Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss (also spelled Höß, sometimes spelled in English as Hoess; 25 November 1900 – 16 April 1947) was an SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel), and from 4 May 1940 to November 1943 the first commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, where it is estimated that more than a million people were murdered. Höss joined the Nazi Party in 1922 and the SS in 1934. He was hanged in 1947 following his trial in Warsaw.

Höss was born in Baden-Baden into a strict Catholic family. He lived with his mother Lina née Speck and father Franz Xaver Höss. Höss was the eldest of three children and the only son. He was baptized Rudolf Franz Ferdinand on 11 December 1901. In his early years, according to his autobiography, he was a lonely child with no playmates his own age until he entered elementary school, and all of his companionship came from adults. His father, a one-time army officer who served in German East Africa, ran a tea and coffee business; he raised his son on strict religious principles and with military discipline, having decided that he would enter the priesthood. Höss grew up with an almost fanatical belief in the central role of "duty" in a moral life. During his early years, there was a constant emphasis on sin, guilt and the need to do penance.

Rudolf Walter Richard Hess, also spelled Heß (26 April 1894 – 17 August 1987), was a prominent Nazi politician who was Adolf Hitler's deputy in the Nazi Party during the 1930s and early 1940s. On the eve of war with the Soviet Union, he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom, where he was arrested and became a prisoner of war. Hess was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to life imprisonment, which he served at Spandau Prison, Berlin, where he died in 1987. After World War II Winston Churchill wrote of Hess, "He was a medical and not a criminal case, and should be so regarded."

On 27–28 September 2007, British news services published descriptions of disagreement between his Western and Soviet captors over his treatment and how the Soviet captors were steadfast in denying his release. In July 2011, the remains of Hess were exhumed from a grave in Bavaria after it became a focus of a pilgrimage for neo-Nazis.

Hess, the eldest of four children, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, to Fritz H. Hess, a prosperous German Lutheran importer/exporter from Bavaria, and Clara Hess (née Münch). The family lived in luxury on the Egyptian coast near Alexandria, and visited Germany often during the summers, allowing the Hess children to learn the German language and to absorb German culture. The family moved back to Germany in 1908, where Hess enrolled as a boarder at the Protestant School in Bad Godesberg. Hess showed aptitude in science and mathematics, and expressed interest in becoming an astronomer. However, his father wished him to continue the family business, Hess & Co., and in 1911 convinced Hess to study business for a year in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce.

Robert Faurisson (born January 25, 1929 in Shepperton, Surrey) is a French academic who is a Holocaust denier. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles, published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers (especially Le Monde), which deny various aspects of the Holocaust, including the existence of homicidal gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps, the reality of the systematic killing of European Jews using gas during World War II, the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank, and the veracity of Elie Wiesel's accounts of his wartime suffering.

After the passage of the Gayssot Act against Holocaust denial in 1990, Faurisson was prosecuted and fined. In 1991, he was dismissed from his academic post.

Faurisson is the son of a French father and a Scottish mother, Jessica Hay Aitken. He was trained as a professor of French literature, receiving his agrégation (license to teach) in 1956, and his doctorate in 1972. He was lecturer, then professor of French literature at the University of Lyon between 1973 and 1990.

Karl Adolf Eichmann (March 19, 1906 – May 31, 1962) was a German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. Because of his organizational talents and ideological reliability, Eichmann was charged by Obergruppenführer (General) Reinhard Heydrich with the task of facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe.

After the war, he fled to Argentina using a fraudulently obtained laissez-passer issued by the International Red Cross. He lived in Argentina under a false identity, working for Mercedes-Benz until 1960. He was captured by Mossad operatives in Argentina and taken to Israel to face trial in an Israeli court on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962. He is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court.

Adolf Eichmann was born to a Lutheran family in Solingen, Germany. His parents were businessman and industrialist Adolf Karl Eichmann and Maria née Schefferling. After his mother died in 1914, his family moved to Linz, Austria. During the First World War, Eichmann's father served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. At the war's conclusion, Eichmann's father moved the family back to Linz where he operated a business. Eichmann left high school—Realschule—without having graduated and began training to become a mechanic, which he also discontinued. In 1923, he started working in the mining company of his father. From 1925 to 1927 he worked as a sales clerk for the Oberösterreichische Elektrobau AG and then until spring 1933 Eichmann worked as district agent for the Vacuum Oil Company AG, a subsidiary of Standard Oil. During this time he was a member of the Jungfrontkämpfervereinigung, the youth section of Hermann Hiltl's right-wing veterans movement. In July 1933 he moved back to Germany.