They viewed the ticket collector as surly and morose, but they never would have guessed that he had killed Jews in his home town during the Holocaust.

None could ever have imagined that their colleague had, as an SS auxiliary, butchered Jewish men, women and children, and then tossed their bodies into mass graves.

It was in 1999 that Sawoniuk, who came from Domachevo, in present-day Belarus, became the first and only person to be convicted under the UK’s War Crimes Act 1991, following a trial at the Old Bailey.

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