After taking part in the murder of the Jewish community in his home town, Sawoniuk served in the SS until November 1944 when he defected to the Polish II Corps in the British Eighth Army.
Andrei Sawoniuk was born in Domaczewo, Poland (now Damačava, Belarus), a spa town on the Bug River.
At that time 90% of the town's population were ethnic Jews, with the remainder being Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and German Volksdeutsche.
[1] The family were poor: his mother worked washing clothes while Sawoniuk and his half-brother collected firewood to sell.
[6] During World War II, Sawoniuk was a member of the local Nazi-supported Belarusian Auxiliary Police[1][7] and rose to the rank of Commandant.
In 1944, Sawoniuk fled westwards when the Red Army advanced towards Domaczewo and in July 1944 joined the German armed forces, serving in the 30th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.
However, due to a misspelling of his name, it took until 1994 for authorities to realise that Sawoniuk, then working for British Rail, was one of the people on the KGB list.
In court, he accused a member of the Metropolitan Police of fabricating a Waffen-SS document which contained his details.
From a legal perspective, this case is interesting, as it was also the first time that a British jury had travelled overseas to view the scene of a crime.