Nostalgia is a powerful tool. As Hollywood relies more and more on the franchises of yesteryear, studios bring back treasured characters from across fiction. That pattern obviously leads to many familiar faces as actors sign contracts for endless sequels. Audiences get used to seeing the same guys over and over. Not every appearance is so predictable, though.

Certain stars revisit their characters years after their debut. They might spend upward of a decade on other projects while the franchises evolve in their absence. Despite those diverging paths, these actors somehow find their way back to their onscreen icons. That time away from the roles usually results in tremendous fanfare upon their return. Good things are far more satisfying after a long wait, and the same goes for fan service.

Related: 10 Actors Who Wanted to Be Killed Off Popular TV Shows

10 Claudia Wells

Although the Back to the Future trilogy largely maintained the same cast for multiple characters, one of the few changes occurred with the hero’s love interest. Claudia Wells played Marty McFly’s girlfriend, Jennifer, in the 1985 original. She didn’t have many scenes, but her warm charisma provided an endearing contrast to all the wacky misfortune. Sadly, her mother’s cancer diagnosis prompted Wells to step away from the role. Elizabeth Shue replaced her in the sequels, and that seemed to be the end of her tenure.

That was until Back to the Future: The Game in 2010. Assisted by series co-creator Bob Gale, this episodic adventure title continued the heroes’ time-traveling exploits. Their actions inadvertently led to an alternate version of 1985, where the town was a totalitarian police state. Wells returned to voice Jennifer, who was now a punk rock anarchist. Such a radical shift suited her surprising reprisal.^[1]

9 Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy accumulated a vast character catalog over his career, but he was practically synonymous with Spock. With dry humor and meticulous nuance, he played the Vulcan science officer for numerous entries in the Star Trek franchise. His tenure across the TV shows, movies, and games initially lasted until 1993. At that point, the focus shifted to other crews across the galaxy. Later years saw a drastic reset, however.

Star Trek (2009) altered the series’ history and took the focus back to the original Enterprise crew. Obviously, new actors assumed these roles, but Nimoy also joined in the fun. He appeared as the future version of Spock, who partly caused this new timeline and strove to guide his younger friends. The position was a symbolic passing of the torch—both for the character and the franchise.^[2]

8 Harrison Ford

Though limited as an actor, Harrison Ford has headlined some of the biggest movies in cinematic history. The most famous was Star Wars. His turn as the roguish Han Solo charmed audiences in the original trilogy from 1977 to 1983. He seemed done with the franchise until 2015 when The Force Awakens brought back the old cast as backup for the younger players. The franchise’s sister series had gotten a grand return a few years earlier.

Arguably as iconic was Indiana Jones. Ford played this plucky archaeologist for three historic adventures from 1981 to 1989, but he made two belated returns: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008 and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023. Of course, he didn’t stop at Lucasfilm properties.

Blade Runner was nearly as iconic. The 1982 neo-noir film positioned Ford as Rick Deckard, a detective tasked with hunting down rogue androids. The dystopian world was more interesting than the star, leading the 2017 sequel—Blade Runner 2049—to focus on a new cast. That said, Ford showed up as an elderly Deckard in the third act. Revisiting past hits has become a habit of his, possibly due to his lack of range.^[3]

7 Linda Hamilton

Few action heroines have matched the heights of Sarah Connor. With her son destined to lead the humans to victory against genocidal machines, this unassuming woman had to grow up fast to defend herself and her child from time-traveling assassins. Linda Hamilton lent intense pathos to that journey in The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

Unfortunately, subsequent films marginalized or omitted Sarah entirely, so Hamilton’s only contribution afterward was a vocal cameo in Terminator Salvation (2009). With other actresses taking over the character, her turn seemed to be firmly in the rearview mirror.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) surprised everyone in that respect. The sequel/reboot altered the timeline to feature a new robot apocalypse along with a new savior. Despite those changes, Hamilton stepped back into Sarah’s shoes as a guiding figure. Her presence provided valuable perspective on the temporal struggle, cementing how eerily familiar it all was.^[4]

6 Michael Keaton

Michael Keaton has mirrored Harrison Ford in revisiting multiple roles, albeit with more varied results. Many comic fans came to know him as Batman. His dark, gothic take in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) redefined the character’s onscreen image and ushered in countless other portrayals. As many as there were, Keaton always maintained a special place in fans’ hearts.

That esteem led to an eventual return in The Flash (2023). This movie tossed multiple DC eras into a blender via time-traveling antics. The multiversal premise enabled Keaton to play an elderly Dark Knight. His gruff demeanor contrasted wildly with the speedy superhero at the center, but he got to have far more fun with his other major return.

Nearly as beloved in Keaton’s filmography was Beetlejuice. He first played this clownish ghoul in the 1988 film of the same name. His unpredictably sleazy energy made for equal parts horror and comedy. What’s more impressive is that he maintained that energy years later. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was a 2024 sequel where Keaton once again donned the grotesque getup. Even amid ever-crazier undead hijinks, he didn’t miss a beat. These distinct icons cemented his strength as a character actor.^[5]

5 Stephanie Nadolny

Goku is one of the most beloved anime heroes of all time. Considering his storied history, he’s had numerous actors voice him at various stages of his life. For his younger years, though, the mainstay English portrayal came courtesy of Stephanie Nadolny. Her slight rasp made her convincing as a little boy, but she also perfectly captured the wholesome enthusiasm inherent to this energetic fighter. Beginning in 1999, she played the child version of Goku (and his son, Gohan) in Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, and all the accompanying movies and games.

Dragon Ball Z Kai appeared to end that run in 2010. This show abridged and remastered DBZ, recasting several characters in the process. Thus, Colleen Clinkenbeard took over as Kid Goku/Kid Gohan and remained in the role for fourteen years.

2024 saw a radical shift in the series’ story with Dragon Ball Daima. This show turned the seasoned heroes into kids as an ode to the IP’s long history. To complement that legacy, the English dub brought back Nadolny as Goku. This shocking return was an inspired move. Many longtime Dragon Ball fans grew up with her portrayal, so her presence was fitting for such a tribute.^[6]

4 Wesley Snipes

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) brought back several legacy characters, but the one with the longest absence was Blade. Wesley Snipes played this vampiric hero in three films: Blade (1998), Blade II (2002), and Blade: Trinity (2004). His cool, stoic performance solidified the Daywalker in pop culture and spearheaded the modern age of superhero blockbusters.

Sadly, the films’ declining quality and the actor’s legal troubles made a continuation less and less likely. The announcement that Marvel would reboot the character with Mahershala Ali seemed to be the final nail in the coffin. Imagine fans’ surprise when the immortal slayer showed up in the Deadpool sequel.

In a typically meta twist, he’s one of the heroes in purgatory after 20th Century Fox’s acquisition by Disney, but he’s no less effective at killing bad guys. He even took a shot at the reboot in development hell, saying that there’d only ever be “one Blade.” After over twenty years of costumed crime-fighting flicks, his triumphant return was a full-circle moment for the genre.^[7]

3 Willem Dafoe

Another multiverse misadventure saw another slew of happy returns. Spider-Man (2002) was equally instrumental in jumpstarting the superhero movie boom. Not only did it faithfully adapt the web slinger’s origin, but it also did justice to his greatest enemy. Willem Dafoe seamlessly embodied the deranged duality of Green Goblin, his manic talents brilliantly fitting the baddie’s twisted menace. Plenty of Spidey villains came afterward, but none left quite the same impact.

That’s why the Goblin once again took center stage in Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). This movie combined the three live-action Web Heads (and their villains) into one chaotic adventure. Dafoe was the antagonist with the longest absence. Sure, he’d popped up for cameos in Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), but he hadn’t suited up as the crazed killer for almost twenty years. That said, his maniacal laugh made it seem like yesterday.^[8]

2 Ghostbusters

Pop culture has given us several paranormal investigators, but the Ghostbusters succeeded in star power. The 1984 classic brought Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Ernie Hudson together as quirky exterminators. Their comedic talents bounced beautifully off each other, turning these no-name losers into household names. Although the actors only returned for one sequel in Ghostbusters II (1989), fans constantly clamored for more spooky escapades.

