Thaindian News

London, June 12 (IANS) An elderly man living in Britain for 60 years has been identified as a former guard at a Nazi slave-labour camp during World War II.

Alexander Huryn, 90, who lives in a retirement bungalow in Hampshire county, kept his past a secret when he left war-ravaged Europe and settled in Britain, Daily Mail reported Sunday.

The retired carpenter was a guard at the Trawniki labour camp in then occupied Poland, where thousands of Jewish prisoners died.

Huryn, who lives with his English-born wife Diana, also 90, in Fareham, has been questioned by officers from Scotland Yard’s war crimes unit. But he has not been charged with any offence.

Ukrainian-born Huryn grew up in Wola Uhruska village, now in Poland. When the Nazis occupied the region, local men were taken on as auxiliaries to serve with the German forces.

It is not clear if Huryn, then 23, volunteered or was compulsarily enrolled. But he was soon posted to Trawniki, where recruits trained as concentration camp guards. The inmates had died from starvation, disease, shooting and hanging.

As the Soviet Army entered Poland from the east during the summer of 1944, most Trawniki guards fled.

Being an ex- member of the German armed forces, Huryn still gets a German Army pension paid into his bank account every month, said his family.

His wartime activities could have remained a secret had it not been for the opening up of Soviet-era archives in recent years. Documents obtained by a researcher revealed that Huryn served at Trawniki. He also joined an SS battalion that committed atrocities against Polish civilians in 1944 and 1945.

Today, Huryn is too frail to leave his home. He declined to speak to Daily Mail, but he said through his daughter that he could no longer remember what he did in the war.