Many companies still exist today that supported the Nazis leading up to and throughout WWII. While there are dozens of companies that fit the bill, each of these remains an important company in and out of Germany. Many contributed to the war effort by designing and building weapons and equipment, while others benefited from slave labor.

While each of these companies supported the Nazis in one way or another, not all of them did so willingly. Pressure was put in place to force numerous companies into submission, which should be considered when considering their actions leading up to and during WWII. That said, the companies that unforgivably employed slave labor crossed a rather significant line.

The following ten companies, presented in alphabetical order, all helped the Nazis in one way or another and continue operating to this day.

Related: Top 10 Discoveries That Wouldn’t Exist Without Nazi Germany

10 Associated Press

The Associated Press is the standard-bearer for modern journalistic integrity, but during the lead-up to WWII, the AP was there, supporting Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. In the 1930s, the AP entered into an arrangement with the Nazis to continue reporting in Germany despite every other respectable agency having been kicked out of the country. This made the AP the sole legitimate reporting agency in Hitler’s Third Reich.

The AP maintained access by establishing a mutually beneficial arrangement with the Nazis. To accomplish this, the AP promised not to publish anything negative about the Nazis. One of the ways the AP managed this was by hiring pro-Nazi reporters and publishing Nazi propaganda. Some of this propaganda was negative toward Jews and filled with all manner of horrendous lies.

When news of the AP’s WWII activities came to light, a spokesperson told The Guardian, “AP rejects any notion that it deliberately ‘collaborated’ with the Nazi regime. An accurate characterization is that the AP and other foreign news organizations were subjected to intense pressure from the Nazi regime from the year of Hitler’s coming to power in 1932 until the AP’s expulsion from Germany in 1941.”^[1]

9 Audi

Audi is known worldwide as one of Germany’s greatest luxury car brands, but it has a sordid past. During WWII, Audi, which operated under the name Auto Union during the conflict, hashed out a deal with the Schutzstaffel (SS) to use concentration camp inmates for production. A report published in 2014 found that Audi used more than 3,700 enslaved workers taken from seven labor camps operated by the SS.

On top of the company’s use of camp-based slave labor, Audi benefited from an additional 16,500 forced workers not taken from concentration camps in Zwickau and Chemnitz. Another 18,000 worked in Bavaria, where some 4,500 people died toiling for the company. Nearly one-fifth of Audi’s “employees” during WWII consisted of concentration camp inmates, the majority of whom were of Jewish descent.

Additionally, anyone who was disabled or otherwise incapable of performing their duties was sent to concentration camps for execution. Audi responded to the revelation, admitting the modern leadership of the company was unaware of the full extent of its shameful past. The company established a fund in the early aughts to compensate Nazi slave laborers and their descendants.^[2]

8 Bayer

Bayer is a leading multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company operating today, but its actions throughout the 1930s and ’40s significantly differ from their modern operations. During WWII, Bayer belonged to the IG Farben conglomerate, which heavily supported the Third Reich. With ethical and legal limitations frozen by the Nazis, Bayer took advantage, testing drugs on unwilling human subjects in the Dachau, Gusen, and Auschwitz concentration camps.

Bayer worked through much of the conflict in Auschwitz, overseeing a chemical factory where human experimentation took place in Birkenau, at the women’s camp hospital. There, Bayer scientists purposefully infected patients with diphtheria, tuberculosis, and many other diseases. In addition to crossing this moral and ethical red line, Bayer also employed over 25,000 slave laborers.

Bayer’s involvement in the Holocaust came to light in 1999 following a lawsuit targeting the company. The suit accused Bayer officials of bribing Nazis to gain access to concentration camp inmates for human testing experiments. The suit included names like Dr. Koenig and Dr. Mengele as beneficiaries of these actions, effectively tying Bayer with the so-called “Angel of Death” and the horrors brought by other unscrupulous Nazi collaborators.^[3]

7 Chase National Bank

These days, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., is one of the world’s largest consumer and commercial multinational banks. Leading up to World War II, Chase National Bank conducted business with the Nazis through a special program involving the sale of a unique version of the Reichsmark called the Rückwanderer (Reborrowing). Chase sold Rückwanderers to American citizens of German descent, but it wasn’t exactly on the up and up.

