10 SS Officers Forced to Face Their Victims in Court

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Number 10, Reinhold Hanning, the silent guard who finally spoke after 70 years.

[00:00:06]In February of 2016, an old man in a tweed jacket and yellow sweater walked slowly into a courtroom in Detold, Germany. His chin was pressed to his chest. His eyes avoided the cameras. He was 94 years old. He used a wheelchair to enter the room, and he had spent the previous seven decades hiding a secret from his wife, his children, and his grandchildren. The secret was simple.

[00:00:32]From January of 1942 until June of 1944, Reinhold Hanning had worn the uniform of the SS at Awitz. He had patrolled the platforms where Hungarian Jews stepped off the cattle cars. He had watched the chimneys of Burkanau push smoke into the Polish sky. He had smelled the bodies burning. He had heard the screams and he had said nothing for 70 years. The trial in debt mold was a strange kind of historical moment. German prosecutors charged Hamming with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, a number based on the transport records of Hungarian Jews who were sent to the gas chambers during his tour of duty. The legal theory was new. Before the John Demjanuk verdict of 2011, German courts required proof that an individual guard had personally killed someone. After Demjanuk, the law accepted a different idea. If you worked at a death camp, you were part of the machinery of death. You did not have to push a victim into the gas chamber to be guilty. You only had to make the camp function. The courtroom in debt mold was packed for the opening day. Nearly 200 people waited in the damp February cold for a seat in the public gallery. 40 Awitz survivors and family members of victims had joined the trial as co-plaintiffs, a feature of German law that allowed them to participate directly in the proceedings. They had flown in from all over the world. They had carried photographs of murdered parents and siblings. They had carried memories that they were finally going to speak out loud in front of a man who had been there. The first survivor to take the witness stand was Leon Schwarzbam.

[00:02:13]He was 94 years old, the same age as the defendant.

[00:02:18]He had been a fast runner in his youth, which was the only reason he survived Awitz. The SS used him as a messenger.

[00:02:25]He had watched a 17-year-old girl with very red hair be murdered right next to him. He had lost 35 members of his family in the camp. He walked into the courtroom impeccably dressed in a navy suit. His hands trembled as he held his written statement. He looked across the room at the man who had been a guard while he had been a prisoner. He spoke quietly at first. He described the chimneys belching flames into the night.

[00:02:51]He described naked prisoners walking toward the gas chambers. He described the smell that hung over the camp every single day. Then his voice rose. He said it was just like Dante's inferno. He turned directly toward Hanning who was sitting only 5 m away. "Mr. Hanning," he said, "we are about the same age, and we will both soon stand before the highest court. Speak here about what you and your comrades did. Tell everyone."

[00:03:19]Hanning did not look up. He kept his eyes on the floor. He said nothing. For 3 months, more survivors took the stand.

[00:03:27]They described crerematoria chimneys belching out flames. They described people being shot in front of their eyes. They described seeing children pulled away from their mothers on the selection ramp. They watched Hanning closely each time, hoping for some flicker of recognition, some sign that the words were landing. They saw nothing. Hanning sat in his wheelchair.

[00:03:49]He held his face still. He did not respond. Then on the 29th of April 2016, 3 months into the trial, Reinhold Hanning finally spoke. He sat in his wheelchair. He pulled the microphone close to his mouth. His voice was weak and shaking. I want to say that it disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organization, he said. I am ashamed that I saw injustice and never did anything about it, and I apologize for my actions. I am very, very sorry. The courtroom was silent.

[00:04:23]Leon Schwarzbound watched from 5 m away with a steely face. He did not move. He did not cry. He waited until Hanning was finished and then he spoke to a reporter outside the courtroom. I lost 35 family members. The 95year-old said, "How can you apologize for that? I am not angry.

[00:04:43]I do not want him to go to prison, but he should say more for the sake of the young generation today because the historical truth is important. On the 17th of June 2016, Judge Anki Gruda delivered the verdict. Reinhold Hanning was found guilty of 170,000 counts of accessory to murder. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison. The judge spoke to the courtroom directly. This trial is the very least that society can do to give at least a semblance of justice.

[00:05:13]She said even 70 years after and even with a 94 year old defendant. The entire complex Avitz was like a factory designed to kill people at an industrial level. You Hanning were one of those cogs. Hanning never spent a single day behind bars. He was allowed to remain free while his lawyers filed appeals, a normal feature of the German legal system. He died at his home in May of 2017 at the age of 95. His conviction had been finalized only weeks before his death. He did not live long enough to see the verdict become legally permanent. For 73 years, he had carried his secret. He had served as a guard in the worst death camp in human history.

[00:05:57]He had watched the trains arrive. He had watched the people being marched to the chambers. He had said nothing to his family, his wife, his children. And in the last year of his life, in a German courtroom, sitting in a wheelchair looking at a survivor who had been there with him, he had finally said the words, "I am ashamed. I am sorry." The survivors received his confession, not as a gift, but as a debt. Finally acknowledged. Seven decades late, number 10 on this list, is not the most powerful SS officer in the dock. He never rose above the rank of sergeant.

[00:06:33]He never gave a command that killed anyone. He was a small man, a regular soldier. But Reinhold Hanning matters because he proved something the survivors had been demanding for 70 years. That ordinary participation in mass murder was itself a crime. That the silence of the small wheel in the great machine was itself a sin. and that even after the lifetime of a defendant, even after the lifetime of the witnesses, justice could still find a seat in a German courtroom. Number nine, Oscar Gring, the bookkeeper of Awitz who counted the money taken from the dead.

[00:07:08]He was the strange one. Among the men brought to face their victims in court, Oscar Groing was the one who had already spoken. He had given interviews to British journalists. He had appeared in BBC documentaries. He had stood at the railway platform of his memory and described in calm, clear sentences what he had seen at Awitz. He was 93 years old when his trial began in April of 2015 in the city of Lunberg, Germany. He arrived in court in a wheelchair, frail with thick glasses and white hair. He listened politely. He took notes. And when the prosecutor read out the charge, 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, Oscar Gring did not pretend he had been anywhere else. Yes, he had been at Awitz. Yes, he had stood on the ramp.

[00:07:57]The job he had been given was the strangest detail in a strange life.

[00:08:01]Groaning had been an SS sergeant. He had served at Avitz between September of 1942 and October of 1944. His task was not the gas chambers. It was not the selections. It was the money. When the trains arrived at the platform, Jewish prisoners were ordered to leave their suitcases behind. Those suitcases were taken to large sorting warehouses inside the camp. Inside the suitcases were watches, jewelry, currency from every nation in occupied Europe, family photographs, books, religious objects, gold teeth pried from the mouths of the dead. Groaning's job was to sit in an office and count it all. He sorted the foreign currency into stacks. He recorded the amounts. He packaged the gold and the watches. He sent the loot back to Berlin to fund the Reich. He was the bookkeeper of the death camp. He worked in a building. He did not pull triggers. He did not drop Cyclon B into the chambers. He was in his own quiet way an accountant of murder. The Lunberg trial was different from the Hanning trial. Groaning did not stay silent. He spoke openly. He described what he had seen on the ramp. He described a baby that an SS man had killed by smashing its head against a truck because the crying had become inconvenient. He said the act had appalled him. He said he had complained to a superior who told him there was nothing to discuss. He had asked to be transferred. The transfer was never granted. He had stayed at Avitz doing his accounting until the camp was evacuated. He was not by his own account an enthusiast. He was not by his own account a monster. He was a young German man who had volunteered for the SS because he believed in Germany and who had ended up sorting the watches of people who were being murdered 50 m away. The prosecutors did not accept his self-portrait. They argued that groaning had helped Awitz function. They argued that by counting the money, he had encouraged the deportations to continue because the regime profited from each transport. Bay argued that his service had directly contributed to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. The specific group whose deaths fell within the time frame of his work. The courtroom in Lunberg held survivors of the Mangala Twin experiments. It held children of the ghast. It held people who had escaped the ramp by minutes or by miracle. And then it held Eva Core. Eva Core was 81 years old. She had been one of the Mangala twins. As a 10-year-old girl, she had been torn from her family on the Avitz ramp and used as a human guinea pig by Dr. Ysef Mangala. Her twin sister Miriam survived alongside her.

