A BBC investigation revealed that a suspected Nazi war criminal, who sat Residing in the United Kingdom, he may have worked for the British Intelligence services during the Cold War.
Before his death occurred, German officials were investigating Stanislaw Chrzanowski for the murder of wartime Jews in Belarus .
The man had previously been interrogated by the British police officer, but had never been charged with a crime.
Now, Chrzanowski, who had boasted in front of his stepson of having ‘an English secret’, has appeared in film records taken in Berlin in the decade of 50.
And Jewish leaders call for an investigation to find out Yes Chrzanowski – and others like him – were not charged with war crimes because they had operated as spies for the UK government.
For more than 60 years ago, John Kingston suspected that his stepfather had been more than just a security guard at the municipal government building in his eastern hometown of Europe during World War II.
So much so that I was certain that Stanislaw “Stan” Chrzanowski had been a Nazi war criminal who had managed to evade justice.
And on several occasions he tried to persuade the British authorities to investigate him. But he never succeeded.
Kingston managed to gather a large amount of evidence -photos, documents and secret telephone conversations-, that for more than 20 years were stored in his attic.
Met Kingston at 1999 and thus began my own investigation of Chrzanowski and his activities during wartime.
But only when Kingston died – and all the material he had stored in the attic was handed over to me – did possible new evidence to explain why Chrzanowski had never been brought to justice.
Bedtime stories
Kingston’s mother, Barbara, met Chrzanowski at 1954, in a Polish club in Handswortg, Birmingham.
And she was delighted with that foreigner who liked to dance.
Chrzanowski told him that he had arrived, along with other Polish soldiers, at the port of Liverpool in 1946, one year after the end of the war.
He also told him that She had grown up in Slonim, a city located within Poland at the beginning of the war but now belongs to Belarus.
Barbara was so captivated by Chrzanowski who asked him to go on vacation that same summer, along with his two children.
Kingston, who was 9 years old at the time, called to those vacations “ the moment everything changed “.
At first the child was amazed by this new father figure.
“Much of he was fascinating and weird, ”Kingston explained.
“ I kind of admired him and wanted to be like him. ”
Chrzanowski told his new family that he was working in a sawmill in Slonim when the war started, until in 1943 the Nazis forced him to work as a security guard.
According to his account, he had managed to escape from his country in 1944, later had been a prisoner of war and had finally joined the Polish ranks to fight alongside the Allies .
There was no reason to doubt his story.
Soon after, Chrzanowski moved in with the Kingstons to their home in Birmingham.
The threat at home
At home, Chrzanowski taught his stepson John to jump walls with the techniques of the paratroopers and bought him a German toy pistol so that he could play in the debris that the German bombs had left during the war in various parts of the city.
But little by little, another Chrzanowski began to reveal himself . And that affected Kingston’s adolescence deeply, both mentally and physically.
“It was a nightmare growing up with him. He was a very dangerous guy ”, Kingston confessed to me.
Chrzanowski had a very strong temper and brought pieces of flexible rubber from work to spank his stepchildren and the family dog.
“I was covered in bruises,” Kingston revealed.
When they went to sleep, Chrzanowski I told him stories of war. They sounded entertaining at first, but gradually turned sinister .
Chrzanowski described events horrendous to children’s ears from when the Nazis had come to Slonim.
According to recollections of Kingston, he spoke of people being tortured and interrogated.
“Sometimes he spoke of babies who were grabbed by the ankles and smashed into the wall ”, he said.
“ And he showed us how they did it “, he added.
The man told them that he had seen these atrocities through binoculars, in his role as a security guard. safety.
But Kingston said that the way he told those stories was so vivid that it seemed like Chrzanowski had committed those crimes.
All This environment caused Kingston’s mental health to suffer a lot while he lived with his stepfather and, as soon as he became a young adult, what he most desired was move somewhere else.
Around this time he also began to question his stepfather’s story before coming to the UK: Maybe Chrzanowski had worked for the Nazis?
Eventually, Kingston met Sheila, they married and moved further north in England, in the Holmfirth town. But their marriage would go through several tragedies: four of their six children died young.
Particularly the death of one of them, at 17 years and due to meningitis, he struck John deeply.
All this accumulated duel brought him to a point where he was overwhelmed by what he He considered it a great injustice.
How was it possible that the only father figure he had ever had had done horrible things -even to children- and would you still move on with your life?
You soon discovered an opportunity to do something about it.
“Do you know a war criminal?”
In March 1986, saw an ad in a national newspaper.
The ad stated that They were looking for information on alleged criminals who lived in the United Kingdom and who had been responsible for “genocide and murder of people in Germany or the territories that the Germans occupied”, during World War II.
The government had launched a formal investigation after members of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is in charge of hunting down fugitive Nazis, gave it a list of suspects.
