German authorities are racing the Grim Reaper to bring an alleged war criminal to justice. Prosecutors in Dortmund say a 105-year-old man is under investigation on suspicion of serving as a guard at Stalag 326 VI K, a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in western Germany that held up to 200,000 Soviet POWs between 1941 and 1945, the Guardian reports. The man is "accused of being an accessory to multiple murders owing to his activities there," prosecutors said.
The investigation is part of a late-stage push by German authorities to pursue lower-ranking figures once considered too minor to charge. That shift traces back to the 2011 conviction of Sobibor guard John Demjanjuk, which established that serving at a death camp could be enough to prove complicity, even without evidence of direct killings. Since then, Germany has prosecuted aging defendants including 101-year-old Sachsenhausen guard Josef Schütz, who was convicted in 2022 of aiding thousands of murders and died the following year.
Prosecutors said a case involving another Stalag 326 guard had been underway, but the 99-year-old suspect died a few months ago, the BBC reports. If the new case proceeds, it is expected to spotlight the broader Stalag system, in which millions of Soviet prisoners were held and more than half died.
- Stalag 326 was liberated by American troops on April 2, 1945. "Of the approximately 5.3 to 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war who were taken into German captivity overall, between 2.3 and three million did not survive," a memorial at the site states, per CBS News. The memorial says Soviet POWs suffered from "malnutrition, inadequate medical care, appalling sanitary conditions, and... forced labor."
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