The Nazis used Chase to sell Rückwanderers to Americans at a discounted rate, and it was able to do this because the purchase of a Rückwanderer was backed by currency taken from Jews and refugees fleeing the Nazis. Chase was fully complicit in this, helping the Nazi government amass more than $20 million ($427 million in 2024), and it wasn’t the only controversy involving the bank.

Chase also aided the Nazis in blocking the French from accessing their accounts from the States, helping the Third Reich sidestep the United States sanctions on Nazi assets. On top of that, the head of Chase in Paris worked hard to block Jewish funds and property, ultimately benefiting the Nazis through this action. Chase’s involvement was finally exposed when The FBI declassified records of Chase’s actions during WWII.^[4]

6 Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank (DB) is one of the largest commercial banks in the world, and it’s a primary money manager for Germans today. Leading up to and during WWII, DB was there to help the Nazis navigate the waters of international sanctions and defense spending. DB was fully integrated into the Nazi government, firing any Jews who worked for the bank. Part of DB’s actions during the lead-up to WWII involved the seizing of Jewish assets and turning them over to the Nazis.

As the Nazis spread across Europe, DB took advantage, taking control of banking institutions in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, and elsewhere. Additionally, DB facilitated the sale of gold stolen from European Jews, which helped fund the Nazi war effort. DB’s WWII crimes came to international attention when the bank attempted a merger with a U.S. company.

Once revealed, the bank’s chairman, Rolf-Ernst Breuer, said, “We deeply regret the misery and injustice suffered and… we acknowledge the bank’s ethical and moral responsibility.” Perhaps Deutsche Bank’s most pivotal violation of human rights came during the war when it loaned the Nazis the money to construct the IG Farben facilities and the Auschwitz concentration camp using stolen Jewish gold.^[5]

5 Ford & General Motors

General Motors (GM) and the Ford Motor Co. are American companies, so most people might not consider their involvement during WWII to be nefarious. After all, Ford and GM, like most companies, manufactured military machines for the American war effort. Still, both automakers were involved overseas through their many subsidiaries, which controlled 70% of the German auto market in 1939.

These subsidiaries did what Ford and GM did for America, only they retooled their plants to support the local war effort, i.e., they built stuff for the Nazis. Not only did these subsidiaries engage in war production, but they also did what many companies in Europe did at the time: They used a large slave labor force to work in their factories, and many of these enslaved personnel were Jews.

GM’s fully-owned subsidiary, Opal, built trucks and aircraft used in the Nazi war effort. When the U.S. Army liberated these factories toward the end of the war, one report found that Ford’s German branch served as “an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles.” The Army determined that the parent company (Ford) consented and was complicit. Despite this, both companies insisted they lost control of their German plants in 1941 and denied any culpability.^[6]

4 IBM

IBM is an American company that developed computers leading up to and during WWII. These computers were considerably archaic compared to whatever you’re reading this article on, and they used punch cards for programming. In 1933, IBM sold 2,000 punch card machines to the Nazis, and the Nazi government used them to produce 1.5 billion index cards.

This was a monumental use of early computing effort, and the Nazis didn’t use it to keep track of bullets or ball bearings. Instead, the Nazis utilized IBM computers to create cards used to track and manage all of the people enslaved and executed during the Holocaust. These cards tracked Jews and other minority groups throughout Germany and Nazi-controlled parts of Europe, making the Nazi murder machine incredibly efficient.

IBM became involuntarily and quasi-voluntarily complicit in the wholesale slaughter of Europe’s Jewish population. Nazis used their IBM “Death Calculators” to determine the number of Jews they could efficiently remove from ghettos daily for shipment to concentration camps. At the time, IBM’s Polish subsidiary, Watson Business Machines, helped liquidate that nation’s Jewish population, so the company’s hands are far from clean.^[7]

3 Mercedes-Benz

Germany had numerous manufacturers supporting the war effort leading up to and throughout WWII, and Mercedes-Benz was one of many. The company was known as Daimler-Benz AG at the time, and it worked closely with the Nazi government. The company’s board included numerous Nazis, and once the war broke out, Daimler-Benz became the Nazi’s leading manufacturer of armaments. While this wasn’t entirely unexpected, the means of manufacture were problematic.