They got their wish twice over. First came Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009). Not only was this title an approved sequel from the series’ creators, but it sported the voices and the likenesses of all four actors.

2021 saw an additional follow-up in Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Although this film introduced a new generation of supernatural fighters, the old guard appeared to aid them in the climax. The only exception was Harold Ramis, who had sadly passed away by then. Regardless, he and his teammates left a palpable impact.^[9]

1 Miranda Otto

The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) was full of unassuming souls stepping up to fight evil. Éowyn was a fine example. A shieldmaiden of Rohan, she was desperate to prove herself and protect those she loved. That love drove her to fight fiercely on the front lines.

Miranda Otto brought enormous empathy to that journey, blending bravery and vulnerability to create an endearing heroine worthy of song. As engaging as she was, though, Éowyn was mortal. That fact meant that Otto was absent as the fantasy franchise dove into other periods of Middle-earth history. Thankfully, fleshing out the heroine’s homeland found a way for the actress’s return.

The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim (2024) fashioned a prequel tale about Rohan’s heroic king, Helm Hammerhand. Though not a major player, Éowyn bookended the story as a narrator. The film’s anime format meant that Otto could voice her character. Her inclusion was appropriate for the setting and provided palpable authenticity, settling fans into this new format.^[10]

Slavery in America didn’t end with the Emancipation Proclamation. It lived on—even after the Civil War had ended and the 13th Amendment had been put into place.

The Civil War brought the Confederate States back into the Union, but the people who lived in the South weren’t through fighting. They were determined to keep things exactly as they were during the heyday of slavery.

They made state laws that let them keep black people in essential servitude. As a result, slavery in America lived on for a lot longer than most people realize.

10 Slavery Was Used As A Legal Punishment

The 13th Amendment didn’t make all forms of slavery illegal. It kept one exception. Slavery, it ruled, was still permitted “as a punishment for crime.”

All the Southern states had to do was find a reason to arrest their former slaves, and they could legally throw them right back on the plantation. So, Southern politicians set up a series of laws called the “Black Codes” that let them arrest black people for almost anything.

In Mississippi, a black person could be arrested for anything from using obscene language to selling cotton after sunset. If he was as much as caught using a bad word, he could be charged, leased out as a slave laborer, and put to work in chain gangs and work camps on farms, mines, and quarries.

It happened a lot. By 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s revenue came from leasing out convicts as slaves.^[1]

The enslaved convicts were treated terribly. They were beaten so brutally and viciously that, in one year, one of every four enslaved convicts died while working. Work camps kept secret, unmarked graves where they would bury men they’d beaten to death to hide the evidence. By the end, those graves held the mutilated bodies of at least 9,000 men.

9 Many Freed Slaves Worked On The Same Farms For The Same Wages

When the 13th Amendment was passed, a judge in Alabama declared that he and his Southern brethren were going to keep black slave labor alive in the South. “There is really no difference,” he said, “whether we hold them as absolute slaves or obtain their labor by some other method.”

He was right. Their new jobs as free people weren’t much different from their jobs as slaves. The newly freed slaves may have dreamed of better lives and new occupations, but a better life wasn’t easy to find. They had no money, no education, and no experience doing anything other than slaving away on a white man’s plantation.

Many ended up signing labor contracts with their former masters and were put back to work on the same farms. There, white landowners kept slave-condition gang labor alive with whites overseeing black workers.

Pay wasn’t much better than it was during slavery. In fact, it was often worse. The earliest records of black wages weren’t taken until 1910, nearly 50 years after emancipation. Even then, the average black man made no more than one-third the salary of the average white man.^[2]

8 Sharecropping Made Slaves Through Debt

Emancipated slaves had been promised 40 acres of land and a mule, but the government quickly backed out of the deal. It was an unfeasible amount of land to take from the white people who owned it, and most refused to sell their land to black people anyway. So they came up with something else—sharecropping.

White landlords would offer to give black families about 20 acres of land on which to grow cotton. In exchange, the whites expected about half of the black families’ crops. The landlords would even be able to dictate what the blacks grew, which often meant they’d be stuck growing tobacco or cotton.

With fields full of cotton, the slaves couldn’t grow their own food. So they had to buy it. But with half of their incomes going to white landlords, they were often bringing home less than slaves. They’d have to borrow money for food from the landlords, too—keeping the blacks in a perpetual cycle of debt and servitude.^[3]

7 Unemployed Black People Were Forced To Work Without Pay

If you turned down the slave-labor jobs you were being offered, they’d just make you work. If a black person in Virginia was caught without a job, he could be charged with vagrancy. He’d be forced to spend the next three months working for pay that, even at the time, was described as “slaves wages [that were] utterly inadequate to the support of themselves.”

Trying to escape just made things worse. If a vagrant working slave wages tried to run, he would be tied up with a ball and chain and forced to keep working—except that now he wouldn’t get paid a penny.^[4]

Vagrancy was called “slavery in all but its name.” But it was often much worse than what the blacks had gone through in slavery days. More than that, it forced black people to either accept the slave-like conditions that came with sharecropping and gang labor or to work without pay.

6 Fake Apprenticeships

Another way to keep legal slaves was to call them your apprentices. Plantation owners would lure their former slaves back by promising to teach them everything the plantation owners knew and get the freedmen ready to succeed on their own. However, the plantation owners just put the freedmen right back in their old slave jobs.

The former slaves would now be under contracts forcing them to work for their old masters, and the freed slaves could get in legal trouble for breaking these contracts. If they got real jobs, even the people who hired them could be sued by the slave owners for “enticing” their apprentices away.^[5]

One woman named Elizabeth Turner went through this. She was tricked into going right back to the same slave labor she’d done before emancipation. Turner managed to get out with the help of an abolitionist lawyer who took her case for free. But most weren’t so lucky. Most former slaves were illiterate and uneducated and didn’t know any way to get out of the contracts that threw them right back into slavery.

5 Confederados Took Their Slaves To Brazil

Brazil lured Confederate slave owners after the Civil War. Slavery was still legal there, and it was in wider swing than it ever had been in the US. About five million slaves had been sent across the Atlantic to Brazil—more than 10 times the number that had been sent to the US.

For many Confederates, that was a selling point. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people moved from the US to Brazil under the promise that they would be allowed to keep their slaves. Some dragged their newly emancipated slaves with them to a land where the freedmen could be forced back into servitude. Meanwhile, other Confederates picked up new slaves in Brazil at discounted prices.

Even today, there are little communities in Brazil that still revere their American slave-owning ancestors, called “Confederados” by the community that took them in.^[6] Now 150 years later, the descendants of slavers still wave Confederate flags and speak with a Georgia twang.

4 Black Workers Were Locked Up And Beaten

Systems of slavery through debt like sharecropping were officially made illegal in 1867, but they carried on for about another 100 years. Sometimes, though, it wasn’t just the debt keeping people imprisoned.

Some African Americans were lured to jobs and then actually locked up and kept from leaving. For example, one group of workers in Florida went to work in a sugarcane field and soon found themselves locked up in a filthy shack. Their new employers would beat the former slaves to get them to work and threatened to kill them if they tried to leave.^[7]

In other places across the US, black workers were shackled to beds or beaten with cat-o’-nine-tails to keep them working for nothing more than a few scraps. The men lured in were usually illiterate, and so they were completely incapable of fighting for their freedom in court.

This wasn’t the norm, however, and even white Southerners were disgusted when they found out it was happening. Little was done to stop it, though, until the 1940s. It took concentrated Axis propaganda campaigns to shame the US into genuinely and effectively stamping out these camps.

3 Blacks Couldn’t Testify Against Whites

In Kentucky, black people didn’t have the legal right to testify against white people in court. That was more than just a civil injustice. It allowed white people to effectively do whatever they wanted to their black neighbors.

A white person could walk into a black person’s house, take everything, and get away with it. And sometimes, that was exactly what happened.

