The German office investigating Nazi war crimes on Tuesday said it would send files on 30 former Auschwitz death camp personnel to state prosecutors with a recommendation to bring charges.
In a twilight bid for justice nearly 70 years on, chief investigator Kurt Schrimm said the former Auschwitz guards now aged up to 97 should face charges of accessory to murder.
“The cases will be handed over to the respective public prosecutors’ offices,” Schrimm said.
Schrimm’s Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in the southwestern city of Ludwigsburg, set up in 1958, has recommended bringing criminal charges against more than 7,000 people, but has no powers to prosecute suspects itself. Instead it sends case files to regional prosecutors who then decide whether to file charges against suspects, who must also be judged fit to stand trial by the courts.
Schrimm said he could not say how many of the suspects would actually be prosecuted in the end.
“It is possible that very few will remain” of the 30 potential defendants, he said.
Victims’ representatives welcomed the announcement.
“These crimes against humanity must not remain unpunished,” Ulrich Sander of the Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime told German news agency DPA.
The Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center said the announcement marked “an important milestone.”
“At the same time, today’s positive development underscores the failure to take such measures during the past five decades, a decision which allowed thousands of the worst hands-on killers to elude justice,” said Efraim Zuroff, the director of its Jerusalem office.
In an “Operation Last Chance” campaign in several German cities in July, the Simon Wiesenthal Center hung posters seeking information on the last perpetrators of the Holocaust still at large.
The German investigative office said it had initially identified 49 former guards from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in what was then Nazi-occupied Poland who were still alive, but nine of the elderly suspects had since died.
Thirty live in Germany and will now be subject to criminal investigation.
Another seven live abroad — including one in Israel — and the investigation against them in Ludwigsburg is still ongoing.
Two people could not be found, the office said, and one had already been under investigation in the southern city of Stuttgart.
More than 6,000 SS personnel served at Auschwitz, where about 1.1 million Jews, Roma and Sinti and members of other persecuted groups died in gas chambers or of forced labor, sickness and starvation.
For more than 60 years German courts only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence showed they had personally committed atrocities, but since a 2011 landmark case all former camp guards can be tried.
In that year, a Munich court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for complicity in the extermination of more than 28,000 Jews at the Sobibor camp, where he had served as a guard.
Thomas Walther, who led the investigation that led to Demjanjuk’s prosecution, hailed the Ludwigsburg announcement.
“It is the first time since the 1960s that the German nation... is going to investigate such a large number of its citizens [for war crimes] and perhaps charge them,” he said.
“It shows that 50 years after the first Auschwitz trials, a large number of these people still live among us and many of them have led quiet lives these last 50 years without ever being investigated. That is a major, major mistake of the German justice system,” Walther said.
Schrimm said that while the latest investigation focused on Auschwitz, it had other Nazi camps including Majdanek in occupied Poland in its sights.
“The Central Office is also looking through the archives in Russia, Belarus and Brazil for further names of possible perpetrators,” he said.
The announcement from Ludwigsburg came a day after the start of a trial in Germany of a 92-year-old former SS officer for the murder of a Dutch resistance fighter nearly 70 years ago.
Dutch-born Siert Bruins, who is a German national, faces a life sentence if found guilty.
Since the Nuremberg Trials in 1945 and 1946, about 106,000 German or foreign-born Nazi soldiers have been accused of war crimes.
About 13,000 have been found guilty and about half sentenced, according to the Ludwigsburg office.
SEEKING CHANGE: A hospital worker said she did not vote in previous elections, but ‘now I can see that maybe my vote can change the system and the country’ Voting closed yesterday across the Solomon Islands in the south Pacific nation’s first general election since the government switched diplomatic allegiance from Taiwan to Beijing and struck a secret security pact that has raised fears of the Chinese navy gaining a foothold in the region. The Solomon Islands’ closer relationship with China and a troubled domestic economy weighed on voters’ minds as they cast their ballots. As many as 420,000 registered voters had their say across 50 national seats. For the first time, the national vote also coincided with elections for eight of the 10 local governments. Esther Maeluma cast her vote in the
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was