Anton Gecas, who lived in Scotland until he died in 2001, was accused of commanding Nazi death squads involved in the murder of 32,000 civilians.
A new book has revealed how top US Nazi hunters remain “incredulous” that Scotland failed to prosecute notorious war criminal Anton Gecas.
Neal Sher, then head of the OSI, flew to Edinburgh to interview Gecas along with officers from Lothian and Borders Police and remarkably he admitted he had been in the 12th battalion and “witnessed” massacres. He said he hadn’t killed because he was a devout Catholic. Only in 1986, when Jewish human rights organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Center published a list of war criminals living in the UK was the Thatcher government shamed into ordering an investigation. In 1986 the Daily Record broke the story of the list naming war criminals living in Scotland.
The cases were pursued so late, defendants grew too old to prosecute and witnesses had died or were too infirm to travel to appear in a Scottish or UK court. Unlike in other jurisdictions video, hearsay and documentary evidence and statements were not accepted in Scotland and UK as evidence enough. A prosecution against Gecas seemed inevitable but, after 15 months of investigation, it came to nothing. Safe Haven’s authors for the first time uncovered a final report sent from Gavin Ruxton, the Procurator-Fiscal, who headed the Crown Office war crimes team, to the Lord Advocate.But he wrote: “There is, in my view, too great a gulf between what we know and what we can prove for any prosecution to succeed.
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