By Polly Johnson
Senior Desk Officer, Europe

FAREHAM, United Kingdom – A former prison guard at the Nazi-run Trawniki camp in southeast Poland, where thousands of Jews were murdered, was discovered this week living in a retirement community in Fareham.

Alexander Huryn, 90, is from Ukraine but has lived in the UK since 1948. Documents recently obtained by Holocaust researcher Dr. Stephen Ankier revealed that Huryn served as a guard at the concentration camp in 1944 and 1945.

Huryn has vehemently denied accusations of his participation in the Holocaust. “I absolutely never saw anyone get killed at the camp and I never killed anyone,” he told the Daily Echo, a British paper. Rather, Huryn said, the Nazi regime forced him into service, but his primary responsibility was to groom horses for Nazi officers.

His family sheltered Jews during World War II, according to Huryn. When the Nazi regime recruited him, he and his family feared they would lose their farm if Huryn did not comply. “I was sent because I was the eldest child. I had no choice. The Nazis took me away on a truck. I was very scared, I had no idea where I was going and definitely did not want to be there.” Huryn was 23 at the time.

“I don’t like what the Nazis did. I feel bad about what happened at Trawniki. It was terrible – but I had nothing to do with it.”

Huryn went as far to say that he had no idea what was happening inside the camps and only learned of the atrocities being committed after the war. Speaking to reporters at his home on June 13, Huryn said, “We were never given a rank, we were just soldiers. We were given a pre-historic gun, like an American Civil War rifle, and just five bullets.”

“I was asked to train horses for the German officers, even though I had no idea what to do. You didn’t dare argue. You just did whatever you were told. The German guards were not nice to me and I did not socialize with them. I never met Hitler or any other senior Nazis.”

Huryn and his wife now live in a bungalow in Fareham, where Huryn still earns a German Army pension of ten pounds a month. Their daughter, Sophie, who also lives in Fareham, said that her father “never really talked about it, but [ ] has always insisted that his family would have been shot. There were all sorts of victims of Adolf Hitler in all sorts of different ways.”

For more information, please see:

Daily Mail – Nazi concentration camp guard, living in Hampshire: “I was told to take the job, or die” – 14 June 2011

Daily Mirror – Hampshire OAP Alexander Huryn defends his past as a Nazi concentration camp guard – 14 June 2011

News From Poland – British pensioner revealed as former Nazi camp guard – 14 June 2011

This is Hampshire – Alexander Huryn tells Daily Echo: ‘I’ve done nothing wrong’ – 13 June 2011