[00:10:47]The rest of their family did not. After the war, Eva Core had built a life in Indiana. She had founded an organization called C A N D, which stood for Children of Avitz, Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors. She had spent decades teaching young people about the camps.

[00:11:04]and she had made a decision that set her apart from many of her fellow survivors.

[00:11:08]She had decided publicly to forgive the Nazis. Not all of them, not as a group, but in her own name, for her own peace.

[00:11:17]She had chosen to release the anger.

[00:11:19]When she walked into the Lunberg courtroom in April of 2015, she did so as a co-plaintiff in the case against Oscar Groaning. She testified about Mangala. She testified about being injected with unknown substances. She testified about watching her sister grow ill from the experiments. And then after she had finished her testimony, she walked across the courtroom toward the defendant. The cameras did not capture what happened next, but a phone in the courtroom did. Eva Core approached, groaning. She offered him her hand. He took it. He pulled her in. He kissed her on the cheek. The two of them held one another in the middle of a courtroom where he was being tried for accessory to the murder of 300,000 people. and she was one of the witnesses against him.

[00:12:05]The photograph went around the world within hours. Some survivors were furious. They accused Core of betraying the dead. They accused her of using the courtroom for personal theater. They wrote angry letters. Core defended her choice in interviews afterward. She said she had not forgiven Groing on behalf of anyone else. She had not absolved him of his crimes. She had simply chosen as a private act to release her own anger. He was the only Nazi who had ever spoken openly about what he did. She said he had validated her testimony in a way that no court ever could. So, she had hugged him. The verdict came in July of 2015. Oscar Gring was found guilty of 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.

[00:12:49]He was sentenced to 4 years in prison.

[00:12:51]His appeals dragged on for 3 years. By the time his final appeal was rejected in 2017, he was 96 years old. He was declared fit to serve his sentence in November of 2017. He died on the 9th of March 2018 before he could be admitted to prison. He had spent his final years giving public testimony against Holocaust deniers. He had told them to their faces that the gas chambers existed because he had seen them. He had told them that the camp was real because he had worked there. He had told them that the murders had happened because he had counted the money taken from the murdered. The bookkeeper of Awitz had become in the last decade of his life a witness for the prosecution against his own past. He was not forgiven by history. He was not absolved by the courts. But he was held for one strange moment by an 81-year-old woman who had survived Mangala in a German courtroom in the year 2015, 70 years after the war ended. That moment is not the meaning of justice, but it is something that history will not be able to ignore.

[00:14:01]Number eight, Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Leyon, who lived as a free man for 40 years before the children he tortured testified to his faith. The story of Klaus Barbie is the story of a man who should have been hanged in 1945 and who instead lived another 46 years, most of them in comfort, most of them in Bolivia. Most of them under the protection of governments that should have been hunting him. He was born in 1913 in Bad Godburg, Germany. He joined the Nazi party in 1932.

[00:14:34]He joined the SS and the Security Service in 1935.

[00:14:39]By 1942, he was the chief of the Gestapo in the French city of Leyon. He was 29 years old. He had absolute power over a city of half a million people. He used that power in ways that earned him a single nickname for the rest of his life. The butcher of Lyon, Barbie did not delegate the torture. He preferred to do it himself. His headquarters at the hotel terminus became a building that the residents of Lyon learned to walk past on the other side of the street. People taken inside were beaten, electrocuted, hung from hooks, dunked in baths of freezing water, forced to watch their family members tortured before their eyes. His most famous victim was Jean Mulan, the leader of the French resistance. Barbie personally interrogated Mulan every day for 3 weeks in June of 1943. Mulan refused to give him a single name. He died from his injuries on the way to Germany. Barbie was also responsible for the deportation of approximately 7,500 Jews from Lyon and the surrounding region, most of whom were murdered at Awitz. He directed the execution of over 4,000 resistance members. And then there was IO. In the spring of 1944, a Jewish woman named Sbine Zlatin had hidden 44 Jewish children at a small farmhouse in the village of Izu in the French Alps. The children ranged in age from 4 to 17.

[00:16:05]They were orphans. Their parents had already been deported. Zlatin and a small team of caretakers were trying to save them. On the morning of the 6th of April, 1944, Klaus Barbie sent a Gustapo unit to the children's home. They burst through the door during breakfast. They loaded the children into tracks. They sent them to Dr, the transit camp outside Paris. From Dr. They were placed on convoy 71 bound for Awitz.

[00:16:33]42 of the 44 children were gassed on arrival. Two older boys were sent to a separate camp and shot. Of the seven adults at EU, six were murdered. Only Leia Feldblum, the caretaker who had been with the children survived. She was tattooed at Awitz and lived through the camp. Sabine's Latin had been in another town that day trying to find new hiding places for the children. When she returned, her home was empty and her children were on the trains. After the war, Klaus Barbie did not run. He did not have to. The United States Army Counterintelligence Corps recruited him as an informant against communists in occupied Germany. The Americans knew what he had done in Leon. They valued his skills anyway. He spent the late 1940s on the American payroll. When the French government finally demanded his extradition in 1949, the Americans refused to hand him over. They feared he would tell French interrogators about American intelligence operations. So in 1951, they helped him escape. They created a false identity for him, Klaus Altman, and they sent him through the so-called rat line, a smuggling route operated by a Croatian priest named Kunislav Draanovich through Italy and onward to South America. Klaus Barbie landed in Bolivia in April of 1951.

[00:17:54]He became Klaus Altman, a businessman.

[00:17:58]He worked with the Bolivian government.

[00:18:00]He helped train death squads. He was made a lieutenant colonel in the Bolivian army. He lived in La Paz with his family for 20 years before anyone tracked him down. The people who eventually found him were a French couple, Beate and Serge Classfeld, who had dedicated their lives to hunting Nazi fugitives. In 1971, they confirmed that Klaus Altman was Klaus Barbie. They launched a public campaign for his extradition. The Bolivian dictator at the time, Hugo Banza, refused. The Classfelds kept pushing for over a decade. They published photographs. They got French television involved. They flew to Bolivia. They made the case impossible to ignore. In 1983, the Bolivian government changed. The new civilian leadership had no loyalty to the old Nazi. They handed Klaus Barbie over to French authorities. He was flown back to Leyon 40 years after he had left and placed in a French prison cell. His trial began in May of 1987 in Leon in the same city where he had tortured the resistance and deported the children. He was charged with 17 counts of crimes against humanity. He was not charged with the murder of Gene Mulan because under French law, a war crime carried a 20-year statute of limitations. But crimes against humanity had no statute of limitations at all. The deportation of the children of Izu was a crime against humanity. So was the raid on the Union general de Israelites. So were the deportations of August of 1944. The trial in Lyon was one of the most heavily covered legal events in French history. Barbie chose after 3 days to refuse to attend the proceedings. He sat in his cell and the trial continued without him. Survivors took the stand one after another. Sabine Zlatine, the founder of the Izu home, was 80 years old when she testified. She described the children. She remembered their names. She remembered the games they had played in the courtyard. She remembered being summoned by police on the morning of the 6th of April 1944 to find that her children were gone. Leia Feldb who was 69 years old stood in the witness box and rolled up her sleeve. She showed the courtroom the number tattooed on her arm at Awitz. She was the only adult from the children's home who had come back. The most haunting testimony came from a woman named Simone Lrange. She had been 13 years old when Barbie arrested her. She had been carried into his interrogation cell on a stretcher because the pain in her body would not let her stand. She told the courtroom what he had done to her. She named him from the witness box. She looked at the judges and said his name. The trial lasted 2 months. The verdict came on the 4th of July 1987.

