Bednarz, Władysław

Władysław Bednarz was a Polish investigative judge who, after the war, led the Polish judiciary’s investigations into what transpired at the Chełmno Camp. He interrogated witnesses and supervised forensic excavations and sample-takings on the former campgrounds. He also investigated the wreck of a moving truck on the Ostrowski factory grounds, which some witnesses had claimed…

Bock, Ludwig

Ludwig Bock (born 1942) is a German defense lawyer. During the West-German Majdanek Trial (1975-1981), he defended Hildegard Lächert, a former inmate supervisor at the Ravensbrück and Majdanek camps. While preparing the case for his client, Bock rightfully received access to the files of the prosecution, where he found the names and residential addresses of…

Eitan, Dov

Dov Eitan was an Israeli defense lawyer who led the successful defense team of John Demjanjuk during his show trial in Jerusalem in 1987. The day before Demjanjuk’s appeal trial before the Jerusalem Court of Appeals was to start, Eitan jumped – or fell, or was thrown – to his death from the 20th floor…

Ferencz, Benjamin

Benjamin B. Ferencz (11 March 1920 – 7 April 2023) was a Hungarian-born American Jew who graduated from Harvard in 1943 with a law degree. After the war, he was tasked to set up a war-crimes branch in the US-occupied area of Germany. This branch was to collect incriminating evidence against German officials for the…

Pinter, Stephen F.

Stephen Pinter was an Austrian who immigrated to America in 1906 at the age of 17. He obtained U.S. citizenship in 1924, and after the end of the Second World War, he applied with the U.S. War Department to become an investigative judge and prosecutor during the Allied war-crime trials in Germany. He got the…

Sehn, Jan

In the years 1945 through 1947, Jan Sehn (22 April 1909 – 12 Dec. 1965) was a Polish investigative judge and a member of the Polish Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. He took over the investigations concerning events at the former Auschwitz camp complex from the Soviets in the spring…

Sheftel, Yoram

After John Demjanjuk’s first defense lawyer, Dov Eitan, had been assassinated the day before Demjanjuk’s appeal trial before the Jerusalem Court of Appeals was to start, Demjanjuk’s second lawyer Yoram Sheftel was attacked during Eitan’s funeral: someone threw acid into his face which almost made him blind (Sheftel 1994, pp. 243-263).

Simpson, Gordon

Gordon Simpson (30 Oct. 1894 – 13 February 1987) was a justice of the Supreme Court of Texas from January 1945 until September 1949. Together with Edward van Roden, at that time a Pennsylvania judge, Simpson was appointed in 1948 to an extraordinary commission. This commission was charged with investigating claims that German inmates in…

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