BERLIN – The accused last week was 94 years old and worked as a secretary. This week, German prosecutors accused a 100-year-old man who worked as a guard, like the 93-year-old convicted last year.
These three Germans are part of a growing wave of criminal prosecutions related to Nazi war crimes of the last century. Not only are defendants increasingly older than those tried in recent decades, they are also less likely to have a direct role in the atrocities committed in their proximity decades ago, and some were underage at the time.
Now they have been caught in Germany’s race against the clock to bring the final members of the Nazi generation to justice. Some Germans resisted their country’s attempts, albeit late, to do justice to those who helped to perpetuate some of the worst crimes of the 20th century, but others say that the emergence of a new extreme right has made the processes more important than ever.
“It took too long, which didn’t make things easier, because now we’re dealing with such elderly defendants,” said Cyrill Klement, a prosecutor in Neuruppin, whose office has filed charges against the 100-year-old man. “But murder and an accomplice to murder have no statute of limitation.”
Over the years, the German justice system has expanded and contracted its interpretation of who was to blame for the murder of millions in the vast network of concentration and extermination camps run by the Nazis. For decades, vigilantes and others in low-ranking positions were seen as not directly associated with the murders to be charged, but a decision by the Munich court a decade ago broadened the scope of who could be prosecuted.
When a judge convicted John Demjanjuk, a former auto industry worker in Ohio, in 2011, for helping to kill 28,000 people who died in the Sobibor camp, where he worked as a guard, he decided that it was impossible for anyone to have worked in a concentration camp and not be part of the Nazi death machine.
Demjanjuk died in 2012 before an appeal could be heard in the upper court. However, his case signaled a change in the German justice system.
“Demjanjuk’s decision was very important because it showed that we had to catch up,” said Thomas Will, the prosecutor who leads the German government’s office in charge of investigating Nazi-era crimes. “It was an initial spark that led us to examine the guards from all camps, not just the extermination camps, under the idea that what happened there could not be forgotten.”
Since then, several men and women over 90, who have worked as guards or administrators in concentration camps, have faced charges in German courts. The most recent convictions occurred just last week.
“These cases are important contextually, but also symbolically,” said Axel Drecoll, director of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation, which includes the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück. “It shows that the German justice system takes it seriously and continues to pursue these crimes. It is eminently important. “
Prosecutors in Neuruppin, eastern Brandenburg, did not cite the 100-year-old defendant they accused on Tuesday of helping to murder 3,518 people who died while he served as an SS guard in Sachsenhausen between January 1942 and February 1945.
“This includes, but is not limited to, executing the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942,” Neuruppin’s court said in a statement. “In addition, the charges include the accomplice in the murder of prisoners for the use of the lethal Zyklon B gas, as well as the shooting and killing of prisoners for maintaining life-threatening conditions in the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp.”
Although prosecutors found him able to stand trial in a limited capacity, the court must now decide whether to bring the case to trial.
Sachsenhausen, located about 20 miles north of Berlin, served as headquarters for the Nazi concentration camp network across Europe, Drecoll said. More than 6,000 guards and camp personnel were trained there before being sent to work in other fields. However, very few of them have been brought to justice.
“Most of the perpetrators in Sachsenhausen went unpunished,” he said. “The accusations are a late but important sign that such crimes will be brought to justice.”
The charges against the centenary came after a 94-year-old woman – who, as a teenager, had worked as a secretary in the concentration camp at Stutthof – was charged with 10,000 charges of being an accomplice in murder and complicity in assassination attempts by her role. support for the Nazi killer machine there.
As she was under 21 at the time of the crimes of which she is accused, she is expected to be tried in a juvenile court, where she will likely receive a milder sentence.
Last year, a Hamburg state court found Bruno Dey guilty of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder – one for every person believed to have been killed at Stutthof during the time he served as a guard there, from August 1944 to April 2004. 1945. Mr. Dey was tried in childhood for being a teenager at the time of the crime. He was 93 when he was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence.
Mr. Dey’s case followed the 2015 conviction of Oskar Gröning, a former SS soldier who worked as an office in Auschwitz, for complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews who were deported to the countryside in the summer of 1944. Mr Gröning, then 94, was sentenced to four years in prison, but his punishment was delayed by appeals and he died in 2018.
The German Federal Supreme Court of Justice upheld Gröning’s conviction, consolidating the Munich court’s decision against Demjanjuk.
Will’s office then began to search the Nazi records to find Germans who were still alive and served, in any capacity, in concentration camps.
In the past decade, sufficient evidence of possible involvement has been found to refer the cases of more than 200 people to local prosecutors near their homes, who are then charged with opening investigations that could lead to criminal prosecutions.
“The trend now is to say that it is not just about mass executions or gas chamber murders, but that charges can be made against someone who accepted that people were dying from cruelty, starvation, neglect or freezing,” Mr Will said .
Only a handful of prosecutors ‘investigations have actually led to criminal charges in recent years, he said, and given the defendants’ advanced age, several died during the preliminary investigation.
Of these charges, only three led to convictions. In addition to Mr. Gröning and Mr. Dey, Reinhold Hanning was found guilty in 2016 for helping with 170,000 murders during the time he served as SS guard in Auschwitz. He was 95 when he was convicted and died the following year.
Over the years, Will said, the government office that investigates Nazi crimes has become an indispensable archive that otherwise might not exist, a record of much of the country’s legal history, World War II criminals and how they have been sued. But the office’s existence and its work also send a broader message.
“Through our work, we have made clear the importance of democracy and the rule of law,” said Will.