A black woman named Nancy Talbot was sitting in her home when a white man broke in, grabbed everything he could carry, and left. Talbot tried pressing charges against the thief, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind—including that of the judge—that the thief was guilty.^[8]

But Talbot was legally forbidden from testifying. Without her testimony, the judge couldn’t convict the white criminal.

Black people had the right to earn their own money now, but they didn’t have any recourse to keep it. A white person could take anything the black person had earned right out his pocket, and there was essentially nothing that the blacks could do about it.

2 White People Could Get Away With Massacres

Even if the 13th Amendment made it illegal on paper to beat a slave, laws like Kentucky’s made it perfectly possible to massacre a whole black family and get away with it. Which is exactly what John Blyew and George Kennard did.

In 1868, Blyew and Kennard broke into the home of the black-skinned Foster family with an axe. The two intruders murdered the father, mother, and grandmother and seriously wounded two of the children.^[9]

The eldest child, 16-year-old Richard, hid under his father’s dead body until the killers left. Then he crawled to a neighbor’s house for help. He’d been hit by their axe, though, and his wounds were so bad that he died two days later.

The only survivors were the youngest children: eight-year-old Laura, who had hidden and survived, and six-year-old Amelia, who had been hacked in the head but miraculously lived. Still, Amelia went the rest of her life with a massive, disfiguring scar across her face—and without her parents.

Blyew and Kennard were arrested. But under Kentucky law, the survivors weren’t allowed to testify. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that Kennard and Blyew couldn’t be convicted because the witnesses were black.

Eventually, the law was changed and Blyew and Kennard were sent to prison. But they didn’t stay there long. Both men were pardoned by the governor and set free.

1 Mississippi Didn’t Ratify The 13th Amendment Until 1995

When the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was passed in 1865, 27 of America’s then-36 states ratified it. As the years passed, the other states gave up their stance of protesting emancipation and threw their support behind the right of a black person to live free.

For some states, though, it took a long time. Kentucky didn’t ratify the 13th Amendment until 1976, and Mississippi waited until 1995 before officially accepting that slavery was against the Constitution.

Even after voting to end slavery in 1995, though, Mississippi still didn’t go through with it. The politicians who voted for the resolution didn’t report it to the Federal Register, so it didn’t actually take effect until 2013.

It wasn’t until activists realized that Mississippi was still registered as protesting the end of slavery that they actually put the order through. Officially, Mississippi’s government was against ending slavery until just four years ago.^[10]

The world’s oldest countries take great pride in how long they have been successful nations, nation-states, or republics. Even if they aren’t the same countries now that they were way back when, the history of a place is held in high regard when that place has had such a formative impact on society.

Take ancient Greece, for example, or ancient Rome. There is still understandably and rightfully a great deal of pride in present-day Greece and Italy for the impact of those two cultures and the legacy they leave behind. And even relatively “young” countries across the world (looking at you, here, USA!) have proud histories and very vocal supporters for all that they have achieved.

But what happens when a country only exists for a few short years? Or even shorter than that? Not all independent nations were made to last. Some were annexed, absorbed, invaded, overtaken, or otherwise destroyed in an incredibly short amount of time after declaring independence and sovereignty. And in this list today, that’s what we’re going to take a look at! The following ten countries—if you can even call them that—were not countries for very long at all. But they made this list, and they made a (small) mark on history, so that counts for something, we suppose!

Related: Top 10 Countries Held Back By Their Geography

10 The Republic of West Florida (1810)

The Republic of West Florida was a very short-lived nation of a region in what is now far-west Florida, its panhandle, and further to the west that was at the time known as the “Florida Parishes.” That region had recently been acquired by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Still, the people there didn’t care much for the governments around them—either the U.S. or the Spanish, who were on the way out.

Before the Spanish could go, though, in September 1810, the residents of these so-called “Florida Parishes” in that state’s current panhandle took up arms and violently overthrew the Spaniards once and for all. In turn, they declared themselves an independent nation, naming it the Republic of West Florida.

That didn’t last very long, though. Up in Washington, D.C., the Americans were watching the situation carefully. They did not care for an armed insurrection going on in what had now become their borders. Even if it was an insurrection against the Spanish, the Americans didn’t really want to encourage off-shoot movements and other fledgling nations. So, they moved in quickly.

The West Floridians named their capital city St. Francisville, and they even elected a president named Fulwar Skipwith (yes, really) to run the new country. But by December 1810, that was all over. The area was forcibly annexed by the United States, and the Republic of West Florida was no more.^[1]

9 The Paris Commune (1871)

The Paris Commune was an independent socialist government that was abruptly and violently set up—and then abruptly and violently quelled—during the spring and early summer of 1871 in Paris, France. This whole thing began during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. By early 1871, the French National Guard had successfully defended Paris. But there was major discontent within the ranks of their soldiers.

In September 1870, French leaders established the Third Republic. But it didn’t stand very long. On March 18, 1871, French soldiers of the National Guard seized control of Paris. They killed two French army generals and then refused to submit themselves to the authority of the Third Republic. Instead, they established an independent government and declared sovereignty as the Paris Commune.

Over the next two months, the Paris Commune governed the famous city. The soldiers established a series of mostly progressive policies that appealed to them from several different schools of 19th-century political science thought. Those policies included the separation of church and state, the abolition of child labor, self-policing, and more pro-worker labor beliefs. All Roman Catholic churches and schools were shut down, too.

But whatever the Paris Commune hoped to achieve simply didn’t happen. It only took two months and three days, and on May 21, 1871, the “Bloody Week” began. Still known in France as “La Semaine Sanglante,” the “Bloody Week” saw national French Army leaders suppress and destroy the short-lived Paris Commune nation once and for all.^[2]

8 The Republic of Mahabad (1946)

The Republic of Mahabad was a Kurdish ethnic state that existed very briefly in Iran—for most of 1946, in fact, and not a second longer. Also sometimes called the Republic of Kurdistan, this short-lived and self-governing nation began in the western portion of present-day Iran on January 22, 1946.

With World War II having just ended and the Soviet Union exploring its geopolitical options in the Middle East at that point, the Republic of Mahabad caught early financial, logistical, and political support from the Soviets. And they weren’t the only nation in that area. There was also a very short-lived (and entirely unrecognized) Soviet puppet state called the Azerbaijan People’s Government, which also functioned for a time in that area. But the Republic of Mahabad was a bit more significant—and they had more significant dreams.

The Republic of Mahabad didn’t have much territory to its name, covering just a section of what is present-day northwestern Iran and running down the western side of that nation. But they had some formidable cities within that area, including Oshnavieh, Bukan, Naghadeh, and Piranshahr. They also claimed three other contested cities—Urmia, Khoy, and Salmas. The people who backed this Kurdish state were wildly patriotic for their cause, too.

But just about two months into the Mahabad experiment, in late March 1946, the United States and other Western powers put pressure on the Soviets to leave the region. The Soviet Union acquiesced, and just like that, Mahabad’s biggest ally was gone. Iran soon re-asserted its power over the rest of the region, isolating Mahabad economically and socially. By the middle of December, the government had imploded, and the nation’s brief life was snuffed out.^[3]

7 The Republic of South Maluku (1950)

At the end of World War II, the Netherlands began the process of pulling out of their colonies in what is present-day Indonesia and relinquishing control of those islands, the surrounding territory, and their half of New Guinea. During that process, Indonesia, as we know it today, gained independence in 1949. There was just one (big) problem with that.

Indonesia is composed of tons and tons of islands, both large and small, and various ethnic groups who did not see eye-to-eye with the early rulers Indonesia had installed in their new nation. That included a group of Moluccan people who, in 1950, created the independent, sovereign Republic of South Maluku.

Neither the Dutch nor the Indonesians cared for this, having very much feared the potential destructive power of separatist states. And when it came time to disband old Dutch colonial forces that had been serving in Indonesia, the fate of several thousand pro-Moluccan soldiers who wanted to fight for their local region’s independence was suddenly a big worry.

Interestingly, with the Republic of South Maluku officially declared, the Indonesians were now forced to do something to get them back in line. So they made a fascinating move with all those Moluccan soldiers: They transferred them thousands of miles away to the Netherlands. More than 12,500 Moluccans were sent forcibly to live in the Netherlands.

