Wellis Elliot (born Kurt Sauerkwel; 1927, Vienna — 2006) — Riga Ghetto prisoner, public figure, Nazi hunter.

Elliot Wellis was born in Vienna. In the winter of 1942, he and his mother were deported with Austrian Jews to the Riga Ghetto. During one of the first selections, an SS officer sent his 34-year-old mother to the gas chamber. At the age of 14, he vowed to take revenge if he survived.

In the ghetto, he was assigned to clean and service buses used by the Arajs Kommando, which returned from mass shooting operations. Toward the end of the war, he was deported to the Stutthof concentration camp and later to Buchenwald. In the final months of the war, he escaped from a labor detail and survived until liberation.

After the war, he returned to Austria and worked as a police officer in Vienna. In July 1949, he emigrated to the United States with his wife and child, adopting the name Elliot Wellis. For several years, he worked in the service sector.

Through persistent archival research in Germany and Austria, he identified and helped bring to justice the Nazi responsible for his mother’s murder. Over time, he became involved in tracking former Nazis, establishing connections with the Anti-Defamation League, and in the late 1970s joined the Office of Special Investigations.

As a member of this office, he traced numerous former Nazis and contributed to their capture and prosecution. Among the most notable cases were that of Boleslavs Maikovskis, involved in the murder of residents of Audriņi in Latgale; Josef Schwammberger, who had hidden in Argentina for 40 years; and Alois Brunner, a former aide to Adolf Eichmann.

For more than 20 years, until his retirement in 2003, Wellis led efforts within the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith to track down Nazi war criminals. In 1996, he visited Riga together with his family.