While the persecution of Nazi war criminals has gone on, this list includes a list of Nazi most wanted war criminals. Some of them have never been convicted and have avoided prosecution for their roles in war crime atrocities and the Holocaust.
John Demjanjuk
John Demjanjuk was born in Ukraine and became a United States citizen by naturalisation when he immigrated after World War II. From his time of immigration in 1950, he worked in a Ford automotive plant in Ohio.
A German court convicted him in 2011 after lengthy court proceedings that involved the United States, Israel and Germany. He was convicted of being an accessory to over 28,000 murder counts when he served as a Sobibor concentration camp guard in Poland in 1943.
He was released pending appeal and died in a German nursing home the following year. The landmark ruling set an important precedent that charged guards who worked at Nazi death camps as accessories to the murders that occurred in the camps even when, like in the case of John Demjanjuk, there was no evidence linking the defendant to any crime.
Laszlo Csatary
Laszlo Csatary, when he served as a Hungarian police officer, organised the deportations of over 15000 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was convicted in absentia by a Czechoslovak court in 1948 and sentenced to death. However, he moved to Canada and worked as an art dealer there till 1997.
The Canadian authorities revoked his citizenship after discovering that he lied on his passport application. After this, he disappeared for another decade till he was arrested in Budapest.
He was named the “most wanted” suspect in 2011 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and he died at 98 under house arrest while awaiting trial.
Hans Lipschis
After the precedent set during John Demjanjuk’s conviction in 2011, German authorities brought in about 50 suspected former guards at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration, where the Nazis murdered over 1.5 million people between 1941 and 1945.
In 2013, Hans Lipschis was the first of this lot to face charges. He had lived in Chicago for about three decades before he was deported because he lied about his Nazi past.
The prosecutors maintained that he worked as a guard in the concentration camp, but he denied it, saying he was only a cook. A German court ruled that he was mentally unfit for trial due to dementia in 2014.
Vladimir Katriuk
From 1924 to 1944, Vladimir served as a platoon commander in the Ukrainian battalion of the SS, the elite Nazi storm troopers. He immigrated in the 1950s to Canada.
A Canadian court in 1999 found out that he lied about his past to enter the country, but the government didn’t strip him of his citizenship. Katriuk, later on, was alleged to have actively participated in murdering over 150 people, primarily women and children, in 1943 and was the second most wanted on the Simon Wiesenthal Center list of former Nazis.
He died in Quebec in May 2015 while the Russian authorities were trying to extradite him and convict him of his war crimes.
Oskar Groening
Oskar Groenig, who was a former SS-Unterscharführer, was released from a British prison after World War II and worked at a glass-making company in Germany. However, decades later, when he heard that people denied that the Holocaust happened, he decided to talk about his service as a guard at Auschwitz.
He described the gas chambers and selection process in a BBC documentary in 2005. A court in northern Germany convicted Oskar Groenig, also known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, due to his responsibility of keeping account of the possessions and money taken from the prisoners when they arrived, with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. It sentenced him to four years in prison.
Gerhard Sommer
Gerhard Sommer currently heads the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s list of the “most wanted.” He served as a soldier in the 16th SS Panzer Division, and in this position, he aided in the massacre of 560 civilians, 119 of them were children.
While he was convicted in absentia with ten others by an Italian court in 2005, Germany never extradited him, and so in 2012, the case was dropped for lack of evidence.
When it was reopened in 2014, the 93-year-old Sommer suffered from severe dementia and was declared unfit for trial.
Alfred Stark
Alfred Stark was a former corporal of the Gebirsgjäger division and ordered the execution of 117 Italian prisoners of war in Greece in 1943.
A military court in Rome sentenced Stark in absentia to life imprisonment in 2012. However, Germany has refused to extradite him to face justice. He also occupies the second position on the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “most wanted” list.
Johann Robert Riss
In 1944, resistance fighters shot two German Soldiers and the Nazi Soldiers retaliated by massacring 184 civilians. In 1945, Charles Edmonson, a British sergeant, took statements from survivors.
From these statements, a military court in Rome sentenced Riss and two other former Nazis to life imprisonment in absentia for the part they played in the killings.
They also requested the German government to pay 14 million euros to the remaining relatives as compensation. Germany declined and was adamant about not extraditing the three men. Ross, however, denied the charges against him.
Algimantas Dailide
Dailide served as an officer in the Lithuanian Security Police sponsored by the Nazis. He arrested some Jews trying to escape and handed them over to the Nazis.
He immigrated to the United States and began work as a real estate agent. Later, the United States government discovered his Nazi association and stripped him of his citizenship.
Numerous times, the Vilnius court convicted him of war crimes, but the Lithuanian government didn’t attempt to bring him to trial. In 2008, another court in Lithuania ruled that Dailide’s health was too poor for him to serve jail time.