This created a massive problem for Indonesia, as it fanned the flames of the Republic of South Maluku’s desire for full-time and eternal independence. It also created a major problem for the Dutch, who now had to house thousands of Moluccan immigrants in Amsterdam and other cities that had only just recently been absolutely decimated by World War II.

As far as the fate of the Republic of South Maluku goes, that independent state was quickly and forcibly brought back under the control of Indonesia before the end of 1950. Today, in Indonesia, various separatist groups spring up from time to time (most recently and most violently, the ones in West Papua), but the Republic of South Maluku itself is no more.

Here’s where things get really interesting: Most of the 12,500 Moluccans who were moved to the Netherlands in 1950 never went back home! Today, census estimates are hard to come by since all their descendants are full Dutch citizens. However, estimates hold that there are somewhere around 40,000 or 50,000 Moluccans who are now two, three, and four generations into calling the Netherlands their (no longer adopted) homeland!^[4]

6 The State of Katanga (1960–1963)

On July 11, 1960, a man named Moïse Tshombe and his very influential political party in the southern region of the Congo declared that they were beginning a new, independent nation. Called the State of Katanga, this breakaway nation did not want to have any part of the Congo after the Belgian colonial government left and the craziness of independence set in.

Katanga, you see, was a very mineral-rich area in the far southern section of what is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, minerals in the “Copperbelt” were mined ruthlessly by all kinds of international conglomerates, which then picked up big profits off the backs of Katangan laborers.

Tshombe wisely understood this, smartly recognized that his region of the world had some financial potential, and wanted out of the craziness of the Congo. Upon declaring independence on that July 11, 1960 day, Tshombe infamously said, “We are seceding from chaos,” which was a direct rebuke of the lawlessness that was rife across the rest of the Congo.

There was just one problem: Literally, nobody else in the entire world wanted the State of Katanga to exist. Not the US government, not the CIA, not the KGB, not the Soviet Union, and not any other fledgling African nation that was worried about secessionist elements within their own borders. International diamond, copper, and other mining corporations were making far too much money in the area at the time to risk political strife, too.

As such, Tshombe’s idea for full independence was a bad one as far as everybody but him and his supporters were concerned. By 1963, Tshombe was driven into exile in Spain—he reportedly took over a million gold bars with him on the way out. While he eventually returned a few years later as the Prime Minister of the Congo, the State of Katanga didn’t survive long enough to see 1964.^[5]

5 The Republic of Biafra (1967–1970)

The Republic of Biafra was a short-lived independent state in present-day Nigeria that seceded from that nation after major ethnic friction. Historically, the north of Nigeria was far more prosperous and economically connected than the south and west. The north was also full of Hausa ethnic people, while the minority Igbo people were vastly outnumbered there.

By late 1966, tens of thousands of Igbo people had been massacred in Nigeria’s north, and the area was devolving quickly into a full-scale civil war. Upon another group of Igbo people being outright expelled from northern and eastern Nigeria, a Lieutenant Colonel (who later became a general) named Odumegwu Ojukwu declared a new independent nation had been formed under the name of the Republic of Biafra.

General Yakubu Gowon, the head of Nigeria’s federal government, flat-out refused to acknowledge Biafra as an independent state. Others did, though. Many African nations, including Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Tanzania, and Zambia, officially opened up democratic relationships with Biafra in early 1967. France even sent the new nation a major stash of weapons with which to defend themselves.

That was the other thing, too; because Nigeria didn’t want Biafra to secede, the whole thing cruised toward a brutal internal struggle. Thus began the awful Nigerian Civil War, which ran through the rest of the 1960s and claimed at least a half-million lives—and possibly more than three million, according to some estimates.

Through it all, Biafra was not meant to be. The region was landlocked, and without shipping lanes of its own, it struggled to complete basic economic trading patterns during the time of war. Worse yet, it was very hard to get supplies to Biafra and its people. By 1969, famine and disease began to horribly ravage the area as the civil war raged on interminably.

Nigerian forces were finally able to completely rout Biafran forces in a series of key battles in December 1969 and January 1970. Fearing for his life, Ojukwu fled to Côte d’Ivoire. On January 15, 1970, with Biafra on the brink of collapse anyway, its remaining generals fully surrendered to Nigeria.^[6]

4 The Republic of Formosa (1895)

The Republic of Formosa was a very short-lived nation that existed for just a sliver of time before it was swallowed up by the Japanese. And when we say “short-lived,” we really do mean short-lived! In the year 1895, the emperor of the Qing dynasty of China formally ceded the island of Taiwan to the Empire of Japan. As part of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the island was meant to be taken over and occupied by Japanese troops.

From there, the Japanese would go on and administer it full time, taking over the job that had previously belonged to China and the emperor of its Qing dynasty. But while the Japanese were interested in Taiwan (then known as Formosa to many in the West), the locals were very much NOT interested in having Japan come through and administer their lives.

So, on May 23, 1895, locals in Taiwan proclaimed the beginning of their new nation, known as the Republic of Formosa. A democratically elected government was installed, which at that time and in that area of the world was a notable rarity. But it didn’t have any staying power. On October 21, 1895—just 151 days after the birth of the Republic of Formosa was declared—the Japanese landed troops on the island and almost immediately took over the capital city, Tainan. And thus, that was that for the Republic of Formosa.

There is one interesting (and minor) sidenote here for all of you history buffs out there. As we already noted in this section, people like to pounce on the Republic of Formosa’s democratic leanings as a point of pride. That’s great, but some go so far as to proclaim it to be the first East Asian republic ever formed—and that part is not true.

The Lanfang Republic in Borneo was established way back in 1777 and lasted for a very, very long time. The Republic of Ezo in Japan was formed in 1869 and sustained itself for a long time, too. Still, the Republic of Formosa is an important part of Taiwanese history. And it’s one of the shortest-lived nations in all of world history!^[7]

3 East Timor (1975–1976)

East Timor was a breakaway region within Indonesia that declared its independence from the surrounding island nation in late 1975. Historically, while most of the rest of Indonesia had been administered by the Dutch before its independence from the colonial rule of the Netherlands in 1949, East Timor was forever separate.

Centuries before, the Portuguese had landed in East Timor, and even as the Dutch took over rule across the rest of Indonesia, East Timor remained a Portuguese colony. But in 1974, the Carnation Revolution way back in Portugal led to a series of colonial consequences—most notably, the Portuguese completely pulling out of East Timor.

In turn, the Timorese people had absolutely no desire to live under the rule of the Indonesians. So they didn’t, and in late 1975, they declared East Timor an independent nation. The Indonesians acted swiftly. On December 7, 1975, Indonesian troops occupied East Timor. Over the next several months, they completely dismantled the already powerless government that East Timor had hastily installed. By early 1976, East Timor completely ceased to be an independent nation, and it was swallowed up in the whole by Indonesia.

Now, if you are a geography buff, you may be saying to yourself, “I’m pretty sure East Timor exists as a country right now, though.” And you’d be right! For the next 23 years after early 1976, the Indonesians brutally administered the area and committed wanton acts of violence. By 1999, a referendum called for East Timor to become independent again. And by 2002, it was so.

Today, East Timor (also commonly called Timor-Leste) is a sovereign nation once more, and a stable one at that. It was that first go-around in 1975, though, where their time as a nation lasted only a few months before total destruction.^[8]

2 The Republic of Hatay (1938–1939)

For about nine months, the Republic of Hatay existed as an independent state and a completely sovereign nation within what is commonly known then and today as Turkey. It all started on September 2, 1938, when an assembly within the breakaway region of Hatay proclaimed that the Sanjak of Alexandretta was formed and the Hatay State was official.

Alexandretta was named the capital city, and for a while, things were peaceful. The French and Turkish even oversaw joint military supervision over the state as it got its bearings together as a country and tried to figure out how to exist while no longer part of Turkey.

Unfortunately for the Republic of Hatay, though, things weren’t meant to be. On June 29, 1939—only about nine months after the nation was officially first formed—the Hatay legislature voted to disestablish Hatay State following a public referendum. That referendum came through overwhelmingly for the Hatay region to rejoin Turkey.