Margaret Thatcher’s government said then, according to security expert Anthony Glees, that not having corroborated the antecedents of those who entered the United Kingdom after the war “ made us look like a banana republic “.
Kingston he was convinced that Chrzanowski was one of those men and that he was not just “a security guard” from the Slonim administration building}, as he claimed.
Thus, he wrote to the research group several s letters where he transcribed the horror stories Chrzanowski had told him during his childhood. And several police officers went to question her stepfather.
But then no action was taken in against him for lack of evidence.
However, Chrzanowski now knew that her stepson suspected something and the police questioning it certainly scared him. So he started applying for various travel visas to countries like Russia, Poland and Canada, where he had wartime friends and some relatives.
As the investigations continued, three old friends of Chrzanowski, who had come to the UK like him, died.
2017 
One of them, suspected of being a war criminal and who had chosen Chrzanowski as best man, committed suicide .
Convinced that his stepfather was a criminal, Kingston began his own investigation.
And one day, While visiting him at his home, he managed to make a copy of all the wartime photos that Chrzanowski kept under his bed.
L The pits of death
“We knew him as a butcher. That’s what he did: kill people, ”Alexandra Daletski told the BBC in 1994, while looking at a photo of Chrzanowski.
After sharing their suspicions with BBC News, Kingston and then-BBC journalist Jon Silverman were walking the snow-covered streets of Slonim, asking people if they recognized the man in the photo.
In it, Chrzanowski wears the uniform of the Belarusian Auxiliary Police, an armed civilian force that carried out orders on behalf of the Nazis.
The photo was dated, according to Kingston’s testimony, to March 1942.
Daletski noted that her husband, Jan, had been one of the people that Chrzanowski and this local police had arrested that year.
AND described how Chrzanowski – or Stasic, as he was known in Slonim – had shot Jan after he had tried to flee an impending execution.
Chrzanowski j further denied that the Nazis had recruited him. But he always claimed it was after 1943 -after the massacre of Jews in Slonim- and that his role had been that of a simple security guard.
And he always denied belonging to that Belarusian police force.
Another witness in Slonim, Kazimir Adamovich, a deacon of the local church, noted that there was seen from his farm as Chrzanowski shot 50 people for three days.
Adamovich said killing put Chrzanowski in a good mood. And he added that he had heard him say that it was “as easy as spitting.”
These testimonies suggested that Chrzanowski had been present at the massacres of Slonim, where tens of thousands of Jews and other inhabitants of the area were killed.
These mass killings began around the middle of 1941, as part of the plan of Nazi Germany to exterminate to the Jewish population.
Men, women and children were taken to the nearest woods, where they were ordered to They took off their clothes and then shot him.
Their bodies fell on the corpses of others who were already in the “graves of death” that had been dug up for this plan.
Kingsman and the BBC team also uncovered more data that disproved Chrzanowski’s original story.
Among them, he had not escaped from the Nazis to directly join the Polish militias.
On the contrary, while fleeing from Slonim when the Germans began their retreat in June of 1944 -and the Russians were arriving from the other side-, he had been dragged along with other collaborators towards the east of France to fight in the German combat units .
While defending her As a German collapse, Chrzanowski was taken a prisoner of war. It was only there that he changed sides and joined the Polish forces.
Again in the United Kingdom , Kingston and the BBC came over to interview Chrzanowski.
During a short confrontation – After his weekly trip to church – Chrzanowski began shouting everything in denial and threatened to call the police.
That was the Last time Kingston and Chrzanowski spoke.
In light of the evidence the BBC had gathered, police detectives questioned Chrzanowski again . But the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) concluded that there was “not enough evidence” to press charges.
“It was very depressing. Scotland Yard suddenly closed all options “, Kingston told me.
He then decided to leave the investigation. Her stepfather, she believed, had gotten away with it.
And it wasn’t until we met again – 20 years later – he saw another opportunity to bring Chrzanowski to justice.
The old case
My work with BBC Radio focuses on the town of Shropshire, in the center of the UK. And Chrzanowski lived in my area.
About five years ago I read several news stories of elderly Germans being tried for alleged war crimes committed by some 70 years before.
I remembered Chrzanowski’s story from the years 80 and contacted Kingston. He agreed to start my own investigation on his stepfather.
Now Chrzanowski had some 90 years and Kingston, around 70.
To this end I managed to convince Stephen Ankier, an experienced researcher on Nazism, to to help me.
Stanislaw “Stan” Chrzanowski was one of hundreds of names reported to UK police when the public request was made of war crimes suspects in 1988.
But in the end only one man was convicted.
Anthony Sawoniuk, a retired British Rail train ticket collector, was sentenced in 1999 for the murder of Jews.
He died in prison, while serving a double life sentence.
