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Guards from Nazi POW camps get away with it

The Soviet prisoners of war are among the largest groups of victims of National Socialism.

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Guards from Nazi POW camps get away with it

The Soviet prisoners of war are among the largest groups of victims of National Socialism. Between the German Reich's invasion of the Soviet Union and the end of World War II, the Wehrmacht captured 5.7 million members of the Red Army. Her treatment was criminal.

The forced labor in the war economy and all kinds of industrial plants was hard, the food supply was catastrophic, diseases were rampant. Medical care was not available. 3.3 million Soviet soldiers were killed in German captivity. The Wehrmacht deliberately let the young men starve, die of disease and cold, or publicly execute them.

The criminal investigation of the systematic mass killings in prisoner-of-war camps and work details hardly existed. The legend of the “clean Wehrmacht”, which historians have disproved, persisted for a long time.

The Germans murdered without punishment. In at least the past 20 years, not a single guard at a “Stalag”, a main camp for Wehrmacht prisoners of war, has been convicted of aiding and abetting mass murder.

It was not until the beginning of 2021 that a new chapter in the legal investigation of National Socialist crimes began. The Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, which has been coordinating investigations into Nazi cases since 1958, initiated several preliminary investigations against former Wehrmacht soldiers who had guarded prisoner of war camps.

At the beginning of 2022, the Central Office handed over four of the proceedings to the state prosecutors after the preliminary investigations had been completed. In the meantime, however, all of these proceedings have been discontinued. This is shown by research by WELT at the public prosecutor's offices in Berlin and Dortmund and the general public prosecutor's office in Celle.

In one case, charges had already been filed. The Berlin public prosecutor accused a 99-year-old of having assisted in at least 809 cases in the gruesome murder of prisoners in the "Stalag 365" prisoner of war camp in Vladimir-Wolynsk (Ukraine) between November 1942 and March 1943.

However, the youth chamber of the regional court, which is responsible due to the age of 19 at the time of the crime, decided in November 2022 not to admit the prosecution to the main hearing because the accused was permanently unable to stand trial. The decision is not yet final because the public prosecutor's office has lodged an appeal.

Senior public prosecutor Sebastian Büchner told WELT: “From the point of view of the public prosecutor, the report on which this decision is based is not fully convincing in terms of content. On the other hand, according to the local interpretation, there would only be a limited ability to stand trial, but not a complete inability to stand trial.” Although the case has been before the Court of Appeal for several months, no decision has yet been made.

In August 2022, the General Prosecutor's Office in Celle dropped preliminary proceedings against a then 101-year-old, also due to the accused being classified as permanently unable to stand trial. A crime period from September 1943 to September 1944 in the prisoner of war camp "Stalag I b" in Hohenstein (East Prussia, today Poland) was determined. The accused was between 21 and 22 years old when he was working as a security guard.

As early as April 2022, the public prosecutor's office in Dortmund dropped investigations against a then 98-year-old man who worked from August 1941 to around October 1943 between the ages of 18 and 20 in the "Stalag 358" prisoner of war camp in Schytomyr (Ukraine).

"The only demonstrable activity of the accused as an interpreter in a kolkhoz, which was responsible for the food supply of the prisoner of war camp, was not presented as an accessory to murder, according to the local view, since there was, among other things, a murder-promoting meaning of the actions required according to the case law - at least with the ascertainable facts - is missing," said senior public prosecutor Andreas Brendel WELT.

The General Public Prosecutor's Office in Celle had already discontinued another preliminary investigation in January 2022. The accused, who worked as a security guard at Stalag VI C in Bathorn (Lower Saxony) between October 1943 and the liberation of the camp, died at the age of 96. The Attorney General's Office has been investigating the man since mid-2021. The preliminary investigations by the central office in Ludwigsburg had been going on for more than two years.

The Ludwigsburg prosecutors had based themselves on case law since the judgment against Sobibor guard John Demjanjuk in 2011, according to which concentration camp guards can be convicted without concrete evidence of the crime.

If systematic killings have taken place in concentration camps over a certain period of time, guard work is punishable as an accessory to murder if the guards' recognizable events were promoted by their work. Crimes under the murder clause are the only ones in Germany that do not become time-barred.

The Central Office considers the case law to be transferrable. "Even in prisoner-of-war camps, there were often systematic mass killings through the creation and maintenance of hostile conditions," said Thomas Will WELT, head of the agency.

There, on average, older people who were no longer suitable for the front were used as security guards. "We can only prosecute those who were younger at the time, and also generally five to six cohorts, which we can pursue with some degree of success."

The Central Office is currently only conducting preliminary investigations into a prisoner of war camp, the "Stalag III C" in Alt-Drewitz (Poland). Thousands of soldiers from the Soviet Union, France, Poland, Great Britain, Yugoslavia and other nations were imprisoned and murdered there. "But the evidence is so weak that I don't expect charges," Will said.

Lawyers Thomas Walther and Hans-Jürgen Förster repeatedly represent survivors of Nazi crimes in trials against concentration camp guards. “We are very late, a bit too late. The judiciary has closed its eyes for decades," said Walther. “Creating and maintaining conditions hostile to life satisfies the murder attribute of cruelty. If this can be conclusively established in prisoner-of-war camps, it is the duty to investigate perpetrators who are still alive.”

Förster, former federal prosecutor at the Federal Court of Justice, said WELT: "The strange omission already affects the central office itself, which should have extended its preliminary investigations to guards in prisoner-of-war camps. The case law that has been practiced since the Demjanjuk case on aiding and abetting state-ordered murder is really not that new.”

"Kick-off" is WELT's daily news podcast. The most important topic analyzed by WELT editors and the dates of the day. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, among others, or directly via RSS feed.

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