Both at the time and in years since, observers and historians have wondered whether the referendum was “phony” or “rigged” in the first place. Regardless, the French saw Hatay’s reunion with Turkey as a possible way to keep Turkey from allying with Nazi Germany as the rumblings of World War II were picking up. And no matter how legit or not, the referendum ended Hatay’s nine-month run as a sovereign nation just like that.^[9]

1 The Republic of Slovene Styria (1941)

World War II was a total cluster all over Europe. Millions of people were killed—both soldiers and civilians—and the sheer displacement of and mistreatment of populations for years on end was absolutely staggering. There were also major political upheavals across the continent, even beyond the ones most often taught in your history books. Take, for example, the case of Slovene Styria.

That region is roughly analogous to the modern-day nation of Slovenia. At the time, just before World War II broke out, it was part of Yugoslavia as decreed by the re-done Yugoslav Constitution of 1931. And for a while, things worked out just fine like that for Slovene Styria. But in April of 1941, Nazi Germany invaded Yugoslavia. When they did that, they immediately annexed Slovene Styria as their own territory. As you might expect, the Slovene locals didn’t care for that at all.

What followed from spring 1941 through late May 1942 was a vicious battle within the greater battle of World War II. Nazi units went all over Slovene Styria and prohibited the use of the Slovene language or any historically Slovene-related cultural relics. They demanded everyone speak German and pledge their undying support for Hitler.

Intellectuals, clergymen, and other public figures were expelled or killed. But the Slovene people fought back. They declared themselves a sovereign state and put together battalions of loyal troops. Over the next year, they fought viciously against the Nazis as a Republic bent on guarding their land and their way of life.

Of course, we know how things eventually ended for the Nazis. But it wasn’t before tens of thousands of Slovene men gave their lives for their (very short-lived) nation. After World War II ended, the Slovenes were content to be reorganized within the reformed Yugoslavia, pointing to Ljubljana as their capital city.

There, Slovene Styria came to be known as an integral and economically prosperous part of Yugoslavia and was officially called the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Today, the area is a nation once again—known solely as Slovenia—and it remains one of the best-kept travel secrets in all of Europe.^[10]

Treasure. There is a world of imagination in just that one word. It conjures up a hint of possibility and a whole lot of excitement.

Treasure hunting is a popular activity around the world, especially in locations such as Oak Island, Nova Scotia which is rumored to be the place one might find the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail, supposedly buried there by the Knights Templar. Numerous attempts have been made to locate these items, as well as pirate treasure and even Shakespearean manuscripts thought to also be hidden somewhere on the island. None of these attempts have yielded anything other than miscellaneous artifacts, but that hasn’t dampened the excitement of what might lie just around another corner.

On this list are some more long-lost treasures around the world and the places they could possibly be discovered in.

10 Legendary Treasures Still Waiting To Be Found

10 The Florentine Diamond

The stunning light-yellow Florentine Diamond was once part of the Crown Jewels of Austria and the pride of the Medici Family. Its worth in modern times has been estimated to be around $20 million, even though it was once sold for a mere 2 francs by a soldier who took it off the lifeless body of Charles the Bold in 1477.

The diamond has nine sharply-cut sides, originated in India and is said to have been cut by Flemish jeweller Lodewyk van Bercken. After the diamond was sold for glass by the aforementioned soldier, it passed through many hands before it ended up being displayed in Vienna as part of the Austrian Crown Jewels.

The stone was stolen in October 1918 along with Queen Elizabeth’s diamond crown, rings, necklaces and more valuable gems. The trail of the Florentine diamond ended in 1919 after a lawyer, Bruno Steiner, who was entrusted to keep the stone safe disappeared with it. When Steiner was eventually tracked down in 1923, he denied having the diamond saying that Charles I of Austria had sold it to regain the throne. He died in 1930 without the diamond ever having been found.

Rumors abounded that the diamond had been smuggled into South America, while yet more rumors had it that the gem had been re-cut or even cut into smaller diamonds and sold on the international diamond market. These days, there is no telling where the diamond could be, but the search is still on in the USA for a hopeful few who are chasing the dream of being the discoverer of this rare diamond.

9 Jesse James’ gold

Jesse James was not a nice guy. He and his brother Frank committed horrible acts against unarmed Union soldiers, and participated in the Centralia Massacre in 1864. When the Civil War ended the brothers became common criminals, robbing stagecoaches, trains and even banks across the Midwest. Jesse had a target on his back in the form of a reward for his capture and one of his own gang members eventually took him out with a bullet, hoping to cash in on the reward.

Despite all the awful things Jesse James did in life, he became somewhat of a heroic figure after his death with many ‘fans’ comparing him to Robin Hood. This was despite a complete lack of evidence that he ever shared his loot with the less fortunate.

It is believed that Jesse buried some of what he stole in the Keechi Hills located in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. Locals and foreigners alike have for years tried to decipher symbols and other clues carved into the rocks in the area, supposedly by Jesse and Frank, hoping that it would lead them to gold. So far, no luck, but treasure hunters are not giving up hope just yet.

8 Sao Joao shipwreck

On 8 June 1552, the Portuguese ship São João was wrecked along the coastline of present-day Port St. Johns in what is today known as the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The ship met its end near the mouth of the Umzimvubu River and 100 of the 600 people on board drowned. The remaining 500, led by Manual de Souza e Sepulveda remained where they washed up for a couple of days before starting a gruelling trek north, towards Mozambique. However, only 21 people, of which 14 were slaves, survived the journey to Delagoa Bay.

The ship was laden with the richest cargo at the time it went down, worth a million in gold. It was crammed full of pepper, precious stones, Chinese blue and white porcelain, carpets and more. Before starting the doomed journey to Mozambique, some of the slaves allegedly took some of the treasures from the ship. The money chests, however, went under with the wreck and treasure hunters are still looking for it. Some claimed to have found some porcelain and Carnelian beads along the shore, while one treasure hunter even claimed to have found a gold pendant.

The bulk of the treasure is seemingly still underwater, just out of reach of those who want to find it the most.

7 East River treasure

The HMS Hussar, a 28-gun British warship, was on its way to Rhode Island via the East River in November 1780. On board, according to several whisperings, was gold to the value of at least $4 million. The Hussar sank in the tidal strait between Astoria and Wards Island, also known as Hell Gate. Survivors of the incident later claimed that the ‘treasure’ had been delivered to its intended destination before the ship sank.

This did not deter the British government, who tried to find the wreck on three separate occasions without success. When they finally gave up, it was the turn of treasure hunters who braved the dark waters to try and uncover the gold. Nothing has come of anyone’s search other than pottery and other small artifacts and the wreck has yet to be discovered, with some experts believing that the remains of the ship has been incorporated as landfill in the Bronx. Some treasure seekers believe the gold may also be part of the landfill now.

6 Varyagin’s valuable cargo

Russia might not be the first location that comes to mind when the topic of treasure hunting arises, but there are some valuable lost items in this country that treasure hunters wouldn’t mind discovering. This includes the Library of Ivan The Terrible, Napoleon’s gold which is believed to have been sunk in a lake in the western part of the Smolensk Region and Kolchak’s Gold which today would be worth over $280 million.

On October 7, 1906 cargo liner Varyagin sank off the coast of Ussuri Bay in what is known today as the Primorye Territory. It wasn’t a ‘big deal’ at the time, but the owner of the ship, Aleksei Semyonovich Varyagin drew a lot of attention to himself and the incident when he asked the authorities to compensate him for a ‘valuable cargo’ that had been lost. The amount he requested was 60,000 rubles. The governor at the time, refused and it was only in 1913 that the former captain of the Varyagin tried to launch an expedition to the site of the sinking. His efforts were unsuccessful and subsequent efforts to find the ‘valuable cargo’ were hindered first by the start of the First World War and then the 1917 Revolution.

However, those who are brave at heart are not discouraged from seeking out the treasure for themselves. The prize might just turn out to be a windfall amounting to several million rubles.