[00:20:50]Klaus Barbie was found guilty on all counts. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. France had abolished the death penalty in 1981. So the man who would have been hanged 40 years earlier instead spent his last days in a French prison cell. He died of cancer on the 25th of September 1991 at the age of 77.

[00:21:12]He never apologized. He never expressed remorse. He died believing he had done nothing wrong. But the children of Isizu had names again. Sabine's Latin had spoken them. Leia Feld Bloom had carried her tattoo back and Klaus Barbie, the butcher of Leyon, had been forced to sit in a cell while the city he had terrorized finally pronounced him guilty. Number seven, Bruno Day, the teenage SS guard who heard the screams from the watchtower and was still alive to face the people who heard them, too.

[00:21:45]He was 17 years old when he put on the SS uniform. He was 93 years old when he was wheeled into the courtroom in Hamburg, Germany in October of 2019. He held a red folder in front of his face to hide from the cameras. His daughter walked beside him. The room was full of survivors who had flown in from France, Israel, Poland, and the United States.

[00:22:09]Some in wheelchairs of their own, some leaning on the arms of their grandchildren. They had come for the same reason the survivors had come to Deb Mold in Lunberg. They wanted to look at him. They wanted him to look at them.

[00:22:22]The crime in question had taken place between August of 1944 and April of 1945 at a place called Stutoff. Stutoff was a concentration camp in occupied Poland, about 24 mi east of the city of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk. It had been the first Nazi camp built outside the borders of pre-war Germany. By the final months of the war, it had become a place where prisoners were murdered by being shot in the back of the neck, by being injected with phenol, by being gassed with cyclon B, and by being deliberately starved and denied medicine. Approximately 65,000 people were killed at Stutoff. Bruno Day had stood in a watchtower at the camp during the final 8 months of its operation. From his post, he could hear the screams of Jews dying in the gas chamber. He told investigators years later that he had also watched the corpses being carted to the crematorium every day. He had been a teenager. He had been drafted into the SS rather than into the regular army because a heart condition had kept him out of frontline service. He had been told to stand in the tower and prevent escapes. He had done what he was told. The charges against him were 5,230 counts of accessory to murder, one for each person who was killed at Stutoff during the months when he stood guard because he had been a minor when he started his service at the camp. German law required that he be tried in a juvenile court, not an adult court. The presiding judge described the case from the opening as an unusual trial. a man of 93 sitting in a juvenile court for crimes committed when he was a teenager during the Second World War. The trial began on the 17th of October 2019 in the regional court in Hamburg. About 25 survivors of the camp had joined the proceedings as co-plaintiffs. They had questions for the defendant. They had memories they wanted heard out loud in front of him. The first co-plaintiff to testify was Peter Loth, who had flown in from the United States. His mother had been imprisoned at Stutoff. He had been born inside the camp. He had survived only because his mother had hidden him under straw in a barracks. He took the witness stand and described what his mother had told him about the camp. He looked at Bruno Day and waited for the old man to respond. Judy Mel was one of the more famous survivors. She had been a teenager at Stoff. Her grandson Ben Cohen had joined the trial as a co-plaintiff. on her behalf. Her testimony described the constant beatings, the starvation, the freezing winter when prisoners died in their bunks every night. Her family had been part of a death march out of the camp in January of 1945.

[00:25:06]She had escaped along the way. She had survived. She was alive to testify against the man whose watchtower had overlooked her ordeal. Other survivors described the smell of the bodies. They described the women who were marched directly to the gas chamber the moment they arrived. They described prisoners who were so weak from hunger that they could not even stand for roll call and who were shot where they lay. They had been children when these things happened to them. They were old now. They had come to Hamburg to a courtroom in a juvenile court because Bruno Day had been a child too when he stood in that tower. And the question of his guilt was a question that German law had decided to answer at last. The defense lawyer for Bruno Day, Stefan Wateramp, asked the courtroom a question on the opening day of the trial. Where does responsibility end? He said, "That is the question this trial must answer."

[00:26:00]Bruno Day in his own testimony admitted he had been there. He admitted he had heard the screams. He admitted he had seen the bodies being carted away. He said he had been a young man with no choice. He had been ordered to stand in the tower and he had stood in the tower.

[00:26:16]He had not personally killed anyone. He had not personally beaten anyone. He had simply been a watchman. The prosecution argued that the watchman was the gas chamber's first line of defense. Without the men in the towers, prisoners could have tried to escape. The camp could not have functioned. Every single death at Stutoff during his 8 months of service was made possible in part by the fact that Bruno Day was standing in the tower. The trial dragged on for 9 months. More than 40 co-plaintiffs took the stand. Day listened to each of them.

[00:26:49]On the 23rd of July, 2020, the verdict came down. Bruno Day was found guilty of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder because he had been 17 at the time of his service.

[00:27:03]And because the trial was held in juvenile court, he was given a 2-year suspended sentence. He would not serve a single day behind bars. The verdict was a strange compromise. The survivors had not come to Hamburg to see Bruno Day go to prison at the age of 93. They had come to see him recognized by a court of law as a participant in the murder of their families. The conviction was, in the language of the co-plaintiffs and their lawyers, a symbolic moment. The man in the watchtower had been judged.

[00:27:34]The screams from the gas chamber had finally been entered into the legal record. The teenagers who had stood guard at the death camps of the Third Reich were not innocent men. They were the small wheels of a vast killing machine. And the law, 75 years late, was finally willing to say so. Bruno Day survived the trial. He lived quietly for several more years in Hamburg with his daughter. The conviction was upheld on appeal. The principle established by his case that a teenage watchtower guard was guilty of every death his guarding had made possible was confirmed in German law. Other prosecutions followed. Other 90s something former guards were brought into courtrooms. The man with the red folder over his face had become the precedent for the last wave of Holocaust prosecutions. The wave that would come for every guard, no matter how minor their role, while one of them still drew breath. Number six, Anton Maloth. the handsome Tony who beat at least 100 prisoners to death and lived in comfort for 55 years before facing a court. The nickname is the first thing to understand about Anton Maloth. The prisoners at the small fortress at Terzian called him Deerna Tony which means the handsome Tony. He was a tall, well-built man with a clean uniform and a careful haircut. He took pride in his appearance. He smiled often and he killed people with his fists and his boots. He was born on the 13th of February 1912 in the town of Shenna near Myirano in the South Tyroll region. He grew up working in his foster parents' guest house. He apprenticed as a butcher. He served briefly in the Italian army as a lance corporal. In 1939, after Italy and Germany signed an agreement that allowed German-speaking South Tyrollians to relocate to the Reich, Malof chose to leave Italy. He received police training in Innsbrook.

[00:29:28]In June of 1940, he was assigned to a place that would become his world for the next 5 years. The small fortress at Terizenat was not the main concentration camp. The main camp was a ghetto prison for Jews, a place that the Nazis would later use as their model fake camp. The showpiece they presented to the Red Cross to prove that they were treating Jews humanely. The small fortress was different. The small fortress was a Gustapo prison. It held members of the Czech resistance, political prisoners, and Jews considered dangerous enough to require harsher confinement. It was not a place where prisoners were given even the pretense of survival. It was a place where they were beaten, starved, and worked to death. Anton Malof became a supervisor at the small fortress in June of 1940. He held that position until the German surrender in May of 1945. For nearly 5 years he had absolute power over the prisoners assigned to his blocks. He used that power to kill. The official Czechoslovak investigation after the war conducted by the court in Litheris established that Maloth had personally beaten approximately 100 prisoners to death over the course of his service. He did not use weapons. He used his fists. He used the heel of his boot. He used a stick. He would single out a prisoner who had displeased him, drag the man to a courtyard, and beat him until the body stopped moving. He did this in front of other prisoners as a warning. The survivors described his face during these beatings. He was calm.

