The final search for the last Nazi perpetrators

Justice - The final search for the last Nazi perpetrators

First the Nazi hunters concentrated on German extermination camps, then concentration camps and, more recently, prisoner-of-war camps: the head of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes has expanded the search field for Nazis since he took over the leadership in Ludwigsburg. Senior public prosecutor Thomas Will does not have much time, as he is looking for suspects born between 1924 and around 1927 - in other words, people who are probably now 97 or older and would be fit to stand trial.

The focus is on camps in Nuremberg (Bavaria), Paderborn-Sennelager (North Rhine-Westphalia) and Mühlberg with Zeithain in Saxony. "Subcamps of concentration camps are also of interest to us," said Will.

The Ludwigsburg preliminary investigation authority recently handed over a case to the public prosecutor's office in Celle. It concerns a woman who worked in a prisoner of war camp.

A decision has not yet been made on a case in Hesse. The public prosecutor's office in Giessen had brought charges against a man who was alleged to have been a guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp as an adolescent. The accused from the Main-Kinzig district is accused of having aided and abetted murder in more than 3,300 cases between July 1943 and February 1945. The Youth Chamber of the Hanau Regional Court has not yet decided whether to admit the charges. The man, who is now 99 years old, was an adolescent at the time of the crime.

The case of an alleged guard at a Wehrmacht prisoner of war camp is also still open. The Berlin public prosecutor's office had charged him with aiding and abetting at least 809 cases of cruel murder. As a young man, he is said to have been deployed in the Vladimir-Volynsk camp in what is now western Ukraine from the end of November 1942 to March 20, 1943, where Soviet soldiers were held in inhumane conditions.

Many prisoners starved to death or died of disease. But the now 100-year-old was not brought to trial in Berlin. "The Berlin Court of Appeal has overturned the regional court's decision not to open the case, as he was deemed fit to stand trial. The district court must now decide again," said Will.

Following the conviction of guard John Demjanjuk in 2011 for aiding and abetting thousands of murders, lower-ranking guards are also being prosecuted. According to this change in legal practice, simply acting as a guard in a concentration camp where people were systematically murdered is considered an accessory to murder.

Will says that he is trying to manage the Central Office in the final phase of its work in such a way that "we fulfill our mandate and find perpetrators or crimes". "Of course, that gets more difficult from year to year." But what will happen to the Central Agency in the medium term?

According to the Ministry of Justice, it is to be developed into a center for documentation, research, information, remembrance and encounters once the prosecution tasks have been completed. "Its aim should be to promote the rule of law, democracy and human rights. The House of History Baden-Württemberg has been commissioned to develop an implementation concept, which is expected to take around two years."

The Ludwigsburg investigators are also pinning their hopes for further clues on files from some public prosecutor's offices to which proceedings have been handed over in recent decades. "Some public prosecutor's offices have investigated the complexes surrounding task forces on a really large scale. And we have discovered that not all personal details may have reached us. The task now is to compare the public prosecutor's investigation files with our findings. We hope to generate more names."

Einsatzgruppen were mobile murder squads of the security police and security service and carried out planned massacres after the invasion of German troops, particularly in Poland and later in the Soviet Union.