While the battlefields of World War II were a stage for acts of daring heroism and horrific atrocities, conditions on the home front seemed more stable. Yet from bombed-out London to occupied France and even Nazi Germany itself, the war enabled one thing to flourish – crime.

WARTIME CRIME looks at the soldiers, gangsters, sexual predators and murderers whose criminal instincts were unleashed by the chaos surrounding them, and who used the instability of war itself to either expand their criminal empires or to conceal their activities.

From the Mafia’s clandestine pact with the Allies during the invasion of Sicily to the rise of organized crime in Britain during the blitz, the shocking Parisian serial killer Dr. Marcel Petiot and violent race riots between US Navy recruits and Mexican youths in Los Angeles, this six-part series reveals the darker side of the Second World War home front.