9. Hans Ludin Deported Thousands of Jews to Their Deaths
Hans Ludin was a Brown Shirt who joined Germany’s Foreign Office. In 1941, he was appointed ambassador to the Slovak Republic – a German client state carved out of a dismembered Czechoslovakia. Ludin wielded great influence, which he used to convince the Slovak government to deport the country’s Jews and hand them over to the machinery of the Holocaust. After the war, he was tried and convicted in Czechoslovakia as a war criminal, and was sentenced to hang. It took him twenty minutes, dangling from a rope, to die. He was survived by six children.