[00:30:59]He took his time. He breathed evenly. He was the handsome Tony, and he was killing a man in front of them. One specific death has been documented in detail by survivor accounts and confirmed in court. On the 24th of September 1944, Maloth beat a Jewish prisoner named Arno Wolf to death. The beating was unprovoked. It was watched by other inmates. It was reported in detail to investigators after the war.

[00:31:27]Wol's death became the central murder count of the trial that finally convicted Maloth 57 years later. After the German surrender, Maloth did what so many lowranking SSmen did. He went home to Italy. He used his old Italian connections. He resumed Italian citizenship under a false name. He lived openly in the South Terroll region for decades. A Czechoslovak military court tried him in absentia in September of 1948. They sentenced him to death for war crimes. The Austrian justice department when asked to extradite him did nothing. He was not even held in custody. He simply walked away. He lived as a free man for over 40 years. He worked, he married, he had a comfortable life. He moved easily between Italy and Germany. He never hid. He never changed his name on official documents. The investigators who could have arrested him knew exactly where he was. They chose not to act. In 1988, after Italy stripped him of his citizenship because of his SS background, Maloth was finally deported to Germany. He settled in a retirement home in Munich. Even then, the German prosecutors waited. Witnesses were dying. Evidence was being lost. It took another 12 years for the case to finally move. In May of 2000, after a Czech witness named Jiri Cos came forward with new testimony about a specific shooting Malof had committed in 1943, the public prosecutor's office in Munich opened a formal case. Girri cause was a survivor who remembered watching Malof shoot at a prisoner who had hidden a cauliflower under his jacket during forced harvest work. Malof had fired several shots. The prisoner had been wounded. CS had assumed he was dead. He came forward decades later to testify.

[00:33:18]Maloth was taken into custody on the 25th of May 2000. He was 88 years old.

[00:33:24]The trial began on the 23rd of April 2001 in the prison in Munich Stadelheim.

[00:33:30]The decision had been made to hold the trial inside the prison, partly because of Maloth's age and partly to keep the security situation under control.

[00:33:39]Survivors traveled to Munich. They sat in the courtroom and looked at the man they remembered from 60 years before.

[00:33:45]Some recognized him immediately, even with the changes that age had brought to his face. He was no longer the handsome Tony. He was an old man in a wheelchair, but the eyes were the same. He was charged with the murder of Arno Wolf in 1944 and the attempted murder of the prisoner Coo had described in 1943. He was not charged with the other 99 killings that the Czechoslovak court had documented in 1948.

[00:34:11]There was no evidence that could be presented in court that met the standards of German criminal law for those other deaths. The witnesses were too few. The records were too fragmentaryary. The prosecutors could only prove what they could prove. So they tried him for two specific cases.

[00:34:27]Witnesses came forward who had seen the wolf killing. Witnesses came forward who remembered the cauliflower shooting.

[00:34:34]They were old, but their memories were clear. Maloth sat in the courtroom in his wheelchair. He followed the proceedings silently. He occasionally peered over at the judges and the witnesses with an expression his guards described as detached. He showed no remorse. He did not testify. He did not apologize. On the 30th of May 2001, the Munich District Court convicted Anton Malof of one count of murder and one count of attempted murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was 89 years old. His lawyers appealed. They argued that he was too sick to stand trial. They argued that the events were too far in the past. The appeals failed.

[00:35:17]The conviction was upheld. Maloth had spent 55 years as a free man after his Czechoslovak death sentence in absentia.

[00:35:25]He spent the final year of his life as a convicted murderer. 10 days before his death suffering from cancer, he was declared unfit for prison and released to a Munich hospital. He died on the 31st of October 2002 at the age of 90.

[00:35:43]His freedom had outlasted his fellow guards, his victims, his witnesses, and almost the 20th century itself. But in the end, the courtroom got him. The handsome Tony, who had beaten 100 men to death in the courtyards of the small fortress, died with the word murderer attached to his name by a court of law.

[00:36:03]Number five, Michael Seaffort, the beast of Balsano, who lived in Vancouver for 50 years before Canada handed him over to face the people he had tortured.

[00:36:12]Michael Seaffort's story is the story of how easily a war criminal could vanish into the post-war world if he simply kept his head down. He was an ethnic German born in 1924 in a town called Landau near Odessa in what was then the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. He was 18 years old when the war reached him. When the SS recruited foreign volunteers from the German-speaking minorities of Eastern Europe, Safford signed up. He was sent west into the Reich, given training, and assigned to a prison camp in northern Italy. The Bolzano transit camp opened in the summer of 1944 after the Allies pushed northward through Italy, and the Nazis needed a new staging point for the prisoners they were still deporting north. The camp held Jews captured in northern Italy, Italian resistance fighters, Allied airmen, German army deserters, and people the Nazis classified as undesirable for any reason. from Bzano.

[00:37:10]Transports were sent further north to Avitz, Mauousen, and other camps.

[00:37:15]Seafford was 19 years old when he was assigned to the camp as a guard. His commanding officer noticed something.

[00:37:22]Seafford seemed to enjoy his work in a way that even other SS guards found notable. He laughed during interrogations. He invented forms of cruelty that his colleagues had not thought of. He took special interest in prisoners who could not defend themselves. The names of his victims, as established at his trial 56 years later, included a 15-year-old prisoner whom Safe systematically starved to death. He locked the boy in a cell, denied him food, and watched him die over the course of several weeks. He gouged out the eyes of another prisoner during an interrogation. He tortured a pregnant woman, and then killed her along with her unborn child. The Italian survivors of Balszano remembered him as the worst guard in the camp. They gave him a name, the beast. When the war ended, Safe had vanished. He did not go back to Ukraine.

[00:38:14]He had no Ukraine to go back to. He went west. He settled in displaced persons camps. He told nobody what he had done.

[00:38:22]In 1951, he immigrated to Canada under his real name, which the Canadian authorities did not investigate. He arrived in Halifax. He moved to Vancouver. He found work in a lumber mill on the west coast of British Columbia. He met a woman named Christine. They married. They moved into a small house in East Vancouver. He worked at the mill for the rest of his career. He retired. He attended church.

[00:38:48]He kept a tidy lawn. He was to his neighbors a quiet old European man with a thick accent who minded his own business. For 50 years, Michael Seaffort was a Canadian citizen leading an utterly invisible life. In the meantime, in Italy, prosecutors had been building a case. Italian military authorities had documented the crimes at Bosano. They had collected testimony from survivors.

[00:39:13]They had identified Safford by name.

[00:39:15]They tried him in absentia in 2000 at a military tribunal in Verona. They convicted him on nine counts of murder.

[00:39:23]They sentenced him to life imprisonment.

[00:39:25]The verdict, as far as Italy was concerned, was the final word. But Italy did not have Michael Seaffort. Canada did. The Italian government formally requested Seaffort's extradition. The Canadian government opened denaturalization proceedings, arguing that Seafford had hidden his SS background when he entered the country in 1951 and therefore had obtained his Canadian citizenship through fraud.

[00:39:51]Seaffort fought back. He hired a lawyer named Doug Christi, a controversial figure who had defended Holocaust deniers in the past. Christy argued that Seaffort was being persecuted by a foreign government, that the evidence was decades old, that the extradition would violate Canadian sovereignty. The case dragged through the Canadian courts for nearly a decade. Safet was held in custody, then released on bail, then ordered back into custody. His final appeal reached the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007. The court rejected it.

[00:40:24]On the 15th of February 2008, an 83-year-old Michael Seaffort was placed on a military flight at Vancouver International Airport. His wife had been called by his lawyer the night before to be told he was being taken. The flight stopped in Toronto. From Toronto, an Italian military aircraft flew him to Rome. He arrived in Italy as the first person ever extradited from Canada for crimes committed during the Second World War. He was transferred immediately to the prison at Santa Maria Capua Veter near Naples. He was given a single room with a private toilet and a television.