5 The many lost treasures of Hawaii

Hawaii is a spectacular holiday destination, with the added bonus of a horde of buried treasure sites. According to several legends, that is. One of the most exciting rumors have it that the burial chamber of King Kamehameha, who died in 1819, contains warrior robes made from the feathers of now-extinct birds, and heaps of valuable gems. Treasure hunters have yet to find this burial chamber with some believing it might be hidden away in a rainforest cave.

During the battle of Kepaniwai in 1790, King Kamehameha’s army murdered most of the Maui warriors and dumped their bodies at Iwao Stream, not far from Wailuku. Treasure enthusiasts believe that relics from this battle can still be found hidden in the area.

In addition to this, many believe that over $5 million’s worth of gold and silver was buried near Palemano Point by English pirate Captain Cavendish, and that Captain James Cook’s treasures and weapons were buried on Kauai after he was killed by natives in 1778.

4 Nadir Shah’s loot

The allure of finding treasure hasn’t escaped exotic India.

In 1739, Persian invader Nadir Shah invaded Delhi with an army of 50,000 men. After massacring at least 30,000 people, his army looted the place and ended up with a treasure caravan of 150 miles long. It is here that the story gets a bit murky. Some versions have it that Nadir was murdered on his way back to Persia that same year, while others say he was murdered in 1747. Either way, the person who killed him is alleged to be Ahmad Shah who made off with the bulk of Nadir’s stolen treasures. Before Ahmad’s death he apparently buried these treasures in the tunnels of the Hindu Kush Mountains.

The Koh-I-Noor diamond was among the loot and has been added to the British Crown Jewels. The rest of it remains up for grabs, so to speak.

3 The Kruger Millions

During the South African War, things started to look really bad for the Boers in South Africa. The president at the time, Paul Kruger, was forced into exile in Europe after South Africa’s annexation to the British Empire, to avoid capture. Leaving Pretoria on 29 May 1900, he travelled by train to Machadodorp on 4 June after which he crossed the border to Mozambique and got on a ship to Europe. He died during exile in Geneva, Switzerland.

What was discovered after he left, is that Kruger allegedly hid away a cache of gold bars and coins to the value of $500 million in the Blue River area in what is today known as the Mpumalanga province. This rumor started in 1900 when British governor, Lord Alfred Milner, revealed that gold had been taken from the South African Mint and National Bank. While Kruger was still in Machadodorp, a train was reportedly loaded to the brim with these bars and coins and sent on its way to Mozambique. However, it never arrived there and between Machadodorp and the Mozambiquan border, the gold seemingly vanished into thin air.

Local treasure hunters believe that the gold had been stashed away on a farm between Sabie and Waterval Boven. Hundreds of searches have been carried out in and around the area, but the treasure has yet to be discovered.

Update: In February 2021 several news articles stated that some of the Kruger Millions have been discovered after Kruger ponds were found in a Swiss vault. They have since been acquired by the South African Mint.

2 The Jacobite Gold of Loch Arkaig

In Lochaber, Scotland lies the beautiful Loch Arkaig. Unlike at Loch Ness, those who travel here don’t keep a look out for a fabled sea serpent. Instead, some try their hand at finding the lost Jacobite gold believed to still be hidden in the area.

The Jacobite gold was a large amount of gold coins sent along by Spain to finance the Jacobite rising in Scotland in 1745. Spain pledged to send at least 400,000 livres each month to sustain the rebel army and the first lot was dispatched in 1745. It had hardly landed on the west coast of Scotland however when it was captured by Clan Mackay. In April the following year a shipment of 1,200,000 livres was unloaded at Loch nan Uamh, Arisaig. In total, seven caskets of Spanish gold made it to Scotland, but by the time the last casket was offloaded, the Jacobite fight was over and their army scattered.

Six of the seven caskets were brought to Loch Arkaig and buried. MacPherson of Cluny was in control of the money and is believed to have used some of it to fund ultimately failed attempts at another uprising. All of the gold has not been accounted for however. There were multiple claims and accusations recorded between the Highland chiefs and exiled Jacobites regarding the treasure, but the fate of the rest of the gold has not been established.

1 Stolen European treasures

Almost 76 years ago a S.S. officer using the pseudonym ‘Michaelis’ wrote constantly in a journal. His writings outlined Nazi commander Heinrich Himmler’s plans to hide stolen European ‘treasures.’ The diary was kept away from the public and was in the possession of a Masonic lodge for decades after the war.

In 2019 the lodge gifted the diary to a Polish foundation named Silesian Bridge. The foundation in turn, confirmed that same year that they had received the journal as ‘an apology for WWII.’ At the time, it was yet to be determined whether the journal was authentic, but a map included with it caused great excitement. The map indicated the location of a well on the Hochberg Palace grounds where the Nazis purportedly hid their stolen treasures. These include around 63,000 artworks and cultural artifacts stolen from Polish Jews.

The diary further listed another 10 sites where it is believed the Nazis buried gold, gems, paintings and religious artifacts. The gold at the bottom of the abovementioned well alone is purported to be worth more than $1 billion.

10 Lost Treasures And The Awesome Ways We’re Getting Them Back

Monsters like Adolf Hitler and Dr. Joseph Mengele may have robbed their victims of any justice, but when WWII came to an end, plenty of other Nazis met their fate at the end of a hangman’s noose.

Years after the war concluded, Nazis were hunted down and brought to justice, and that trend continues and will continue until they’re found or die of old age.

Some of the better-known Nazis captured after the war are well-known, including Adolph Eichmann, Franz Stangl, and Josef Schwamberger.

While they aren’t as well known as others, these ten were found in the nooks and crannies to face justice decades after their war crimes were committed and are presented in no particular order, as they’re all monsters.

10 Jews Who Fought In Hitler’s Nazi Army

10 Jakiw Palij

Four years after the war, Jakiw Palij emigrated to the United States, claiming he worked on his father’s farm during the war. Of course, that was a lie, and instead of working as a farmhand, Palij worked as an armed guard at the Trawniki concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The Trawniki camp was a forced-labor concentration camp that held Jewish prisoners, but it was more than that. The camp was also one of the locations the Schutzstaffel (SS) trained to hunt down and kill Polish Jews. As for Palij, it took a long time, but he was finally outed by a senior historian from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

In 2003, a federal judge stripped Palij of his American citizenship, and the following year, he was ordered deported. Despite the order, no country was willing to receive the Nazi war criminal. Then, in 2018, Germany finally relented and accepted Palij — he was 94-years-old at the time.

In 2019, Palij passed away, and while he was stripped of his American citizenship and finally deported, he was never charged for any crimes related to his involvement in the Holocaust. Regardless, he was outed, which served to properly vilify the man for nearly two decades before his death.

9 Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan

Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was an SS Helferin, working as a female camp guard at the Majdanek and Ravensbrück concentration camps. She was dubbed the “Stomping Mare” and was known to be a cruel and monstrous woman.

She hanged and whipped women to death and would throw children by their hair onto trucks as they were carted off to gas chambers. She earned her nickname after she stomped an older woman to death with her boots.

She was chased across the pond by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who managed to track her down. Her path to the States began in Vienna before she headed to Canada, and finally, Queens. Wiesenthal and his associates finally found her playing housewife under the name “Hermine Ryan.” In 1973, she became the first Nazi extradited from the US to Germany.

She was tried in Düsseldorf, beginning in 1975, and her trial took more than five years. She was found guilty and was given a life sentence, which began in 1981. After she lost a leg to diabetes in 1996, she was released from prison. She passed away three years after her release.

8 Mykolaiovych “John” Demjanjuk

Mykolaiovych “John” Demjanjuk was a Ukrainian member of the Red Army who served as a Trawniki man (recruited POW) for the Nazis. He worked as a camp guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg.

After the war, he emigrated to the United States and became a naturalized citizen in the 1950s. He worked at a Ford automotive plant in Ohio, but in the 1980s, he was misidentified as a notoriously cruel guard known as “Ivan the Terrible.” He was tried and convicted, but in 1993, the Israeli Supreme Cours overturned the conviction.

