2017-03-27

The Holocaust, which means “sacrifice by fire,” was a term used to exterminate the Jewish people when Hitler took power in 1933, and he almost succeeded. An estimated 11 million people were murdered, including children, the disabled, and gays. Although many of the soldiers and servers of Adolf Hitler’s regime are dead or in the late stages of life, they are still being tracked down to pay for their heinous crimes against humanity. Many fled and found safety in South America, Canada, Russia, and went underground in Germany.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest human rights organizations to support Jewish rights, released its annual report of Nazi war criminals in April 2015. These are the most wanted criminals that have never been convicted for war crimes. According to the the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the assailants are as follows:

1. Gerhard Sommer – Germany (Italy) – massacre of hundreds of civilians in Sant'Anna di Stazzema

2. Vladimir Katriuk – Canada (Belarus) – murder of Jews and non-Jews in various locations

3. Alfred Stark – Germany (Greece) – murder of Italian prisoners of war in Kefalonia

4. Johann Robert Riss – Germany (Italy) – murder of civilians near Padule di Fucecchio

5. Oskar Groening – Germany (Auschwitz) – accessory to murder of Hungarian Jews

6.  Algimantas Dailide – Germany (Lithuania) – arrested Jews and Poles executed by Nazis and Lithuanian security police

7. Helmut Oberlander – Canada (Ukraine) – served in Einstazkommando 10a (part of Einsatzgruppe D, which murdered an estimated 23,000 mostly Jewish civilians)

Oskar Groening (No. 5), who was arrested and put on trial in April, was an accountant in Auschwitz, and was found guilty in a German court as begin an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people in July for all the Hungarian Jews sent to the gas chambers from May through July 1944. He helped count the money and valuables of the all the Jews that came through, sending the collection to Nazi headquarters in Berlin. His lawyers are appealing the sentence.

Olivia Marks-Woldman of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a charity that supports Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK shared with CNN.

"Even 70 years after the end of the Holocaust, the need for justice remains powerful. Oskar Groening was part of the Nazi killing machine which murdered 6 million Jewish people, and it is right that a court has judged him for his role. He chose to stand by and be complicit in the killing."

Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center personally filed a complaint with the Danish government July 21st, regarding a SS volunteer who worked a concentration camp where 90 percent of the prisoners were executed or died from starvation and illnesses. Over 5,000 Danish worked for the SS when Germany invaded in 1940.

“Since the Danish Justice Ministry isn’t going to do anything, I have decided to come to Copenhagen and personally file a police report that is based upon documentation and research. We hope it will result in a trial,” Zuroff told the Danish press.

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