57 Fall 2024 A very significant decision was that the cases should proceed by the then-normal two-stage process – committal proceedings in the magistrates’ court to test whether the prosecution’s evidence justified sending the case for trial in the Crown Court. Witnesses from abroad, who would likely be aged and possible infirm, had to be able and willing to come to England to give their evidence twice. As the authors point out, this again could have been avoided due to an exemption expressly provided in the Schedule to the Act. The Schedule stated that committal proceedings were not required if an officer acting for the Attorney General or the DPP found that there was sufficient evidence to commit the case for trial and the case was of such complexity that removing the case without delay to the Crown Court was appropriate. After the War Crimes Act became law the Metropolitan Police set up a War Crimes Unit (WCU). We are told that the WCU investigated 376 cases (p. 71). Unfortunately, there was never a final report regarding the work of the WCU and the information in the book is sparse. After the Introduction there are seven chapters and an Afterword. There is also a valuable fourteen-page list of sources. The first chapter deals with the immediate post-war period; the UK does not come out well. The failure to commit to an unequivocally clear strategy on war crimes, the sclerotic bureaucracy which inhibited effective coordination between departments, and the inexperience of military investigators played their part but perhaps not as much as the lack of will shown by those in the War Office and the higher echelons of the military, many of them weary veterans of the Great War who were always reluctant to elevate the issue of war crimes to a status matching its significance (pp. 60-61). The second chapter is entitled “The Soviet Hunt for War Criminals Who Fled to the West.” The Soviets were relentless in pursuing war criminals, and more than half of the names examined by the Hetherington-Chalmers Inquiry were compiled from Soviet sources. It is a pity that the authors did not have a chapter about what led to the introduction of the War Crimes Bill and the battle over its passage through Parliament. The House of Lords blocked the Bill three times, and the Government was only able to get it onto the statute book by using the Parliament Act, yet the book omits virtually everything about that history. The last five chapters explore the stories of individual residents in the UK who had committed war crimes as a member of the auxiliary police in a country occupied by the Germans. Such local police were invaluable to the Holocaust project, not least of all because they identified Jews within the community and often murdered them on their own. We are given a lot of information about five individuals, the war crimes they allegedly committed, and the course of the WCU’s investigation. A great deal of that information came from investigations carried out by the Soviets in the years after the war. The WCU’s difficult task was to find eyewitnesses who could (and would) give evidence in an English criminal trial. Three of these five cases did not result in a prosecution, but presumably they were included as illustrative of typical reasons. Harijs Svikeris. The WCU interviewed hundreds of potential witnesses in different countries, but it was concluded that their evidence did not add much to the information that had been provided by the KGB to the Hetherington-Chalmers Inquiry. Svikeris himself admitted to being present at one shooting, but the only corroborating witness became unreliable – and then Svikeris died. Anton Gecas was identified as a war criminal in a Scottish television documentary. He unwisely sued for defamation. Giving judgment, Lord Milligan said “I am clearly satisfied that [Gecas] participated in many operations involving the killing of innocent Soviet citizens, including Jews.” That verdict was based on the civil “balance of probability” standard of proof. The Lord Advocate (the Scottish equivalent of an attorney general) decided there was insufficient evidence to satisfy the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In 2001, a court in Lithuania issued an arrest warrant for Gecas’s involvement in the murder of 32,000 civilians and 13 specific crimes. In July 2001, Gecas had a stroke while still in Scotland and died in September of that year. Szymon Serafinowicz had been identified as a war criminal after the war by the KGB, but his name was not included by the Hetherington-Chalmers inquiry and when the WCU began their inquiries they were unaware of his significance. After information about his leading role in massacres emerged, he was interviewed by the police in July and again in November 1993. He admitted that he had been present but claimed that the killing was carried out by the Germans. It wasn’t until 1995 that the CPS was ready to submit the evidence for consideration by
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