In our top 10 lesser‑known Nazis, monsters like Adolf Hitler and Dr. Josef Mengele stole any chance of justice from their victims, yet when World War II finally drew to a close, a host of other Nazi perpetrators met their reckoning at the end of a hangman’s rope.
Top 10 Lesser Nazis Uncovered
10 Jakiw Palij
Four years after the conflict, Jakiw Palij crossed the Atlantic to the United States, falsely claiming he had toiled on his father’s farm throughout the war. In reality, he served as an armed guard at the Trawniki concentration camp in Nazi‑occupied Poland.
Trawniki was a forced‑labor camp that imprisoned Jews, but it also functioned as a training ground where the SS prepared units to hunt down and murder Polish Jews. Palij’s deception finally unraveled when a senior historian from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum exposed his true past.
In 2003 a federal judge stripped Palij of his American citizenship, and a year later an order for his deportation was issued. Yet no nation would accept the aging war criminal until Germany relented in 2018, taking him in at the venerable age of 94.
Palij died in 2019. Although he never faced criminal charges for his Holocaust involvement, the loss of his U.S. citizenship and eventual deportation ensured his name was publicly vilified for the final two decades of his life.
9 Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan
Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan served as an SS Helferin, a female guard stationed at both the Majdanek and Ravensbrück concentration camps. Nicknamed the “Stomping Mare,” she earned a reputation for ruthless cruelty.
She was known to hang and whip women to death, and she would hurl children by their hair onto trucks bound for the gas chambers. The moniker stemmed from a horrifying incident where she stomped an older woman to death with her boots.
Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal tracked her across the Atlantic, eventually locating her living in Queens under the alias “Hermine Ryan.” After a painstaking investigation, she became the first Nazi extradited from the United States to Germany in 1973.
Her trial in Düsseldorf began in 1975 and stretched over five years. Convicted in 1981, she received a life sentence, but after losing a leg to diabetes in 1996 she was released, and she passed away three years later.
8 Mykolaiovych “John” Demjanjuk
Mykolaiovych “John” Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian former Red Army soldier, was conscripted as a Trawniki man and served as a guard at Sobibor, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg extermination camps.
After the war he emigrated to the United States, became a naturalized citizen in the 1950s, and worked at a Ford plant in Ohio. In the 1980s he was mistakenly identified as the infamous “Ivan the Terrible,” leading to a conviction that the Israeli Supreme Court overturned in 1993.
Even though the mistaken identity was dismissed, authorities recognized that Demjanjuk had indeed served as a camp guard. Consequently, his U.S. citizenship was revoked in 2002, and Germany extradited him in 2009, charging him as an accessory to 27,900 murders at Sobibor.
In 2011 a German court convicted him, establishing a precedent for holding guards accountable without direct evidence of personal killings. He received a five‑year sentence but died the following year, in 2012.
7 Fyodor Fedorenki
Fedor Fedorenko was drafted into the Soviet Army just before the German onslaught, captured, and transferred to an auxiliary police unit that served Nazi Germany. He was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp for training.
There he rose to command over 200 men whose duties included shaving, stripping, beating, and gassing prisoners. He later trained as a marksman and participated in the brutal “cleansing” of the Warsaw Ghetto, though he later claimed he never fired his rifle.
After the war he fled to the United States, where he obtained citizenship and retired in Miami in 1973. Five years later, U.S. authorities arrested him, stripped his citizenship, and in 1984 he became the first Nazi war criminal deported from America to the Soviet Union.
A nine‑day hearing found him guilty of treason and participation in mass executions. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1987—42 years after the conflict’s conclusion.
6 Karl Linnas
Karl Linnas commanded the Nazi concentration camp at Tartu in Estonia, overseeing the shooting of men, women, and children while directing camp operations.
When Soviet forces expelled the Germans, Linnas fought alongside them, was wounded, and later lingered in displaced‑persons camps before emigrating to the United States in 1951. From 1951 to 1979 he worked as a land surveyor in Greenlawn, New York.
The Soviet Union pursued him relentlessly; in 1962 a Soviet court tried, convicted, and sentenced him to death in absentia. In 1981 a U.S. federal court stripped his citizenship and ordered deportation, a decision he fought until the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.
