Britain likes to think it ‘stood alone’ against the Nazis. So why did it convict so few for war crimes? | Jon Silverman

Out of 274 suspects investigated in England, Wales and Scotland, there was only a single conviction

• Jon Silverman is research professor of media and criminal justice at the University of Bedfordshire

In the mid-1980s, as Holocaust awareness" bloomed in western societies, Britain woke up to the revelation that, for 40 years or so, it had provided a safe haven for refugees from eastern Europe whose participation in the genocide had rarely, if ever, come under scrutiny. It was a deeply uncomfortable awakening for a country that had prided itself in standing alone" against Hitler's tyranny.

The passage of the War Crimes Act 1991 raised the possibility of putting on trial those who had not been British citizens or residents at the time the crimes were committed. The outcome was the prosecution in 1995 of Szymon Serafinowicz, a Belarusian living in Banstead, Surrey, although his trial collapsed when the jury ruled he was mentally unfit, and the conviction in 1999 of one auxiliary policeman, Anthony (Andrzej) Sawoniuk, for murdering Jews in his native Belarus. By then, Scotland Yard's war crimes unit had been mothballed, and political attention switched to enshrining remembrance, in the form of the first Holocaust Memorial Day.

Jon Silverman is research professor of media and criminal justice at the University of Bedfordshire. He is the author, with Robert Sherwood, of the forthcoming book Safe Haven: the United Kingdom's investigations into Nazi collaborators and the failure of Justice

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