Exclusive | Recent Nazi deaths not the end, German court still searching for accessories to WWII mass murder
When two former Nazis who worked at concentration camps recently died aged 99 and 100, many believed the atrocities of the Holocaust were finally at an end.However, a special court in Germany is still pursuing around a dozen of those who helped the Nazis commit mass murder, eighty years after the end of the Second World War, The Post has learned.“We are always working on new prosecutions,” said Thomas Will, chief prosecutor at the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, just outside the city of Stuttgart.The special court has helped to find and prosecute some 7,000 Nazi war criminals since its inception in 1958, according to its website.The court is currently searching for “accessories to National Socialist crimes” born between 1925 and 1927, who were teenage administrators or guards at camps where the murders of more than 11 million people, including the Holocaust of six million Jews, were perpetrated by the Nazis.But even those cases are getting difficult to prosecute due to the advancing ages.Last month, the last-known Nazi concentration camp guard died before he was set to face German prosecutors for the murder of more than 3,300 people at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.Gregor Formanek, 100, was a teenager during his employment at the camp and was to be tried as a minor.
He would likely have received a suspended sentence if he had been found guilty.Another teenage Nazi, Irmgard Furchner, 99, was hired as a shorthand typist at Stutthof concentration camp, working there between 1943 and 1945.In 2021, when she was 96, she was charged with 11,412 counts of accessory to murder.She was the last person to have been convicted in Germany for Holocaust-era crimes and died in January, although her death was only recently announced.
She was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2022.As accessories to Nazi crimes are becoming increasingly difficult to find, one of the world’s most ce...