The Monuments

Men

Monuments Man Lt. Frank P. Albright, Polish Liaison Officer Maj. Karol Estreicher, Monuments Man Capt. Everett Parker Lesley, and Pfc. Joe D. Espinosa, guard with the 34th Field Artillery Battalion, pose with Leonard da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine upon its return to Poland in April 1946.

LA GLEIZE, BELGIUM - FEB 1, 1945: Monuments Man Walker Hancock (front left, in U.S. Army helmet) assisted residents of the town of La Gleize with the relocation of the Madonna of La Gleize to a more secure site. (Photo credit: Walker Hancock Collection)

MONTE CASSINO, ITALY - MAY 27, 1944: Monuments Man Lt. Col. Ernest T. Dewald (center) makes his way up to the ruins of Monte Cassino, the Benedictine Abbey destroyed by controversial allied bombing in February 1944. (Photo credit: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

Germans display Botticelli’s masterpiece, Camilla and the Centaur, from the Uffizi. (Photo Credit: National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. / Public Domain)

Monuments Man Harry Ettlinger and Robert Edsel visited the grave of Walter Huchthausen in 2012. Huchthausen was a Monuments officer who was killed in action near Aachen, Germany. He is buried at the America Cemetery at Margraten, Holland. (Photo credit: Robert M. Edsel collection)

BERNTERODE, GERMANY - MAY 1945: Monuments Men George Stout (left), Walker Hancock (center right), and Steven Kovalyak (right) during the excavation of Bernterode. The soldier standing between Stout and Hancock is a Sgt. Travese. (Photo credit: Walker Hancock Collection)

ALTAUSSEE, AUSTRIA - JULY 1945: The central panel of the Ghent Altarpiece, due to its size and weight, proved particularly challenging to move through the narrow passageways. Other panels of the altarpiece are visible in the background behind Stout. Note the tissue that has been applied to the painted surface to secure loose or flaking paint. This is a process known as "facing." Stout was proud of his U.S. Navy background and usually wore an “N” for Navy on his jacket or helmet. (Photo credit: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

Captain Walker Hancock, U.S. First Army. Age: 43. Born: St. Louis, Missouri. Hancock was a renowned sculptor who had won the prestigious Prix de Rome before the war and designed the Army Air Medal in 1942. Warmhearted and optimistic, he wrote often to his great love, Saima Natti, whom he had married only two weeks before shipping to Europe for duty. His most common refrain was his joy in his work and his dreams of a house and studio where they could live and work together in Gloucester, Massachusetts. (Photo credit: Walker Hancock Collection)

^JAN VERMEER, THE ASTRONOMER, 1668. Oil on Canvas, 51 x 45 cm (20 x 17 3/4 in). Louvre, Paris, France. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

LA GLEIZE, BELGIUM - FEB 1, 1945: During the Battle of the Bulge, the church in La Gleize was severely damaged. The statue, known as the Madonna of La Gleize, was fully exposed to one of the harshest winters on record. Note the gaping hole in the roof overhead. (Photo Credit: Walker Hancock Collection)

Rose Valland, Temporary Custodian of the Jeu de Paume. Age: 46. Born: Saint-Etienne-de-Saint-Geoirs, France. Rose Valland, a woman of modest means raised in the countryside of France, was the unlikely hero of the French cultural world. She was a longtime unpaid volunteer at the Jeu de Paume museum, adjacent to the Louvre, when the Nazi occupation of Paris began. An unassuming but determined single woman with a forgettable bland style and manner, she ingratiated herself with the Nazis at the Jeu de Paume and, unbeknownst to them, spied on their activities for the four years of their occupation. After the liberation of Paris, the extent and importance of her secret information, which she fiercely guarded, had a pivotal impact on the discovery of looted works of art from France. (Photo credit: Archives des Musées Nationaux

Captain Robert Posey, U.S. Third Army. Age: 40. Born: Morris, Alabama. Raised in poverty on an Alabama farm, Posey graduated from Auburn University with a degree in architecture thanks to funding from the army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC). The loner of the MFAA, he was deeply proud of Third Army and its legendary commander General George S. Patton Jr. He wrote frequently to his wife, Alice, and often picked up cards and souvenirs for his young son Dennis, whom he called “Woogie.” (Photo credit: Robert Posey Collection)

