In the mid-1980s, as Holocaust “awareness” bloomed in western societies, Britain woke up to the revelation that, for 40 years or so, it had provided a safe haven for refugees from eastern Europe whose participation in the genocide had rarely, if ever, come under scrutiny. It was a deeply uncomfortable awakening for a country that had prided itself in “standing alone” against Hitler’s tyranny.
The passage of the War Crimes Act 1991 raised the possibility of putting on trial those who had not been British citizens or residents at the time the crimes were committed. The outcome was the prosecution in 1995 of Szymon Serafinowicz, a Belarusian living in Banstead, Surrey, although his trial collapsed when the jury ruled he was mentally unfit, and the conviction in 1999 of one auxiliary policeman, Anthony (Andrzej) Sawoniuk, for murdering Jews in his native Belarus. By then, Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit had been mothballed, and political attention switched to enshrining remembrance, in the form of the first Holocaust Memorial Day.
How was it, then, that out of 274 suspects investigated in England, Wales and Scotland, and the submission of over 250,000 pages of evidence, there was only a single conviction? Who were the suspects who never stood trial? Take, for instance, Harijs Svikeris, a longtime resident of Milton Keynes, who was one of the three “strongest” cases when the war crimes inquiries began. Svikeris, a Latvian, had been a platoon captain in the infamous Arājs Kommando, a unit established for the single purpose of ridding their country of Jews and communists. Over the years, fellow members of the unit testified about Svikeris’s role in killings in both Latvia and Belorussia, now known as Belarus.
When I spoke to the head of Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit, Chief Supt Eddie Bathgate, shortly after he retired, he admitted: “Svikeris was a powerful case, and I would cheerfully have put him on the charge sheet. The interviews with him were videotaped and you could see he was guilty. One of my last remarks to the CPS was, ‘you are not going to be able NOT to prosecute Svikeris’.” But ultimately, the CPS did not believe they could establish his guilt in court beyond reasonable doubt.
There was one case that garnered attention even before the War Crimes Act was passed. Anton Gecas, a former national coal board manager living in Edinburgh, had previously gone by the name Antanas Gecevicius, and had been the commander of the 3rd platoon of the 2nd company of the notorious 12th Lithuanian Police Auxiliary Battalion, whose wanton cruelty in murdering Jews in Slutsk in 1941 was cited at the Nuremberg tribunal. Gecas sued Scottish Television (now STV) for defamation over a documentary detailing his participation in massacres in Belarus. He lost the case at the court of session in 1992, with the judge, Lord Milligan, declaring he was “clearly satisfied” that Gecas had “committed war crimes against innocent civilians”.
Gecas had first come to the attention of the Scottish authorities as early as 1982, when he was interviewed by Neal Sher, the then head of the US war crimes unit, the Office of Special Investigations, in connection with an American inquiry into a Nazi collaborator. Sher’s successor Eli Rosenbaum later said: “The evidence against Gecas was overwhelming yet it did not lead to any kind of investigation nor to any kind of action on the part of the UK authorities.”
There are many other cases of those accused of terrible crimes suffering no more than the disturbance of a police interview towards the end of their life, followed by a letter from the CPS saying there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. In researching a book on this process, I and my co-author, Robert Sherwood discovered the CPS had insisted on a set of criteria that inevitably restricted the number of cases to reach court.
These included the insistence that a suspect had to have been in a command position – a criterion nowhere to be found in the War Crimes Act. To be considered a strong case, the victims had to have been Jews, notwithstanding the many thousands of non-Jews murdered by the police auxiliaries. And without credible eyewitnesses prepared to testify in open court that they had seen the defendant kill, after half a century, even the most compelling cases – like those of Gecas and Svikeris – failed to pass the threshold.
This is also a story about a palpable lack of transparency. Neither Scotland Yard nor the CPS published a final report on the war crimes inquiries. Had they done so, questions would undoubtedly have been raised about the delay in bringing Serafinowicz to full trial, ignoring a key recommendation that the age of witnesses and potential defendants would mean that justice delayed was bound to be justice denied.
Britain’s self-image since the second world war has been defined by its dogged stand against tyranny. But it is time to admit that the due process of law denied by the Nazis to their victims has shielded many of the perpetrators to the bitter end.
Jon Silverman is research professor of media and criminal justice at the University of Bedfordshire. He is the author, with Robert Sherwood, of the forthcoming book Safe Haven: the United Kingdom’s investigations into Nazi collaborators and the failure of Justice
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