To fuel the Nazi war machine, Daimler-Benz did what most companies did during WWII: It used a massive force of slave labor for manufacturing. These enslaved people were primarily Jews but also prisoners of war and other marginalized groups targeted by the Nazis. During the war, Daimler-Benz “loaned” its enslaved laborers to other companies in exchange for money, so it was fully active in the Nazi slave trade.

After the war, Daimler-Benz didn’t try to hide its involvement in Nazi activities and embraced the “Remembrance, Responsibility, and Future” initiative. In 1988, the company agreed to pay $12 million into a fund managed by the West German Red Cross designed to pay reparations to thousands of former slaves and their families.^[8]

2 Porsche

Porsche didn’t come into existence until 1950, but the company existed before this, and it was one of Hitler’s most prolific suppliers of his war machine. This was done through Porsche’s founder, Ferdinand Porsche, who designed cars for Hitler leading up to WWII. When the conflict broke out, Porsche continued designing for Germany, only switching to building tanks and off-road vehicles.

Porsche’s success at this time could be attributed to two things: Hitler adored the man, and he fully embraced using slave labor in his factories to meet the Führer’s demands. Porsche not only utilized slaves to build everything from cars and trucks to tanks and more, but he did so actively and with the full knowledge that his “employees” were forced to live in rat-infested quarters with minimal food and terrible treatment.

Porsche enjoyed massive profits, and the company that grew from these efforts became a multinational car company that is respected worldwide. Those who labored and died producing Porsche’s Nazi war machine saw little compensation after WWII. Porsche hasn’t fully admitted its involvement, though it supplied €2.5 million to a German reparation fund. Ultimately, Porsche avoided prosecution for his actions during WWII. Still, his reputation bears the stain of his involvement in the Holocaust.^[9]

1 Volkswagen

Most people know that Volkswagen created the VW Beetle for Hitler, but the company’s involvement in the Nazi war effort went way beyond that. When the war broke out, Volkswagen switched to military production, which most companies did at the time. This was true in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere, so war production isn’t why Volkswagen crossed numerous lines through its actions during World War II.

When Volkswagen’s Fallersleben plant opened, the war broke out, leading to the production of several military vehicles. Additionally, VW manufactured the V-1 flying bomb, which made its factory an ideal target for the Allies. This was problematic because VW employed a massive force of slave labor in the production of its vehicles and weapon systems. Volkswagen’s workforce consisted of approximately 70% forced laborers, who numbered in the thousands.

The laborers were “supplied” by the Schutzstaffel (SS) from nearby concentration camps. As you can imagine, living conditions were inhumane at best. Investigations into the company’s activities during the war determined the company “let babies die” in horrid conditions throughout WWII. In 1998, the company established a reparations fund consisting of $12 million to compensate its WWII victims ($23 million in 2024).^[10]

When World War II began, Nazi Germany had an unimaginable advantage of surprise. The Nazis had prepared for the war for years while the Allied countries had no idea what was going on.

Adolf Hitler would never have begun a military campaign if it was doomed to fail and boomerang. Germany held four aces when the war began, but the costly decisions Hitler made along the way saw the German advantages metamorphose into disadvantages. The Nazis could have won the war if they had made these decisions differently.

10 Germany Invaded Britain Instead Of The Soviet Union

Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 proved to be the undoing of Hitler’s military campaign. Hitler sent 4.5 million troops to invade a country that had signed a nonaggression pact with him. This was a fatal mistake because Britain, Germany’s most bitter enemy, was close to powerlessness at that time.

Following the defeat of France, Britain made a pragmatic decision to withdraw its troops from France due to intensive land and air assaults from Germany. As British forces withdrew, they had to leave a substantial percentage of their heavy armory behind. At the moment that Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the British Army was lacking in heavy weaponry and motor transport. They also lacked the operational concept and experience to resist a German invasion.

Hitler made the costly mistake of not going for the kill.^[1] Instead, he opted to engage the Soviet Union, a decision that eased the pressure on Britain. This allowed the country to remobilize its military forces to continue fighting Germany throughout World War II.

