They have more than 90 years old and the dubious honor of being considered the last Nazi criminals to face justice.
They were not part of Adolf Hitler’s military high command, nor did they command any SS squad. They were security guards, secretaries or administrative employees who worked in the extermination camps of the Third Reich and now, more than 75 years after the end of World War II, they are finally facing justice.
Last Tuesday, prosecutors in Germany charged a man with 100 year old for assisting in the murder of 3, 518 people who died while he was working as a guard of the SS in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, located about 35 kilometers from Berlin.
The week before, a woman from 94 year-old who worked as a secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp (Poland) was charged as an accomplice in 10, 000 murder cases and attempted murder for his work in support of the atrocities that were committed there.
Although she is now in her nineties, given that she was less than 21 years when these events occurred, it is likely that this woman will end up being tried before a juvenile court.
Their cases are part of a small group of low-level employees of the Nazi regime who in the In recent years they have been being investigated by the German authorities in a last effort to settle the pending accounts with the Nazi past : a race against time as fewer and fewer survivors of that time remain.
Pursuing the crimes of the Third Reich
But why Are you now investigating former officials who did not even have command posts during the Holocaust?
The inquiries into the atrocities committed by the Third Reich formally began in 1943, when an international commission was created to investigate crimes committed by the Axis powers. His work came to the imputation of 36 , 10 German and Japanese officials, of which at least 000, 000 were convicted in trials carried out until 1948 .
At the same time, between 1945 Y 1949, courts in the West German area ntal dictated about 4. 600 convictions for crimes of Nazism.
However, after the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in 1948, interest declined of continuing to pursue Nazi crimes s and, in fact, numerous amnesties were issued and even legislation was passed allowing former Nazi soldiers to agree to collect pensions.
“During the decade of 1950, in West Germany there was not much desire to prosecute Nazi crimes, which it resulted in a real scandal in the rest of the world. East Germany, in particular, launched a propaganda campaign that highlighted how former Nazi leaders were in prominent positions in both the private and public sectors. That was truly embarrassing for the government of the FRG ”, explains Devin Pendas, a professor at Boston College specializing in the history of the trials against the Nazis after World War II.
The response of the FRG was creation in 1958 of the Central Office for Investigation of Crimes of National Socialism, which is the body that until now continues to investigate these issues.
Some experts have pointed out that this government agency did a very good job during the following decades, while others point out that there was a lot of resistance from the German judicial authorities to these investigations, Pendas believes that these two events coexisted.
“Clearly, many judges and prosecutors were reluctant in the decades of 1950, 1960 Y 1970 to forcefully prosecute Nazi crimes, in part, because many of them had been working in the Judiciary during the Third Reich but also because they did not want to wash the dirty cloths of their country before the world ”, Pendas tells BBC Mundo .
“But it is also true that the Central Office and many individual prosecutors and judges took this very seriously, exposing much evidence and rendering a great service in bringing many of these atrocities, ”he adds.
The work of the Central Office was further limited by various legal issues such as the fact that German laws did not contain specific provisions for to prosecute war crimes and by the regulations in force then on prescription of crimes , that made it difficult for many of the cases could be brought to trial after 1960.
This government agency also suffered a severe setback when, in 1969, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction of a former SS member who worked as a dentist in the Auschwitz camp (Poland) on the grounds that working in an extermination camp was not a crime in itself.
As a result of that ruling, the Central Office had to abandon an investigation into the Reich Central Security Office, a dependency of the minister The Interior Ministry controlled by the SS that was the main responsible for executing Hitler’s policy of mass assassinations.
To these limitations must be added the fact that the Central Office is a small entity, endowed of few personnel and only has the power to investigate the cases , because once he finds evidence of possible punishable acts, he must pass the files to the prosecutors who are ultimately responsible for bringing the alleged criminals to trial.
The impulse of the 11 September
All these restrictions reduced the Office’s capacity for action Central for many years.
But things changed after 2007, when a German court sentenced 15 years in prison for Moroccan Mounir el Motassadeq for having transferred money to Marwan al Shehhi, the allegedly responsible for crashing the flight 175 of United Airlines against the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, according to the Commission that investigated the attacks of the 11 September 2001.
This precedent drove the then prosecutor from Thomas Walther Headquarters to seek the prosecution of guards and other officials of the concentration camps, even if they had not participated directly in these crimes.
Following this argument it was achieved what in 2011 a German court convicted John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor extermination camp (Poland), for collaborating with the murder of the 28, people who were killed there.
“It became easier to get a conviction. Until then you had to prove that someone had been directly involved in a death. In this case, the Prosecutor’s Office argued that – and the court agreed – that since these camps were extermination centers, anyone who had belonged to the Nazi personnel who was there contributed to those deaths . You no longer had to prove that a guard killed someone in that field, it is enough to prove that it was a guard who worked there, ”explains Pendas.
Justice and History
Demjanjuk’s conviction gave new impetus to the work of the Central Office, which over the last decade has referred prosecutors to more than 200 cases for imputation.
This is not a lower figure when considered that this government agency only has a handful of investigators, that to assemble the cases they have to search for information in different parts of the world and that, due to their advanced age, alleged criminals often die before the file is filed. e is completed.
However, so far, there have only been a handful of convictions , including that of Oskar Groening, a former member of The SS known as the “Auschwitz accountant”, as he worked in the offices of this extermination camp and, among other things, was in charge of counting the money stolen from the victims.
In 2015 , Groening, who then had 94 year-old was sentenced in 2015 to four years in prison for facilitating the murder of 300, 000 prisoners. However, passed away in 2018 without having entered prison pending the outcome of their appeals.
Reinhold Hanning was sentenced in 2016 -to the 95 year old- for cooperating with the death of 175. people in Auschwitz, where he worked as a guard of the SS. Although during the trial he said he was ashamed for having witnessed the deaths without doing anything to prevent them , he denied being guilty of them and appealed the sentence. He died the following year without going to jail.
In 2020, a Hamburg court sentenced Bruno Dey, a former guard of the Stutthof concentration camp, for having collaborated with the murder of 5, 230 people who died in that center while he worked there.
However, as he was a teenager when the events occurred, he was prosecuted by a juvenile court and received a suspended sentence of two years in prison.
Although they have had a lot of visibility , the fact that they are trials against exfu Low-ranking officials who are now so old and who, until now, have not served their sentences effectively has led some critics to question whether it makes sense to continue with these processes.
“I think There is no reason for a person to have immunity from criminal justice because they were a low-ranking official, ”says Todd Buchwald, former ambassador and special coordinator of Global Criminal Justice from the United States, to BBC Mundo.
Indicates that these trials have many objectives including bringing to justice some of those responsible for the terrible atrocities that were committed, creating a historical record of what occurred and strengthening the deterrent message for all those low-level officials who in the future find themselves in a situation where they are tempted to think that because of their low rank they will not pay for these crimes.
“It is not good to help perpetuate such atrocities, so it is convenient to reinforce the deterrent message for the future,” says Buchwald.
“The crimes that were committed in Germany were so devastating that I fully understand the effort to try to bring to justice those who were responsible for what happened,” he concludes.
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