Scotland’s casual exoneration of a man responsible for many hundreds of deaths could be said to be emblematic of Britain’s response to the presence of war criminals in its midst until the passage of the 1991 War Crimes Act. But, as our book reveals, even armed with criminal legislation, the legal authorities provided no more than a scant measure of justice for the victims. 

Other suspects accused of even more egregious atrocities did not even suffer the indignity of prosecution. Take, for example, Harijs Svikeris, a long-time resident of Milton Keynes, who was presumed to be one of the three “strongest” cases when the war crimes inquiries began. Svikeris, a Latvian, had been a platoon captain in the infamous Arãjs Kommando, a unit established for the sole purpose of ridding their country of Jews and Communists and, with merciless savagery, proved remarkably successful in doing that. 

Over the years, fellow members of the Kommando testified about Svikeris’s role in killings in both Latvia and Belorussia. When I spoke to the head of Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Unit, Chief Supt. Eddie Bathgate, shortly after he retired, he admitted: “Svikeris was a powerful case and I would cheerfully have put him on the charge sheet. The interviews with him were videotaped and you could see he was guilty. One of my last remarks to the CPS was ‘you are not going to be able NOT to prosecute Svikeris’.” But prosecutors refused to proceed without the testimony in open court of eyewitnesses to his crimes. 

There was one case that garnered attention even before the War Crimes Act was passed. Anton Gecas, a former National Coal Board manager, living in Edinburgh, had previously gone by the name Antanas Gecevicius and had been a commander of the 12th Lithuanian Auxiliary Police Battalion, whose wanton cruelty in murdering the Jews of Slutsk in 1941 was cited at the Nuremberg Tribunal. 

Gecas sued Scottish Television for defamation over a documentary detailing his participation in massacres in Belorussia. He lost the case at the Court of Session in 1992, the judge, Lord Milligan, declaring that he was ‘clearly satisfied’ that Gecas was a war criminal. He too was never tried, for the same reason as Svikeris.