The invasion of the Soviet Union created a huge dent in the German military machine as Hitler did not prepare for a winter war. German forces never recovered from the Soviet’s winter counteroffensive. By late 1942, the Germans were fighting defensively in the Soviet Union.

9 Germany Did Not Declare War On The United States

During World War II, one of Nazi Germany’s huge mistakes was declaring war on the United States. If Germany had exercised caution in this regard, there is a chance that the US would not have formally declared war on Germany.

Even if the US had eventually done so, it would have been much later and the Germans would have bought themselves adequate time to confront their enemy. Several historians agree that although Germany and the US were unofficially at war, the Americans may not have wanted to fully commit to the European theater of the war if Germany didn’t expressly declare war on the US.

For the same reason, Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa (which was under Axis control), might have proceeded with minimal American participation. This would have bought the Germans more time and possibly turned things around for the Nazis.^[2]

8 There Was No Holocaust

The Holocaust was the systematic and state-sponsored torture and murder of six million Jews under the Nazi regime. It was also the biggest mistake the Nazis made during the war.

The killing of innocent Jews, including women and children, portrayed Adolf Hitler as a cruel dictator with animalistic instincts. This was crucial to the success of the mobilization of a massive military effort against Germany.

Moreover, Hitler wasted a lot of human and material resources in carrying out the racist torture and murder of innocent and noncombatant Jews.^[3] If Hitler had refrained from such atrocities, it would have been much more difficult for the Allied countries to mobilize the massive military response that eventually led to the downfall of the Third Reich.

7 Germany Had Coordinated With Japan On The Invasion Of The Soviet Union

Germany made a serious mistake by invading the Soviet Union on its own when it could have coordinated with Japan and forced the Soviets to fight on two fronts. One reason why the Soviet winter counteroffensive succeeded just a few kilometers from Moscow was that the Soviets were capable of reinforcing their military with well-equipped and well-trained divisions from Siberia.

These fresh troops stopped and repelled the winter-stricken German soldiers. If Hitler had coordinated with Japan during the Soviet campaign, this would have been the most likely scenario: As German soldiers advanced from the west, Japan would have invaded the Soviet Union from the east.^[4]

Japan would have pinned down the military reinforcements that rescued the Soviets from the brink of defeat at the hands of their German invaders. Moreover, the sheer size of the Soviet Union allowed it to trade space for time. If Germany and Japan had invaded the Soviet Union simultaneously, the Soviets wouldn’t have had that luxury.

6 Hitler Didn’t Interfere With Battle Strategy

Hitler’s interference with battle strategy caused more damage than the combined efforts of the Allied forces. He bypassed his generals on the Eastern Front and assumed day-to-day operational command of the army.

Worse yet, Hitler did not consider any point of view that differed from his own. He issued orders based on his perception of reality. From his headquarters in Germany, Hitler directed the movements of individual divisions on the Eastern Front using information that was too old by the time it reached him.^[5]

For example, Hitler’s directive that German troops should stand firm in Moscow was against the counsel of his military officers on the ground. It led to the deaths of a million German soldiers.

Moreover, several historians believe that it wasn’t just the firepower of the Allied Forces that made their invasion of Normandy successful. Hitler’s refusal to listen to wise military counsel played a major role in the defeat of German forces in France.

5 Hitler Did Not Order The Bombing Of British Cities

Germany’s bombing campaign on Britain, initially restricted to military and industrial targets, was aimed at crippling Britain’s capacity to defend itself. In fact, Germany made remarkable gains in the bombardment of military installations, especially British air force bases and airfields.

When the Royal Air Force (RAF) launched a retaliatory air raid on Berlin, Hitler lost his temper and ignored the significant progress that the German air force had made against its British counterpart. In September 1940, several British airfields and air force bases had been destroyed.

The RAF was hopping on one leg when Hitler gave it a respite and ordered that German planes bombard British cities, especially London.^[6] This gave the RAF ample time to repair its airfields and bases and return to battle at full capacity.

4 Hitler Did Not Halt The Pursuit Of British Forces At Dunkirk

In May 1940, German infantry units and several tank divisions were in pursuit of 350,000 British soldiers at Dunkirk. The Panzer tank divisions were on the verge of surrounding the British forces while the Luftwaffe (German air force) conducted an unimpeded bombing raid on the enemy.

