How the net finally closed on the Nazi henchman Andrei Sawoniuk

Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his childhood friend Andrei Sawoniuk standing in a clearing outside Domachevo, their town in Belarus. Sawoniuk had lined up 15 terrified women, all wearing the yellow Jewish star. As Zan watched, hidden behind the pine trees, Sawoniuk ordered the women to strip naked, shot them in the back and kicked their bodies into a newly dug pit.

Fifty-seven years later, Zan was one of a dozen witnesses to give evidence against Sawoniuk at the Old Bailey, at the only war crimes trial ever held in Britain. Though the UK lost interest soon after the second world war in prosecuting war criminals, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre continued to pursue former Nazis all over the world, and in 1985 the names of 97 suspects living in Britain were handed to the authorities. One of those on the list was Sawoniuk, recently retired after working for 35 years on the railways, a British citizen by virtue of having deftly changed sides in the closing months of the war.

Even so, it was only in 1991, after many debates in parliament and the passing of a War Crimes Act, framed to allow British citizens to be charged with crimes committed in Nazi-occupied Europe, that the British police went in search of the suspects. One man was charged but died after being declared unfit to stand trial. Others had disappeared or died, or the evidence against them was found to be insubstantial. Sawoniuk, by now a sad, choleric figure living alone in the East End, was the only one to be brought before the courts.

Mike Anderson and Neil Hanson have based their story on the court transcripts annotated by the judge, the late Sir Humphrey Potts, on the vast amount of news coverage and on interviews with survivors, witnesses, detectives and historians.