The law of war that governs how combatants must behave is frequently ignored when chaos reigns. Breaches can range from the cold‑hearted murder of prisoners and civilians to unspeakable acts of rape and torture. Below, we dive into the top 10 forgotten war criminals who ended up paying the ultimate price – death. Their names may not ring a bell, but the horror they unleashed still echoes through the ages.
Top 10 Forgotten War Criminals: Why They Matter
10 Vojtech Tuka
When Jozef Tiso seized power in October 1939 as president of the First Slovak Republic, he promptly installed Vojtech Tuka as his prime minister. Tuka, a lawyer‑journalist turned fascist firebrand, quickly earned notoriety by drafting sweeping anti‑Jewish legislation. Yet his most chilling pastime was orchestrating the wholesale deportation of Slovak Jews to Nazi death camps. As the war ground on, Tuka’s health deteriorated; a stroke left him wheelchair‑bound, and he fled to Austria only to be captured and shipped back to Slovakia. Throughout the post‑war Czechoslovak trial he suffered additional strokes, leaving him partially paralysed. Despite his frail condition, the courts showed no clemency to the man who had dragged Slovakia into the Soviet front. On August 20 1946, the 66‑year‑old was wheeled in his chair to the gallows, meeting a grim end befitting a monster who delighted in others’ misery.
9 Taha Yassin Ramadan
In the tense lead‑up to the 2002 U.S.–Iraq showdown, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan floated a bizarre peace proposal: he suggested President George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein settle their dispute with a duel, complete with a UN‑sponsored referee. Unsurprisingly, Bush dismissed the notion outright. Two years later, American forces captured Ramadan, and he stood before the Iraqi High Tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity. Initially sentenced to life imprisonment in November 2006, the prosecution deemed the punishment too lenient. The appellate chamber swiftly reversed the decision, ordering a death sentence. Ramadan was hanged on March 20 2007, exactly four years after the invasion began.
The episode stands as a stark reminder of how far diplomatic absurdities can stretch before the grim machinery of justice finally clicks into place.
8 William Joyce
William Joyce, better known to wartime listeners as “Lord Haw‑Haw,” was an American‑born propagandist who found a home in Nazi Germany in 1939. His silver‑tongued oratory caught the eye of Joseph Goebbels, who recruited him to broadcast treasonous messages aimed at the British public. By 1940, Joyce’s shows attracted six million regular listeners and an additional eighteen million occasional ones, all tuned to his venomous calls for distrust and surrender. Goebbels even bragged in his diary about the “astonishing” success of Joyce’s broadcasts. As the war progressed, Joyce’s rhetoric grew ever more incendiary, urging invasion and capitulation. Captured in May 1945, he was tried for high treason in England. The court found him guilty, and on January 3 1945 he was hanged at Wandsworth Prison, becoming the last person ever executed for high treason in the United Kingdom.
7 Carmen Mory
Carmen Mory, dubbed “The Devil,” was a Swiss native who slipped to Berlin in 1933 and soon fell under the sway of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, paving her way to the Gestapo. In 1940, she was apprehended in France after a botched murder attempt on a newspaper editor. Initially condemned to death, she secured release on the condition she spy for the French. The Gestapo, wary of her double‑crossing, re‑arrested her and sent her to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was appointed a Blockova – a block overseer. There she reveled in cruelty, subjecting prisoners to daily beatings, lethal injections, and even dousing them with freezing water in the infamous “lunatic room.” After the war, Allied forces recaptured her for the atrocities committed in Block 10. Though sentenced to hang, Mory beat the executioner at his own game, slashing her throat with a razor on April 9 1947, a week before her scheduled death.
6 Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher rose early within the Nazi ranks, infamous for his virulent anti‑Jewish propaganda that endeared him to Adolf Hitler, who even regarded him as a protégé. By May 1945, the Allied forces had captured him, and he was slated for the Nuremberg trials. In October 1946, Streicher was led to a modest prison gym where his fate awaited. When the trapdoor dropped, he fell, but the rope failed to snap his neck. He writhed and gasped for air for agonizing minutes, a scene many believed was deliberately botched by executioner Master Sgt. John C. Woods, who boasted in Time magazine about his efficiency: “I wasn’t nervous. A fellow can’t afford to have nerves in this business.”
