked in an agricultural company. However, 71 years after the end of the war, following preliminary investigations by the central office for the investigation of Nazi crimes, Zafke stood trial for 3861 counts of accessory to murder. After a lengthy trial delayed multiple times by Zafke's failing health, the trial was dropped, as Zafke was found to be unfit for trial.
The Devil Next Door is a documentary series about John Demjanjuk, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out while serving as a guard at Nazi extermination camps during World War II, who spent years living in Cleveland. The show premiered on Netflix in 2019.
Angela Orosz-Richt is a Holocaust survivor. Of several thousand babies born at the Auschwitz complex, she is one of the few who survived to liberation. Her testimony has led to the 21st century convictions of two former Nazis.
Josef Schütz, known in the German press as Josef S., was a Lithuanian-born German Nazi concentration camp guard who was stationed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In June 2022, at the age of 101, Schütz was handed a five year sentence after a criminal trial for complicity in war crimes during the Holocaust during World War II, becoming the oldest person tried and convicted for Nazi war crimes in Germany.
