Image of the entrance to the Nazi concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, in 2020.TOBIAS SCHWARZ / AFP
Time has been the best ally of the accomplices of the Holocaust.
76 years after the end of the Second World War, thousands of participants in the atrocities or necessary collaborators of those who executed them have died without having to answer to justice.
But some of them are still alive, and the German authorities keep trying to get them to sit on the bench and take their blame.
It is not just about going after those who ordered the mass executions, pulled the trigger or escorted those who died in the gas chambers with rifle butts.
A Louisburg-based office has spent a decade tracking files and taking testimony from witnesses in order to prosecute accomplices: unranked guards, administrative staff, secretaries.
People who knew, and accepted, that they worked in concentration camps where people died every day, sometimes killed in cold blood and sometimes from disease and starvation.
It is a race against the clock, all those interviewed for this report acknowledge.
This week the Neuruppin Prosecutor's Office formally presented its accusation against a 100-year-old man, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen death camp, 35 kilometers north of Berlin.
He considers him an accessory to the murder of 3,518 people between 1942 and 1945, the years he worked there.
Also a few days ago another prosecutor's office, that of Itzehoe, presented its indictment against Irmgard F., a 95-year-old woman who was secretary of the commander of the Stutthof concentration camp, near Gdansk, in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Her case is unusual, because it is a woman - very few have been tried - and because she was a minor.
Peter Müller-Rakow, Itzehoe's chief prosecutor, explains that the case has been open for five years and has required "extremely complex investigations", such as taking testimony from witnesses in the United States and in Israel.
Both investigations have relied on the help of historians, confirms Cyrill Klement, Neuruppin's chief prosecutor, to determine exactly, with the help of documentation, when the defendants worked in the fields and what information they had access to.
A medical evaluation has concluded that the 100-year-old man is physically and mentally fit to endure a judicial process, although if that moment comes the courtroom sessions will be shorter than usual.
In the case of Irmgard F. it will be a juvenile court that decides whether to open a trial against her.
She is accused, Müller-Rakow explains, of "assisting those responsible for the camp in the systematic slaughter of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war in her role as stenographer and secretary to the commander between June 1943 and April 1945." .
Historian Astrid Ley, attached to the management of the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, does not recall any other case of women prosecuted as accomplices to murder in recent decades - after the war dozens of female camp guards were tried for war crimes such as Ravensbrück - and attributes it to the fact that there were few female staff in the fields.
Administrative tasks, for example, were usually handled by men, SS soldiers, as well as surveillance.
Ley explains that, in the same way that men accepted to work in the fields to avoid being sent to the front, women preferred these jobs to factories.
They were better paid, there was no shortage and they offered a life in the country, away from the bombings of cities like Berlin or Hamburg.
“Before going they didn't know what they were going to find,” Ley admits, “but when they saw it, many stayed, and it is not true that they were forced, that they would end up in hospital if they rebelled, as many alleged in the trials;
we know many examples of young people who left and were not retaliated ”.
The Central Office for the Clarification of the Crimes of National Socialism in Louisburg has investigated more than 7,000 cases since its inception in 1958. But it had not focused on accomplices until relatively recently.
"A mistake," says lawyer Cornelius Nestler, who has represented victims of the Holocaust in various processes.
For decades, he explains, the office did not investigate the collaborators, who were part of the Nazi horror machine.
Until 2011, no one had been convicted of complicity.
But then the case of John Demjanjuk, 91, a former guard at the Nazi camp of Sobibor in occupied Poland, came to trial.
He was a simple voluntary vigilante, without rank.
He was extradited from the United States, where he had gone into exile, and sentenced to five years in prison as an accessory to 28,000 murders, those that occurred while he worked there.
His direct relationship to any specific crime was not proven, but it was not necessary: it was enough to prove that he knew the daily horror of the countryside.
The sentence changed everything.
It was as an extension to continue looking for the guilty, everyone.
The Louisburg office has a dozen open investigations that it will send to the prosecutors of the defendants' place of residence when they are concluded.
“The SS guards made sure the prisoners did not escape.
Therefore, if they knew that organized mass murders were taking place, they committed a crime of complicity ”, explains Nestler about the case of the 100-year-old man.
The same argument would apply to Stutthof's secretary: "If he helped the commander organize the murders, he was an accomplice."
Murder does not prescribe and was already punishable, like complicity, when the events occurred, he adds.
Nestler sees it difficult for the woman to be sentenced to a prison sentence.
First, because it is a juvenile court, and second, because "unless the accused are in extraordinary shape for their age, it is difficult for them to even be tried."
Attorney Christoph Rückel, who participated in the trial of 93-year-old Bruno Dey last year, does not rule it out.
A juvenile court sentenced Dey, who was a guard in Stutthof aged 17 and 18, to five years as an accessory to the murder of more than 5,000 people.
It is estimated that in that camp, the first established by the Nazis outside of Germany, in 1939, around 65,000 people died, almost half Jews.
"You still consider yourself an observer, but you were an endorsement of that man-made hell," the judge told him.
Rückel, who represented the victims, says these efforts, although late, are important to the survivors and their families.
"They greatly appreciate the continued investigation of what happened during the Nazi period."
Also society as a whole: "They show that Germany does not give up when it comes to clarifying its past."