The most wanted Nazi criminal in the world according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, 97-year-old Hungarian Ladislaus Chizhik-Chatari, who was sentenced to death in absentia, reports the British newspaper Sun.
And here is who is on the list of wanted Nazi criminals according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center:
1. Ladislaus Csizsik‑Csatary, Hungary
During the Second World War, Chizhik-Chatari served as the chief of police for the protection of the ghetto, located in the city of Kassa (now the city of Kosice in Slovakia). Chizhik-Chatari was involved in the death of at least 15.7 thousand Jews. According to documents held by the Wiesenthal Center, this man took pleasure in beating women with a whip, forced prisoners to dig the frozen earth with his bare hands, and was involved in other atrocities.
After the war, the court of the revived Czechoslovakia sentenced Chizhik-Chatari to death, but the criminal moved to Canada under a false name, where he began to trade in works of art. In 1997, the Canadian authorities stripped him of his citizenship and began to prepare documents for his extradition.
However, the Hungarian went into hiding before the necessary legal procedures were completed.
2. Klaas Carl Faber, Germany
Was a volunteer in the Dutch branch of the SS; He served in the camp Westerbork (Westerbork), from which the Dutch Jews were deported to the death camps.
In 1947 he was sentenced to death by a Dutch court on charges of murdering at least 11 people. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.
In 1952, he escaped from prison and went to Germany, where he received citizenship.
On May 11, 2011, a court in Germany ruled that Klaas Karl Faber would not be extradited to Holland.
On May 26, 2012, it became known that Klaas Karl Faber died in Germany.
3. Gerhard Sommer, Germany
Former SS-Untersturmführer of the Reichsführer-SS Panzergrenadier Division. Accused of complicity in the murder of 560 residents of the Italian village of Santa Anna di Stazzema.
In 2005, he was found guilty in absentia by the military court of La Spezia (Italy) of committing mass "murder with extreme cruelty."
Since 2002, he has been under investigation in Germany.
4. Vladimir Katriuk, Canada
Former squad leader in the police battalion No. 118, formed by the Germans from the inhabitants of Ukraine. The battalion is involved in the death of Jews and other civilians in Belarus. Vladimir Katryuk took an active part in the destruction of the Belarusian village of Khatyn.
After World War II, Vladimir Katryuk emigrated to Canada.
In 1999, he was stripped of his Canadian citizenship due to suspicions of a Nazi past.
In May 2007, this decision was revised due to lack of evidence.
In November 2010, the return of Canadian citizenship to him was confirmed by the country's federal appeals court.
5. Karoly (Charles) Zentai, Australia
6. Soeren Kam, Germany
Former SS man, wanted by the Danish authorities for the murder of anti-fascist newspaper editor Karl Henrik Clemmensen in 1943.
In 1999, the Danish authorities demanded Kam's extradition from Germany, but the extradition was denied due to Kam's German citizenship.
In early 2007, the German authorities again refused to extradite Seren Kam, arguing that Clemmensen's death was manslaughter. Efforts to bring Kam to justice continue.
7. Ivan (John) Kalymon (Ivan (John) Kalymon), USA
Served in the Nazi-controlled Ukrainian police in Lvov from 1941-1944. Accused of complicity in the murders and deportation of Jews from the Lvov ghetto.
On January 31, 2011, the US authorities decided to deport Kalymon to Germany, Ukraine, Poland, or any other country willing to accept him on their territory. None of the countries agreed to accept Kalymon.
8. Algimantas Dailide, Germany
He served in the Vilnius branch of the Saugumas (Lithuanian security service) during the Nazi occupation. Accused of arresting Jews and Poles and handing them over to the Nazis.
In 1997 he was deprived of US citizenship for concealing war crimes and in 2004 he was deported from the country.
In 2006, the Latvian authorities found him guilty of handing over to the Nazis 12 Jews who fled the Vilnius ghetto and two Poles who were executed.
Sentenced to five years in prison. He was released from punishment, since, according to the court, he does not pose a danger to society.
