German officials have opened an investigation into an 87 year-old suspected WWII Nazi concentration camp guard. According to German weekly Der Spiegel, the unnamed presumed Nazi worked at the death camp in 1944, during which period 344,000 people were sent to their deaths.
Although chief prosecutor for the Investigation of Nationalist Socialist Crimes Kurt Schrimm admitted there was not tangible evidence holding him directly responsible for the murders, or to suggest that he witnessed them, the investigation follows the precedent of late Sobibor camp guard John Demjanjuk who was last year convicted in Germany of serving as an accessory to the murder of Jews at the camp, despite no evidence being available as to his specific involvement in the crimes.
Head of the Israel branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Dr Efraim Zuroff, confirmed he has been in touch with prosecutors in this case and highlighted the Demjanjuk case means that any wartime Nazi “whose entire purpose was the murder of Jews, will be indicted and convicted automatically”.
However, Schrimm added, the prosecution have documents proving the suspect in this latest case worked at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and was responsible for sending Jews to their deaths in the gas chambers. The investigation, which is thought to already have reached an advanced stage, is expected to be complete in another few weeks, at which point German authorities will decide whether to extradite him from his current country of residence.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk died earlier this year aged 91, having previously been found guilty by a Munich court of more than 27,000 counts of serving as accessory to murder during his six month stint as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in 1943.
The landmark ruling, after an 18 month-long trial, came after the German court declared it was convinced he had served as a guard, and was therefore automatically implicated in killings carried out during his time there, which mainly involved Dutch Jews.
Some 1.3 million people, including 1.1 million Jews from across Nazi-occupied Europe, died in Auschwitz between 1940 and its liberation by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.
Auschwitz was set up in a former Polish army base by the Nazis shortly after they invaded Poland in 1939 and was initially used to detain and kill Poles seen as a pool of resistance to their occupation. It was gradually expanded to Birkenau and became the hub for the Holocaust.
The site was turned into a Polish state-funded memorial and museum after the war.