Alois Hudal (also known as Luigi Hudal; born 31 May 1885 in Graz, Austro-Hungarian Empire; died 13 May 1963 in Rome, Italy) was a Rome-based bishop of Austrian descent. He was for thirty years head of the small Austrian-German congregation of Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome and until 1937, an influential representative of the Austrian Church. In his 1937 book The Foundations of National Socialism Hudal praised Adolf Hitler and some of his policies and indirectly attacked the policies of the Vatican. After World War II, Hudal became infamous for the "ratline" he helped to establish, allowing prominent Nazi German and other European former Axis officers and political leaders, among them war criminals, to escape Allied trials and denazification.

Gustav Franz Wagner (18 July 1911 — 3 October 1980) was an SS-Oberscharführer (Staff Sergeant) from Vienna, Austria. Wagner was a starter deputy commander of the Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, where more than 200,000 Jews were gassed during Operation Reinhard. Due to his brutality, he was known as "The Beast" and "Wolf" (Yiddish: Welfel).

While living in Austria, Wagner joined the Nazi Party in 1931 as member number 443,217. After being arrested for proscribed National Socialist agitation, he fled to Germany, where he joined the SA and later the SS in the late 1930s.

In May 1940, Wagner first participated in killing during the Action T4 euthanasia program at Hadamar and Hartheim. Due to his killing experience in T-4, Wagner was assigned to help establish the Sobibor extermination camp in March 1942. Once the gassing installations were completed, Wagner became deputy commandant of the camp under Commandant Franz Stangl. His official title was quartermaster-sergeant of the camp.

Franz Paul Stangl (26 March 1908 — 28 June 1971) was an Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited and tried in West Germany for the mass murder of 900,000 people, and in 1970 was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.

Stangl was born on 26 March 1908 in Altmünster, located in the Salzkammergut region of Austria. The son of a nightwatchman, his relationship with his natural father was emotionally distressing. He was so deeply frightened of him that Stangl developed a hatred for his Habsburg Dragoons uniform. Stangl claimed that his father died of malnutrition in 1916. To help support his family Franz learned to play the zither and earned money giving zither lessons. Stangl completed his public schooling in 1923.

In his teens he secured an apprenticeship as a weaver, qualifying as a master weaver in 1927. Concerned that this trade offered few opportunities for advancement – and having observed the poor health of his co-workers – Stangl sought a new career. He moved to Innsbruck in 1930 and applied for an appointment in the Austrian federal police. Stangl later suggested that he liked the security and cleanliness that the police uniforms represented to him. He was accepted in early 1931 and trained for two years at the federal police academy in Linz.