BERLIN – The woman charged last week was 94 and worked as a secretary. This week, German prosecutors charged a 100-year-old man who worked as a guard, like the man convicted last year, 93 years old.
These three Germans are part of a declining ripple of criminal prosecutions related to the Nazi war crimes of the previous century. The accused are not only older than those who have been tried in recent decades, but they are also less likely to have played a direct role in the atrocities they committed decades ago, and some were minors at the time.
Now they are trapped in Germany’s race against the clock to bring the final members of the Nazi generation to justice. Some Germans have pushed the country’s efforts to serve the law, however late, against those who helped commit the worst crimes of the 20th century, but others believe the rise of a new far-right has made the prosecution more important than ever. made before.
“It took a long time, which has not made things any easier yet, because now we are dealing with such elderly accused,” said Cyrill Klement, a prosecutor in Neuruppin. The office has filed charges against the 100-year-old man. “But murder and aiding and abetting murder have no statute of limitations.”
Over the years, the German legal system expanded its interpretation and contracted on who was guilty of the murder of millions in the vast network of concentration and death camps run by the Nazis. Guards and others in low positions have been seen for decades as not directly enough to be linked to the killings, but the decision of a court in Munich a decade ago has increased the scope of who can be prosecuted.
When a judge, John Demjanjuk, a former Ohio car worker, found guilty in 2011 of killing 28,000 people who died in the Sobibor camp where he worked as a guard, he ruled that it was impossible for anyone worked in a concentration. camp and was not part of the Nazi death machinery.
Mr. Demjanjuk died in 2012 before an appeal could be heard before the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, his case indicated a shift in the German legal system.
“The Demjanjuk ruling was very important because it showed that we had caught up a bit to do,” said Thomas Will, the prosecutor who led the German government office, with the task of investigating Nazi-era crimes. . “It was an initial spark that led us to examine the guards from all the camps, not just the death camps, under the idea that what happened there could not be overlooked.”
Since then, several men and women in the 90s and older, who worked as guards or administrators at concentration camps, have stood trial in German courts. The most recent convictions have just come in the past week.
“These matters are contextually important, but also symbolic,” said Axel Drecoll, director of the Brandenburg Memorial Foundation, which includes the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps. ‘It shows that the German legal system takes these crimes seriously and continues to do so. This is extremely important. ”
Prosecutors in Neuruppin, in the eastern state of Brandenburg, did not mention the 100-year-old accused they charged on Tuesday with aiding the killings of 3,518 people who died while serving as SS guards between January 1942 and February 1945. in Sachsenhausen. .
“This includes, among other things, the execution by shooting Soviet prisoners of war in 1942,” the court in Neuruppin said in a statement. “The charges also include the murder of prisoners through the use of the deadly gas Zyklon B, as well as the shooting and death of prisoners by maintaining life-threatening conditions in the former concentration camp Sachsenhausen.”
Although prosecutors deemed him fit to stand trial in a limited capacity, the court must now decide whether the case will be heard.
Sachsenhausen, about 20 km north of Berlin, was the headquarters of the Nazi network of concentration camps across Europe, said Mr. Drecoll said. More than 6,000 camp guards and staff were trained before being sent to other camps. Yet very few of them have ever been brought to justice.
“Most of Sachsenhausen’s offenders got away with it,” he said. “The charges are a late but important sign that such crimes will be brought to justice.”
The charges against the hundred-year-old man came after a 94-year-old woman – who worked as a teenager as a secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp – was charged with 10,000 charges of murder and complicity in attempted murder for her. role supporting the Nazi assassination machinery there.
Because she was under 21 at the time of the offenses she is accused of, she is expected to stand trial in a juvenile court, where she is likely to receive a lighter sentence.
Last year, a court in Hamburg found Bruno Dey guilty of 5,230 charges of murder – one for every person allegedly killed in Stutthof during the time he served as a guard there, from August 1944 to April 1945. Dey was tried as a juvenile because he was a teenager at the time of his crime. He was 93 when he was given a suspended sentence of two years.
The case of mr. Dey follows the 2015 conviction of Oskar Gröning, a former SS soldier who worked a desk at Auschwitz, for complicity in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews deported to the camp in the summer of 1944. Mr. Gröning, then 94, was sentenced to four years in prison, but his sentence was delayed by appeals and he died in 2018.
The Federal High Court in Germany has upheld the conviction of Mr. Gröning confirmed and the ruling of the court in Munich against mr. Demjanjuk confirmed.
The office of mr. Will then began investigating Nazi reports to find Germans who were still alive and in whatever capacity had served in concentration camps.
Over the past decade, enough evidence of possible involvement has been found to send the cases of more than 200 people to the local prosecutors near their homes, who then have the task of conducting investigations that could lead to criminal charges.
“The trend now is to say that it’s not just about mass executions or murders in the gas chambers, but that there could be complaints against someone who accepted that people die through cruelty, through hunger, neglect or freezing,” he said. Mr. Will said.
Only a handful of prosecutors’ investigators have actually led to criminal charges in the past few years, he said, and given the advanced ages of the defendants, several have died while under preliminary investigation.
Of the charges, only three led to convictions. In addition to mr. Gröning en mnr. Dey, Reinhold Hanning was convicted in 2016 of aiding 170,000 murders during the time he served as SS guard in Auschwitz. He was 95 at the time of his conviction and died the following year.
Over the years, Mr. Will said the government office investigating Nazi crimes has become an indispensable archive that would not otherwise exist, a report of much of the country’s legal history, of World War II criminals and of how they were processed. But the existence of the office and its work also sends a wider message.
“Through our work we make clear the importance of democracy and the rule of law,” he said. Will said.