BERLIN – Nazis in their 90s accused of mass murder during World War II are the target of an intensified hunt by German prosecutors who want to punish them before they die.
Three
suspected members of the Nazimobile death squads known as the
"Einsatzgruppen" are being investigated, according toGerman federal
prosecutors. The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for more than
1 million shooting massacres of civilians.
The effort
comes 73 years after the war ended and as the youngest perpetrators of the
Holocaust turn 90, underscoring the limited time left to find the remaining
Nazi war criminals.
Though there
are no precise counts, Nazi hunters estimate dozens who served in
the Einsatzgruppen are still alive, along with as many as several thousand
Nazis who committed war atrocities against civilians.
"In a
way, when the Nazis said that they would create a thousand-year empire, they
weren't wrong. What they did will be felt for the next thousand years,"
said Rabbi Daniel Fabian of the Kahal Adass Jisroel synagogue in Berlin.
His
grandmother survived in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the
Holocaust, in which Nazis systematically murdered 6 million Jews and countless
others.
"For
the 95-year-old men who are being tried, perhaps this is a distant
memory," Fabian said. "But for people like myself and my parents,
it's still something that's very palpable."
Horrific
scenes from Auschwitz and other death camps are prominent in history books
and films, but little is taught about the brutal Einsatzgruppen shooting
squads.
In the
war’s early years, Nazi death squads tore through villages of the Soviet
Union behind German troops, killing mass numbers of Jews and
others before Adolf Hitler established concentration camps such
as Birkenau and Auschwitz.
One of the
most notorious incidents by the Einsatzgruppen was the two-day massacre in
1941 of more than 33,000 people, mostly Jews, at Babi Yar, a
ravine near Kiev, Ukraine.
"The
camps liberated by the Western Allies, they're the iconic images of the
Holocaust," Efraim Zuroff, the chief Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Jerusalem, told USA TODAY. "But the truth of the matter is that
the greatest horrors of the Holocaust are really the murders by shooting."
Allied
forces tried and convicted a few dozen members of the Einsatzgruppen during the
Nuremberg trials after the war, but only a handful of death squad members have
been tried since then, Zuroff said. None was brought to justice in the
past 40 years.
German
prosecutors initially targeted the death squad leaders instead of rank-and-file
members because of the sheer number of those involved in the genocide. The
strategy was logical, given the desire to bring prominent Nazis to justice, but
the implications of ignoring those killers were troubling, Zuroff said.
"People
who were out there shooting and murdering innocent people ... day in, day out,
were basically ignored," he said.
It’s
difficult to prove whether suspected Einsatzgruppen members actually
pulled the trigger because the killing squads were constantly on the move,
said Jens Rommel, who heads the German federal prosecutors' office that
investigates Nazi war crimes.
Rommel said
that changed after groundbreaking cases in 2011 and 2015.
First was
the conviction in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a guard at the Sobibor
extermination camp in Poland who became an American citizen in the 1950s, for
being an accessory to the murder of more than 28,000 Jews. Then in 2015,
Oskar Gröning, a junior squad leader at Auschwitz, was convicted as an
accessory to 300,000 murders.
Those
convictions gave prosecutors a legal precedent to go after suspected
Einsatzgruppen members, because they could indict low-level abettors of
atrocities just by proving the men were active Nazis at the time.
That's when
Zuroff got to work. Combing through archives, he compiled a list of
79 members of the killing squads likely to still be alive.
Zuroff's
work led German authorities to look into three suspects in the cities of
Braunschweig, Celle and Kassel, though no formal charges have been filed,
according to Rommel.
The three
men, ages 94 to 96, have been widely identified in the German news media,
but prosecutors declined to identify the suspects, citing privacy laws.
"Finding
these people has been one of the most satisfying results of my work over the
years," said Zuroff, who has hunted Nazis since the 1970s.
"When they're brought to justice, there will be no person happier than
me."
Despite the
difficulties of bringing such individuals to justice, the final-hour effort is
welcomed by victims of the Nazis, as well as Germany's Jewish
community. "Even if these perpetrators are already very old today,
it's a gesture of latent justice," said Josef Schuster, president of the
Central Council of Jews in Germany.
With that
gesture, Rabbi Fabian said, the arduous process of forcing the German nation –
and the world – to atone for the Holocaust has found new energy.
"It
brings uncomfortable memories back to the surface," he said. "But in
order to come to terms with the horrors of the past, it's both necessary and
important."