Suddenly, Hitler gave the “halt” order.^[7] Rather than let the fast-driving Panzer tanks overtake the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), Hitler wanted the slow-moving infantry units to do the job.

The British military command capitalized on Hitler’s mistake and mobilized ships, yachts, fishing boats, rowboats, and lifeboats to evacuate the BEF. Eventually, only 40,000 British troops were captured by the Germans.

If Hitler had allowed the Panzer divisions to continue their pursuit, the Germans could have captured significantly more British troops. Britain may have surrendered early in the war, just like France.

3 Germany Did Not Invade Greece

Hitler believed that if he invaded the Soviet Union in May 1941, he would overrun Moscow before winter. Some historians agree that Hitler’s reasoning could have played out accurately if Germany hadn’t invaded Greece.

Following Italy’s humiliating defeat in Greece, Hitler decided to bail out the Italians. Historians believe that moving into Greece delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union by six weeks.^[8] If Hitler hadn’t entered Greece in April 1941, there is a chance that the attack on the Soviet Union would have occurred earlier and Moscow would have fallen before winter.

2 Germany Did Not Fight On Two Fronts

The fact that Germany was engaged in combat on two fronts played a crucial role in their defeat. The Nazis were fighting Britain and the US, among others, to the west while they battled the Soviet Union to the east. This proved to be a fatal decision for Germany.

If the Nazis had fought on one front at a time, the course of the war could have been different. The June 22, 1941, invasion of the Soviet Union turned a one-front battle against a war-weary Britain into a two-front engagement. The Eastern Front absorbed about three-quarters of the German army and resulted in two-thirds of German casualties.^[9]

Many historians wonder why Hitler made the fatal mistake of invading the Soviet Union when Britain had yet to surrender. If Hitler had invaded Britain and waited patiently to win the war before moving to the Eastern Front, he would have kept the war on a single front.

With Britain defeated, it would have been nearly impossible for the US to have operational bases in Europe. Even if that had become possible, it would have bought Germany enough time to figure out how to subdue the United States.

Hitler’s diversion of military resources to the Soviet Union gave the British ample time to rebuild their military might and allowed the US to gain a stronghold on the Western Front. If Hitler had been more cautious and restricted the war to one front at a time, there is little doubt that World War II would have turned in Germany’s favor.

Moreover, historians believe that if Hitler had not broken the nonaggression pact as early as he did, the Soviets, who had Stalin as their dictator, could have become an Axis power. Hitler could have turned against the Soviet Union at the most convenient time.

1 Germany Exercised More Patience Before Starting The War

A major reason why the Nazis lost the war is that they started a global military campaign before they were fully prepared for it. One shortcoming of this decision is that the German navy was poorly prepared to fight a war on the scale of World War II.

While the United States had aircraft carriers and several surface ships, German naval warfare relied mainly on U-boats. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles prohibited Germany from amassing a large military force. The German navy and air force were not constituted until 1935.^[10]

Surprisingly, by 1939, Germany had already started war on a global scale. But Hitler only had about four years to prepare for it. If he had waited a decade longer, Germany would have had more time to develop a military force that could have won on such a large scale.

Jeffrey Morris is a prolific freelance writer with a passion for history and finance.

Cyanide, in its various forms, is a fast-acting poison that has taken millions of lives, most notably claiming the lives of 909 of Jim Jones’s followers at Jonestown. Even worse, cyanide was employed in the Nazi death chambers during World War II through the use of Zyklon-B, a cyanide-based pesticide.^[1] The gas would claim countless lives.

In an ironic twist of fate, many notable Nazis would later die by the very poison they so heavily utilized, administering the agent themselves as the war unraveled and their lives fell apart. Staring down the barrel of the Allied invasion, these Nazis knew their time was up and opted to take their own lives.

Twisted irony? The easy way out? Or did they finally get a rightfully deserved taste of their own medicine? Either way, the Nazis handed these cyanide capsules out like candy, leaving many to die from a taste of their own medicine. Here are ten notable Nazis who died by cyanide poisoning.

10 Hermann Goering

Herman Goering was a Nazi leader and was very active in many of the most horrible, fascist events which took place over the decades between the time the Nazis first began to gain early traction until the climax of World War II. He even survived to see the Nuremberg trials. Goering famously created the Gestapo, which enforced the party’s domination.