9. Mikhail Gorshkov, Estonia
He served as an interpreter for the Gestapo in Belarus, accused of complicity in the mass murder of Jews in Slutsk.
Hiding in the USA, later fled to Estonia. Was under investigation.
In October 2011, the Estonian authorities closed the investigation into Gorshkov.
10. Helmut Oberlander, Canada
A native of Ukraine, he served as an interpreter in the Einsatzkommando-10A punitive group, which operated in southern Ukraine and in the Crimea. It is estimated that more than 23,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed by the punishers.
After World War II, he fled to Canada.
In 2000, a Canadian court ruled that Oberlander, upon entering the country in 1954, hid his involvement in a group engaged in punitive actions on the territory of the USSR.
In August 2001, he was stripped of his Canadian citizenship. In 2004, his citizenship was restored, but this decision was reversed in May 2007. In November 2009, the Federal Court of Appeal again restored Oberländer's citizenship. The case is pending.
Criminals who are presumed dead:
1. Alois Brunner, Syria
A key collaborator of Adolf Eichmann, a German officer, a member of the Gestapo, directly responsible for the mass extermination of Jews.
Responsible for the deportation of Jews from Austria (47,000 people), Greece (44,000 people), France (23,500 people) and Slovakia (14,000 people) to Nazi death camps.
Convicted in absentia by France. For many decades he lived in Syria. The Syrian authorities refuse to cooperate in the pursuit of Brunner.
Alois Brunner, born in 1912, was last seen in 2001. The chances that he is alive are decreasing every year, but so far no conclusive evidence of his death has been received.
He was a doctor in the Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen concentration camps.
In 1962 he disappeared. Wanted by Germany and Austria.
In February 2009, it was reported that he allegedly died in Cairo in 1992, but there is no evidence of death. So far, Heim has not been found and his death has not been confirmed.
The material was prepared on the basis of information from open sources
Many famous Nazi criminals managed to escape retribution.
There are several versions of what happened to the man who destroyed the "enemies of the Reich" with such zeal and ruthlessness.
So, according to one of them, he died in May 1945 in Berlin. In the same year, the corpse of a man with a certificate in the name of Müller was discovered in Berlin. He was buried, but in 1963 an examination found that the remains did not belong to Muller.
There is also a version that Muller managed to hide in Latin America. Among the countries where he could hide were called Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay.
At the same time, Walter Schellenberg, in his memoirs, expressed the version that Muller was recruited by the NKVD and died in Moscow in 1948.
Bruner's lifelong escape
One of the highest-ranking Nazi criminals who managed to escape was one of the leaders of the SS, an ally of Eichmann in the implementation of the "Jewish question" Alois Brunner.
It was Brunner, as the head of the special SS detachments from 1939 to 1945, who was responsible for the deportation of 100,000 Jews from Vienna, Berlin, Greece, France and Slovakia to the death camps.
After World War II, Brunner fled to Munich, where he worked as a truck driver and miner. In 1954, he fled to Syria, where he lived under the name of Dr. Georg Fischer and collaborated with the Syrian secret services.
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He was unofficially called "the father of the Syrian secret services." French military courts sentenced him in absentia to death in 1954, and in 2001 to life imprisonment. Israeli intelligence agencies have repeatedly organized assassination attempts on him. But official Syria has always denied the fact of Bruner's residence in the country. In December 1999 it was reported that Brunner had died. But it was refuted by German journalists who claimed to have seen him alive. Whether Brunner is alive now remains a mystery.
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Already after the allied forces defeated Nazi Germany and military operations in Europe ended in 1945, it became difficult and dangerous for the Nazis to be in Europe. Thousands of SS civil servants, influential members of the Gestapo and their associates (including a considerable number of war criminals) crossed the Atlantic, finding refuge in South America, especially in Argentina, Chile and Brazil.
Why South America?
