The execution of Nazi guards of the Stutthof concentration camp on July 4, 1946.
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The head of Germany’s main agency for investigating Nazi crimes, Jens Rommel, told dpa on Tuesday the suspects included four men and four women who worked in the German concentration camp Stutthof near Danzig in Poland.
In response to the news, President of the World Jewish Congress Ronald Lauder said in a statement: “Germany’s commitment to identifying more former Nazi camp guards is encouraging…it comes as no surprise that a few of these perpetrators are still alive, even today”.
While the men worked as security guards, the women were employed in jobs such as typists and telephone operators at the camp, Rommel said.
In an interview with Reuters, Jens Rommel said his Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes is now going after more civilian camp workers after last year’s successful prosecution of the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, Oskar Groening. It became a concentration camp in 1942, mainly for non-Jewish Poles.
Ageing suspects, most of whom deny guilt, are growing frail more than 70 years after the end of World War Two, making the race to prosecute them all the more pressing. “These employees had to forward details on the arriving deportation trains, for example”, Rommel said.Germany had long faced criticism for not prosecuting those who were the small cogs of the Nazi machinery even though they did not actively take part in the killing of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.
In a four-month trial, Hanning was determined to be an SS guard at Auschwitz from 1942 to 1944.
At the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp, there were no witnesses to testify what his role was in the camp.
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Zuroff told JTA he is still waiting for news about several former members of the Einsatzgruppen death squads who may still be living in Germany.
