An in-depth  illuminating account of WWII Nazi fugitives in the UK and their escape from British justice.

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (Israel)

(*First published in The Jerusalem Report)

The book ‘Safe Haven’ is one that should attract several diverse audiences of readers. Former BBC reporter Jon Silverman, who covered the British Nazi War Crimes Act issue from beginning to end, and his co-author Robert Sherwood, an expert on the post-World War II prosecution of Nazi war criminals, have written an excellent history of the fate of the legislation passed in the British Parliament in Spring 1991 to enable the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators living in the United Kingdom. Theirs is a cautionary tale regarding an important and highly justified judicial initiative, launched to prosecute Nazi war criminals who had illegally immigrated to Great Britain, which in practical terms, only ONE individual was convicted and punished out of many clearly guilty perpetrators. This was a miserable failure but ultimately had a positive impact on Holocaust consciousness in the United Kingdom.

The authors explain the practical “failure” of the bill in great detail, and point out how quite a few more mass murderers could have been convicted, had the British legal bureaucracy been more flexible, and had there been greater political will to convict and punish these Eastern European Nazi collaborators. Thus, this story is not only about the Holocaust, or post-World War II justice, but also about how governments function and how justice is or isn’t achieved in a leading Western democracy. On a personal level, the book also deals with an important chapter of the efforts of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to help facilitate the prosecution of Nazi criminals. In 1986, I was hired by the center to open an office in Jerusalem, which would focus on Eastern European Nazi collaborators who had immigrated to Western democracies. By this point, it was common knowledge that all the major Anglo-Saxon democracies which had fought against the Nazis had admitted at least dozens, if not hundreds, of the worst of Hitler’s henchmen as refugees. (The only exception was South Africa, which was closed hermetically to immigration in those years.) Canada and Australia had already been alerted to the problem and were discussing possible steps to take, but Great Britain and New Zealand ostensibly had no indication that they also had the same problem. On October 22, 1986, however, the Wiesenthal Center submitted a list I compiled of 17 Latvian and Lithuanian Nazi collaborators living in Great Britain to Donald Ballentine, the British consul in Los Angeles, which marked the beginning of the process that led to the War Crimes Act. We subsequently sent 50 more names to the British authorities and did our best, together with the local supporters of the initiative, to convince the government to pass the bill and maximize its impact. The “heart” of the book and its most interesting chapters are about the sole conviction, how it was achieved, and the cases of suspects who were obviously guilty but for technical reasons or simple bad luck (their premature demise or the refusal of eyewitnesses to their crimes to testify against them) could not be convicted. Thus, for example, Anthony Sawoniuk, a cruel Byelorussian policeman who participated in many executions of Jews in his hometown of Domachevo, was successfully convicted because of the testimony of eyewitnesses to the murder of local Jewish women and the fact that he was the only person in town named Andrusha. In three other cases, the British police and prosecutors were not so lucky, and as a result, mass murderers from Lithuania, Latvia, and Belarus escaped punishment.

The most famous case was that of Antanas Gecevicius, who changed his name in Scotland to Anton Gecas. He was the “star” of my original list, having served as an officer in the notorious Lithuanian 12th Auxiliary Police Battalion, which was sent in October 1941 to Belarus, where they murdered at least 20,000 Jews. According to members of his unit, who were prosecuted in Soviet Lithuania, Gecas not only issued orders to murder Jews but finished off those not killed by the initial round of bullets. Gecas denied the accusations and filed a defamation suit against Scottish TV, and he sued me for libel because I accused him of those crimes in my book Occupation: Nazi-Hunter. Gecas lost his suit against Scottish TV and was called a criminal; but luckily for him, the standard of proof was based on the civil standard, which fell short of the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which would have paved the way for his prosecution. In addition, at least a dozen veterans of Gecas’s unit were found living in the UK, to whom the Scottish war crimes team were ready to grant immunity if they testified against Gecas. But the British refused to exempt them from prosecution, and without that promise none of them were willing to testify against him. Some of them were willing to answer a few questions about the unit but not to deliver strong enough evidence against Gecas.

A second case of a murder squad officer who immigrated to Britain and escaped prosecution, was that of Latvian Harijs Skiveris, who had been a senior officer in the Latvian Auxiliary Security Police, commonly referred to as the Arajs Kommando (named for its commander Viktor Arajs, who was convicted in Germany of the murder of 13,000 Jews and was sentenced to life imprisonment). Thirty additional members of the unit were executed for war crimes in the Soviet Union. Skiveris, who signed documents as “Head of Security, Kommando”, and “Battalion Commander”, was obviously one of the most important officers in the unit, which played a key role in the majority of the murders of approximately 30,000 Jews in and around Riga (initially in Bikerenieki Forest, and later at Rumbula), as well as in the provincial Latvian towns. In 1942, moreover, the unit was sent to combat pro-Soviet partisans in Belarus, where they killed partisans and burned down entire villages. Skiveris, of course, denied that he committed any crimes or even was present when Germans shot Jews. The problem was, however, that he could not be prosecuted because there was no direct evidence that Skiveris served as Arajs’s adjutant or as a battalion commander, and the prosecution did not have any live, legally admissible eyewitness evidence of his participation in the murder of innocents.

The third case of a guilty criminal who escaped punishment despite his crimes was that of Szymon Serafinowicz, who was the first person prosecuted under the 1991 War Crimes Act. Various testimonies accused Serafinowicz of active participation in the mass murder of the Jews of Mir, especially the testimony of Dov Resnik, who saw Serafinowicz murder his 16-year-old son and a friend Aron Rudicki, along with his wife and two children. On July 12, 1995, Serafinowicz was arrested and charged with four counts of murder. At that point, he was 84 years old but was considered physically and mentally capable to stand trial. According to the authors, if Serafinowicz would have been put on trial in 1995 or early 1996, a historic conviction could have been obtained. Unfortunately, the trial was delayed by a committal procedure, which was a test run of the prosecution’s case before a magistrate without a jury, a step which the lawyers who supported the War Crimes Act recommended to omit. And indeed, the delay caused by the committal process spared Serafinowicz from a conviction and a punishment, since he had begun to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease and could not be prosecuted. Sawoniuk was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in jail in 2005. The Serafinowicz investigation was the last of its kind, which meant that only one Holocaust perpetrator who had entered Britain illegally was convicted and punished, clearly a terribly dismal result, which the authors very cogently explain could have been far better. They do, however, leave us with a silver lining, as they assert that the tremendous efforts invested in passing the War Crimes Act and trying to implement it helped:

 “change the status of the Holocaust in British culture and society…and helped to mark the dawn of the institutionalization of the Holocaust; a process aligned to the formation of cultural memory, and one which climax a decade later by Holocaust Memorial Day and other events.”

SAFE HAVEN: The United Kingdom’s Investigations into Nazi Collaborators and the Failure of Justice
Jon Silverman and Robert Sherwood
Oxford University Press, 2023
336 pages; £43.8

About the writer:

Dr. Efraim Zuroff. Director, Simon Wiesenthal Center – Israel office and Eastern European Affairs. Coordinator, SWC Nazi war crimes research worldwide
1 Mendele Street
Jerusalem, Israel 92147
Tel: 972.2.563.1273/4/5
Fax: 972.2.563.1276
www.swcjerusalem.org <http://www.swcjerusalem.org> 

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