Argentina, for its part, was a popular place of refuge for German expatriates, and therefore maintained a close relationship with Germany even during the war. Already after 1945, the Argentine leader Juan Peron, himself not indifferent to fascist ideology, called on his own officers and diplomats to identify and develop "Rat Paths", that is, escape lines for agents of the Reich through third countries and forged documents. In addition, the Nazis were supported by the priests of the Vatican in Rome and Austria. Many of them supported and sheltered the Nazis, unaware of their bloody past, and some were fully aware.
Here is a list of the most notorious SS war criminals who fled to South America in the hope of evading punishment.
Adolf Eichmann
"The most hunted down fascist on the planet", Eichmann was the main architect of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem", or, in other words, Hitler's decree to exterminate absolutely all the Jews of Europe. The infamous SS Lieutenant Colonel secretly ran the SS network of concentration camps, which became the killing point for some 6 million people. Eichmann was the initiator of a complex system of identification, collection and transportation of European Jews to Auschwitz, Treblinka and other camps in German-occupied Poland.
After World War II ended, Eichmann hid in Austria. With the support of a Franciscan friar from Genoa, he obtained an Argentine visa and applied for a forged identity document from the Red Cross. In 1950 he went to Buenos Aires. Eichmann lived with his wife and children in the suburbs of Buenos Aires and worked at the Mercedes car factory.
Israeli intelligence agents Mossad took Eichmann during a special operation on May 11, 1960 and secretly took him to Israel. There, Eichmann was put on trial as a war criminal. He was found guilty in a four-month trial in Jerusalem and received the only death verdict ever handed down by an Israeli court. He was hanged on May 31, 1962.
Josef Mengele
Mengele lost the highest line in the list of the most wanted Nazis only to Eichmann. Received the name of the Angel of Death, the doctor performed terrible experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz. An SS officer, Mengele was sent to the Eastern Front at the beginning of the war, where he received the Iron Cross for courage.
Wounded and declared unfit for intensive military service, he went to Auschwitz. There, he used prisoners, especially twins, pregnant women, and invalids, as lab rats for his own sinister experiments. He constantly tortured and killed children with his medical experiments.
After World War II, Mengele hid in Germany. In 1949, with the support of the church clergy, the Angel of Death fled to Argentina, then to Uruguay, where he even married under his own name.
West Germany sent an extradition request to Argentina, whose government was deliberately dragging its feet. Mengele ultimately drowned off the Brazilian coast in 1979 due to a heart attack.
Walter Rauff
SS Colonel Rauff is responsible for the development and introduction of mobile gas chambers, which resulted in the killing of approximately hundreds of thousands of people during the war. According to British intelligence, Rauff personally supervised the operation of trucks, whose exhaust gases entered sealed chambers placed behind heavy vehicles. Sixty people were placed in one mobile cell. Rauff became notorious for his excessive ruthlessness and executed both Jews and captured partisans indiscriminately and without remorse.
Allied troops detained the colonel, but he escaped from the camp and hid in the monasteries. In 1949, Rauff sailed to Ecuador before settling in Chile, where he resided under his own name.
He never managed to catch and condemn. In fact, Rauff was a spy for West Germany from 1958 to 1962. His whereabouts became known only after he sent an official request to Germany to send his German naval pension to Chile. The Chilean tyrant Pinochet actively ignored German requests to extradite this war criminal. Rauff died in Chile in 1984.
Franz Stangl
Dubbed the White Death for his passion for the snow-white uniform and the whip, the Austrian Stangl worked on the Aktion T-4 euthanasia plan, according to which the Nazis killed people with mental and physiological disorders. He later worked as the commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka concentration camps. Over 100,000 Jews were killed during his service in Sobibor before he transferred to Treblinka, where he was directly responsible for the deaths of almost a million people.
At the end of the war, Stangl was taken by the Americans, but fled to Italy in 1947. Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal, who favored the Nazis, assisted Stangl in obtaining a Red Cross passport, on which he sailed to Brazil in 1951.