In 1934, Hitler had feared that there were too many political figures who had gained too much power among his ranks. From June 30 to July 2, a purge of those he felt were political threats, called the Night of the Long Knives, was carried out. This purge was, of course, done in part by none other than Goering’s Gestapo secret police. In all, at least 85 people who posed a threat Hitler’s power were assassinated. Goering would also go on to help plan and invent the Nazi concentration camps, where Zyklon-B would take so many lives.

Goering lived to see the end of the war and the Nuremberg trials, where figures of the Nazi party were to be held accountable for war crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to hang for his actions. He begged the court for a bullet to the head, but they steadfastly refused. On October 15, 1946, the night before he was to be hanged, Goering took a cyanide capsule in his cell. He was found dead, having been poisoned by the substance.^[2]

9 Odilo Globocnik

One of the lesser-known, though equally terrifying, figures of the Nazi Party was a man by the name of Odilo Globocnik, an Austrian Nazi who had a hand in coming up with the plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Keeping it a secret, the Nazis named this project Aktion Reinhardt, and this monster was involved every step of the way.

Before the Nazis took hold of his native Austria, Globocnik was very active in building local support for the movement—that is to say, Globocnik was a Nazi by choice, not through force, without a doubt. His responsibility for the deaths of millions of people, especially in Poland, is undeniable, but eventually fate would have its way with him.

Captured in Austria by the Allies in a 4:00 AM raid on May 31, 1945, Globicnik chose to end his own life than face justice. He placed a cyanide suicide capsule under his tongue that he would hold there, allegedly for several hours, before ingesting it around 11:25 AM. He died within minutes.^[3]

8 Joseph Goebbels’s Children

The date was May 1, 1945, and Hitler and Eva Braun had already taken their own lives as the Soviet war machine moved in on Berlin. The Nazi empire they had dreamed of was falling apart into literal rubble, buildings collapsing everywhere, with major party members trembling in fear at the thought of facing the Soviets. Those with enough status were able to hide in bunkers, including the propaganda minister himself, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had six young children at the time, and rather than see them have a chance at life under the Allies, he chose to administer poison to them in the final days of the Nazis.^[4]

Initially, they had called upon a Nazi doctor, a dentist originally from the Panzer division called Death’s Head named Helmut Kunz, but he was unable to bring himself to carry out the murder of six innocent children. Another physician, Ludwig Stumpfegger, would end up carrying out the deed by rendering the children unconscious and placing a 0.5-cc cyanide capsule between each of their teeth and crushing it.

7 Richard Glucks

The Allied invasion, as it toppled the Nazi war machine, resulted in many cowardly Nazi suicides, as they knew that their trials for war crimes would not treat them kindly. Was it possible that actual guilt drove them to suicide? Or was it shame and primal fear? We may never know. Another among the Nazis to do so in the end was a man named Richard Glucks.

Glucks was a soldier before the rise of the Nazi Party, like many others, and would quickly move up the ranks to concentration camp inspector. He inspected the death camps and was the man who would often make the sickening decision of how many people would be executed and how many would stay alive.^[5] This man even made a joint decision with Himmler that the hair of the victims of the concentration camps would be used for yarn for the Nazi soldiers. He deserved every bit of fate he received.

After being shell-shocked in an Allied bombing, Glucks was laid up in a hospital, when he, too, swallowed a suicide capsule filled with cyanide. (There has been some speculation that he was killed by Jews as revenge for his role in the Holocaust.)

6 Hans-Georg Von Friedeburg

A navy admiral during the Nazis’ reign of terror, Hans-Georg von Friedeburg was a high-ranking military official who oversaw U-boat operations and commanded the Kriegsmarine. A decorated war leader, Friedeburg would move his way up through the ranks throughout the life of the Nazi Party and would cause Hell on Earth for the Allied forces at sea.^[6]

Unlike the others on this list, its unlikely that Hans was actually a war criminal. In fact, he aided the Allies in drafting the papers of German surrender, though he had heard, true or not, that he would still likely stand trial, probably due to his rank. Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg would commit suicide on May 23, 1945, by the administration of cyanide.

