Eight concentration camp suspects have been identified by Jens Rommel, the head of Germany’s central office for the investigation of Nazi crimes in Ludwigsburg. According to Mr. Rommel, he was able to find four men and four women, who worked at Nazi Stutthof concentration camp near what is now Gdańsk in Poland.
Stutthof was a Nazi German concentration camp that was set up around already existing structures after the invasion of Poland in World War II. It operated as the ultimate killing machine from September 2, 1939 to May 9, 1945. More than 110,000 inmates were deported there, and 85,000 victims died in the camp.
Mr. Rommel said that the eight suspects worked as guards, secretaries, and telephone operators at the camp. The individuals are all alive and over the age of 80, and they have denied the claims. He said:
“The male suspects had worked as guards at the Stutthof camp, while the women had been employed as typists or phone operators, Rommel said, all of the suspects were born between 1918 and 1927, meaning they would be in their late 80s or 90s.”
He said their cases had been passed on to prosecutors across the country, and they will decide if the suspects can be charged as accomplices to murder. Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said in a statement.
“Germany’s commitment to identifying more former Nazi camp guards is encouraging.Given the vast system of concentration and extermination camps put in place by the Nazis, and the number of personnel needed to run and guard these sites, it comes as no surprise that a few of these perpetrators are still alive, even today.”
In 2015, Germany’s state justice ministers announced that it was giving Rommel’s office up to 10 more years to continue its investigative work before it is turned into a documentation center.
In June, Reinhold Hanning, 94, who worked at several posts in Auschwitz where 170,000 people were killed, was convicted as an accessory to murder.
In 2011, John Demjanjuk, an autoworker, who lived in the U.S. for years after the war, was convicted of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder.
German authorities are still searching for dozens of suspected Auschwitz guards, who are believed to be alive and residing in Europe under false identities.