[00:40:59]He was allowed daily phone calls and 1 hour of outdoor walking in the morning and 1 hour in the afternoon. He was an 83year-old prisoner being treated according to Italian humanitarian standards in stark contrast to the way he had treated the 15year-old boy he had starved to death. The Italian military prosecutor who had pursued the case for years, Bartameo Costantini did not stop with Seaffort's imprisonment. He continued investigating other guards from the Bolzano camp. He questioned Seaffort as a witness against those colleagues. Seaffort refused to cooperate. Seaffort never apologized. He gave occasional interviews in which he acknowledged having been a guard at the camp but denied being involved in any atrocities. He blamed other guards. He claimed he had been a low-level soldier who had only stood watch. The survivors who had testified at his trial had given names. They had given dates. They had described the specific moments when he had laughed at their pain. Their testimony stood on the legal record. His denials did not change it. He lived in the Italian prison for 2 years. He was sent to a hospital in Caserta in the final days of his life. He died on the 6th of November 2010 at the age of 86.

[00:42:13]He had spent 57 years as a free Canadian. He spent the final two years of his life as the beast of Bolzano. The man finally sent home to answer for what he had done. Number four, Eduard Krebs, the chief doctor at Mounten, whose nickname among the prisoners was Dr. Injection. The story of Eduard Krebs is one of the most disturbing on this list because the man at the center of it was a doctor. He had taken the oath. He had been trained to heal. He had attended the University of Bon, earned his medical degree and worked for many years as a pediatrician. He had spent his early career taking care of children and then he had become an SS officer and he had taken his medical training and he had used it to murder approximately 900 people by injecting their hearts with poison. He was born on the 8th of August 1894 in Bon in the German Empire. He served in the First World War. He earned his medical doctorate. He spent the 1920s working as a pediatrician and a company doctor. In 1937, he applied for membership in the SS. In 1938, he was admitted with the rank of second left tenant. In the autumn of 1941, he was assigned to the Maltausen concentration camp in occupied Austria as its chief medical officer. The position came with absolute authority over every aspect of medical care for the prisoners. It was a position of enormous trust. Krebs used it to organize systematic murder. The procedure was simple. Twice a week, Krebs or his subordinates would inspect the camp infirmary. They would identify prisoners who were too sick or too injured to return to forced labor. These prisoners were classified as ballast, the German term meaning useless weight.

[00:44:00]They were taken to a small room next to the infirmary. They were laid on a table. A nurse or a fellow SS doctor would prepare a syringe filled with gasoline, benzene, or pure phenol. The needle would be pushed directly into the chest between the ribs into the heart.

[00:44:18]The injection would kill the prisoner within seconds. The bodies would be carried to the crematorium. The infirmary records would be falsified to show the cause of death as natural.

[00:44:27]Approximately 900 Russian, Polish, and Czech prisoners were murdered by lethal heart injection under Krebs supervision at Mounten between 1941 and 1943. The prisoners called him Dr. Spritzbach, which translates roughly to Dr. Injection, a play on his real name combined with the German word for syringe. They knew exactly what he did.

[00:44:51]They knew that being assigned to the infirmary often meant being marked for death. They knew that a doctor who should have been treating them was sorting them like cattle for slaughter.

[00:45:01]Krebs did more than supervise the injections. He also organized the construction of a gas chamber in the basement of the Mountousen hospital. The chamber was disguised as a shower room.

[00:45:12]Prisoners considered unfit for labor were sent there and gassed with Cyclon B. After the chamber was complete, Krebs Bark also conducted regular selections, walking down the rows of sick prisoners in their barracks, choosing who would live and who would die. The testimony of one survivor, a man named Yseph Herzler, was preserved in the camp's postwar documentation. As the senior SS doctor in the camp, Herzler said, "Dr. Krebs, sometimes came to Block 5 and had the still surviving Jews paraded before him." He then asked if any of them were doctors. If there were, he would say, "You Jewish pig, you're just an abortionist." The next day, they were done away with by the capos. If a Jewish inmate was lying on the floor with a broken Zim, a not uncommon occurrence at work, he was usually thrown over a wall by a cappo. If Dr. Krebs were passing, he would say, ironically, "Yes, this broken foot is a hopeless case." Kreb's back was transferred away from Maousen in 1943 after personally shooting a prisoner named Yseph Brightenfelner during an altercation. The shooting had embarrassed his superiors. They moved him to the Kaiserald camp in Latvia where he supervised selections and the liquidation of the camp in August of 1944.

[00:46:30]He then briefly served in the regular army as a senior staff doctor. By the end of 1944, he had left military service entirely. He returned to civilian life. He took a position as the company doctor at a spinning mill in the German city of Castle. He was working at the mill treating ordinary workers when American forces arrived in Castle in the spring of 1945. Krebs was arrested. He was identified by Maousen survivors. He was placed in custody for trial. The trial took place at the American Military Court of Dao in the spring of 1946.

[00:47:06]It is known to history as the Mount Trial or more formally as case number 0 5561 defendants were tried together.

[00:47:16]They included SS officers, camp doctors, guards, and even some capos. The charges were violations of the laws and customs of war with specific allegations of subjecting prisoners to killing, beating, torture, and starvation.

[00:47:31]Survivors took the witness stand one after another. They named names. They described specific moments. They identified specific defendants from the dock. Dr. Krebs was identified by multiple witnesses as the man who had supervised the injection murders. The court records preserved a remarkable exchange between Krebs and the prosecutor. When asked how he had carried out the killing orders he had been given, Krebs answered with the calm precision of a doctor describing a procedure. Incurably sick inmates who were absolutely incapable of work were generally gassed. Some were also killed by benzene injection. The prosecutor asked whether he himself had administered injections. Krebs answered yes. He had been ordered to. He had carried out the order. The trial lasted 6 weeks. On the 13th of May 1946, the court found all 61 defendants guilty.

[00:48:25]Dr. Edward Krebs was sentenced to death by hanging. He was sent to Lansburg prison in Bavaria. On the 28th of May, 1947, just over a year after his sentencing, Krebs was led to the gallows. Two executioners worked the prison hangings.

[00:48:42]The American Master Sergeant John Christopher Woods used one set of gallows. The German executioner Johan Reichart used the other. The men sentenced to death were brought up one by one. Krebs was among them. He was hanged with no last public statement.

[00:48:58]His body was buried in the prison cemetery, the Schperting of Friedhof, beside the bodies of the other Nazi war criminals executed at Lansburg. He had killed 900 people with syringes calmly, methodically, twice a week for 2 years.

[00:49:14]He had used his medical training to make murder efficient. And the survivors who had watched him work, who had whispered the nickname Dr. Spritzback through the barracks, had lived long enough to put him in the dock at Dakau and watch a court of law write him out of the world.

[00:49:29]Number three, John Demianjuk, the Ohio auto worker whose case spanned 35 years and three countries and rewrote the law on what it meant to be guilty at a death camp. The Demian case is the most legally consequential one on this list.

[00:49:45]It is also the most twisted. He was tried, convicted of being one of the most infamous individual killers of the Holocaust, sentenced to death, and then released by a higher court that ruled the prosecution had identified the wrong man. He was then tried again in another country for a different death camp and convicted on a legal principle so new that it would change every Nazi prosecution that came after. He died before he could appeal. His name is in the textbooks now attached to the rule that any service at a death camp was complicity in murder. Ivan Mikoloyovich Demianuk was born on the 3rd of April 1920 in the village of Dubv Makarinsi in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He grew up under Soviet rule. He survived the holiday, the artificial famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. He was drafted into the Red Army in 1940. In the summer of 1942, his unit was captured by the German army during the fighting in eastern Crimea. He became one of the more than 3 million Soviet prisoners of war who fell into German hands during the war. Most of those prisoners were starved to death in open air camps. Demand Duke did not die.