5 Martin Bormann

Martin Bormann was a dark, shadowy figure, even as the head of the chancellery of the Nazi Party, who worked most often directly with Hitler himself. Bormann, with his closeness to Hitler and depth within the party, had a far-reaching influence on decisions throughout the party and the entire country. He pushed hard for the creation of concentration camps and the subsequent use of slaves. Martin Bormann was undoubtedly a monster and nefarious Nazi from the early days of the party’s inception.

Bormann went through great lengths to cover his tracks and flee Germany to escape to South America, where he would hide from the Allies for the rest of his days. For half a century, this was believed to have possibly been Bormann’s fate. However, in 1998, a DNA test confirmed that a postal worker who had claimed to have found the bodies of Martin Bormann and Ludwig Stumpfegger (the man who had killed the Goebbels children) had not been lying. Both men died of cyanide poisoning on May 2, 1945.^[7]

4 Robert Ritter Von Greim

One of the masterminds behind the aerial attacks on England, including the famous Battle of Britain, Robert Ritter von Greim was an airman for the Luftwaffe. He would later move up the ranks to field marshal, where he would continue the German terror from the air upon Allied forces. He was also a major figure in planning Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.

On May 8, 1945, von Greim was captured in Austria by American soldiers. On May 24, he killed himself while in custody in Salzburg by crushing a cyanide capsule in his mouth.^[8]

3 Heinrich Himmler

One of the most notorious and nefarious figures in Nazi history was Heinrich Himmler. Beginning his tenure with the party in 1923, Himmler was a longtime party loyalist who quickly shot up in the ranks. Himmler would go on to be a leading figure in the Gestapo and various other Nazi-supporting police forces and was the twisted mind from which the infamous SS was born. While other men on this list made their contributions to the Holocaust, Himmler himself planned the extermination of the Jewish people under Nazi Germany. There is no doubt of this man’s long history as a terrifying war criminal.

Himmler became minister of the interior in 1943, and surprisingly, he was actually expelled from the Nazi Party that year, though he wasn’t killed. As the war unraveled and things spiraled out of control for Germany, Himmler knew he would be brought up on war crimes charges. He attempted to flee but was captured by the Allies. On May 23, 1945, to avoid having to stand trial for war crimes at Nuremberg, he took his own life.^[9] His method of choice, of course, was a cyanide suicide capsule.

2 Eva Braun

Any list about notable Nazi suicides would be incomplete without a mention of Eva Braun, Hitler’s longtime mistress and eventual wife. Braun lived a life of quiet desperation, tucked into the underbelly of the Nazi charade while Hitler championed his strange and bizarre visions of the world through the unrelenting force of the Nazi war machine. Braun attempted suicide twice while she was with Hitler. Lonely and despondent, she was definitely dissatisfied with life.

While not part of the war machine itself, Eva Braun was right there at Hitler’s side all the way until the end of both of their lives, when they would die together as the Nazi German world collapsed around them. The Soviets were closing in on Berlin, and Hitler went with Braun into a secret bunker, where she would ingest a glass vial filled with the same cyanide poison that so many Nazis used to die by their own hands.^[10]

1 Adolf Hitler

While it’s no secret that Hitler went out with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, this list must be closed with the man whose face lives on in infamy and terror, the man who had used the cyanide-based Zyklon-B to kill so many people throughout Europe during the Holocaust. Scores had been poisoned by cyanide in the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps, tricked into supposed showers or locked into rooms, only to die from a canister of gas which seeped through the wall. And according to some, Hitler, too, would have a date with cyanide.

In 1968, a Soviet intelligence officer published a book claiming that the USSR had recovered Hitler’s body, identified it, performed an autopsy on it, and found that Hitler had been poisoned with cyanide.^[11] Today, some accounts of Hitler’s suicide only mention the gunshot; others say he took cyanide along with Eva Braun and then shot himself. In a bunker beneath the rubble of the fall of the Third Reich, there will forever be doubt as to what happened on that fateful day of April 30, 1945, but it’s very much within the realm of possibility, considering everyone else on this list, that to absolutely ensure his death, Hitler added in the method of suicide the Nazis favored the most: cyanide.

I like dark stuff, horror, history, the macabre, and philosophy.

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