Senior Public Prosecutor Thomas Will stands in one of the file rooms detailing investigative foreign correspondence over Nazis from World War Two
Credit: Craig Stennett
Thomas Will has been described by the German press as the “last of the Nazi hunters”. From an office in the historic city of Ludwigsburg, just north of Stuttgart, he heads a team of prosecutors who are working to track down the last surviving perpetrators of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity, and bring them to justice while there is still time.
But in a year in which Germany marked the 75th anniversary of the start of the Nuremberg trials,Mr Will admits his team is fast running out of suspects who are still alive.
“The justice ministers of all the German states agreed in 2015 that our work would continue as long as there were still living perpetrators left to prosecute,” says Mr Will. “But it’s clear it will only be a few more years. The youngest suspect we’re currently investigating is over 90.”
The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, to give it its official name, was set up in 1958. But at first its work was hampered by laws that meant it could only investigate crimes committed outside Germany, and by judges who had themselves served under the Nazis and appeared all too willing to acquit suspects on the slightest of technicalities.
The last Nazi war crimes suspect facing deportation from the US, Jakiw Palij, a former concentration camp guard, was sent to Germany in 2018
Credit: AFP
For decades the Central Office remained hamstrung by a German legal precedent that only the most senior Nazi leaders could be held responsible for the worst crimes of the Holocaust. That changed in 2011, when a German court found John Demjanjuk, a Soviet prisoner-of-war who had volunteered as an SS guard, guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp.
That opened the way to a slew of prosecutions in recent years, most famously the case of Oskar Gröning, the so-called “book-keeper of Auschwitz”, who was found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of at least 300,000 Jews in 2015 and sentenced to four years in prison at the age of 93.
The Central Office’s critics say it has been forced to go after old men who were in junior positions during the Second World War because of Germany’s failure to prosecute more senior perpetrators while they were still alive.
“Of course it’s true that any perpetrators who are still alive were very young at the time in question. They would have been 18 or 19, very junior figures. But that does not make them innocent,” says Mr Will.
This archive in Ludwigsburg holds more than 1.7 million files on the Nazis and their activities
Credit: Craig Stennett
The Central Office is currently investigating 11 cases. The suspects cannot be named or otherwise identified under German law, but they are all German citizens currently living in the country.
Three of the cases concern crimes committed at Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, where 50,000 prisoners died of inhuman conditions. Two concern Mauthausen camp in Austria, where more than 300,000 are believed to have died, thousands of them murdered in mobile gas chambers, thousands more literally worked to death.
“I learned early on that I have to leave my work in the office,” says Mr Will. “When you’re dealing with these sorts of crimes, you have to learn not to think about them when you’re not working. The hardest thing is dealing with the descendants of victims. I had a case in Italy where a young girl had survived by pretending to be dead while the corpses of the rest of her family lay over and around her.”
He rejects the label Nazi hunter. “I don’t prosecute Nazis, I prosecute criminals,” he says. “I don’t investigate people for being Nazis. I investigate them for committing crimes under the law of Germany.”
In a clear sign the Central Office’s work is coming to an end, each new case to come to court is routinely hailed by the international press as “probably the last Holocaust trial”. In June a 93-year-old former guard at the Stutthof concentration camp d was found guilty of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder and given a two-year suspended sentence.
But most of the cases never get that far. Many are called off after elderly defendants are ruled too sick or infirm to stand trial. Even Gröning, the “book-keeper of Auschwitz”, never went to prison. He spent the last three years of his life fighting his sentence through the appeal courts and died at the age of 96 before he could start serving his sentence.
For Mr Will, there is more to his office’s work than sending old men to die behind bars. “People from other countries sometimes ask me, why are you still prosecuting these crimes in Germany?” he says. “I think this decision is a statement that what happened will not be forgotten.”
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