Did You Know?

"Did you know that at Auschwitz, when they ran out of Zyklon B, the guards for a bit of a joke would grab newly born babies and young children, open up the ovens and throw them in alive for the fun of hearing them scream?"

"Line after line of naked people, including women and children, thousands, would be shot and fall into a pit -- and watching it were people having a picnic, as spectators, with wine and cheese and bread and dogs running about."

"The point is that the men who were having a lark killing babies in Auschwitz and organizing -- even filming -- the public slaughters in those villages in almost every case got away with it and went on to have children of their own, and live respectable, untroubled lives -- hundreds of them here in Britain"

"Even with the current fuss about this being the75th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, the appalling, shameful fact is that 99-plus percent of those who committed what I believe to be the worst crimes in history were never even questioned about them."

David Wilkinson, 65, actor and film director

A mass burial pit at the 9th Fort Kaunas, Lithuania where Robin Lustig’s German grandmother was murdered    Greenlit

Actor/Director David Wilkinson is a man with a mission. He is not Jewish. He is nonetheless appalled that those who took delight in the atrocities committed against Jews in Europe during World War II -- when Nazi Germany vowed to extinguish the lives of every Jew in Europe for starters until the Third Reich succeeded in vanquishing all opposition to world control -- suffered no consequences though they were not merely onlookers but enablers and participants in the execution of the Holocaust, an institutionalized state genocide where both Axis countries and the countries occupied by Germany facilitated the Nazi Final Solution.

A friend and kindred spirit of David Wilkinson, dramatist Sir Ronald Harwood, a Jew, knew of his commitment and gave him some advice about how to proceed with his denouement: "Before he died last year Ronnie said 'You must explain to people that you're doing it because you're angry and ashamed at the injustice, not because you've got an axe to grind'." And how better to demonstrate that than to execute his documentary without the presence of Jews, by using a cast comprised completely of non-Jews to reinforce the reality that this was, while a Jewish tragedy of untold proportions, it was also a universal human tragedy and travesty of justice.

96-year-old Irmgard Furchner is accused of involvement in the deaths of 65,000 people among whom were 28,000 Jews, murdered in the concentration camp where she worked, where thousands died in the gas chambers in the camp while others were clubbed to death, drowned in mud, killed by lethal injection, shot, or were worked to death as slave labourers. She is accused of knowing what was happening but getting on with her work regardless. What a shame; holding a 96-year-old German national responsible for events that happened so long ago. What a miracle, a 99-year-old Jewish woman who survived, is testifying against her.

Across all of eastern Europe in towns and villages where Jews lived amongst their non-Jewish counterparts, Einsatzgruppen, special paramilitary German killing squads rounded up Jews with the help of their neighbours, and led them to areas outside town, usually areas whose geological features included a ravine -- alternately the Jews were given shovels and ordered to dig deep ditches -- after which they were informed they must strip off all their clothing, and stand at the edge of the ravine/ditch where lines of soldiers strafed them with bullets and they fell into the receiving hollow, some still living, to be buried alive with the dead. One of the most infamous was Babi Yar.

What David Wilkinson learned about the Holocaust incensed him with its barbaric inhumanity. What David Wilkinson learned about the punishment meted out to those responsible astonished and infuriated him. Well of course there were the Nuremberg Trials, a showpiece of justice where the movers and shakers of Hitler's death machine tasked to complete a mission to free the world of the presence of Jewish scum, stood trial and pleaded "Nicht Schuldig!" and were sentenced for their crimes, held responsible despite their attestation of following orders.

David Wilkinson, the offended non-Jew went on to produce a documentary titled Getting Away With Murder(s) coinciding with the anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials at a time when the aged survivors of concentration-, slave-labour- and death-camps are vanishing through natural life-spans running their course. A time when Helmut Oberlander, formerly a member of a German killing squad who immigrated to Canada under false pretence in 1954 fought deportation to Germany to stand trial, resisting for 35 years, appealing the government's continued efforts to revoke his citizenship and deport him. He lived to age 97 on the cusp of deportation.

