Nazis are more than just people who care way too much about grammar — they’re also real, live humans who once did terrible, terrible things. For more information, consult your local Hogan’s Heroes rerun. Once you’re back, you’ll be in the mood for some NAZI HUNTING, which is exactly what the Simon Wiesenthal Centre wants.
Some 2,000 posters popped up yesterday in Berlin, Hamburg and Cologne, offering a €25,000 [or $33,190] reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of Nazi war criminals. It marks the latest push by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to locate as-yet unconvicted Third Reich war criminals.
The impetus for the campaign, dubbed “Operation Last Chance”, was the Munich trial of former SS guard John Demjanjuk for war crimes at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland. Though he died last year before his conviction was finalised, it marked a watershed in Nazi trials.
In previous decades, German authorities had refused to open an investigation without concrete proof of a specific Nazi-era crime – often a difficult task given the regime’s industrial killing machine. But now German authorities have indicated a willingness to lower the legal hurdle to prosecutions, thus expanding the pool – if diluting the seniority – of potential Third Reich perpetrators still at large. (Via)
Here are their 10 most wanted Nazis.
László Csizsik-Csatáry
The Hungarian, 97, sent 15,700 Jews to their death in a ghetto in Kosice. He was found by The Sun last year and held in Budapest. But Slovakia, which now owns Kosice, wants him extradited to stand trial in the city.
Gerhard Sommer
The SS man, 92, helped massacre 560 people in an Italian village including a three-month-old baby and a civilian aged 86. He was convicted of murder in absentia in Italy but still lives in a home in Hamburg, Germany.
John (Ivan) Kalymon
Now 92, he took part in the deportation and murder of Jews in Lvov (then in Poland, now Ukraine) in 1941-44. Tracked down to Michigan, USA, he was ordered to be deported. But no country has so far agreed to take him.
Algimantas Dailidė
As part of the Lithuanian police, Dailide, 92, arrested Jews and Poles who were later executed. After the war he moved to Florida but was deported in 2004. He was given a five-year jail term but hasn’t served it due to his age.
Vladimir Katriuk
The platoon commander, 93, allegedly burned the villagers of Khatyn, Belarus, to death in a barn in 1943. He also ordered other atrocities on Jews. Today, he keeps bees in Ormstown, Canada, and sells their honey.
Hans Lipschis
Lipschis 93, was in the SS Death Head’s Battalion until 1945 and was behind mass murder at Auschwitz. He fled to the US but was deported to Germany in 1983. He insists he was a cook in the war not a criminal.
Helmut Oberlander
Ex-member of the Einsatzkommando which murdered more than 23,000 people in Ukraine. He was stripped of his Canadian citizenship in 2001 after his past was revealed. Now 89 he says he was a translator in the war.
Mikhail Gorshkow/Theodor Szehinskyj (no photos)
The 90-year-old was a Gestapo interpreter who allegedly helped murder 3,000 Jews in Slutzk, Belarus. In 1951 he fled to the US which granted him citizenship. He was later deported and now lives in Estonia.
Now 89, he was an SS guard at the Gross Rosen, Sachsenhausen and Warsaw death camps. He later farmed in the States. Now living in Philadelphia, he insists he was a slave labourer not a killer in the war.
For more information, check out the Sun.
(via Getty Image) (via YouTube screengrabs) (Via the Sun) (Via)