People of the Revolution and the USSR

French Communist Party (PCF) Fascists and Nazis 1898–1945 ✕ Killed by aircraft gunfire

The Saint-Denis Communist who demanded the popular front first and ended a fascist

In April 1934 he sent an open letter to the Comintern demanding immediate joint action with the Socialists. In June he was expelled; in July the party signed the very pact he had demanded

A metalworker from Saint-Denis who became a deputy at twenty-six and rose to the executive committee of the Comintern as one of the French Communist Party's young leaders. He was jailed for agitation against the Rif war, sent to China as a Comintern envoy in 1927, and elected mayor of Saint-Denis in 1931. Immediately after the February 1934 crisis he demanded, publicly and ahead of the party line, immediate joint action with the Socialists; he refused a summons to Moscow and was expelled on 27 June. A month later the party signed the very pact of unity of action he had called for, and he was already outside it. In 1936 he founded the Parti Populaire Français and moved toward fascism; in 1941 he helped create the Légion des Volontaires Français against Bolshevism and fought on the Eastern Front in German uniform; he was killed in Germany in February 1945 when Allied aircraft strafed his car.

Hungary state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1898–1946 ✕ Executed by hanging

Gendarmerie officer turned National Socialist who as state secretary for the interior in 1944 ran the deportation of Jews with László Endre

Born in Budapest, a military academy graduate and First World War officer, he made his name in Szeged in 1919 with violent counter-revolutionary work and rose to be one of the Gendarmerie’s leading figures. Retiring in 1938 as a major-general, he joined the Hungarian National Socialist Party, entered parliament in 1939 and edited the German-funded Magyarság. After the German occupation in 1944 he became political state secretary for the interior and, with László Endre, took charge of deporting the Jews; on 4 April he chaired a meeting with Eichmann’s officers that agreed to seize Jews’ possessions and move them into urban ghettos before deportation to Germany. Removed in the summer and arrested for plotting a coup against Horthy, he headed the National Security Office under the Arrow Cross. Arrested in Austria in 1945 and returned, he was hanged in 1946.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1900–1942 ✕ Fatally wounded by Soviet partisans

SS officer who led Einsatzgruppe A in 1941, instigating the Kaunas pogrom and directing the murder of Baltic Jews

Born into a pastor’s family in Sternenfels, he took a doctorate in law at Tübingen. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932, headed the Gestapo in Württemberg and then Breslau, and in 1938 became formal head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. Given command of Einsatzgruppe A in February 1941, he followed Army Group North into the Baltic states in June. He had Klimaitis start a pogrom in Kaunas and Arājs raise a unit in Riga, staging the killings as the “self-cleansing” of the local population. By the winter of 1941 he reported that Einsatzgruppe A had murdered some 249,420 Jews, and at the end of November he became commander of the Security Police and SD for Ostland. He was fatally wounded by Soviet partisans near Krasnogvardeysk, Russia, in March 1942.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1900–1945 ✕ Suicide

A principal architect of the Nazi racial state

At Posen in October 1943, he told SS officers that standing firm before 100, 500, or 1,000 corpses and staying 'decent' was 'a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.'

Heinrich Himmler was a central Nazi leader who expanded the SS and police into a bureaucratic apparatus for racial rule and mass murder. He directed the concentration-camp system, extermination policies, and killing formations in occupied Europe, making him one of the principal perpetrators of the Holocaust and the murder of millions of other victims. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he approved and directed the German reprisal that treated the city and its population as targets for destruction, massacre, and deportation. After attempting unauthorized negotiations with the Western Allies as Germany’s defeat became unavoidable, he was dismissed by Hitler, captured by British forces, and died by suicide in custody.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1900–1984 ○ Natural causes

A senior Nazi SS coordinator who became a late-war negotiating envoy

On 8 March 1945, Wolff met Allen Dulles in Switzerland to discuss terms for the surrender of German forces in northern Italy.

Karl Wolff was a senior Nazi SS officer who served as Heinrich Himmler’s chief of staff and stood close to the regime’s central decisions and crimes. As the highest SS and police leader in occupied Italy, he oversaw a system marked by the deportation of Jews, forced labor, and repression of the resistance, responsibilities not erased by his later negotiations. In 1945 he conducted the secret Operation Sunrise talks with OSS chief Allen Dulles in Switzerland, helping secure the early surrender of German forces in northern Italy, though his influence and motives were limited. After the war he was convicted for facilitating mass murder.

Fascists and Nazis 1901–1978 ○ Died in Graz, Austria

Estonian Vaps politician who headed the collaborationist Estonian Self-Administration under German occupation in 1941–1944

Born at Tuhala in Harju County, he studied in Berlin, Vienna, Innsbruck and Graz and took doctorates in geophysics (1927) and constitutional law (1930). After standing twice for parliament he joined the Vaps movement as its propaganda chief; sentenced in 1935 to twenty years’ hard labour, he was amnestied in 1938, went to Germany and took German citizenship. In May 1941 he founded the Estonian Liberation Committee in Helsinki, and returning with the German army that year he headed the Estonian Self-Administration from 1941 to 1944. In 1944 he fled to Austria, where the Western Allies cleared him of Nazi crimes and he later advised the Austrian government. In the 1990s Estonia’s International Commission named him among the Estonians chiefly responsible for crimes committed by Estonian police and SS units.

Italy state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1903–1944 ✕ Executed

A Fascist diplomat who became a witness to the regime's internal collapse

On 25 July 1943, Ciano voted for Grandi's motion, the act that helped bring down his father-in-law Mussolini.