[00:51:02]He survived because the Germans recruited him. The SS had an enormous problem in 1942. They were planning to murder millions of people in newly built death camps in occupied Poland. They did not have enough German manpower to operate the camps. So they created a training facility in a Polish town called Trroniki and they began recruiting Soviet prisoners of war who were willing to serve as auxiliary guards. The recruits known as Troniki men were given uniforms, paid wages, and shipped to the death camps to do the work the SS could not do themselves. The Demjanduk case begins with the question of whether he was a Trroniki man. The American government in the 1970s came to believe that he was. They obtained an identity card from Soviet archives. The card carried the name Ivan Demyanuk, a photograph and a record of assignment to a place called Trroniki with a transfer to Soibbor in March of 1943. Demjanjuk's defenders argued the card was a Soviet forgery designed to discredit Ukrainian immigrants. Forensic experts examined the card and concluded it was authentic.

[00:52:11]After the war, Demand Juke had immigrated to the United States. He had arrived in 1952.

[00:52:17]He had settled in suburban Cleveland, Ohio. He had become a mechanic at a Ford Motor Company plant. He had married, raised three children, become a naturalized American citizen. In 1958, he had attended his Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He had been for 30 years a quiet retired auto worker. In 1977, the United States Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations began the process of revoking his citizenship. They alleged he had lied on his immigration application about his wartime activities. The case rested on testimony from survivors of the Trebinka death camp who had identified Demyanguk from a photo array as a guard known as Ivan the Terrible. Ivan the Terrible was a specific man. He had operated the diesel engines that pumped exhaust into the gas chambers at Trebinka. He had personally tortured and killed prisoners on their way into the chambers. He had been remembered by name by the few prisoners who survived the camp. The survivors named John Demyanuk as that man. His citizenship was revoked in 1981. He was deported to Israel in 1986. He was tried in Jerusalem under the same Israeli law that had convicted Adolf Aikman. The trial began in November of 1986.

[00:53:38]Five survivors of Trebinka testified.

[00:53:41]They identified Demjanuk in the courtroom. One of them, Eliu Rosenberg, asked Demjanuk to take off his glasses.

[00:53:48]Demjanuk removed them. Rosenberg approached him slowly, peered into his face, and then shouted in Russian, "Grozny," meaning terrible. He recoiled from Demjanuk as if from a snake. The Israeli court convicted Demjanuk in April of 1988. He was sentenced to death by hanging. His lawyer, Yoram Shefftell, appealed. The appeal took 5 years.

[00:54:14]During those 5 years, the Soviet archives opened. New documents came to light. The new documents identified Ivan the Terrible as a different man entirely, a Ukrainian named Ivan Marenko, who had been a Toriki recruit at Trebinka and who had vanished in 1945. The Israeli Supreme Court reviewed the new evidence in 1993.

[00:54:36]They reached a unanimous decision. The Trebinka survivors had been wrong. They had identified the wrong man. Demjanuk was acquitted of being Ivan the Terrible. The court was careful, however, about what it was saying. It said there was reasonable doubt about whether Demjanuk had been at Trebinka.

[00:54:55]It did not say he was innocent of all war crimes. It said the case against him on this specific charge could not stand.

[00:55:03]Demanduk returned to the United States.

[00:55:06]His citizenship was restored in 1998, but the case did not end there. American investigators returned to the Trroniki identity card. They returned to the records showing his assignment to Soibbor. They began a new denaturalization case in 1999, arguing that even if he was not Ivan the Terrible, he had still served as a guard at a death camp. His citizenship was revoked again. The legal battle continued through the 2000s. In 2009, he was finally deported to Germany. He arrived in Munich on a stretcher. He was 89 years old. The German trial began in November of 2009. The charges were 28,60 counts of accessory to murder, one count for each Jewish prisoner who was gassed at Soibbor during the 6 months that Demanduk had served there in 1943. There were almost no surviving eyewitnesses.

[00:56:02]The few sobore survivors who had lived to old age could not place Demjan Juk specifically. The German court had to rely on the Traniki card, the assignment records and the legal theory that service at a death camp was itself an act of complicity. The trial lasted 18 months. Demjanuk lay on a stretcher in the courtroom most days. He claimed he was too sick to participate. He denied ever having been a guard anywhere. His defense lawyer argued that the prosecution was applying a moral and judicial double standard, that higherranking German SS officers had walked free, that a Ukrainian prisoner of war was being scapegoed for the crimes of Germans. On the 12th of May 2011, the Munich state court found John Demanyuk guilty of 28,60 counts of accessory to murder. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison. He was released pending appeal because at his age and with his health he was not considered a flight risk. He moved into an old age home in Bad Failback. On the 17th of March 2012, John Deianjuk died in the nursing home at the age of 91. His appeal had not yet been heard. Under German law, his death before the final appeal meant that he died in legal terms, presumed innocent. The conviction was vacated by his death. But the legal principle established by his trial survived. The principle was simple. If you served at a death camp, you were guilty of every murder committed there during your service. The prosecution did not need to prove a specific killing.

[00:57:35]The job itself was the crime. This principle reopened the door to dozens of new prosecutions. It led directly to the trials of Reinhold Hanning, Oscar Gruing, Bruno Day, and many others. The Demj Janjuk case had failed to convict the man, but it had succeeded in changing the law. The Ohio auto worker, who had been wrongly identified as Ivan the Terrible, had become in the final years of his life the most legally consequential defendant in the history of Holocaust prosecution. Number two, Anton Muset. The Dutch man who built a Nazi party in the Netherlands and was executed by his own people on the dunes where the Germans had shot the resistance. The trial of Anton Musett is different from every other trial on this list. He was not a German SS officer. He was not a camp guard or a prison doctor or a Gestapo torturer. He was a Dutch civil engineer who had built a political movement of his own. He had been the most prominent collaborator in his country. He had walked openly into the arms of the Nazis and when the war ended, the country he had betrayed brought him home to be killed. Anton Adrian Musset was born on the 11th of May 1894 in the small Dutch town of Verkundam. His father was a school teacher. The family belonged to the local Protestant elite. Anton was bright. He earned a degree in civil engineering from Delft University of Technology. He went to work for the Dutch State Water Management Agency. By the late 1920s, he was the chief engineer of the province of Utre. He should have lived an obscure comfortable life in a stable Dutch career. Instead, in 1931, he founded a political party.

[00:59:18]The party was called the National Socialist Beaging, the NSB, the National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands.

[00:59:26]It was modeled on the Nazi party in neighboring Germany. It advocated for Dutch nationalism, racial purity, and opposition to communism and democracy.

[00:59:35]In the early years, it was a fringe movement. By the late 1930s, after the rise of Hitler in Germany, it had grown to over 50,000 members. When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940, Muser did what most Dutch nationalists refused to do. He collaborated. He did not flee. He did not resist. He offered the services of his party to the German occupation. He hoped to be installed as the head of a new Nazi government in the Netherlands, an equal partner to Hitler within a German-led European order. He badly miscalculated what the Germans were willing to give him. The Germans did not need a Dutch fascist running the country. They had their own Reich Commissioner Arthur Seinquat, an Austrian Nazi who reported directly to Berlin. Musett was given a meaningless title. He was named the leader of the Dutch people in December of 1942.

[01:00:28]The title had no real authority. He had no government. He had no army. He had only his party, the NSB, which served the German occupation by helping to identify and arrest Jews, by recruiting Dutchmen to fight for the Waffan SS on the Eastern Front, and by terrorizing the Dutch resistance. At its peak, the NSB had over 100,000 members. By 1943, the Netherlands had become one of the most violently occupied countries in Western Europe. Of the 140,000 Jews who had lived in the Netherlands before the war, approximately 102,000 were murdered. The proportion of Dutch Jews killed was higher than in any other Western European country. The Anfrank family was caught and deported during this period. The NSB had played a direct role in the deportations, providing Dutch personnel for the arrests, the logistics, and the identification of Jewish neighborhoods. Musett had not personally arrested Jews bite but he had given the political cover and the institutional infrastructure that made the deportations possible during the so-called hunger winter of 1944 to 45 when the Germans cut off food supplies to the western Netherlands in retaliation for a national strike.

