A 105-year-old man has been placed under investigation on suspicion of being an accomplice in multiple murders at a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, German prosecutors said. The case, which is being handled by the public prosecutor's office in Dortmund, focuses on the "Stalag 326 VI K" camp in western Germany, in what is now the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
"The 105-year-old suspect is believed to have been a guard at the "Stalag 326 VI K" prisoner-of-war camp in the Senne region of western Germany," prosecutors said in a statement. He "is accused of being an accomplice in multiple murders due to his activities there," they said.
The Senne camp housed between 180,000 and 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war between 1941 and April 1945, when it was liberated by American troops.
The investigation is the result of a last-minute, urgent effort by the judiciary to prosecute suspected participants in the Nazi killing machine before they died. The judicial efforts stem in part from the recognition that many of the suspects who have escaped prosecution in the eight decades since the end of World War II on the grounds that they were deemed to have played an insignificant role were in fact integral to the implementation of the murderous aims of Hitler's regime.
The precedent was set by the case of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Nazi Sobibór death camp in occupied Poland, who was convicted in 2011 of being an accomplice in the murders of more than 28,000 Jews that occurred while he worked there.
Prosecutors had sought the extradition of Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk from his Ohio home to Germany for years, arguing that he was an accomplice in the crimes committed at Sobibór despite a lack of evidence that he had directly killed anyone.
Demjanjuk died at the age of 91 in March 2012, awaiting appeal, but due to his age and frailty, he did not go to prison.
The Demjanjuk case lowered the standard for proving complicity, paving the way for other 90-year-olds and, more recently, 100-year-olds to stand trial. ©LAPSI.al