American GIs admire In the Conservatory, a masterpiece by Edouard Manet. This painting from Kaiser-Friderich Museum in Berlin, had been brought to the mine for safekeeping. (Photo credit: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD / Public Domain)

PARIS - DECEMBER 2, 1941: At the Jeu de Paume Museum, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, painting in his left hand and cigar in his right, sits gazing at two paintings by Henri Matisse being supported by Bruno Lohse. Standing to Göring’s left is his art advisor, Walter Andreas Hofer. Note the bottle of champagne on the table at center. Both paintings were stolen from the Paul Rosenberg collection by the Nazis and were recovered and returned after the war. The painting on the left, titled Marguerites, today hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago. The other, titled Danseuse au Tambourin, is at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, California. (Photo credit: Archives des Musées Nationaux)

PARIS - SEPTEMBER 12, 1944: Monuments Man James Rorimer (right) and Ecole du Louvre director Robert Rey, stand before the empty wall where the Mona Lisa (La Joconde) once hung before its precautionary evacuation from the Louvre in 1939. (Photo credit: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

Captain Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen, U.S. Ninth Army. Age: 40. Born: Perry, Oklahoma. Hutch, a boyishly handsome bachelor, was a practicing architect and design professor at the University of Minnesota. Stationed primarily in the German city of Aachen, he was responsible for much of the northwest portion of Germany. (Photo credit: Harvard University Archives, no. UAV 874.1269)

Second Lieutenant James J. Rorimer, Comm Zone and U.S. Seventh Army. Age: 39. Born: Cleveland, Ohio. Rorimer was a wunderkind of the museum world, rising to curator of the Metropolitan Museum at a young age. A specialist in medieval art, he was instrumental in the founding of the Met’s medieval collections branch, the Cloisters, with the help of the great patron John D. Rockefeller Jr. Assigned to Paris, his bulldog determination, willingness to buck the system, and love of all things French endeared him to Rose Valland. Their relationship would be vitally important in the race to discover the Nazi treasure troves. Married to a fellow employee of the Metropolitan, Katherine, his daughter Anne was born while he was on active duty; he was not able to see her for more than two years. (Photo credit: National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

ALTAUSSEE, AUSTRIA - JULY 10, 1945: Removal of priceless works of art from the salt mine at Alt Aussee posed problems for Monuments Man George Stout unlike any ever contemplated. Stout constructed a pulley to lift Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna onto the salt cart to begin its long trip home to Belgium. Visible on the far left is Monuments Man Steve Kovalyak, an expert in packing art, who was a key assistant to Stout. (Photo credit: National Gallery, Washington, D.C., Gallery Archives)

^MICHELANGELO, BRUGES MADONNA, 1503-04. Marble, H. 121.9 cm (48 in). Notre Dame Cathedral, Bruges, Belgium. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

American GIs hand-carried paintings down the steps of the castle under the supervision of Captain James Rorimer. (Photo credit: NARA / Public Domain)

Race Institute Building. In a corner of the basement were hundreds of Torah scrolls piled 10 feet high. The Race Institute was used by Alfred Rosenberg to research the characteristics of various people overrun by the German Army and under subsequent Nazi rule. American Chaplain Samuel Blinder examines a Sefer Torah as a he begins the overwhelming task of sorting and inspecting. July 1945. (Photo credit: NARA / Public Domain)

Lieutenant George Stout, U.S. First Army and U.S. Twelfth Army Group. Age: 47. Born: Winterset, Iowa. A towering figure in the then obscure field of art conservation, Stout was one of the first people in America to understand the Nazi threat to the cultural patrimony of Europe and pushed the museum community and the army toward establishing a professional art conservation corps. As a field officer, he was the go-to expert for all the other Monuments Men in northern Europe and their indispensable role model and friend. Dapper and well-mannered, with a fastidiousness and thoroughness that shone in the field, Stout, a veteran of World War I, left behind a wife, Margie, and a young son. His oldest son served in the U.S. Navy. (Photo credit: Walker Hancock Collection)

Vermeer's Astronomer found in the Altaussee mine by the Monuments Men. (Photo credit: Robert Posey Collection)

