A man suspected of having been a guard in the Nazi camp of Ravensbrück (Germany), on which the German justice was investigating, died at the age of 99, announced Tuesday February 28 the parquet floor of Cobourg.
An investigation was opened against this suspect, "
who would have been part of the guard team at Ravensbrück between 1943 and 1945
", according to a press release from the prosecution.
Suspected of "complicity in murder"
“
He was suspected of complicity in murder
”, adds the prosecution, specifying that “
the exact number of cases could not at this stage be quantified
”.
“
The suspect having died, the investigation is now closed
,” concludes the prosecution.
The investigation was close to being closed and a referral of the suspect to imminent trial, say German media.
More than 130,000 detainees, mainly women, were imprisoned in the Ravensbrück camp (north of Berlin) between 1939 and 1945. Tens of thousands, including Jews, died of murder, starvation, disease or ill-treatment , before the liberation of the camp by the Red Army on April 30, 1945.
Read alsoLa Douceur, by Étienne de Montety: a rose in Ravensbrück
Seventy-seven years after the end of the Second World War, Germany continues to search for former Nazi criminals still alive, illustrating the increased, albeit belated, severity of its justice.
The case law of the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard of the Sobibor camp (Poland) in 1943, to five years in prison, now makes it possible to prosecute for complicity in tens of thousands of assassinations any auxiliary of a concentration camp, from the guard to the accountant.
In June 2022, a 101-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (north of Berlin) was sentenced to five years in prison.
In December of the same year, a 97-year-old former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp in present-day Poland was given a two-year suspended prison sentence.
She called.