Like Chrzanowski, Sawoniuk had been a member of the Belarusian Auxiliary Police, of the German Waffen-SS and then of the Polish forces that fought alongside the Allies.
According to historian Martin Dean, who worked in Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Unit, some 50. 000 Nazi collaborators managed to infiltrate the Polish forces in the last sections of the Second War 1st World.
And about a third of them landed in the United Kingdom after the end of the conflict.
had different degrees of relationship with the Nazis. But some were local policemen from places like Belarus, ”he pointed out.
Through some sources in Belarus, Ankier managed to obtain documents from the agency of Russian intelligence, the KGB, with a list of some of the former members of the Belarusian Auxiliary Police who had worked in Slonim during the war.
AND Chrzanowski’s name and date of birth 7862824071. Which proved that he had lied about his real job during the conflict.
The list also helped us track down other suspects who had been to Slonim and they now lived in various parts of the UK.
And confirmed names that Chrzanowski had mentioned to her stepson John over the years.
In total, more than 30 suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis in Slonim had settled in England and Wales after the war. But according to the historian, most of them are dead.
Then, upon learning of the work we were doing, we were contacted by the ‘Nazi hunters ‘of the German special war crimes unit.
Based on the powerful testimonies gathered by Kingston and the BBC, in 1996, Prosecutor Thomas Will told us that he would consider building a case against Chrzanowski, using evidence that had previously been rejected by the CPS.
And the Federal Court of Justice of Germany ruled that the proceedings against Chrzanowski could continue, despite the fact that neither he nor his victims were German and his alleged crimes had occurred in Belarus.
German crime ”, said Will.
Investigators were pushing German law to the limit. And they had greater legal powers than they initially had for the Nuremberg trials (where Nazi leaders were tried after the end of the war).
And in a case that would become a landmark, Chrzanowski would be the first British citizen to be investigated by Germany for alleged war crimes.
Prosecutors focused the case on the suspicion that he had executed more than 30 civilians in Slonim in 1942.
But in October 2017 -While the German police awaited authorization to carry out an operation at his home- Chrzanowski died, at 96 years.
Those who knew him in the city of Telford remember that he used to distribute the fruits that he planted in his garden at the doors of his neighbors’ houses. Others recalled her strong and unpredictable temperament.
By this time, Barbara was separated from Chrzanowski. His ex-wife described him as a “brutal” man who had threatened to kill her.
But he also said that he had never recorded the abuse his son had suffered.
Research done by Germans brought great relief to Kingston. But less than six months later, he died. He never told me that he had been diagnosed with leukemia.
His death, however, was followed by a letter, which came to me out of nowhere for a few months later, in which he gave me permission to use all the evidence that he had collected.
I wondered if he would find something in those folders that he could offer A new perspective on Chrzanowski and other Nazi collaborators.
And then, while climbing into his attic, I found Chrzanowski’s audio recordings, in a cassette labeled “War Crimes.”
Kingston managed to record several conversations with Chrzanowski, where several questions arose. The audios
Kingston recorded his conversations with Chrzanowski for several months on 1994, with the idea of collaborating with a tabloid journalist who intended to expose it.
The article was published , the police spoke to Chrzanowski again. But nothing happened .
According to Kingston , Chrzanowski had not incriminated himself in the recordings.
When I listened to them, however, a piece of the conversation caught my eye.
I heard Chrzanowski speak of an “English secret” that he should not reveal.
His words – in rustic English and in sentences riddled with grammatical errors – were difficult
But Chrzanowski seemed to explain to Kingston that the UK authorities had asked him to keep quiet.
“ They don’t want this advertisement. They are waiting for us all to die. ”
“ Take the secret, keep it with you all the time , maybe even to death, ”Chrzanowski was heard saying.
What was that secret? A small fragment of a film made a decade after the war would give us the answer.
face in the crowd
I looked at hundreds of film files to see if I could detect Chrzanowski’s face, even for a second, in places we knew he had visited.
It was hard work, but I made it.
His image appeared not on recordings of World War II but on a batch of material United States News March 1946, eight years after his arrival in the United Kingdom.
The film shows the Marienfelde transit camp in West Berlin, the place where millions of people passed from East Berlin during the Cold War Communist to capitalist West Berlin.
The American narrator refers to the scene saying that thousands of refugees are fleeing of the “red tyranny” in Eastern Europe.
And suddenly, Chrzanowski appears, with an overcoat, walking through the entrance hall of the place.
For a second, look straight into the camera.
To be sure it was him, I consulted a face mapping expert, Hassam Ugail, from the University of Bradford.
Ugail used software that compared old photographs of Chrzanowski with the man in the film.
“It’s definitely him” , he pointed out.
Chrzanowski had told him several times to Kingston that he had never left the country since his arrival in 1946. And Ankier discovered that he had said the same thing to the police in 1954, when you applied for British citizenship.