BERNTERODE, GERMANY - MAY 1945: The bronze coffin of Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was one of four enormous coffins found at the Bernterode repository by Monuments Man Walker Hancock. (Photo credit: Walker Hancock Collection)

NEW JERSEY: Almost sixty-five years later, Harry Ettlinger reflects with pride on a life well-lived as a Monuments Man as he stands in front of his grandfather’s print of the very painting he was never allowed to see as a Jewish boy growing up in Karlsruhe, Germany. (Photo credit: Bill Stahl)

Private Harry Ettlinger, U.S. Seventh Army. Age: 18. Born: Karlsruhe, Germany (immigrated to Newark, New Jersey). A German Jew, Ettlinger fled Nazi persecution in 1938 with his family. Drafted by the army after graduating from high school in Newark in 1944, Private Ettlinger spent much of his tour of duty lost in the army bureaucracy before finally finding his niche in early May 1945. (Photo credit: Harry Ettlinger Collection)

The Allied Commander-In-Chief General Eisenhower communicated to commanders the importance of respecting monuments and artworks so far as war allowed (Photo credit: NARA / Public Domain)

Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani), c. 1483-88. Oil on Panel, 55 x 40 cm (21 2/3 x 15 ¾ in). Czartoryski Museum, Cracow. (Photo credit: Wikipedia Commons / Public Domain)

Major Ronald Edmund Balfour, First Canadian Army. Age in 1944: 40. Orn: Oxfordshire, England. Balfour, a scholar at Cambridge University, was what the British called a “gentleman scholar”: a bachelor dedicated to the intellectual life without ambition for accolades or position. A dedicated Protestant, he began his life as a history scholar, than switched to ecclesiastic studies. His prized possession was his immense personal library. (Photo credit: King's College Archive Centre, Cambridge, The Papers of Ronald Edmund Balfour, Misc. 5.)

ALTAUSSEE, AUSTRIA - MAY 1945: One of the many mine chambers in which the Nazis had constructed wooden shelves to house the enormous number of stolen works of art. To understand the volume of space in this one chamber, note the nine foot ladder in the center right portion of the photograph. (Photo Credit: Robert Posey Collection)

Private Paul Oglesby of the 30th Infantry Regiment pauses to observe this severely damaged church. This was an all too common scene throughout Italy. September 1943. (Photo credit: National Archives and Records Administration)

Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring both had an interest in art, and expanded their personal collections through looting and other illegal methods of acquisition. Since their relationship began in 1922, Göring was always the number two man. He knew how to play the supporting role well. Whether relaxing together at a hunting lodge, enjoying a parade during the “2000 years of German culture” festival, or jointly admiring a painting, Hitler and Göring were linked as the leaders of the Nazi party until April 20, 1945, Hitler’s final birthday and the last time they would see each other. (Library of Congress)

By order of the Führer, more than 16,000 modern works deemed “degenerate” were removed from the walls of German museums. By 1937 works by artists such as Nolde, Kandinsky, Klee, Dix, Chagall, Kokoschka, Beckmann, and many others were collecting dust in various storage facilities pending their new fate. Hitler, accompanied by Goebbels, was seemingly always available when an opportunity arose to see art, especially when it could be used for such effective propaganda purposes. Here they examine art at the Degenerate Art Depot in Berlin. (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

In fall 1939, museums across Europe evacuated their collections to remote locations in the countryside in anticipation of war. Here, the Winged Victory of Samothrace is carefully moved down the stairs at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Louvre workers constructed a pulley to position the statue before crating it for shipment.

The Monuments Men encountered repositories such as this one all across Europe. Here, piles of boxes, records, and clothing are guarded by an American GI inside a church in Ellingen, Germany. The church had been used by the Nazis as a secret depot for clothing requisitioned from France and Holland. (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

This was the scene of devastation that greeted Monuments Man Walker Hancock and other troops of U.S. First Army upon their arrival at the Aachen Cathedral on October 25, 1944. (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley, Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower inspect the German museum treasures stored in the Merkers mine on April 12, 1945. Also pictured in the center is Major Irving Leonard Moskowitz. (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD)

Monuments Man Lt. Frank P. Albright, Polish Liaison Officer Maj. Karol Estreicher, Monuments Man Capt. Everett Parker Lesley, and Pfc. Joe D. Espinosa, guard with the 34th Field Artillery Battalion, pose with Leonard da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine upon its return to Poland in April 1946.

