Anthony Sawoniuk

Anthony Sawoniuk (March 7 1921 - November 6 2005) was a convicted Nazi war criminal from Poland. His name is rendered Antoni Sawoniuk in Polish, and Андрэй Саванюк Andrej Savaniuk in Belarusian.

Sawoniuk was born in Domaczewo, Poland. This town was part of the region transferred to Soviet jurisdiction after the Second World War, as part of the Belorussian SSR. The town is now known as Damachava, Brest, Belarus.

Sawoniuk fled the region after the war and lived in England from 1946. In the early 1950s he wrote a letter to his brother, Mikołaj, in Poland, and that was what sealed his fate ultimately. All mail was intercepted by the KGB, and his name, Sawoniuk, had been spelled wrongly. And he was already being watched as a suspected war criminal. Only in the 1990s, however, was it clear that only one person on the list of suspected war criminals had moved to the United Kingdom, and it was there that he was arrested.

Sawoniuk was tried at the Old Bailey in London in 1999 and given two life sentences for the murder of 18 Jews in his Nazi-occupied hometown during World War II. He was the first and the only person in Great Britain to be convicted under the War Crimes Act 1991 when he stood trial in 1999.

He died in Norwich prison at the age of 84.

External links

* [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/uk/309937.stm Sawoniuk - a hidden life exposed] (BBC)