Mr. Wilkinson's film was 18 years in the making, mostly self-financed and aided by film industry friends. One of the narrators in the production emphasized the unbelievable fact that close to a million enablers and participants in the murder of six million Jews faced no punishment. These were the 'little minnows' who slipped through the nets of the machinery of justice busy prosecuting the readily recognizable 'big fish', though they were all live-feeding carnivores to greater or lesser degree. 

The focus moves from one malefactor to another in the three-hour-long film. There is the man
Anthony Sawoniuk who lived in a council flat in Bermondsey for 40 years who had  worked as a ticket collector at London bridge station, a Byelorussian collaborator known to have murdered 15 women ordered to undress, spraying them with a machine gun, then shoving them into pits. He was tried in 1999 and died six years later in prison, the sole convicted war criminal in Britain of the over 400 living in the United Kingdom.

Lithuanian Anton Gecas helped in the execution of close to 40,000 Jews and Russian prisoners of war, and lived in Scotland from 1947 where he attended Heriot Watt University and worked for the National Coal Board. Eventually he operated a popular Edinburgh bed and breakfast. The Lithuanian authorities attempted to have him extradited but to no avail and he died in 2001 age 85, in Edinburgh. Two former members of the Ukrainian Self Defence Legion known as the 14th Waffen SS, lived freely in Nottingham until their deaths in the 2000s. 

Malka Levine, originally from Volodymyr-Volynskyi in Ukraine lives in the university suburb of Beeston, Nottingham, one of 30 survivors of a massacre of 25,000 Jews by the two, Anton Jurczuk and leksa Fedoryn's Waffen SS unit. She had survived the massacre when a farmer hid her as a baby along with others in her family under his barn. Unaware that men who were involved in the murder of her family and neighbours lived close by, she learned of their presence when she was interviewed by David Wilkinson. 

"She was horrified that she could have been on the bus or in the supermarket next to one of them", explained Mr. Wilkinson. "Their names are clearly on duty rosters from that time [back in Ukraine]." And then there was Johanna Altvater, a German who was tried in 1978 and in 1982 where she defended herself as having been a mere secretary. Both times she was acquitted and died just before her 85th birthday. She had been a council youth worker in her German hometown. She had entered a small hospital of sick children in Malka Levine's home town in Ukraine and began throwing children out of a third-floor window, injuring some, killing others.

The first deputy commander of Sobibor extermination camp in Poland was Gustav Wagner, known as The Beast, who ran the selections process that determined whether people would go to the line of slave labourers or to the gas chambers where 250,000 Jews were murdered. He escaped to Brazil after being sentenced to death in absentia. Extradition requests to Brazil went rejected. At age 69 in 1980 he was found with a knife in his chest, said to have been a death by suicide.

The litany of atrocities is mind-numbing. The 'Butcher of Riga', Herberts Cukurs, was a Latvian national hero, a prewar aviator who went on to take part in the mass murder of over 30,000 Latvian Jews. In 1941 he ordered that an elderly Jewish man must rape a young Jewish woman. Prisoners who looked away were beaten to death by Cukurs himself. The soviets attempted without success to extradite him  after he escaped to Brazil post-war. Eventually Israeli Mossad agents in Uruguay assassinated him in 1965, aged 64.

 (Photo: Guerilla Films)

"Many of the Germans just moved back to their hometowns and resumed life under their own name. The notorious Dr.Josef Mengele himself travelled back from Argentina to Germany under his own name twice, stayed in his hometown and was sheltered there by nuns. It seems only the police were unaware he had returned for a visit."

"[There are hundreds of Nazis with similar stories] But I just want people to be aware that we know the exact identities and often the addresses of the many culprits who got away with murder -- and that hundreds of them lived here in the U.K."

David Wilkinson, producer, documentary Getting Away With Murder(s)