Monuments Man Harry Ettlinger and Robert Edsel visited the Castle of Neuschwanstein in 2012. Here they pose on the same steps as Rorimer on the cover of The Monuments Men. Ettlinger inspected Neuschwanstein with Rorimer in the summer of 1945. (Photo Credit: Monuments Men Foundation)

Nazi War Criminals

Top 10 Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals

1. Gerhard Sommer (age 93. Last known location: Germany)2. Vladimir Katriuk (age 93. Last known location: Canada)3. Alfred Stark or Stoerk (Last known location: Germany. Last known news: former corporal convicted in

absentia by Rome Military Court for participating in killing of 117 Italian prisoners of war on Greek island of Cephalonia.)

4. Johann Robert Riss (Last known location: Germany. Last known news: on May 25, 2011, the former sergeant found guilty in absentia for participating in killing of 184 civilians near Padule di Fucecchio in Italy)[2]

5. X - unnamed person (Last known location: Denmark) wanted for murder of Jews in Bobruisk, Belarus6. Y - unnamed person (Last known location: Germany) wanted for being accessory to the murder of

Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz7. Z - unnamed person (Last known location: Norway ) wanted for murder of Jews in various locations in

Poland and Ukraine8. Oskar Groening (age 93. Last known news: Trial in Hannover, Germany, opened in on 20 April 2015)9. Algimantas Dailidė (age 94. Last known news: Deported from USA to Germany in 2004. Sentenced to five

years imprisonment, but was diagnosed "medically unfit to be punished".)10. Helmut Oberlander (age 90–91. Last known location: Canada)

MOST WANTED NAZI WAR CRIMINALSAs of April 1, 2015

A. Death Camp Personnel 1.     Auschwitz-Birkenau – 1,300,000 victims 2.     Treblinka – 835,000 victims 3.     Belzec – 600,000 victims 4.     Majdanek – 360,000 victims 5.     Chelmno – 320,000 victims 6.     Sobibor – 250,000 victims B. Einsatzgruppen Personnel 7.     Einsatzgruppe A – primarily active in Baltics 8.     Einsatzgruppe B – primarily active in Belarus 9.     Einsatzgruppe C – primarily active in Northern Ukraine 10.  Einsatzgruppe D – primarily active in Southern Ukraine C. Current Individual Cases (Country of current residence precedes site of crimes) 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.     X – Denmark (Belarus) – murder of Jews in Bobruisk 6.     Y – Germany (Auschwitz) – accessory to murder of Hungarian Jews 7.     Z – Norway (Poland and Ukraine) – murder of Jews in various locations 8.     Oskar Groening – Germany (Auschwitz) – accessory to murder of Hungarian Jews 9.     Algimantas Dailide – Germany (Lithuania) – arrested Jews and Poles executed by Nazis and Lithuanian security police 10.  Helmut Oberlander – Canada (Ukraine) – served in Einstazkommando 10a (part of Einsatzgruppe D, which murdered an estimated 23,000

mostly Jewish civilians)

Hermann Goering

A WW1 veteran, the Reichsmarschall was head of the luftwaffe, and the founder of the gestapo. After the fall of France he stole millions of pounds worth of art from Jews, and amassed a personal fortune. Goering took part in the beer hall putsch of 1923 and was wounded in the groin. Subsequently, taking morphine for pain relief, he became addicted to the drug for the rest of his life. In 1940, the Marshal ordered the bombing of the civilian population of Britain (the Blitz) and was involved in planning the holocaust. Goering was the highest ranking defendant during the Nuremberg Trials. Sentenced to hang, he committed suicide in his cell the night before his execution by cyanide ingestion.

Ilse KochKnown as The “Bitch of Buchenwald” because of her sadistic cruelty towards prisoners, Ilse Koch was married to another wicked Nazi SS, Karl Otto Koch, but outshone him in the depraved, inhumane, disregard for life which was her trademark. She used her sexual prowess by wandering around the camps naked, with a whip, and if any man so much as glanced at her she would have them shot on the spot. The most infamous accusation against Ilse Koch was that she had selected inmates with interesting tattoos to be killed, so that their skins could be made into lampshades for her home (though, unfortunately, no evidence of these lampshades has been found). After the war she was arrested and spent time in prison on different charges, eventually hanging herself in her cell in 1967, apparently consumed by guilt.