He was recruited by Volkswagen in São Paulo under his own name. In 1967, Stangl was found by the famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of the Holocaust. He extradited the criminal to West Germany, where he was found guilty of the massacre of 900,000 people. He died in prison of heart failure in 1971.
Josef Schwammberger
An Austrian fascist, Schwammberger was an SS commander leading three labor camps in Poland during the war. He loved to swing his whip and walked around the camp with a German Shepherd trained to pounce on people. In 1943, he organized the massacre of five hundred Jews. He personally executed 35 people by shooting them in the back of the head, in addition, he sent a huge number of Jews to death in Auschwitz.
Schwammberger was detained in Austria in 1945, but fled to Italy in 1948, and a few months later ended up in Argentina, where he lived freely under his own name and even took citizenship.
Schwammberger was eventually arrested by Argentine civil servants in 1987 after an informant snagged a $300,000 reward from the German government.
He returned to West Germany in 1990 to stand trial. In 1992, Schwammberger was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Schwammberger died in prison in 2004 at the age of 92.
Erich Priebke
A mid-level SS commander and member of the Gestapo, Priebke was an accomplice in the massacre of Italians in the Ardeatian caves, where the Nazis shot 335 people in retaliation for the murder of 33 German officers by Italian partisans.
Priebke slipped out of an English prison camp on Christmas Eve in 1946. With the support of Bishop Alois Hudal, Priebke fled to Argentina.
From there he was extradited to Italy, where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment. Priebke passed away in 2013 at the age of 100.
Gerhard Bonet
A lawyer and SS officer, Bonet spearheaded the Reich's web of sanatoriums and nursing homes and is responsible for the managerial logistics of Hitler's Aktion T-4 euthanasia project. Bonet called himself the Angel of Mercy, and he actively participated in the systemic extermination of the disabled and people with mental disabilities in order to purify the Aryan race and evade government spending on assisting the disabled.
Bonet fled to Argentina in 1949. He later confessed that Perón's assistants provided him with funds and false papers.
After a government coup toppled Perón, Bonet returned to Germany and was charged by a tribunal in Frankfurt in 1963. He was released on a deposit and Bonet fled once more to Argentina, but was ultimately extradited to Germany three years later. Bonet was the first SS criminal formally extradited by the Argentine government. Bonet died in 1981 without ever receiving a court verdict.
It is well known that after the defeat of Nazi Germany, its main leaders either committed suicide, or were convicted during the Nuremberg Trials and executed, or sent to prison for many years. But many of those who took part in the committed crimes managed to hide in distant lands and avoid punishment for a long time. Some were never caught.
Let us recall the high-profile stories of those Nazis who nevertheless were overtaken by the punishing hand of justice - even after decades and on the other side of the Earth.
Jewish retribution
The most famous Nazi criminal caught after the end of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Adolf Eichmann is considered one of the main organizers of the Holocaust.
A native of Germany, Eichmann, like Adolf Hitler, grew up in Austria and even attended the same school in the city of Linz as the Fuhrer for some time. Two years after joining the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), he was assigned to work in the newly formed "Jewish" department. Immediately after the start of the Second World War, the policy of the Third Reich towards the Jews changed: from “voluntary” emigration (to which the people despised by Hitler were forced by all means) it was decided to move on to forced deportation. It was Eichmann who developed its various options, including the creation of a reservation for Jews in Madagascar (!). In 1941, a new directive appeared: the “Untermensch” was to be physically exterminated. This is what Eichmann did until the end of the war, organizing the process.
After the defeat of Germany, the Americans arrested him, but they did not have time to identify him: at first he presented false documents, and then he completely managed to escape. After that, under a new name, he rented a piece of land in a Saxon village, where he lived until 1950. In 1948, with the help of the Franciscan friar Edward Dömeter, who was part of the circle of Nazi-sympathetic Catholic clergy, Eichmann received documents in the name of Ricardo Clement and began to prepare the ground for moving to Argentina. Two years later, he managed to get a Red Cross humanitarian passport. With him, he reached the Italian Genoa, hiding along the way in the monasteries, and boarded a ship to Buenos Aires.