Galeazzo Ciano was Mussolini's son-in-law and a leading diplomat of Fascist Italy who helped drive the regime's expansion and dependence on Germany before turning against a war he saw ending in catastrophe. He supported the Ethiopian war, the invasion of Albania, and the attack on Greece, while keeping diaries and diplomatic papers during his years as foreign minister. In July 1943 he voted for Dino Grandi's motion at the Fascist Grand Council, helping remove Mussolini, but miscalculated that his privileged position would survive the regime's change. After fleeing to Germany and being handed to the Italian Social Republic, he was executed after the Verona trial; his diaries remain a major record of Fascist responsibility and internal collapse.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1903–1979 ○ Natural causes

The SS general who commanded the repression of the Warsaw Uprising

In a report during the Warsaw Uprising, Reinefarth wrote: “We have more prisoners than ammunition to kill them.”

Heinz Reinefarth was a lawyer who joined the Nazi Party and the SS before becoming a commander in Germany's occupation war. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he led a battle group combining combat, police, and security units, playing a central role in the command structure of the 5 August assault on Wola and the mass killing of civilians. Despite Polish demands for his extradition, he escaped prosecution and conviction after the war and served as a mayor and state legislator in West Germany. His career links command responsibility for war crimes with postwar impunity in a single life.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1904–1942 ✕ Died of wounds from an assassination attack

Nazi official who led SS intelligence and police agencies in implementing the Holocaust.

At the 1942 Wannsee Conference, Heydrich coordinated German state agencies for the murder of Europe’s Jews.

Heydrich joined the SS in 1931 and built and led its Security Service (SD); in 1936 he took command of the Security Police, including the Gestapo and criminal police. When the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was established in 1939, he became its chief, unifying the Security Police and SD under an agency central to Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews and political opponents. Appointed acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1941, he oversaw executions of resistance figures and the ghettoization and deportation of Jews. He chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference to coordinate ministries in the murder of European Jews; wounded in an attack by Czech resistance agents in May, he died on June 4.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1904–1977 ○ Natural death

SS diplomat who, as Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary in 1944, pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz

Born in Bad Kissingen, the son of a schoolteacher, he studied political science in Munich and took his doctorate in 1928. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and took part in forcing the resignation of Austria’s Chancellor Schuschnigg, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941. Promoted to SS-Brigadeführer, he became Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary when Germany occupied it in March 1944, with authority over all occupying forces except the Wehrmacht, chiefly the Gestapo, and pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz. In June he cabled Ribbentrop that some 340,000 Jews had been delivered to the Reich, and in October he helped the Arrow Cross take power. Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial in 1949, he was released in 1951 and died in Darmstadt in 1977.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1906–1962 ✕ Executed by hanging

SS officer who ran the deportation of Europe’s Jews to the death camps and in 1944 oversaw that of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz

Born to a Calvinist family in Solingen, Germany, he grew up in Austria, where the family moved in 1914, and joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. In 1938 he was posted to Vienna to organise Jewish emigration from Austria. Head of RSHA Sub-Department IV B4 from December 1939, he attended the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and prepared its minutes, after which he and his staff were responsible for deporting Jews to the extermination camps. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 he oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jews; by the time the transports stopped in July, 437,000 of its 725,000 Jews had been deported. Captured by US forces after the war, he escaped from a detention camp and reached Argentina in 1950, but in 1960 Israel’s Mossad abducted him; tried in Jerusalem, he was hanged in 1962.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1908–1975 ○ Natural causes

A Nazi commando leader magnified by propaganda

Standing before Mussolini at Gran Sasso, Skorzeny became the face of a victory whose command credit belonged elsewhere.

Born in Vienna, Skorzeny became a Waffen-SS officer who directed sabotage and commando operations for Nazi Germany. In the 1943 Gran Sasso raid, he helped locate Benito Mussolini and led an SS detachment at the landing site, but the operation as a whole was planned and commanded by the airborne officers Harald Mors and Kurt Student. Nazi propaganda presented him as Mussolini's liberator, while he also took part in the overthrow of Hungary's government and the Ardennes deception operation. Acquitted at a postwar war-crimes trial, he later lived in Spain amid far-right networks.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1910–1988 ○ Died in prison

Latvian former policeman whose Arajs Kommando, under the SS Security Service, murdered about half of Latvia’s Jews

Born in Baldone to a Latvian blacksmith and a mother from a wealthy Baltic German family, he served in the Latvian Army, studied law at the University of Latvia and was a policeman until 1938. When the Germans entered Riga in July 1941 he was introduced to Stahlecker and recruited a unit from his student fraternity and the Pērkonkrusts, which took part in burning Riga’s synagogues on 4 July. The Arajs Kommando murdered some 26,000 people in Latvia and then Belarus, and he was made an SS-Sturmbannführer in 1943. Interned in a British camp until 1949, he lived under a false name and worked at a printing company in Frankfurt. In 1979 the Hamburg State Court sentenced him to life imprisonment for leading the Jews of the Riga ghetto to their deaths on 8 December 1941; he died in prison in Kassel in 1988.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1913–1991 ○ Life sentence for crimes against humanity

The Nazi Gestapo chief who made Lyon a center of terror

At his 1987 Lyon trial, he denied the Izieu roundup and said: “I fought the Resistance. It was war.”

Klaus Barbie was an SS and Sicherheitsdienst officer who commanded the Gestapo in occupied Lyon, organizing systematic persecution of the French Resistance and Jews. He arrested and tortured Jean Moulin at Caluire and was responsible for deporting 44 Jewish children and their teachers from Izieu to Auschwitz. After the war, U.S. intelligence used him in anti-communist operations and helped him escape to Bolivia, where he avoided justice for decades before his 1987 Lyon trial and life sentence for crimes against humanity. His case exposes both the continuity of Nazi criminal networks and the impunity produced by Cold War anti-communism.