Joseph Goebbels

Dr. Paul Josef Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Propaganda, and a vehement antisemite. Goebbels speeches of hatred against Jews arguably initiated the final solution, and no doubt helped sway public opinion to the detriment of the Jewish people. A sufferer of polio, Goebbels had a club foot, but this did not effect his standing as the second best orator in The Reich. He coined the phrase “Total War”, and was instrumental in convincing the nation to fight long after the war was effectively lost. At the end of the war, a devoted Goebbels stayed in Berlin with Hitler and killed himself, along with his wife Magda and their six young children.

Franz StanglBorn in Austria, Stangl was a commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. In 1940, through a direct order from Heinrich Himmler, Stangl became superintendent of the T-4 Euthanasia Program at the Euthanasia Institute at Schloss Hartheim where mentally and physically disabled people were sent to be killed. Stangl accepted, and grew accustomed to the killing of Jews , perceiving prisoners not as humans but merely as “cargo”. He is quoted as saying, “I remember standing there, next to the pits full of black-blue corpses…. somebody said ‘What shall we do with rotting garbage?’ that started me thinking of them as cargo. Stangl escaped Germany after the war and was eventually arrested in Brazil, in 1967. He was tried for the deaths of around 900,000 people. He admitted to these killings, but argued: “My conscience is clear. I was simply doing my duty”. He died of heart failure in 1971, while serving a life sentence.

Paul Blobel

During the German invasion of the Soviet Union, he commanded Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, that was active in Ukraine. Following Wehrmacht troops into Ukraine, the Einsatzgruppen would be responsible for liquidating political and racial undesirables. Blobel was primarily responsible for the Babi Yar massacre at Kiev. Up to 59,018 executions are attributable to Blobel, though during testimony he was alleged to have killed 10,000-15,000. He was later sentenced to death by the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison on June 8, 1951.

Josef Kramer

Kramer was the Commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Dubbed “The Beast of Belsen” by camp inmates; he was a notorious Nazi war criminal, directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Kramer adopted his own draconian policies at Auschwitz and Belsen and, along with Irma Grese, he terrorized his prisoners without remorse. After the war he was convicted of war crimes and hanged in Hameln prison by noted British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Whilst on trial he stated his lack of feelings as he was “just following orders”.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner

Austrian born Kaltenbrunner was chief of security in the Reich where he replaced Reinhard Heydrich. He was president of Interpol from 1943 to 1945, and was there to destroy the enemies within the Reich. Kaltenbrunner was a physically imposing man with scars on his cheeks, which made him look like the tyrant he really was. Kaltenbrunner was one of the main perpetrators of the holocaust and he was hanged after the Nuremberg trials on 16th October 1946. He was the highest ranked SS man to be hanged.

Friedrich Jeckeln

Jeckeln led one of the largest collections of Einsatzgruppen, and was personally responsible for

ordering the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other “undesirables” of the Third Reich, in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II. Jeckeln developed his own methods to kill large numbers of people, which became known as the “Jeckeln System” during the Rumbula, Babi Yar, and Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacres. After the war he was tried and hanged by the Russian,s in Riga on February 3, 1946.

Jeckeln led one of the largest collections of Einsatzgruppen, and was personally responsible for

ordering the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other “undesirables” of the Third Reich, in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II. Jeckeln developed his own methods to kill large numbers of people, which became known as the “Jeckeln System” during the Rumbula, Babi Yar, and Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacres. After the war he was tried and hanged by the Russian,s in Riga on February 3, 1946.

Jeckeln led one of the largest collections of Einsatzgruppen, and was personally responsible for ordering the deaths of over 100,000 Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other “undesirables” of the Third Reich, in the occupied Soviet Union during World War II. Jeckeln developed his own methods to kill large numbers of people, which became known as the “Jeckeln System” during the Rumbula, Babi Yar, and Kamianets-Podilskyi Massacres. After the war he was tried and hanged by the Russian,s in Riga on February 3, 1946.