The botched hanging turned Streicher’s death into a prolonged spectacle, underscoring the brutal irony of a man who once thrived on dramatizing suffering.
5 Champ Ferguson
Champ Ferguson earned a reputation as a “gambling, rowdyish, drinking, fighting, quarrelsome man” and led a Confederate guerrilla band across the Tennessee‑Kentucky border. While some of his killings qualified as combat, the majority were Union soldiers targeted for personal vendettas. Captured prisoners—soldiers and civilians alike—often met a grisly end at the edge of his beloved Bowie knife, sometimes even decapitated. In 1864 his band repelled a Federal cavalry assault, only to return the next day and slaughter wounded soldiers at a hospital, an atrocity now known as the Saltville Massacre. Ferguson’s reign of terror concluded when he was apprehended on May 26 1865. Expecting a parole like other surrendering guerrillas, he instead faced murder charges. With his wife and 16‑year‑old daughter in the audience, he was led to the gallows and hanged on October 20, meeting a comparatively civil end to the carnage he had inflicted.
4 Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant
When the Second Boer War erupted in October 1899, the Boers declared war on Britain after a raid sparked over diamond and gold interests. Australia answered the imperial call, sending 16 000 volunteers, among them Lieutenant Harry “Breaker” Morant. As guerrilla warfare intensified, Morant’s commanding officer fell, prompting the “womanizing horse‑breaker” to embark on a revenge spree. In August 1901, eight Boers approached his camp to surrender; Morant ordered their execution on the spot. He later killed three Boer prisoners of war and the German missionary Reverend Heese after witnessing earlier executions. Arrested in September 1901, Morant faced a court‑martial the following year and was convicted of murdering twelve prisoners, though he was acquitted of Heese’s murder. On February 27 1902, he met a firing squad’s bullets. The execution shocked Australians, who felt Britain had acted without consulting their government. To this day, Morant remains a folk hero in Australia, his trial still a source of controversy.
3 Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al‑Tikriti
In the early hours of January 15 2007, Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al‑Tikriti—Saddam Hussein’s half‑brother and chief of the secret police—was led to the gallows for his role in the 1982 torture and execution of countless Shiites. A tragic mishap during the hanging caused the trapdoor to open in such a way that his head separated from his body. The gruesome scene sparked outrage: Sunni Arab loyalists accused the executioners of deliberately decapitating him as a revenge act, while many Basra residents celebrated the spectacle, honking horns and waving Iraqi flags. An Iraqi official noted that locals saw the incident as divine retribution, describing it as “an expression of what a bad man he was during his life.”
2 Irma Grese
Irma Grese, forever remembered as the “Hyena of Auschwitz,” was among the most sadistic Nazi guards of World War II. Rising quickly to senior SS supervisor, she delighted in cruelty: kicking prisoners with hobnailed boots, whipping them, and even unleashing a vicious dog on the sick and helpless. She harbored a twisted fascination with striking women’s breasts and would deliberately select attractive female inmates for the gas chambers out of spite. Grese also committed numerous rapes, forcing Jewish girls to act as lookouts, and kept macabre trophies—lampshades fashioned from the skin of three dead prisoners. Captured by the British in spring 1945, she faced multiple war‑crime charges, pled not guilty, but overwhelming victim testimony led to her conviction. On December 13 1945, at just 22 years old, she became the youngest woman hanged under British law in the 20th century.
1 Edith Cavell
Edith Cavell, a celebrated nurse, was anything but a criminal. After graduating in 1907, she moved from London to Brussels, training thousands of nurses until 1914 when German forces occupied Belgium. During the occupation, Cavell began sheltering wounded British and French soldiers—and civilians—sneaking many of them into neutral Holland. Betrayed by a French informant in August 1915, she confessed to aiding roughly 60 British soldiers, 15 French soldiers, and 100 civilians. Despite the German civil governor’s recommendation for leniency, she received a death sentence. On October 12 1915, she was executed by firing squad, a martyrdom that sparked outrage across the West and helped sway American opinion toward entering World War I in 1917. Today, a statue in Trafalgar Square commemorates her, bearing her words: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness to anyone.”