And that was not all: in an unedited sequence of this Marienfelde film, we managed to recognize others four men who were in Chrzanowski’s photo collection.
Two of them were photographed with Chrzanowski in Slonim during the German occupation. In the other photos, the men were wearing military uniforms, perhaps from when they fought alongside the Allies at the end of the war.
The software searches facial similarities. Any value greater than 70% is considered an accurate match. Chrzanowski and the other four tests were above that figure.
For legal reasons, we are unable to show the photos of the other four men or identify them. But the investigations continue with the idea of confirming their names.
But, the question we can ask ourselves is: what were these five men doing , who clearly knew each other before, in Berlin during the Cold War?
The Marienfelde refugee camp itself could hold the key.
This complex was a haven for people seeking a better life in the West.
But it was also a nest of spies: the refugees coming from the East were a very useful source of data.
“The British, American and French intelligences wanted to learn all they could about the Soviet forces and on East Germany, ”says Keith Allen of the German Institute for Contemporary History.
When we presented our evidence on Chrzanowski and his colleagues to three experts on security and intelligence issues, we were told that the evidence could point that he had operated as a spy for the UK.
Chrzanowski’s language skills – he spoke Russian, German and Polish – could have been helpful in gathering information on Soviet nuclear ambitions, says researcher Steve Vogel.
“American and British intelligence officers interviewed German scientists who had been brought to work in the Soviet Union,” he stressed.
Chrzanowski had learned to operate the radio in the Polish army at the end of the war.
And historian Stephen Dorril points out that other people like him were sent to Eastern Europe to install intelligence networks.
“This is exactly what MI6 was doing: we know they trained people,” says Dorril and emphasizes that the British security services should know about Chrzanowski’s past with the Belarusian Auxiliary Police and the Nazi Waffen-SS.
“There has been a long-term cover-up. Some of these people had really horrible backgrounds. ”
Professor Anthony Glees of Buckingham University told the BBC that British security services had destroyed near 96. 000 files at the end of the years 90 and early 90, which “almost certainly” included details of foreign collaborators of the Nazi regime who had later worked for British intelligence.
We wanted to know the government’s version of this fact, but did not receive We responded to our request.
The destruction of the documents was a “double-whammy cover-up,” says Gless.
It was not only a way of keeping secret the aid that Nazi collaborators gave to the British government, but their war crimes They also went undercover .
According to Glees, if they worked secretly for the government of the United Kingdom, Chrzanowski and the others had to be protected from the accusations that weighed on them for their actions during the Second War.
“The incentive was that there would be no prosecution: it was his passport to freedom,” explained Glees.
“If you had been a bad person and you were afraid of what might happen to you, the more you offered [a los servicios de inteligencia], the safer you were going to be ”, he concludes.
Could this explain why there was only one war crimes trial after called from 1988 for people to hand over names of suspects?
Professor Glees, historian Dorril and others urge the UK government to imitate what the US Central Intelligence (CIA) did and release the remaining files related to individuals like Chrzanowski.
But n or everyone we spoke to agreed that Chrzanowski could have been a spy.
Cold War historian Paul Maddrell told us that he saw “no evidence of any connection between [Chrzanowski] and any intelligence agency.”
In a statement, the Home Office repeated what Kingston had been told in the decade of 1990: that the CPS had reviewed Chrzanowski’s case at the time, but had considered that there was insufficient evidence to proceed.
The Metropolitan Police also told us that the case had not “complied with the acrimonious evidence “.
Leaders of the Jewish community have described the new evidence against Chrzanowski as “ horrible and terrifying “.
If he and others worked for British intelligence, this is “a badge of shame for the UK” and a “double betrayal” for the UK. war victims, says Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, who sent the list of suspected Nazis to the Thatcher government in 1986.
“So many of these people should, and could, have been brought before the justice “, claims Zuroff.
“It is sad that one of the best democracies in the world has not been able to prosecute them.”
The chairwoman of the Board of Representatives of British Jews, Marie van der Zyl, notes that this appears to be a “major cover-up” and is now calling for a public inquiry.
Conservative MP Robert Halfon, who is Jewish, he plans to call the parliamentary security committee to investigate whether there were Nazi war criminals in the UK “who ended up working for British intelligence or any other state body.”
________________________________________
Before his death, John Kingston He told me that he was sorry he spent so much of his life unmasking his stepfather, but was relieved that his suspicions were true .
He remembered Chrzanowski’s display of arrogance – after being questioned by the police in the 90 -, saying that he had the ability to convince to anyone that he was innocent.
“I remember he said ‘Those people are buried [en Slonim], they are buried and crushed. And here I am living my life, whose side is God on? ‘”Kingston said.
“And for me it was the scariest thing I ever heard.”
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