In Latin America, Eichmann did not show off, but this did not stop him from moving his wife and three children there from Europe. And soon the former Nazi was helped by the now democratic homeland: he got a job at the local branch of Mercedes-Benz, where he rose to the rank of head of the department. With the new funds, the family was able to build a house. And everything would be fine, but some people across the ocean really wanted to find Eichmann. And waited for their chance. In this they were helped by the vigilant resident of Argentina, Lothar Hermann, a half-German-half-Jew who emigrated from Germany in 1938. His daughter somehow started dating a young man named Klaus Eichmann, and the father suspected something was wrong, which he reported to the German prosecutor. And from that information got into the Israeli special service Mossad. Knowing that the Argentine government was in no hurry to extradite the former Nazis, the Israelis decided to take Eichmann out on their own. They successfully carried out this operation on May 11, 1960, grabbing their target right on the streets of Buenos Aires and injecting her with a tranquilizer, and then loading her onto a plane as a member of the official Israeli delegation, who became “bad”. In the Promised Land, he was interrogated for almost a year, preparing a trial, which it was decided to make as open as possible.
Both during the investigation and at the trial, Eichmann adhered to one line: he did not consider himself guilty, because he only followed the orders of “responsible leaders”, to which he did not belong. True, at one of the meetings, the Israeli prosecutor quoted to the Nazi his own words, which he said in 1945: “I will go to the grave with laughter, because the feeling that five million lives are on my conscience gives me great satisfaction.” Eichmann initially explained that he meant "enemies of the Reich", such as the Soviet Union, but later admitted that he was referring to the Jews.
Eichmann was sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed on the night of June 1, 1962 at the age of 56. His last words were: “Long live Germany! Long live Argentina! Long live Austria! These are the three countries I was most connected with and I will never forget them. I greet my wife, family and friends. I'm ready. We will meet soon, because such is the fate of all people. I die with faith in God.”
Butcher from Lyon
The fate of this criminal strikes with its bizarre twists and just asks for the pages of an adventure novel. A man with a funny name Klaus Barbie was born in 1913 in Germany, in a family with French roots (ancestors' surname was Barbier). His father was drafted into the Kaiser's army, where he fought in World War I against the French, whom he apparently passed on to his son. Returning home after being wounded in the neck near Verdun and being held captive, Klaus Barbie Sr. drank heavily and often engaged in assault. His son also acquired a taste for violence well.
Barbie's party career was swift, and at the age of 29 he headed the Gestapo branch in occupied French Lyon. There, in the homeland of his ancestors, the young SS man showed himself to the full extent. At his headquarters, he personally engaged in the brutal torture of all suspected members of the Resistance, regardless of their gender and age. So, the daughter of one of the leaders of the local partisans claims that Barbie ordered to skin him alive, and then dip his head in a bucket of ammonia, which is why he died.
Historians claim that in total in France, Barbie was involved in the death of 14 thousand people, for which he received the nickname "The Butcher from Lyon." At the same time, the command greatly appreciated the effective employee, and in 1943 Hitler personally awarded him the Iron Cross, first class.
The end of the war suddenly opened up new career opportunities for Barbie. In 1947, after being imprisoned, he was recruited by the US Counterintelligence Corps to help the US in the fight against communism (and all other enemies along the way). Over the years, intelligence work in Europe became more and more difficult for him, because the French, who had sentenced him to death in absentia, began to demand that the Americans hand over the Butcher. They, however, refused, and in 1951 even helped him emigrate to Bolivia, using Catholic clergymen (already mentioned in the section on Eichmann) to cover up.
Barbie with friends in Bolivia
In South America, Barbie continued to work for the Americans, and in 1965 he was also recruited by West German intelligence. Many of his overseas activities are not well known, but he is believed to have helped the CIA capture the legendary Ernesto Che Guevara and helped grow the criminal empire of the equally legendary drug lord Pablo Escobar.