His legal troubles didn’t end there, though, as it was known that he was a concentration camp guard even if he wasn’t who the world thought he was. As a result, his citizenship was revoked in 2002, and Germany extradited him in 2009, claiming he was an accessory to more than 27,900 counts of murder.

That was the number of people killed under his “guard” at Sobibor. In 2011, he was convicted, which set a new precedent for convicting guards/collaborators where no direct evidence of their involvement in murder was available. He was given a five-year sentence but died the following year.

7 Fyodor Fedorenki

Fedor Federenko was mobilized into the Soviet Army shortly before the Germans advanced into Soviet territory. He was captured and taken to Chelm, Poland. He was recruited into an auxiliary police unit, serving Nazi Germany, and was taken to the Treblinka extermination camp for training.

While there, Fedorenki was promoted to a position of authority over 200 men. Their job was to shave, strip, beat, and gas prisoners brought to the camp. He later trained as a marksman and executioner who took part in the “cleaning out” of the Warsaw Ghetto, though he claimed he was issued a rifle but never fired it.

After the War, Fedorenki escaped to the United States, where he was suspected of being a Nazi war criminal. Regardless, he was given citizenship and retired to Miami in 1973. Five years later, he was arrested, denaturalized, and by 1984, he was the first Nazi war criminal deported from the United States to the Soviet Union.

Following a nine-day hearing, he was found guilty of treason and having taken part in mass executions. He was sentenced to death and was executed for his crimes in 1987 — 42 years after the war ended.

6 Karl Linnas

Karl Linna was the Commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Tartu in Estonia. During his time in that position, he shot men, women, and children while he oversaw the camp’s operations. When the Soviets pushed the Germans out of Estonia, Linnas fought alongside the German army and was wounded.

He remained in various displaced persons camps in Germany before making his way to the United States in 1951. Between ‘51 and 1979, Linna worked as a land surveyor in Greenlawn, New York. While living in the States, the USSR worked tirelessly to bring him to justice. In 1962, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in absentia by a Soviet court.

In 1981, the Federal District Court in Westbury, NY stripped him of his citizenship and ordered his deportation. He fought this for years, but the Supreme Court refused to hear his final appeal, and in 1987, Linnas was flown to the USSR.

Unfortunately, he never stood trial. He was in the Soviet Union for three months before he died in a prison hospital while awaiting trial. Had his trial taken place, there’s little doubt he would have been found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed.

5 Arthur Rudolph

Arthur Rudolph was brought to the U.S. via Operation Paperclip. That operation brought German scientists to the U.S. to help develop the American space program and other rocketry-related technology. In that respect, Rudolph helped develop the Pershing missile and Saturn V rocket.

Scientists brought to the States under Operation Paperclip were generally forgiven for their actions during the war, but Rudolph is a special case. In 1943, he began production of the V-2 at the Mittelwerk facility. He was in charge of production, which relied on forced labor via the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.

It has been estimated that as many as 20,000 prisoners died building the rockets — information that the U.S. Government buried until 1982. When this came to light, he signed a confession/agreement with the OSI to renounce his U.S. citizenship and leave the country.

Ultimately, Rudolph wasn’t prosecuted for his crimes and was granted citizenship in West Germany. He was stripped of his NASA Distinguished Service Medal, and when he visited Canada, he was expelled from the country. He died from heart failure in 1996 while living in Germany.

4 Valerian Trifa

Leading up to WWII, Valerian Trifa was a member of the Iron Guard, a Romanian fascist group that helped provoke the Legionnaires’ Rebellion of 1941. A staunch anti-semite, Trifa worked hard to instigate violent riots against Bucharest’s Jewish community and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Jews.

He spent most of the war as a detainee of the Nazis with privileged status, and when the war ended, he emigrated to the United States. He rose to prominence to lead the Romanian-American Orthodox community against the Orthodox Church in Communist Romania.

His crimes leading up to the war remained unknown unti l 1975, when the U.S. Department of Justice began an inquiry against Trifa. He was stripped of his American citizenship before being allowed to move to Portugal.

By ‘84, Portugal declared Trifa an “undesirable” due to his ties with Fascism. The country forced him to leave, offering him three months to make that happen. He fought deportation for several years through the courts. In 1972, while the process was still underway, Trifa died of a heart attack.

3 Friedrich Karl Berger

During the Winter of 1945, Friedrich Karl Berger served as a Nazi guard at the Meppen sub-concentration camp. During that time, he guarded the prisoners as they were forced to work in “atrocious” conditions, working many “to the point of exhaustion and death.”

When Allied forces approached the camp, the Nazis abandoned it, and Berger helped move prisoners to the Neuengamme main camp. This process resulted in the deaths of some 70 prisoners under his watch. When the war ended, Berger made his way to the United States in 1959, where he remained until 2020.

When his case was brought to light, Berger admitted to working as a guard at the Neuengamme concentration camp system but said he never witnessed any killings or prisoner abuse. While German prosecutors dropped their case against him for lack of evidence, he was nonetheless deported from the United States in November 2020.

Berger, who was 95-years-old at the time of his deportation, expressed astonishment at what was happening to him. “After 75 years, this is ridiculous. I cannot believe it. You’re forcing me out of my home.” Despite his protests, the U.S. no longer wanted an admitted Nazi concentration camp guard residing within its borders.

2 Laszlo Csatáry

Laszlo Csatáry worked as the Commander of the Royal Hungarian Police in the city of Kassa. In 1944, he organized the deportation of 15,700 Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was also accused of using his authority and position to brutalize his city’s people while also using prisoners in forced labor camps.

His crimes were well known to Kassa’s people, and in 1948, he was convicted in absentia for war crimes by a Czechoslovakian court. The following year, he fled to Canada, claiming to be a Yugoslavian national.

He set himself up in Montreal, where he became an art dealer, and by 1955, he became a Canadian citizen. He enjoyed that privilege right up until 1997 when Canada revoked his citizenship for lying on his application. He was permitted to leave the country but wasn’t charged for his crimes.

Csatáry ended up in Budapest, where his identity was revealed in 2011. After this, Slovakia was ready to prosecute him for the deportation of nearly 16,000 people to Auschwitz. Ultimately, he died in custody while awaiting trial, having “eluded justice and punishment” to the end.

1 Hans Lipschis

Hans Lipschis was a Waffen-SS member who spent most of the war working at the Auschwitz concentration camp. When the war ended, he found his way to Chicago, where he remained until 1983. He was deported for “lying about his Nazi past” and eventually settled in Germany.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center placed him fourth on its most-wanted list, but he eluded capture for an incredibly long time. He wasn’t captured until 2013, when he was 93-years-old. Lipschis admitted to being stationed at the camp, but he claimed he worked as a cook, not a guard.

When he was arrested, there was more than enough evidence, linking him to the camp from 1941 to 1945. Unfortunately, there was no direct evidence implicating him in taking part in any murders. The German government sought to bring charges against him in the same manner John Demjanjuk was convicted for accessory to murder.

Unfortunately, due to his age and poor health, he was ruled unfit to stand trial for his crimes. He had dementia, so the court never opened the trial. Despite being caught, he avoided justice and passed away in 2016 at the age of 96.

10 Famous People Who Were Nazi Sympathizers

Depending on where you are in the world and what you believe about the law, prison is meant to be a punishment, a deterrent, or a rehabilitation. Sometimes it may do all three, sometimes it may do only one and even then just barely. It seems to depend on the sentence and the prisoner in many cases. But that aside, there are some occasions when prison is used as a dramatic statement, often political or perhaps just a moral one. In these cases a sentence is rendered that seems less about what it means to the person getting it than what it might mean for society as a whole. Some of them can be bafflingly long.

10. 141,000 Years for Fraud

Getting into the Guinness Book of World Records seems fun, but not if it’s for getting the longest sentence in the history of prison sentences which is what happened to Chamoy Thipyaso. The Thai business executive was found guilty of running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of people. Because of her position in the oil industry and the fact her husband was a high ranking military official, people thought her would-be investment opportunity had military backing and was on the up and up, so over 16,000 invested $204 million.  Even members of the Thai royal family got scammed.

