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| 'Evil Nazi murderer' dies in prison
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The only Nazi tried and convicted under the War Crimes Act in Britain has died in prison, aged 84.
Anthonyn (Andrzey) Sawoniuk, a former British Rail ticket collector from Bermondsey, South London, was given two life sentences in April 1999, after an Old Bailey court convicted him of murder.
Sawoniuk, who came to Britain shortly after WWII, was found guilty of murdering 18 Jews in his hometown of Domachevo, in Belarus while the country was occupied by the Germans.
Symbolic beacon
 Anthony Sawoniuk was a violent, evil, Nazi murderer. He will not be missed
Lord Greville Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust | The jury at his trial had heard how Sawoniuk had signed up at the age of 20 to serve in the police force formed by the occupying Nazis.
Jurors also heard how he was implicated in the round up of 2,900 men, women and children who were forced to strip before being shot and buried in mass graves, something he denied.
Sawoniuk, then 78, was tried after an inquiry by the war crimes investigation unit established after the War Crimes Act of 1991.
His name was on a KGB list of suspected war criminals, which was passed to the British upon the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Lord Greville Janner, chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: “Anthony Sawoniuk was a violent, evil, Nazi murderer. He will not be missed.”
Janner, who campaigned for the successful introduction in parliament of the War Crimes Act, said at the time of his trial: “We don’t count the cost of murder trials or fraud trials; it is a question of justice.”
“The trial is a symbolic beacon, relighting memories of the hideous barbarity of the past.”
A man of power
Justice Potts told Sawoniuk at his trial: "Though you held a lowly rank in the hierarchy of those involved in liquidating Jews, to the Jews of Domachevo it must have seemed otherwise.
“A witness said of you that ‘when you became a policeman you became a man of power, a master and a lord.’ I am sure that he was right when he said that.”
The former Nazi, who had denied the charges, lost an appeal against his conviction in 2000. He had claimed to be the victim of mistaken identity.
The father-of-one was originally held in Kingston Jail in Portsmouth, before being moved to a unit for elderly lifers at Norwich Prison earlier this year. His death is not being treated as suspicious.
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