Anthony Sawoniuk wasn’t a ticket collector in Belarus; he was a ticket collector in Bermondsey. In Belarus he was a murderer. In the great roiling wash-up of the last months of the Second World War and the first years of the peace, thousands of displaced people from the countries of eastern Europe ended up in Britain. Some, like Robert Maxwell, became millionaires, most went on to lead ordinary lives and die ordinary deaths, and one — Sawoniuk — became the only person in British history to be tried successfully for war crimes.

There could have been dozens more. As the authors Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson tell us, in the Soviet archives there was a list of 97 suspected war criminals believed to have been… continue reading