Pablo Escobar
In Bolivia, Barbie, known as Klaus Altmann, became his own man, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the local army and was friends with two dictators, Hugo Banser and Luis Garcia Mesa. He, in fact, helped the second to come to power. At the same time, in Europe, the location of the Lyon executioner was revealed back in the early 1970s, but Bolivia ignored all French requests for extradition. And only in 1983, the new democratic government arrested Barbie and sent to trial across the ocean.
In 1987, the hater of the French, who was already 73, was sentenced to life imprisonment. In court, he declared: “When I stand before the throne of the Lord, I will be acquitted.”
Four years later, Barbie died in the prison of the same Lyon, where he committed his main atrocities. He was simultaneously diagnosed with leukemia, spinal cord cancer and prostate cancer.
Executioners from Sobibor
Persecution for the destruction of people in Nazi concentration camps was subjected not only to top leaders, but also to direct executors on the ground. One of the most difficult stories of this kind was the fate of the administration of the Sobibor camp, which functioned on the territory of Poland from May 1942 to October 1943. During this time, at least 250 thousand representatives of this people died within its walls as part of the so-called “Operation Reinhard” to exterminate Polish Jews.
Franz Stangl
The first commandant of Sobibor was Franz Stangl, a native of Austria, who began his career in the police. At 32, he left the police bureau to work in the Reich's new project, the T-4 Killing Program. This initiative was aimed at clearing society of physically and mentally handicapped people through their "compulsory euthanasia".
A poster promoting getting rid of sick members of society. Above shows that in 1925 there were four parasitic invalids for every 50 workers. It is predicted that in 1955 there will be seven of them, and in 2000 - 12.
Another similar poster. The inscription reads: “60,000 marks. So much is spent by society on the maintenance of this person with a hereditary defect for life. It's your money too, citizen."
It was with this program that the mechanism began to work, which was soon used as an instrument of the Holocaust.
Having received an appointment in Sobibor, in the three months of his leadership, Stangl passed about a hundred thousand Jews through the conveyor of death. After that, he received a new appointment - to lead a similar death camp in Treblinka, opened a little later and suffering from “poor organization”. There, the new commandant also set up the process in an exemplary manner. For the color of his uniform, he received the nickname “White Death” from the prisoners, although he himself distanced himself from the cruelties of the staff and did his job dispassionately. Later, Stanglt stated that he did not feel any hatred for the Jews and was indifferent to ideology, but simply realized his professional ambitions. He perceived the victims not as people, but as a “cargo” to be eliminated.
Gustav Wagner
His assistant in Sobibor was another Austrian, Gustav Wagner, nicknamed “The Beast” and “Wolf” for his cruelty, as well as the German Karl Frenzel, who replaced Wagner in his absence. According to another former camp worker, Erich Bauer, this trinity was worried about the “indicators” of the institution entrusted to them, sadly stating that Sobibor was losing to Belzec and Treblinka in terms of the number of Jews killed.
Wagner (center)
The post-war fate of the three comrades developed in a similar way. Stangl and Wagner, like many other Nazis, also managed to escape to South America - though not to Argentina or Bolivia, but to Brazil. But in the "country of wild monkeys" their paths diverged.
Stangl, who got a job at the Volkswagen plant, did not even bother to change his name and was eventually arrested and extradited to Germany. This happened when the "White Death" was 59 years old. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment, and in June 1971 he died in prison of a heart attack.
Stangl giving an interview in prison
But Wagner, who changed his name to "Gunther Mendel", happily avoided extradition: the Brazilian authorities consistently refused to extradite him to Israel, Austria, Poland and Germany. Already in 1979, he freely gave an interview to the BBC, in which he said: “I did not experience any feelings ... It was just another job. In the evenings, we never talked about her, but just drank and played cards.”
Karl Frenzel (left) and Erich Bauer
True, a year later, the life of Mendel-Wagner still ended. He was found in Sao Paulo with a knife in his chest at the age of 69. According to his lawyer, he committed suicide.
