How the net finally closed on the Nazi henchman Andrei Sawoniuk

Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his childhood friend Andrei Sawoniuk standing in a clearing outside Domachevo, their town in Belarus. Sawoniuk had lined up 15 terrified women, all wearing the yellow Jewish star. As Zan watched, hidden behind the pine trees, Sawoniuk ordered the women to strip naked, shot them in the back and kicked their bodies into a newly dug pit.

Fifty-seven years later, Zan was one of a dozen witnesses to give evidence against Sawoniuk at the Old Bailey, at the only war crimes trial ever held in Britain. Though the UK lost interest soon after the second world war in prosecuting war criminals, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre continued to pursue former Nazis all over the world, and in 1985 the names of 97 suspects living in Britain were handed to the authorities. One of those on the list was Sawoniuk, recently retired after working for 35 years on the railways, a British citizen by virtue of having deftly changed sides in the closing months of the war.