Germany
reopens investigations into Nazi death camp guards – JCE II
Poland
reopens investigations into Nazi-era crimes
Germany
reopens investigations into Nazi death camp guards
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 5 October 2011
Prosecutors
in Germany have reopened
hundreds of investigations of former Nazi death camp guards and others who
might now be charged under a precedent set by the conviction of John Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor camp in
Poland in 1943.
the
head of the German prosecutors' office dedicated to investigating Nazi war crimes , Kurt
Schrimm
The
Simon Wiesenthal Centre's chief Nazi-hunter, Efraim Zuroff, said he would
launch a campaign in the next two months – a successor to his Operation Last
Chance – to track down the remaining war criminals.
He
added that the Demjanjuk conviction had opened the door to prosecutions that
were never thought possible.
Demjanjuk,
now 91, was deported from the US to Germany in 2009 to stand trial. He was convicted in May of 28,060
counts of accessory to murder for serving as a guard at the Sobibor death camp.
It was the first time
prosecutors were able to convict someone in a Nazi-era case without
direct evidence that the suspect participated in a specific killing.
He
has appealed against his conviction.
In
bringing Demjanjuk to trial, Munich prosecutors argued that if they could prove he
was a guard at a camp like
Sobibor, which had been established for the sole purpose of extermination, it would be enough to convict him of being an accessory to murder.
After
18 months of testimony a Munich court
agreed and found Demjanjuk guilty, sentencing him to five years in
prison. Demjanjuk, a retired car worker who denies having served as a guard, is
currently free and living in southern Germany as he waits for his appeal to be
heard.
Schrimm said his
office was poring over its files to see if others fit into the same category
as Demjanjuk. He could not give an exact
figure, but said there were probably "less than 1,000" possible
suspects living in Germany and elsewhere who could face prosecution.
It
has not yet been tested in court
whether the Demjanjuk
precedent could be extended to
guards of Nazi camps where
thousands died but whose sole purpose
was not necessarily murder.
Murder
and related offences are the only charges that are not subject to a statute
of limitations in Germany. Even the
narrowest scenario – investigating the guards of the four death camps: Belzec,
Chelmno, Sobibor and Treblinka – plus those involved in the Einsatzgruppen
could lead to scores of prosecutions, Zuroff said.
Immediately
after the war senior Nazis such as Hermann Göring were convicted at
war-crimes trials run by the allied powers, while investigations of lower-ranking
officials fell to German courts. But there was little political will to
aggressively pursue the prosecutions, and many of the trials ended with short
sentences or the acquittal of suspects in greater positions of
responsibility than Demjanjuk allegedly had.
However,
Schrimm said it makes sense to try to bring new cases to trial once the
Demjanjuk case is through the appeals process, rather than expend the resources
needed to charge a suspect only to have the case thrown out if Demjanjuk wins.
Zuroff
said he hoped the appeal would be fast-tracked so new charges could be filed.
"This is a test for the German judicial system to see if they can expedite
this in an appropriate manner to enable these cases to go forward," he
added.
Germany
reopens hundreds of Nazi investigations
October
5th, 2011
"This
signals that there is a new generation of prosecutors who want to take a fresh
and serious look, and it means that the larger German bureaucratic machine is
paying attention to the importance of finding these criminals."
Germany
Reopens Nazi War Criminal Investigations
October
9, 2011
the
defense attorney for Demjanjuk, he has often made the argument that his client
is effectively a stand-in and
a kind of scapegoat. That he essentially
stood by and did nothing and participated, but that a great many Germans
at that time did the same thing. And I guess I'm wondering what you feel about
that assessment
Poland reopens
investigations into Nazi-era crimes
Thu
Oct 27, 2011
WARSAW
(Reuters) - Poland has reopened investigations into crimes committed at the
Nazi death camp of Auschwitz during World War Two, in an effort to track down any surviving
camp employees before they die.
Up
to 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, perished at Nazi German hands at Auschwitz,
near the city of Krakow in southern Poland, during the war that ended in 1945.
In
the postwar communist era, Warsaw launched probes into crimes committed at
Auschwitz, but closed them in the 1980s because questioning witnesses
and perpetrators based abroad was too hard at a time when Poland was part of
the Soviet bloc.
"We
do not exclude the possibility of finding alive former employees of the
Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp," Piotr Piatek of Poland's Institute
of National Remembrance (IPN) told the PAP state news agency Thursday.
Jewish
groups welcomed Thursday's announcement by the IPN.
Poland
reopens investigation into Auschwitz crimes
By
VANESSA GERA, Associated Press Oct.27,
2011
Nazi
Germany opened Auschwitz in 1940, months after it invaded and occupied Poland.
Over the next five years of war, German and Austrian Nazis murdered up to 1.5
million people there at the expanded Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex, most of
them Jews from across Europe, but also Poles, Roma, gays and others
A
leading international Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, praised Poland's reopening of
the investigation
Poland
reopens investigations into Auschwitz crimes
By
Matthew Day, Warsaw , 27 Oct 2011
Many
of the old cases were started in the 1970s and 1980s but failed to progress
owing to difficulties caused by the Iron Curtain,
Most
of the staff who served at the camp were captured and punished but a 1956
amnesty stopped trials and led to the release of some of those imprisoned for
crimes committed at Auschwitz