Magazine with interview and photo of Wagner
As for Karl Frenzel, he did not escape from Germany anywhere, but worked as a lighting technician in Frankfurt until 1962, when he was accidentally recognized on the street during a lunch break. At the trial, he said that he regretted what happened in the concentration camps, but during the war he believed that it was legal and even necessary.
Karl Frenzel
The court sentenced Frenzel to life imprisonment, but after 16 years, for health reasons, he was released. He died in 1996 at the age of 85. In an interview, he said: “When my children and friends ask me if all this really happened, I tell them that yes, really. Then they say that it is impossible, to which I once again answer them that it is all true.”
Humanity is gradually beginning to forget about the horrors of World War II. It is already much quieter and "tolerant" about events, does not speak of them as crimes. The names of heroes and criminals are forgotten. But this must be remembered! One must know and respect those who stopped the madness of destruction. And do not forget that it would be an alternative to what, for example, such "cute" girls were carrying.
1) Irma Grese - (October 7, 1923 - December 13, 1945) - overseer of the Nazi death camps Ravensbrück, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Among the nicknames of Irma were "Blond-haired devil", "Angel of death", "Beautiful monster". She used emotional and physical methods to torture prisoners, bludgeoned women to death, and reveled in the arbitrary shooting of prisoners. She starved her dogs to set them on her victims, and personally selected hundreds of people to be sent to the gas chambers. Greze wore heavy boots, and in addition to a pistol, she always had a wicker whip.
In the Western post-war press, the possible sexual deviations of Irma Grese, her numerous connections with the SS guards, with the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer (“Belsen beast”), were constantly discussed.
On April 17, 1945, she was taken prisoner by the British. The Belsen trial, initiated by a British military tribunal, lasted from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Together with Irma Grese, the cases of other camp workers were considered at this trial - commandant Josef Kramer, warden Joanna Bormann, nurse Elisabeth Volkenrath. Irma Grese was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
On the last night before her execution, Grese laughed and sang along with her colleague Elisabeth Volkenrath. Even when a noose was thrown around Irma Grese's neck, her face remained calm. Her last word was "Faster", addressed to the English executioner.
2) Ilse Koch - (September 22, 1906 - September 1, 1967) - German NSDAP activist, wife of Karl Koch, commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps.
Best known under a pseudonym as "Frau Lampshade" Received the nickname "Buchenwald Witch" for the cruel torture of camp prisoners. Koch was also accused of making souvenirs from human skin (however, no reliable evidence of this was presented at the post-war trial of Ilse Koch).
On June 30, 1945, Koch was arrested by American troops and in 1947 sentenced to life imprisonment. However, a few years later, the American General Lucius Clay, the military commander of the American occupation zone in Germany, released her, considering the charges of issuing execution orders and making souvenirs from human skin insufficiently proven.
This decision caused a protest from the public, so in 1951 Ilse Koch was arrested in West Germany. A German court again sentenced her to life imprisonment.
On September 1, 1967, Koch committed suicide by hanging herself in a cell in the Bavarian Eibach prison.
3) Louise Danz - b. December 11, 1917 - overseer of women's concentration camps. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but later released.
She began working in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, then she was transferred to Majdanek. Danz later served in Auschwitz and Malchow.
Prisoners later said that they were subjected to ill-treatment by Danz. She beat them, confiscated their winter clothes. In Malchow, where Danz had the position of senior warden, she starved the prisoners without giving food for 3 days. On April 2, 1945, she killed an underage girl.
Danz was arrested on 1 June 1945 in Lützow. At the trial of the Supreme National Tribunal, which lasted from November 24, 1947 to December 22, 1947, she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1956 for health reasons. In 1996, she was charged with the aforementioned murder of a child, but it was dropped after doctors said that Danz would be too hard to endure a re-imprisonment. She lives in Germany. Now she is 94 years old.
4) Jenny-Wanda Barkmann - (May 30, 1922 - July 4, 1946) Between 1940 and December 1943 she worked as a fashion model.
