Lucian Kozminski - The Oberkapo

During the early 1940's, six million Jews died in the gas chambers at death camps across Europe. The killers, the tormentors, both inside and outside the camp, were mostly Germans and their allies. But among them, sadly, were men who were Jews themselves. They betrayed their own people and became vicious enforcers. One of those men was a young Polish Jew, Lucian Kozminski. Kozminski sided with the Nazis and served as their enforcer, or "oberkapo," in German camps where his fellow Jewish prisoners were interned. Oberkapos were known for extreme cruelty. They beat prisoners, they tortured prisoners, and in many cases, they killed prisoners -- their fellow prisoners.

After the war, Kozminski spent years in a German prison for fraud. But, then, in 1968, he moved to America, lying about his past and pretending to be just another refugee.

When Lucian Kozminski set up shop in Beverly Hills, California in the 1980's, a lot of people saw him as a savior. He promised Holocaust survivors he would help get them money from the German government, money to repay them for their suffering at the hands of the Nazi's. But, what the Holocaust victims didn't know was that Kozminski had been at the camps with them, not as a prisoner, but as an enforcer.

Pretending to be just another refugee, Kozminski lured Holocaust victims to him, the same people he used to beat and torture. Now, that they were being given money to try to compensate for those horrible crimes, Kozminski was going to steal that too.

Here's how the scam worked. Kozminski would gain the trust of his victims and persuade them to sign over power of attorney. He then used that power to divert payments from the German government into his own accounts. After stealing millions of dollars from unsuspecting victims, Kozminski was arrested, convicted, and tossed into federal prison in 1982 for fraud. The judge ordered Kozminski to pay back his victims, but that would never happen.  Because after getting out of prison in 1993, Lucian Kozminski died -- or did he?

The terrible things Lucian Kozminski had done would continue to haunt his victims. Then, ten years after his death, Kozminski himself seemed to begin haunting them. His victims knew he was still alive because some of them saw him in the Los Angeles area as recently as the year 2000. One of Kozminski's victims says he actually followed Kozminski down the street to his home, "I saw him twice, the second time I followed him and went up to the mail box and there was his name - Kozminski - on the mail box." Kozminski had pulled off the biggest scam of all - he faked his own death. Despite all of the new sightings, Lucian Kozminski has not been found. To this day, his victims continue to suffer.