Hitler's plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe and the Nazi policy of genocide were carried out "with enthusiasm" by a 77-year-old retired railwayman now living in London, an Old Bailey jury has been told.
On the opening day of the prosecution case against Mr Anthony Sawoniuk, who denies four charges of murder in German-occupied Belorussia (now Belarus) in 1942, Mr John Nutting QC told the jury in Britain's first war crimes trial yesterday that the defendant "executed Jewish men and women whose only offence was to be Jewish".
As the eight men and four women of the jury prepare to travel to the former Soviet republic of Belarus on Sunday to visit the town of Domachevo where the alleged crimes took place - the first time a British jury will take evidence in another country - Mr Nutting told the jury the trial would be a lesson in history.
"We will have to remind ourselves and perhaps learn a little of the history of the Soviet Union in 1941 and we will have to understand something of what is known to history as the Holocaust and something of the Nazi policy of the destruction of the Jewish race. The evidence indicates in our submission that the defendant not only was prepared to do the Nazi bidding, but carried out their genocidal policy with enthusiasm," Mr Nutting said.
The jury was told that Mr Sawoniuk, who was also known by the nickname "Andrusha", was one of the first men to volunteer to join a civilian police force established by the Nazis in his home-town of Domachevo after the German army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Within days of the German occupation of the town the civilian force was established and it is alleged that by the time he fled Domachevo with the Nazis in 1944 when the Russian army was advancing, he had been promoted to the rank of a senior officer or commander.
The murders took place in three ways, Mr Nutting said. Firstly, about 40 prominent Jews in the town were rounded up and "summarily executed". Then, just over a year later on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, on September 20th, 1942, 2,900 Jews were murdered in a massacre "which resulted in the attempted eradication of the Jewish population of Domachevo".
The final wave of killings came in the days and weeks after September 20th when Mr Sawoniuk "played a prominent part" in rounding up Jews who had fled to the nearby forests or had hidden in houses in the town.
Mr Nutting told the court that although Mr Sawoniuk was charged with the murder of a single Jew on each of the four counts, three of the counts related to an occasion when he was alleged to have murdered a number of Jews.
English law, he said, did not permit anyone being charged with more than one murder in a single count. Furthermore, the names of two of the Jews murdered were not disclosed in two of the counts against Mr Sawoniuk.
Witnesses to the events in Domachevo described Mr Sawoniuk as "always in the front of activity". One Jewish witness, Mr Ben Zion Blustein, who hid with his family for eight days during the "search and kill operation" in the aftermath of the September 20th killings, recalled seeing Mr Sawoniuk and other civilian policemen setting fire to the beard of a Jewish man and then stabbing him, Mr Nutting said.
Another witness, he said, alleged that Mr Sawoniuk stood in a nearby forest with 15 Jewish women in front of an open grave: "The defendant was standing behind them with a sub-machine gun. He ordered the women to remove their clothes and shot them with the gun. As he did so, they collapsed one after another into the grave."
The trial continues today.
A Lithuanian court indefinitely suspended the trial of an alleged Nazi-era war criminal yesterday and called for additional evidence from the US Justice Department in the case of a second.
At two separate sessions, Judge Viktoras Kazhys heard evidence from the head of a court-appointed medical commission that Mr Kazys Gimzhauskas and Mr Aleksandras Lileikis, both 91year-old former US citizens, were too ill to be tried.