John Demanjuk who was a concentration camp guard at Sobibor and Treblinka, seems to be the person that all of these fantasies about Nazi war criminals living in the USA is based on. After the war he lived in Ohio and was a UAW member and worked in Ford plant. He was arrested by the INS based on evidence that may have originated with the KGB, had his citizenship revoked, and was extradited to Israel in 1986. Israel tried Demanjuk, but the court decided that he was not the particularly cruel guard nicknamed “Ivan the Terrible” that he was suspected to be, and he was aquitted and returned to the USA. In 2009 he was deported to Germany on the same charges, losing his US citizenship for a second time, was tried again, was found guilty and died in a Bavarian nursing home at 91.

Here’s the thing. Demanjuk was not a Nazi. He wasn’t even German. He was a Ukranian Red Army soldier who was captured by Germans and was given the opportunity to save his neck by becoming Trawniki man, or an auxillary worker in the Final Solution. He was not even issued a Nazi uniform since he was a Slav, and thus considered subhuman. Becoming a concentration camp guard saved him twice, the second time being when the Western Allies deported all Soviet POWs back to the USSR against their will, and most of them were worked to death in Siberia because they were considered politically unreliable after having been prisoners of the Germans. It’s a complicated story, and the legal documents involved in all of the proceedings against Demanjuk must run into the hundreds of thousands of pages. A lot of the real German Nazis escaped prosecution and lived normal lives and died in bed, many in Germany itself. But there’s not a dramatic Amazon series in that since it doesn’t have a happy ending.