[01:01:46]20,000 Dutch civilians died of starvation. Musett said nothing. He did not advocate for his own people. He was too afraid of losing what little power he had to make any public protest against German policy. When the war ended in May of 1945, Musett had a choice. He could have tried to flee.

[01:02:06]Some of his fellow collaborators had already left for South America or Spain.

[01:02:10]He chose not to flee. He went to the NSB headquarters in the Hague. He sat in his office. He waited for the Allies to arrive. He was arrested on the 7th of May, 1945.

[01:02:22]2 days after the German surrender, he spent the next 6 months in a Dutch prison while the new Dutch government decided what to do with him. During his imprisonment, Musut wrote a strange letter to the Dutch Prime Minister Whim Shermahorn. In it, he claimed to have invented a secret maritime weapon greater than the atomic bomb. He asked to be put in contact with President Truman. He believed that his technical knowledge would be valued so much that the Allies would spare his life. The Dutch government ignored the letter. The trial began in November of 1945. It lasted only 2 days. The court was the special court of the Hague, established specifically to try Dutch citizens who had collaborated with the German occupation. The charges were high treason and aiding the enemy. The prosecutor laid out the evidence simply.

[01:03:11]Musett had founded a Nazi party. He had aligned that party with the German occupation. He had presided over the deportation of Dutch Jews and the recruitment of Dutchmen to fight for the SS. He had been the most prominent Dutch collaborator of the entire war. The defense argued that Musett had tried to mitigate the worst of German excesses, that he had acted in what he believed to be the interests of the Netherlands. The court rejected the defense. On the 28th of November 1945, Anton Musut was convicted of high treason. He was sentenced to death on the 12th of December 1945. He filed an appeal for clemency to Queen Wilhelmina who had spent the war in exile in London and had returned to a country devastated by occupation. Wilhelmina refused. She had no interest in saving the man whose party had helped deport 100,000 of her Jewish citizens. The execution was scheduled for the 7th of May 1946, exactly 1 year after his arrest and 4 days before his 52nd birthday. The location chosen for the execution was deliberate. The Wsdorp of Laca is a stretch of sand dunes in the Myendel area near the Hague. During the German occupation, the SS had used these dunes as their primary execution site for captured members of the Dutch resistance. More than 250 Dutch citizens had been shot in those dunes by the Germans during the war. Most of them had been members of the underground who had refused to give names under torture.

[01:04:41]They had been driven to the dunes in trucks lined up against wooden posts and shot. After the war, the dunes had become a national memorial. So when the Dutch government chose where to kill Anton Muset, they chose the dunes where his German allies had killed the Dutch resistance. The symbolism was inescapable. He was driven to the walls dorpora at 6:00 in the morning on the 7th of May 1946.

[01:05:07]He was placed against a post on the same ground where the resistance fighters had stood. A Dutch firing squad raised their rifles. The execution was filmed by Dutch authorities who wanted documentary proof that the founder of the NSB was dead. The film has never been publicly released, but its existence has been confirmed by Dutch officials. Musert was buried in a secret mass grave in the general cemetery of the Hague. The location is officially a state secret.

[01:05:35]The grave has no marker. In 1956, a group of former NSB members reportedly tried to steal his remains. Forensic evidence suggests that they took the wrong body. What actually happened to Musert's bones remains officially unknown. He had been the most prominent Dutch fascist of the 20th century. He had served the people who deported the Jews of his country and starved its civilians. He had asked his queen for mercy. She had refused. He had died on the same dunes where the people he had betrayed had died first. And then his country had buried him in a place where his followers could never find him.

[01:06:12]Number one, Jurgen Stroop, the SS general who destroyed the Warsaw ghetto and was hanged by Polish authorities on the soil he had raised. There is no other name that belongs at the top of this list. Reinhold Hanning was a sergeant. Oscar Grooning was a bookkeeper. Klaus Barbie was a Gustapo captain. Eduard Krebs was a medical major. Bruno Day was a teenage private.

[01:06:37]Anton Malof was a warden. Michael Ciphert was a corporal. John Demjanuk was an auxiliary. Anton Musett was a foreign collaborator. Jurgen Stroop was an SS grouper, the equivalent of a major general, one of the highest field ranks the SS gave out. He had divisions under his command. He had reported directly to Hinrich Himmler.

[01:07:01]He had personally directed the destruction of one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe. He had written the report that bore his name, a hardbound book given to Himmler as a souvenir titled, "The Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more." He had photographed his own crime. He had bragged about it.

[01:07:19]And when the war ended, he was hunted, captured, tried twice, and finally hanged on a gallows in Mokoto prison in Warsaw, less than a mile from the rubble of the ghetto he had destroyed. He was born Yseph Stroop on the 26th of September 1895 in debt mold in the German Empire. He came from a Roman Catholic workingclass family. He served in the German Imperial Army during the First World War. After the war, he worked as a cler in a land registry office. He was 37 years old when he joined the Nazi party in 1932.

[01:07:55]He joined the SS later that same year.

[01:07:58]He changed his first name to Jurgen in 1941, claiming he was honoring the memory of a son who had died as a child.

[01:08:06]He rose quickly through the SS ranks during the early years of the war. He served as an inspector of the security police in Russia south. He commanded SS personnel during the occupation of Ukraine. He directed deportations of Jews from the Lviv region in early 1943.

[01:08:23]By the spring of 1943, he had proven himself to Himmler as a man who could get unpleasant job done.

[01:08:31]The Warsaw Ghetto was an unpleasant job.

[01:08:33]The ghetto had been established in November of 1940. At its peak in 1941, it had held over 400,000 Jews crammed into a small section of Warsaw, sealed off from the rest of the city by a brick wall. The Germans had used it as a holding pen for deportation to the death camp at Trebinka. By April of 1943, most of the ghetto's population had already been murdered. Only 60,000 Jews remained, hidden in bunkers and basement, refusing to come out for the final transport. They had organized themselves into a resistance group called the Jewish Combat Organization, the Jabi. They had collected weapons.

[01:09:13]They had decided to fight. On the 19th of April, 1943, the Germans entered the ghetto to finish the deportations. The first commander, Ferdinand von Salammon Frankeng, expected token resistance.

[01:09:27]Instead, his troops were hit with Molotov cocktails and small arms fire from upper windows. They withdrew within hours. Himmler was furious. He fired von Sammon Frankeng and replaced him with Jurgen Stroop. Stroop arrived in Warsaw on the same day. He took command of approximately 2,000 German troops, including SS men, vermarked units, Ukrainian auxiliaries, and Polish police. His orders were to crush the uprising and clear the ghetto. He had expected the operation to take 3 days.

[01:10:00]It took 28. The Jewish fighters knew the streets. They moved through the sewers.

[01:10:05]They held entire blocks against German artillery. They forced Stroop to fight a buildingby-building urban war. Stroop adapted his methods. He began to burn the ghetto. Block by block. His men set fire to every building. Anyone who escaped the flames was shot. Anyone who stayed inside burned alive. The fighters in the bunkers were sealed in with poison gas. The civilians hiding in basements were forced out at gunpoint and put on trains to Trebinka. Stroop kept a daily diary of the operation in the form of formal reports sent to Berlin. He reported the number of Jews captured each day. He reported the number of bunkers destroyed. He reported on what he called the heroism of his troops. On the 16th of May 1943, he announced that the operation was complete. The former Jewish quarter in Warsaw, he wrote, is no more. He marked the end of the operation by personally ordering the dynamiting of the great synagogue on Twomaki Street, a building outside the ghetto borders that had no military significance whatsoever. He chose to destroy it as a symbol of total annihilation. Approximately 7,000 Jews had been killed in the fighting. Another 7,000 had been shot or burned during the clearance. 42,000 had been deported to Trebinka and gassed. Roughly 5 to 6,000 had been killed by other means. The total death toll of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and its suppression was approximately 56,000.