He was finally flown to the USSR in 1987, but died three months later in a prison hospital before a trial could commence, likely facing a death sentence had the proceedings occurred.
5 Arthur Rudolph
Arthur Rudolph entered the United States under Operation Paperclip, the secret program that recruited German scientists to boost America’s space and missile programs, where he contributed to the Pershing missile and Saturn V rocket.
During the war, beginning in 1943, he oversaw V‑2 rocket production at the Mittelwerk facility, a plant that relied on forced labor from the Mittelbau‑Dora concentration camp.
Decades later, U.S. investigators uncovered that as many as 20,000 prisoners perished building those rockets—a fact concealed until 1982. Facing exposure, Rudolph signed an agreement with the Office of Special Investigations, renouncing his U.S. citizenship and agreeing to leave the country.
He never faced prosecution; instead, West Germany granted him citizenship, stripped him of his NASA Distinguished Service Medal, and barred him from Canada. He died of heart failure in 1996 while residing in Germany.
4 Valerian Trifa
Before the war, Valerian Trifa belonged to Romania’s Iron Guard, a fascist movement that sparked the 1941 Legionnaires’ Rebellion and unleashed violent attacks on Bucharest’s Jewish community, resulting in hundreds of deaths.
During the conflict he was detained by the Nazis under privileged conditions, and after the war he emigrated to the United States, eventually rising to lead the Romanian‑American Orthodox community in opposition to the communist‑controlled church in Romania.
His wartime activities remained hidden until 1975, when the U.S. Department of Justice opened an inquiry, stripped him of his American citizenship, and forced him to relocate to Portugal.
In 1984 Portugal declared him an “undesirable” because of his fascist ties, gave him three months to leave, and after years of legal battles he died of a heart attack in 1972 while the deportation process was still pending.
3 Friedrich Karl Berger
During the winter of 1945, Friedrich Karl Berger acted as a guard at the Meppen sub‑camp, overseeing prisoners forced to labor under horrendous conditions that drove many to exhaustion and death.
When Allied forces approached, the Nazis abandoned Meppen, and Berger helped transfer inmates to the main Neuengamme camp, a move that resulted in about 70 prisoner deaths under his supervision.
After the war he migrated to the United States in 1959, living there until 2020. When his past surfaced, he admitted to serving as a guard at Neuengamme but claimed he never witnessed killings or abuse.
German prosecutors dropped the case for lack of evidence, yet the United States deported him in November 2020. At 95, Berger protested, saying, “After 75 years, this is ridiculous. I cannot believe it. You’re forcing me out of my home.” The U.S. nonetheless expelled him.
2 Laszlo Csatáry
Laszlo Csatáry commanded the Royal Hungarian Police in Kassa, orchestrating the 1944 deportation of 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz and allegedly abusing civilians and employing forced‑labor prisoners.
In 1948 a Czechoslovak court convicted him in absentia of war crimes. The following year he fled to Canada, posing as a Yugoslav national, and by 1955 had become a naturalized Canadian citizen.
Canada revoked his citizenship in 1997 after discovering his false statements, allowing him to leave the country without facing charges. He settled in Budapest, where his identity resurfaced in 2011.
Slovak authorities prepared to prosecute him for the mass deportations, but he died in custody while awaiting trial, having evaded justice until his final breath.
1 Hans Lipschis
Hans Lipschis served in the Waffen‑SS, spending most of the war stationed at Auschwitz. After the conflict he settled in Chicago, remaining there until his 1983 deportation for lying about his Nazi past.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center listed him fourth on its most‑wanted roster, yet he managed to avoid capture until 2013, when at 93 he was finally arrested in Germany.
Lipschis acknowledged his presence at Auschwitz but insisted he worked as a cook, not a guard. Evidence linked him to the camp from 1941 to 1945, but prosecutors lacked direct proof of murder, mirroring the legal approach used against John Demjanjuk.
Because of his advanced age and dementia, German courts deemed him unfit for trial, and he died in 2016 at 96, never facing criminal prosecution.