Oskar DirlewangerWW1 veteran Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger led the infamous SS Dirlewanger Brigade, a penal battalion comprised of the sickest most vicious criminals in the Riech. Dirlwanger raped two 13 year old girls on separate occasions in the 1930s, and lost his Dr. title after being imprisoned, only to have it reinstated after his bravery Fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He volunteered for the SS at the start of WW2, and was given his own battalion due to his excellent soldiery, Dirlewanger’s unit was employed in operations against partisans in the occupied Soviet Union, but he and his soldiers are widely believed to have tortured, raped and murdered civilians (including children) and he allegedly fed female hostages strychnine in order to entertain his soldiers whilst they died in agony. Dirlewanger was captured by the French in a hospital after being injured at the front as he had always led his soldiers into battle. The French handed him over to the Polish, who locked him up and beat and tortured him over the next few days. He died from injuries inflicted by the Polish guards around June 5, 1945.

Odilo GlobocnikOdilo Globocnik was a prominent Austrian Nazi, and later an SS leader. He was one of the men most responsible for the murder of millions of people during the Holocaust. Globocnik was responsible for liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, which contained about 500,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe, and the second largest in the world, after New York. He is also known for liquidating the Bialystok Ghetto, which stood out for its strong resistance to German occupation and resettling a large quantity of Poles under the premise of ethnic cleansing. He was in charge of the implementation and supervision of the Lublin reservation, to which 95,000 Jews were deported, with its adjacent network of forced labour camps in the Lublin district. He was also in charge of over 45,000 Jewish laborers. On May 21st, Shortly after capture, Globocnik committed suicide by means of a cyanide capsule hidden in his mouth.

Adolf EichmannEichmann was the organizational talent that orchestrated the mass deportation of Jews from their countries into waiting ghettos and extermination camps. A prodigy of Heydrich, he is sometimes referred to as “the architect of the Holocaust”. He learned Hebrew and studied all things Jewish in order to manipulate Jews, through his power of coercion, to leave their occupied territories and possessions in favor of a better life in the ghettos. At the end of the war he was doing the same to Hungarian Jews and, if it wasn’t for the intervention of Raoul Wallenberg, the number of victims of the holocaust would have been much higher. He fled Germany at the end of the war via a ratline to south America, and was captured by the Mossad in Argentina. He was extradited to Israel and executed by hanging in 1962, after a highly publicized trial. Eichmanns death was, and is, the only civil execution ever carried out in Israel.

Joseph MengeleMengele initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, but is far more infamous for performing grisly human experiments on camp inmates, for which Mengele was called the “Angel of Death”. His crimes were evil and of many. When it was reported that one hospital block was infested with lice, Mengele gassed every single one of the 750 women assigned to it. Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in identical twins. Mengele’s experiments included attempts to take one twin’s eyeballs and attach them to the back of the other twin’s head, changing eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes, various amputations of limbs, and other brutal surgeries. He survived the war, and after a period living incognito in Germany, he fled to South America, where he evaded capture for the rest of his life, despite being hunted as a Nazi war criminal.

Reinhard Heydrich

Heydrich was appointed Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. In August 1940, he was appointed and served as President of Interpol. Heydrich chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, which discussed plans for the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German occupied territory, thus being the mastermind of the holocaust. He was attacked by British trained Czech agents on 27 May, 1942, sent to assassinate him in Prague. He died slightly over a week later from complications arising from his injuries. The foundations of genocide were laid by Heydrich and carried out in Operation Reinhard in his name.

Adolf Hitler

Hitler would be some people’s choice to be number one but not mine. Adolf Hitler went from being a lance corporal in the German army, to chancellor of Germany in 15 years. The holocaust may have been his subordinates doing, but he knew about it, which, amazingly, has only been fairly recently proven. Adolf Hitler had a major role in initiating the bloodiest conflict ever, which still has a massive bearing on the world to this day. His megalomania saw large parts of Europe devastated in his lifetime and forced into communism after the war.

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the holocaust and considered to be the biggest mass murderer ever, by some (although it’s really Josef Stalin). The holocaust would not have happened if not for this man. He tried to breed a master race of Nordic appearance, the Aryan race. His plans for racial purity were ended by Hitler’s vanity in making rash military decisions rather than letting his generals make them, thus ending the war prematurely. Himmler was captured after the war. He unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with the west, and was genuinely shocked to be treated as a criminal upon capture. He committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule he had bit upon.

