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Sachsenhausen Memorial
Photo: Omer Messinger/Getty Images
On December 20, the Itzehoe District Court ended a case on Germany's darkest chapter: it convicted a former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp of being an accessory to murder and attempted murder.
The 97-year-old appealed.
Five other cases against suspected Nazi perpetrators are pending with public prosecutors in Erfurt, Coburg and Hamburg and two in Neuruppin.
It's about crimes in the Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme and Sachsenhausen camps.
According to SPIEGEL information, one of the two procedures from Neuruppin has now landed at the Gießen public prosecutor's office.
Chief Public Prosecutor Thomas Hauburger confirmed that a preliminary investigation was being conducted against a man from the Rhine-Main area on initial suspicion of aiding and abetting the murder.
The procedure was handed over to Giessen a few weeks ago.
"In the course of the investigation, it turned out that the accused was an adolescent at the time of the crime and is currently living in Hesse," says Hauburger.
The 98-year-old suspect is said to have worked as a security guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Brandenburg between 1943 and 1945.
more on the subject
Judgment against former concentration camp secretary: Julia Jüttner and Fabian Hillebrand report from Itzehoe in the »centre of the chain of command«
Former concentration camp secretary in court: Why a trial is right even 77 years after the end of the war A commentary by Julia Jüttner
“Let's take on one camp after the other”: The hunt for the centenariansFabian Hillebrand reports from Ludwigsburg
The 2011 trial of John Demjanjuk, a security guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, paved the way for proceedings like this one: Since then, security guards, typists and all the helpers who have not been individually involved in the crime have been held accountable.
It was only in June that the Neuruppin district court had convicted 101-year-old Josef S. of being an accessory to murder in 3,518 cases because he had been a guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Rajmund Niwinski represented survivors both in these proceedings and in those against the former secretary in the Stutthof concentration camp.
He says aiding and abetting murder is a crime with no statute of limitations.
If the Gießen public prosecutor files charges, the trial against the 98-year-old could begin next year.
More than 200,000 people were imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Oranienburg, just outside Berlin.
More than half of them were murdered there.
There were systematic killings such as mass executions of Soviet prisoners of war by shots in the neck, which the Nazis referred to as "Operation 14f14," and downright extermination operations in gas chambers.
