Germany investigates 100-year-old man suspected of being a Nazi guard

German prosecutors are investigating a 100-year-old man suspected of having been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp and taking part in executions in the final years of World War II. Dortmund authorities indicate that the crimes occurred between December 1943 and September 1944, as prosecutor Andreas Brendel said today, confirming information from Bild.

The man would have worked in the prisoner of war camp in Hemer (west), where at least 100,000 soldiers arrived, most of them Soviets, and where thousands of them died. Many similar cases have been initiated in recent years, building on the one carried out in 2011 against former Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk, despite no evidence being presented that he directly murdered anyone.

Another former guard, Josef Schuetz, was sentenced in June 2022 to five years in prison and died less than a year later, aged 102. In April, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin died before he could answer court questions over accusations he was an accomplice in the murder of 3,300 people.