German prosecutors investigate 105-year-old in Nazi POW camp murders

Demjanjuk precedent lowered bar for prosecuting aging camp personnel

German prosecutors in Dortmund have opened an investigation into a 105-year-old man on suspicion of being an accessory to murders at the Nazi prisoner of war camp Stalag 326 VI K, the public prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

“The 105-year-old suspect is thought to have been a guard at the prisoner of war camp Stalag 326 VI K in the Senne region of western Germany,” prosecutors said. The man is “accused of being an accessory to multiple murders owing to his activities there,” they said.

Stalag 326 VI K housed between 180,000 and 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war from 1941 until April 1945, when it was liberated by American troops. The investigation is part of a broader German judicial effort to prosecute alleged participants in Nazi-era crimes before they die — an effort that has acquired urgency as aging suspects increasingly die before their cases can be heard. The judicial effort stems in part from a recognition that many suspects who escaped prosecution in the eight decades since the end of the second world war, on the grounds that they had played insignificant roles, were in fact integral to the implementation of the Hitler regime’s murderous aims.

The current case draws on a precedent established by the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Nazi Sobibór death camp in occupied Poland. Prosecutors had sought Ukraine-born Demjanjuk’s extradition from his Ohio home to Germany for years, arguing he was complicit in crimes at Sobibór despite a lack of evidence that he had personally killed anyone. He was convicted as an accomplice to the murders of more than 28,000 Jews. Demjanjuk died in March 2012 at the age of 91, awaiting an appeal; he never served prison time because of his age and frailty.

That ruling lowered the bar for proving complicity, paving the way for a string of late-life prosecutions of former camp personnel.

The most prominent recent trial involved Irmgard Furchner, who worked as a secretary to the commandant at the Stutthof concentration camp between 1943 and 1945 and has been characterized as representative of what political theorist Hannah Arendt described as a Schreibtischtäter, or “desk perpetrator.” Furchner received a two-year suspended sentence for her role as an accessory to murder; her trial was filmed for historic purposes and she made headlines after fleeing her retirement home on the scheduled opening day. Josef Schütz, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, was sentenced in June 2022 to five years in prison as an accomplice to murder; he died the following year at the age of 102.

In April last year, an alleged former guard at Sachsenhausen died before he could face trial on charges of complicity in the murder of more than 3,300 people. Separately, Dortmund prosecutors opened an investigation last year into a 100-year-old former guard at a prisoner of war camp in Hemer, also in North Rhine Westphalia, who is suspected of participating in executions of prisoners between December 1943 and September 1944.

The current case was opened by the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, which transferred its preliminary investigation into the man to prosecutors in Dortmund along with its findings on another former guard. That second suspect has since died, according to German media.

If a trial proceeds, it is expected to shed light on the Stalag system in general and on the Senne camp in particular, drawing both victims and historians to give evidence. Up to 5.7 million Soviet prisoners were held in captivity in Germany during the war; more than half did not survive.