At the end of her trial, Thipyaso was convicted and sentenced to 141,078 years in prison. Remarkable, right? But here’s the thing. Under Thai law, a law passed that same year that she was convicted, there was a sentence cap for fraud and that was 20 years. So the dramatic sentence was essentially just for show and couldn’t really be upheld. Even more egregious was the fact she only served 8 of the potential 20 years, anyway.

9. Terry Nichols Got 161 Life Sentences

A lot of people are sentenced in American courts to life in prison, which is a fairly obtuse term without a lot of meaning that very much involves when and how parole can be offered. Is life for an 18-year-old the same as life for a 90-year-old? And is it the same from state to state? The answer is no. For instance, in Georgia, a person sentenced to life in prison before July 1, 2006 could be eligible for parole after 14 years. But after that date it was 30 years. So is 30 years a life sentence? In many states it’s actually 15 years before parole can be granted. 

To get around that pesky parole issue, judges in the US can do consecutive sentences for crimes and that’s how criminals can end up serving forever and then some behind bars. Take, for instance, Terry Nichols who was convicted of the Oklahoma City Bombing. He was given 161 consecutive sentences, one life sentence without the possibility of parole for each of the people who died in his attack. This was after the death penalty was taken off the table. 

8. James Holmes Got 12 Life Sentences Plus 3,318 Years

James Holmes is the mass murderer who killed 12 people in Aurora, Colorado in 2012 while injuring 70 others. He was given 12 life sentences, one for each of the people he outright murdered, but the judge was not done. Since his intent was to kill everyone, all of the people he injured were cases of attempted murder. And for that, along with charges relating to explosives he used to rig his own home,  he was sentenced to an additional 3,318 years. 

That sentence breaks down to 48 years plus five of parole for each of the attempted murder counts plus 96 years for second degree murders, and six years for the explosives. 

Holmes was nearly sentenced to die but one member of the jury did not agree with the sentence, deciding that mental health issues were a mitigating factor, while two other jurors were on the fence. In the end, Holmes will never see the light of day again as a free man.

7. Bombmaker Abdullah Barghouti Got 67 Life Sentences Plus 5,200 Years

Acts of terrorism will often net the perpetrators longer sentences than a nearly identical crime not deemed to be a terroristic act would get. Abdullah Al-Barghouthi was arrested for his involvement with Hamas, including resurrecting its armed wing which involved making bombs. He was taken into custody by Israeli forces and charged in seven different bombing attacks. 

After a military trial in 2004, Al-Barghouti was sentenced to 67 life sentences that resulted from the 67 deaths and around 500 injuries he was said to have caused. In addition, he was given another 5,200 years.

In 2011 it was reported he’d spent the entirety of his sentence up to that point in solitary confinement with no visitors allowed. 

6. Multiple People Have Been Sentenced to Over 1,000 Years for Drug Trafficking

When it comes to heinous crimes like acts of terrorism, murder and rape it can be a lot easier to understand the outrage that is behind some of these more dramatic sentences. But that’s not exactly what happened to Bentura Flores when he was sentenced back in 1973 for trafficking.

Disproportionate drug sentences are nothing new, of course, and there are ongoing efforts to have people in prison serving sentences for marijuana charges released since the drug is actually legal in a wide number of states already. But Flores was charged with trafficking heroin which, though a much more dangerous drug, still seems questionable since the man only sold $10 worth. 

Despite the minor nature of the offense, Flores was sentenced to 1,800 years in jail. 

In Oklahoma, Larry D. Kiel ended up with 2,501 years for drug trafficking when he was sentenced back in 1992. Part of that sentence included 250 years for possession of a controlled substance without a tax stamp, and another 250 years for maintaining a vehicle where a controlled substance is kept. 

5. Gary Ridgway Got 48 Life Sentences Plus Nearly 500 Years

There’s no such thing as a good serial killer, but some are definitely worse than others. In the United States. Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, is considered the most prolific in history. He pleaded guilty to 48 murders back in 2003 though he claimed to have killed around 80. His admission was part of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty.

A judge gave Ridgway 48 life sentences with no possibility of parole for each of the murders, to be served consecutively. The judge also tacked on an additional 10 years per case for evidence tampering, adding 480 years to the total sentence.

In 2011, a 49th victim was identified. Ridgway admitted to that murder as well and an additional life sentence was added to his total.

4. Brenton Tarrant of the Christchurch Mosque Attack Got 51 Life Sentences 

In 2019, Brenton Tarrant attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand and killed 51 people while injuring dozens more. He was found guilty at trial and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. This may not sound significant to those in the United States for whom life sentences are doled out frequently but in New Zealand a life sentence, a true life sentence in which the accused will never be released again, had never actually been handed down before. Tarrant got the stiffest sentence in the country’s history.

The full sentence, however, was not technically just life in prison for Tarrant. In the judge’s ruling he instead sentences Tarrant to life in prison for each of the 51 murder victims. The judge did not say these were concurrent. He was also given 12 years for each of the 40 cases of attempted murder although this were to be served concurrently rather than consecutively. He was then given an additional life sentence for committing an act of terrorism. So, in effect, he is serving 52 life sentences.

3. Darren Bennalford Anderson Got Over 11,000 Years

Darron Bennalford Anderson may have had one of the worst lawyers in American history to account for his prison sentence. Anderson was tried alongside an accomplice, Allen Wayne McLaurin, for rape back in 1996. The two men were given dramatic sentences, with McLaurin getting the brunt of it at 20,750 years. He was sentenced to 13 consecutive sentences and, though he is eligible for parole, it will only be after the minimum term of each sentence which his lawyers note means he won’t be up for parole until the year 2191, when he’s 224 years old. 

Anderson, unlike his partner, started with the relatively light sentence of a mere 2,200 years. But perhaps his lawyers convinced him that such a sentence was unjust, even in the face of the massive sentence his partner received, so Anderson appealed. Things did not turn out well.

At the appeal the judge agreed that Anderson had been sentenced incorrectly. Instead of 2,200 years, Anderson was given 1,750 years for kidnapping, 2,000 years for each of two counts of first degree rape, 2,000 years each on two more counts, 500 for robbery and 500 for grand larceny. He managed to add just over 9,000 years to his sentence with a grand total of 11,250 years. 

2. Three Men Charged With the 2004 Madrid Train Bombing Got Over 30,000 Years Each

In 2004, a series of bombings in Madrid killed 191 people and injured nearly 2,000 more. Ten bombs hidden in backpacks were hidden on four different commuter trains. There was a vast conspiracy behind the attacks and several terrorist groups were suspected of being involved though that never seemed to pan out during the investigation.

Some of the guilty parties received fairly light sentences of just 23 years, relatively speaking, and some were even acquitted. But not everyone got off so lightly. Three men, convicted of supplying the explosives, were sentenced to thousands of years a piece. One got nearly 43,000 years, another 35,000 years. 

Unfortunately, these were also sentences made for show as Spanish law does not allow such sentences to be carried out. The longest the men can serve is just 40 years. 

1. Charles Scott Robinson Got the Longest Sentence in US History

The longest sentence in the world, as we saw, was a bit of a trick. That sentence could have never truly been enacted and the convicted only served a paltry eight years. Hardly worth a Guinness Record, really. But in the US, for a truly long term sentence that took no mercy on the accused we need to go back to 1994. 

Charles Scott Robinson was already an 8-time felon. He had been convicted of a series of heinous crimes including rape and indecent or lewd acts with a child under 16. His victim was a three-year-old girl. The jury gave him 5,000 years on each of the six counts of which he was convicted. At a bare minimum, he would have gotten 20 years per count, but the jury clearly wanted to send a message. That message was one of anger. Anger over seeing felons convicted again and again only to be back on the streets committing crimes once more. And while surely there’s room to argue that some convicts can be rehabilitated this was clearly not the case with Robinson. 

Robinson’s defense called the sentence a joke and suggested it was more about showing outrage than anything else. He said it was based on an inaccurate perception that most felons weren’t serving enough time, though one imagines he would have been hard pressed to win any sympathy for his client in those particular circumstances.