The Nuremberg Trials

Held for the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, the Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. The defendants, who included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking military officers along with German industrialists, lawyers and doctors, were indicted on such charges as crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) committed suicide and was never brought to trial. Although the legal justifications for the trials and their procedural innovations were controversial at the time, the Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.

The Major War Criminals’ Trial: 1945-46

The best-known of the Nuremberg trials was the Trial of Major War Criminals, held from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946. The format of the trial was a mix of legal traditions: There were prosecutors and defense attorneys according to British and American law, but the decisions and sentences were imposed by a tribunal (panel of judges) rather than a single judge and a jury. The chief American prosecutor was Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Each of the four Allied powers supplied two judges–a main judge and an alternate.

Twenty-four individuals were indicted, along with six Nazi organizations determined to be criminal (such as the “Gestapo,” or secret state police). One of the indicted men was deemed medically unfit to stand trial, while a second man killed himself before the trial began. Hitler and two of his top associates, Heinrich Himmler (1900-45) and Joseph Goebbels (1897-45), had each committed suicide in the spring of 1945 before they could be brought to trial. The defendants were allowed to choose their own lawyers, and the most common defense strategy was that the crimes defined in the London Charter were examples of ex post facto law; that is, they were laws that criminalized actions committed before the laws were drafted. Another defense was that the trial was a form of victor’s justice–the Allies were applying a harsh standard to crimes committed by Germans and leniency to crimes committed by their own soldiers.

As the accused men and judges spoke four different languages, the trial saw the introduction of a technological innovation taken for granted today: instantaneous translation. IBM provided the technology and recruited men and women from international telephone exchanges to provide on-the-spot translations through headphones in English, French, German and Russian.

In the end, the international tribunal found all but three of the defendants guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death, one in absentia, and the rest were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life behind bars. Ten of the condemned were executed by hanging on October 16, 1946. Hermann Göring (1893-1946), Hitler’s designated successor and head of the “Luftwaffe” (German air force), committed suicide the night before his execution with a cyanide capsule he had hidden in a jar of skin medication.

Subsequent Trials: 1946-49 Following the Trial of Major War Criminals, there were 12 additional trials held at Nuremberg. These proceedings, lasting from December 1946 to April 1949, are grouped together as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings. They differed from the first trial in that they were conducted before U.S. military tribunals rather than the international tribunal that decided the fate of the major Nazi leaders. The reason for the change was that growing differences among the four Allied powers had made other joint trials impossible. The subsequent trials were held in the same location at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg.

These proceedings included the Doctors Trial (December 9, 1946-August 20, 1947), in which 23 defendants were accused of crimes against humanity, including medical experiments on prisoners of war. In the Judges Trial (March 5-December 4, 1947), 16 lawyers and judges were charged with furthering the Nazi plan for racial purity by implementing the eugenics laws of the Third Reich. Other subsequent trials dealt with German industrialists accused of using slave labor and plundering occupied countries; high-ranking army officers accused of atrocities against prisoners of war; and SS officers accused of violence against concentration camp inmates. Of the 185 people indicted in the subsequent Nuremberg trials, 12 defendants received death sentences, 8 others were given life in prison and an additional 77 people received prison terms of varying lengths, according to the USHMM. Authorities later reduced a number of the sentences.

The Aftermath

The Nuremberg trials were controversial even among those who wanted the major criminals punished. Harlan Stone (1872-1946), chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court at the time, described the proceedings as a “sanctimonious fraud” and a “high-grade lynching party.” William O. Douglas (1898-1980), then an associate U.S. Supreme Court justice, said the Allies “substituted power for principle” at Nuremberg.

Nonetheless, most observers considered the trials a step forward for the establishment of international law. The findings at Nuremberg led directly to the United Nations Genocide Convention (1948) and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), as well as the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War (1949). In addition, the International Military Tribunal supplied a useful precedent for the trials of Japanese war criminals in Tokyo (1946-48); the 1961 trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann (1906-62); and the establishment of tribunals for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia (1993) and in Rwanda (1994).