Revealed: Britain's refusal to extradite 'Nazi war criminals'

1:00 PM By PAUL LASHMAR

LONDON - Britain's hostility to eastern bloc governments meant that for decades it refused to investigate allegations against probable Nazi war criminals said to be responsible for mass killings of Jews and Russians.

According to Foreign Office files seen by the Independent on Sunday, successive British governments dismissed all requests for cooperation from Russia during the Cold War despite eyewitness accounts of the horrors perpetrated by British citizens.

In 1970, the Soviet Union requested the extradition of a Bournemouth guesthouse owner called George Chappell over the extermination of 5000 Jews in the Ukraine during the German occupation.

But documents released under the 30-year rule by the Public Record Office show that Foreign Office officials dismissed the allegations against Chappell as propaganda, and turned down similar requests in a peremptory manner.

It failed to instigate any police inquiries despite the fact that other countries, including Switzerland and Holland, handed over a number of Nazi war criminals to communist countries.

Born in 1913 in Georgia as Yuri Chapodze, George Chappell was captured by the Allies and came to Britain in 1947. He anglicised his name and became a British citizen in 1956.

The Soviet request says that Chappell defected from the Red Army to the Germans in 1942. According to Soviet claims he joined the notorious Caucasian Company, a police unit that helped the Germans in killing civilians. The Soviets said Chappell had served as a squad commander and had been involved in "mass annihilation".

"According to eyewitnesses Chapodze personally took part in gunning down 2000 people in Jewish ghettoes near the city of Ternapol.

He personally shot at close range a large number of women, children and other prisoners at the Yanovsky camp on the outskirts of Lvov," the Russian request said.

"In October 1943 Chapodze directed the massacre of 3,000 Jews, and this is a far from complete list of the many atrocities perpetrated by this zealous executor of the Nazi policy of genocide."

In a confidential memo, one Foreign Office official wrote: "We would have little confidence in the ability of the Soviets to carry out a proper trial."

The British rejected the extradition request. However, there was no move by the British authorities to establish whether there was any truth in the allegations against Chappell. A police constable was sent to tell him of the extradition request and Mr Chappell, then 58, denied the allegations.

The Foreign Office files show that West Germany also wanted to interview Chappell about an SS sergeant, Walter Kehrer, who ran a mobile gas chamber used to kill Jews, Russians, prisoners and children identified as mentally defective.

West Germany said members of the Caucasian Company had helped Kehrer's unit. A Foreign Official legal adviser wrote to mandarin Sir Thomas Brimelow: "As far as I am aware we are under no legal obligation to assist the Germans to track down and punish war criminals although we might be under a moral obligation to do so."

The Foreign Office papers reveal that Chappell admitted a connection to Kehrer but again denied atrocities. He continued to live in Britain. The West Germans tried Kehrer in 1975 and he was convicted.

According to the author Tom Bower, Chappell would have been among 10,000 Ukrainian PoWs captured in Italy who settled in the UK after the Second World War. He says the British authorities knew that many of the PoWs had been members of the 14th Waffen SS "Galician" Division, which had committed many atrocities.

Mr Bower said: "It was a terrible scandal which has never been explained. Unfortunately no one has ever tried to properly remedy the existence in Britain of these horrendous murderers."

It was not until the War Crimes Act came into force in 1991 that the British Government instituted full police inquiries into anyone suspected of war crimes.