105-year-old under investigation over deaths at Nazi POW camp
by The Washington Times AI News Desk · The Washington TimesGerman prosecutors are investigating a 105-year-old man on suspicion that he worked as a guard at a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp during World War II and was an accessory to multiple killings there, prosecutors said in a statement issued Thursday.
The suspect is believed to have served at Stalag 326 VI K, a camp in the Senne region of northwestern Germany that held roughly 180,000 to 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war between 1941 and its liberation by American troops in April 1945. The man is “accused of being an accessory to multiple murders through his activities there,” Dortmund prosecutors said.
A parallel case against a second former guard at the same camp, identified by Dortmund prosecutor Sonja Frodermann, had been underway before that suspect died a few months ago at age 99. No further details on either man have been released, but the two cases underscore the difficulty facing German authorities as they race to bring the last living participants in Nazi-era crimes to justice more than 80 years after the war’s end.
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About 5.7 million Soviet Red Army soldiers were captured by Germany during the war, and roughly 3.3 million of them are believed to have died in custody, many from malnutrition, disease and forced labor. Survivors who eventually made it home were often treated as traitors by Soviet authorities.
Stalag 326 was among the largest of the Nazi POW camps. An estimated one in three Soviet POWs brought into the German Reich between 1941 and 1945 passed through the Senne complex, and many were later sent to do forced labor elsewhere in the region. Prisoners from France, Poland, Serbia and Belgium were also held there.
Germany has had no statute of limitations on murder or accessory to murder since 1979, allowing prosecutors to keep pursuing Nazi-era cases even as the pool of surviving suspects shrinks. Such investigations are typically opened by the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, in Ludwigsburg, before being handed to regional prosecutors — in this case, the office in Dortmund.
Germany’s recent prosecutions of elderly camp guards have had mixed outcomes. In 2022, Josef Schutz, then 101, became the oldest person ever convicted of a Nazi-era crime when the Neuruppin Regional Court sentenced him to five years in prison for complicity in murders at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Schutz never served time behind bars; he died in 2023 while appealing the verdict.
A former Stutthof concentration camp secretary was convicted on similar charges in 2022 and given a suspended sentence; she died last year at 99. A separate case against another centenarian former guard at the Hemer POW camp, also in North Rhine-Westphalia, remains open.
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