In January 1944, she became a warden at the small Stutthof concentration camp, where she became famous for brutally beating female prisoners, some of whom she beat to death. She also participated in the selection of women and children for the gas chambers. She was so cruel, but also very beautiful, that the female prisoners called her "Beautiful Ghost".
Jenny fled the camp in 1945 when Soviet troops began to approach the camp. But she was caught and arrested in May 1945 while trying to leave the train station in Gdansk. She is said to have flirted with the policemen guarding her and was not particularly worried about her fate. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was found guilty, after which she was given the last word. She stated, "Life is indeed a great pleasure, and the pleasure is usually short-lived."
Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was publicly hanged on Biskupska Gorka near Gdansk on July 4, 1946. She was only 24 years old. Her body was burned, and the ashes were publicly washed away in the closet of the house where she was born.
5) Herta Gertrud Bothe - (January 8, 1921 - March 16, 2000) - overseer of women's concentration camps. She was arrested on charges of war crimes, but later released.
In 1942 she received an invitation to work as a warden in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. After four weeks of preliminary training, Bothe was sent to Stutthof, a concentration camp near the city of Gdańsk. In it, Bothe was nicknamed "The Sadist of Stutthof" because of her mistreatment of female prisoners.
In July 1944 she was sent by Gerda Steinhoff to the Bromberg-Ost concentration camp. From January 21, 1945, Bothe was a warden during the death march of prisoners, which took place from central Poland to the Bergen-Belsen camp. The march ended on February 20-26, 1945. In Bergen-Belsen, Bothe led a group of women, consisting of 60 people and engaged in the production of wood.
After the camp was liberated, she was arrested. At the Belzensky court, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Released earlier than the specified date on December 22, 1951. She died on March 16, 2000 in Huntsville, USA.
6) Maria Mandel (1912-1948) - Nazi war criminal.
Occupying the post of head of the women's camps of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in the period 1942-1944, she is directly responsible for the death of about 500 thousand female prisoners.
Colleagues in the service described Mandel as an "extremely intelligent and dedicated" person. The Auschwitz prisoners among themselves called her a monster. Mandel personally selected prisoners, and sent them to the gas chambers by the thousands. There are cases when Mandel personally took several prisoners under her protection for a while, and when they bored her, she put them on the lists for destruction. Also, it was Mandel who came up with the idea and the creation of a women's camp orchestra, which met new prisoners at the gates with cheerful music. According to the recollections of the survivors, Mandel was a music lover and treated the musicians from the orchestra well, she personally came to their barracks with a request to play something.
In 1944, Mandel was transferred to the post of head of the Muldorf concentration camp, one of the parts of the Dachau concentration camp, where she served until the end of the war with Germany. In May 1945, she fled to the mountains near her hometown, Münzkirchen. On August 10, 1945, Mandel was arrested by American troops. In November 1946, as a war criminal, she was handed over to the Polish authorities at their request. Mandel was one of the main defendants in the trial of Auschwitz workers, which took place in November-December 1947. The court sentenced her to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on January 24, 1948 in a Krakow prison.
7) Hildegard Neumann (May 4, 1919, Czechoslovakia -?) - senior warden in the Ravensbrück and Theresienstadt concentration camps.
Hildegard Neumann began her service in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in October 1944, immediately becoming a head overseer. Due to good work, she was transferred to the Theresienstadt concentration camp as the head of all camp guards. Beauty Hildegard, according to the prisoners, was cruel and merciless towards them.
She supervised between 10 and 30 female police officers and over 20,000 female Jewish prisoners. Neumann also facilitated the deportation of more than 40,000 women and children from Theresienstadt to the death camps of Auschwitz (Auschwitz) and Bergen-Belsen, where most of them were killed. Researchers estimate that more than 100,000 Jews were deported from the Theresienstadt camp and were killed or died in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and another 55,000 died in Theresienstadt itself.
Neumann left the camp in May 1945 and was not prosecuted for war crimes. Hildegard Neumann's subsequent fate is unknown.