[01:11:34]After the war, Stroop produced a leatherbound report for Himmler. The Stroop report, as it came to be known, was a piece of physical evidence so damning that it played a central role in the Nuremberg trials. It contained 53 photographs of the destruction. The most famous of them showed a small Jewish boy with his hands raised wearing a cap and short pants walking out of a bunker with a German soldier pointing a submachine gun at his back. The boy's name is not known with certainty. The photograph has become one of the most reproduced images of the Holocaust. Stroop personally signed the report. He treated it as an accomplishment. He sent copies as gifts.

[01:12:14]After the destruction of the ghetto, Stroop was promoted again. He served as the SS and police leader for Greece where he helped organize the deportation of the Greek Jews of Salonica to Awitz.

[01:12:26]He served in Vbardan as the war ended.

[01:12:29]He was captured by the Americans in May of 1945.

[01:12:33]He was held in American custody for 2 years. The Americans tried him first. In 1947, an American military tribunal at Dhau sentenced him to death for the execution of American airmen who had been shot down over Greece. The death sentence was confirmed. Before it could be carried out, the Polish government formally requested his extradition. The Polish state, newly under communist rule, wanted to try him for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The Americans agreed. They handed him over.

[01:13:05]Stroop arrived in Warsaw in 1947 and was placed in Mochov prison on Recoer Street, less than a mile from the ground, where he had killed 56,000 people. The trial was delayed for nearly 4 years. The new Polish government was busy with other matters, including the Stalinist purges of its own non-communist resistance fighters. The trial finally began in the summer of 1951. During his time in prison, Stroop shared a cell with a Polish journalist named Kazmir Schmatzki. Matsaski had been a member of the Polish home army during the war. He had himself been sentenced to death by the Stalinist authorities. For 255 days, the two men shared a cell. Moxi survived his own death sentence and was released in 1956.

[01:13:52]He spent the next two decades writing down what Stroop had told him during their cellblock conversations. The resulting book, Conversations with an Executioner, became one of the most important non-fiction accounts of the Nazi mentality ever written. In the book, Stroop appears as a calm, unrepentant, almost benile figure. He talks about his family. He talks about his rise through the SS. He talks about the Warsaw ghetto without emotion. He describes the burning of the buildings as a tactical necessity. He describes the deportations, as work. He never expresses regret. He refers to the Jewish fighters as guerrillas and acknowledges their courage. He mentions specific moments. He had been so confident in 1943 that the destruction of the ghetto would take only 3 days.

[01:14:41]that he had reserved a hotel in the city for celebratory dinner with his officers. He had to extend the reservation. He had to extend it again.

[01:14:49]The trial took place at the Warsaw Provincial Court in July of 1951. The charges included the murder of approximately 100,000 people during his service in occupied Poland, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, the execution of Polish hostages, and membership in a criminal organization.

[01:15:09]Members of the Jewish Combat Organization who had escaped through the sewers testified. They sat in the courtroom in Warsaw in a country still buried in rubble and they pointed at Jurgen Stroop. He defended himself by arguing that he had been following orders. He claimed he had not killed personally. He claimed he had been a soldier doing what soldiers do. The court rejected the defense entirely. The verdict was announced on the 23rd of July 1951. Jurgen Stroop was found guilty on all charges. He was sentenced to death by hanging. The court's final words were preserved in the official record. His actions show that he is a being devoid of human feeling. The judges wrote, "A fascist hangman who tracked his victims with cold and relentless cruelty. An executioner who must be removed from the society of man." The sentence was carried out at 7:00 in the evening on the 6th of March, 1952. The location was the courtyard of Makotov prison. The same prison where Stroop had spent the last 5 years of his life. The same prison where Kazmir's Machoski had once shared his cell. The Polish executioner brought him to the gallows. He climbed the steps. The noose was placed around his neck. The trap door opened. Jurgen Stroop, the SS Groupenfer, who had destroyed the Warsaw ghetto and written the report with the photograph of the small boy with his hands raised, was hanged in Warsaw, less than a mile from the rubble of the city he had raised. His body was buried in an unmarked grave. The Warsaw Ghetto today is a series of memorials, streets named for the dead, plaques marking the bunkers, a monument with the names of the fighters. Children from Polish schools and Israeli schools walk through it every year. They are taught what happened. They are taught who did it.

[01:16:59]And they are taught that the man who did it was found, tried, convicted, and hanged on the soil of the city he had tried to erase. That is what makes Jurgen Stroop the number one entry on this list. Not because he was the most brutal. Not because he killed the most personally, but because he was the highest ranking SS officer ever put on trial by the people he had directly attacked. He was killed by the survivors of his own crime. He was killed in the prison cell next door to a Polish resistance hero. He was killed and buried in unmarked ground in a country that had every right to put him there.

[01:17:33]Justice in the case of Jurgen Stroop was complete. It was overdue. It came after 4 years of legal delay and Stalinist politics and cold war distraction.

[01:17:45]But it came and the 60,000 Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, the ones who fought him with pistols and Molotov cocktails from upper windows for 28 days in April and May of 1943, would have wanted nothing less than what the Polish courtroom finally gave them. These 10 men sat in courtrooms over the course of seven decades. Some of them faced their victims directly. Some of them tried not to look. Some of them apologized. Some of them denied everything. Some of them died before the verdict could be appealed. Some of them spent the last years of their lives in retirement homes while their lawyers filed motions on their behalf. Reinhold Hanning never spent a day in prison. Oscar Grooning never spent a day in prison. Bruno Day was given a suspended sentence. Klaus Barbie died of cancer in his cell. Anton Maloth was released 10 days before his death. Michael Ciphert lived 2 years in an Italian prison. Eduard Krebs was hanged by an American sergeant. John Demjanuk died in a German nursing home.

[01:18:48]Anton Muset was shot in the dunes by his own people. Jurgen Stroop was hanged in Warsaw less than a mile from the ghetto he had destroyed. The trials of these men cover the entire span of postwar history from 1946 to 2020.

[01:19:04]They cover four continents and at least six different legal systems. They cover men who held the rank of private and men who held the rank of major general. But they share one thing. In each case, a courtroom became the place where the dead were given a voice through the living. Survivors flew across the world to look at men they had not seen in 50 or 60 or 70 years. They sat in witness boxes. They named names. They remembered specific moments, specific words, specific cruelties. They forced these men to listen. They forced these men to be present. They forced these men even at the end of their lives, even in wheelchairs, even behind red folders, to face them. That is the meaning of these trials. Not the prison sentences, which were almost always too late and too light. not the convictions which often failed to capture the full scope of the crimes. The meaning was the confrontation itself. The fact that the survivors lived long enough to put their tormentors in a courtroom. The fact that the courts, however slowly, however imperfectly, eventually agreed to hear what they had to say. The fact that the law in the end was made to do what it had refused to do for so many decades.

[01:20:17]Look the killers in the face and call them killers. If this ranking changed how you understand the long, slow, painful pursuit of Nazi justice, hit that like button right now. Every like tells YouTube to show this video to more people who need to know that the work of accountability never really ends.

[01:20:34]Subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss our next deep look into the forgotten corners of military history. Drop a comment and tell us which of these trials surprised you most. Tell us which of these men you had never heard of before today. Tell us where you are watching from. Our community spans the entire world and you are the reason real history stays alive.

[01:20:57]Thank you for watching. These 10 men sat in courtrooms because survivors refused to forget. We will see you in the next