Killer Gets Life Term in Britain’s First War Crimes Trial

A Belarussian man was convicted for the murders of two Jewish women in 1942 and sentenced to life in prison Thursday in Britain’s first war crimes prosecution.

Anthony Sawoniuk, 78, had denied killing the women while serving in the local police in his hometown of Domachevo, Belarus, during the German occupation.

Sawoniuk, a retired British Rail employee, was accused of killing a woman who was among at least 15 people mowed down with a submachine gun as they stood naked by a pit in Domachevo.

The jury also found him guilty of shooting an unidentified woman who was one of three Jews executed and pushed into a grave.

In imposing the sentence at the Old Bailey courthouse, Judge Humphrey Potts told Sawoniuk: “No words of mine can add anything of value to those words already written and spoken about the events in which you played a part.

“I only say this--that although you held a lowly rank in the hierarchy of those involved in the liquidation of Jews in Eastern Europe, to the Jews of Domachevo, it must have seemed otherwise.”

During the course of the trial, Potts had dismissed two other murder counts facing Sawoniuk.

“I have done no crime whatsoever,” Sawoniuk told jurors during his testimony. “My conscience is clear. I would not dream of doing it. I am not a monster--I am an ordinary working-class poor man.”

But Alexander Baglay, 67, testified that he had seen Sawoniuk kill the second woman. Baglay, who was a child at the time, said she had resisted Sawoniuk’s order to the group to undress.

“When she refused, he threatened her with a truncheon. When she had undressed, they were lined up and shot. He shot them with his pistol in the back of the head,” Baglay testified.

“He was standing behind each of them and levered them into the pit by raising his knee,” Baglay said.

An estimated 200,000 Jews were killed in Nazi-occupied Belarus during the war.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, which campaigns for the pursuit of war criminals, “expressed its satisfaction” with the conviction of Sawoniuk and called for continuation of the efforts to prosecute war criminals in Britain and elsewhere.