The German government has announced that hundreds former Nazi death camp guards will now be brought to justice. This comes in the wake of the May 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk (91), a former camp guard assigned to the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War. Demjanjuk was convicted of assisting in the murder of more than 28,000 Dutch Jews. While he was sentenced to five years in jail, Demjanjuk is currently free on appeal. Other elderly Nazis and collaborators may now face similar proceedings. German authorities are now seeking them out. Kurt Schrimm, head of the prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi crimes, says he is now looking into other possible suspects who could still be alive and prosecuted once Demjanjuk's appeal is heard.
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, welcomed the news that the files were being re-examined and urged prosecutors to act quickly. "As our numbers — those of the victims — have also rapidly dwindled, this represents the final opportunity to witness justice carried out in our lifetimes," he said. "Time is the enemy here."
After the war, Demjanjuk emigrated to the United States and for a time lived in relative obscurity as an autoworker in Detroit MI as a naturalized U.S. citizen. Following decades of investigation, Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship and deported to Germany to stand trial.
Schrimm said the Demjanjuk verdict had provided motivation to clean up the spotty German record on prosecuting war criminals. His office is going over all of its files to see if others may fit into the same category as Demjanjuk. There are probably “under 1,000” possible suspects, averred Schrimm, who could still be alive and prosecuted. “We have to check everything - from the people who we were aware of in camps like Sobibor ... or also in the Einsatzgruppen,” he said. The Einsatzgruppen were motorized death squads that engaged in mass killings in Poland, Russia, and elsewhere under Nazi control early in WW2 before death camps like Auschwitz and Sobibor were established.
The youngest suspected Nazis are now octogenarians and many of them living in government retirement homes and receiving state pensions. Some may not be medically competent to stand trial.
Following WW2, leading Nazis such as Hermann Goering were convicted at war crimes trials run by the Allied powers at Nuremburg, while investigations of the lower ranks eventually fell to German courts. With little political will to aggressively pursue the prosecutions, and many of the trials ended with short sentences, or the acquittal, of suspects in greater positions of responsibility than Demjanjuk allegedly had. For example, Karl Streibel — the commandant of the SS camp Trawniki, where Demjanjuk allegedly was trained — was tried in Hamburg but acquitted in 1976 after the judges ruled it hadn't been proven that he knew what the guards being trained would be used for.
According to Efraim Zuroff, an investigator for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, applauded an apparent new willingness on the part of younger German prosecutors and judges to pursue even the lower echelons among Nazis. “Our goal is to bring as many people to justice as possible,” Zuroff said. “They shouldn't be let off if they're less than Mengele, less than Himmler ... in a tragedy of this scope, their escaping justice should not in any way mean that people of a lesser level would be ignored.” A factor favouring the prosecution is that would likely have. Those who are harder to locate will be the focus of the Wiesenthal center's new appeal, which Zuroff said would include reward money for information that helps uncover a suspect. “'This ... is a test for the German judicial system to see if they can expedite this in an appropriate manner to enable these cases to go forward,” Zuroff said. The Wiesenthal Center will launch an investigation, named ‘Operation Last Chance’, within the next two months to find elusive Nazis.
Prosecutor Schrimm said it makes sense to try to bring new cases to trial once the Demjanjuk case is through the appeals process, rather than expend resources to charge a suspect only to have the case thrown out if Demjanjuk wins. The Demjanjuk appeal may take as much as a year or more, while fellow Nazis are not getting younger. 'It's very clear that they're old, that's why we're preparing everything now so that as soon as there is a final decision, we can move immediately with charges,” Schrimm said.
The Demjanjuk verdict already has "created the possibility to prosecute perhaps as many as several dozen Holocaust perpetrators who served in the most lethal Nazi installations and units, and basically spent as much as two years carrying out mass murder on practically a daily basis," said Zuroff of the Wiesethal Center.
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