The islanders were chiefly represented by the respected local doctor, Philip Martell (Bernard Horsfall), who struggled to maintain the peace while the Germans were led by Major Dieter Richter (Alfred Burke), a peace-time academic who was inclined to be lenient on the Guernsey populace but whose approach was challenged by his more conventionally "nasty" SS counterpart Hauptsturmführer Klaus Reinicke (Simon Cadell).
Among them are Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor assigned to Auschwitz; Klaus Barbie, Gestapo Chief of Lyon; Alois Brunner, Adolf Eichmann's assistant; and Amon Göth, who was sentenced to death and hanged for committing mass murder during the liquidations of the ghettos at Tarnów and Krakow, the camp at Szebnie and the Plaszow camp, portrayed in the film Schindler's List.
SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Schmidt (physician) (1912–2000), medic at Majdanek extermination camp in charge of selections, acquitted and released at the Third Majdanek Trial in Germany
Czarny Las Massacre (Polish: Mord w Czarnym Lesie) was a mass murder of around 250 Poles, carried out by the Gestapo, on the orders of SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger in Czarny Las (Black Forest) near Stanisławów, during the night of August 14/15, 1941.
Gunther Lutze, a former captain in the SS, returns to the ruins of Dachau concentration camp to relive the memories of his time as its commandant during World War II.