Nazi Hunters

These stories of pursuit and the struggle to balance the scales of justice are full of drama and tragedy. Brilliant German scientists worked for the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s, creating the V2 ballistic missile. When the war ended, the US was desperate to get its hands on these scientists before the Russians did. They wanted their expertise as the need for military superiority overrode any concerns of bringing these criminals to justice. Their wartime work hid a dark secret. Hundreds of slave labourers died building the V2. There was a chase across Germany in 1945 to get them before the Russians did. But these rocket scientists had blood on their hands.

Martin Bormann was vital to Hitler. Bormann made Hitler, and the Third Reich, rich through thinly veiled extortion schemes such as The Hitler Endowment Fund of German Industry. He also came up with the idea of charging royalties on Hitler's image on postage stamps - and so made his Fuhrer personally wealthy. He became so close to Hitler and the running of the war that Hitler once screamed "To win this war, I need Bormann!". More sinister was Bormann's involvement in ensuring the progress of the final solution . Himmler had to report back to Bormann on the extermination of the Jews.Bormann, Hitler's doctor Stumpfegger and Artur Axmann (the Head of the Hitler Youth) all left the bunker in Berlin together after Hitler's suicide on 30th April 1945. After Axmann left them at the Lehrter Station Bormann and Stumpfegger disappeared. This led to one of the longest Nazi hunts in history.

The SAS War Crimes Investigation Team secretly hunted down Gestapo officers.

Joachim Peiper and his vicious bunch of SS thugs marched US 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion into a field near Malmedy in January 1945 and shot them. There were a series of other massacres of US soldiers which were attributed to Peiper. The hunters were members of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force. They were horrified by the brutality of the action. It was also the biggest massacre of US soldiers in the Second World War and caused uproar among the US public.

Franz Stangl was the Nazi commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps in Poland. He was responsible for the extermination of around 900,000 men, women and children. At the end of the war, he escaped to Italy where he joined a "rat-line" organised by Vatican officials. From there, he disappeared. Simon Wiesenthal was a survivor of the Holocaust. Born in the Ukraine in 1908, he was rounded up with his family in 1939 and imprisoned in a labour camp where he serviced the German railroad. In May 1945, he was liberated by Allied soldiers from Mauthausen camp. His six-foot-frame weighed barely 99 pounds. Restored to health, he vowed to track down some of the Nazi monsters who had put him and so many other Jews through hell.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey tracks down Albert Speer, who accepts responsibility for his crimes during the Nuremberg trials.