BERLIN (AP) — The Simon Wiesenthal Center has identified dozens of former members of Nazi mobile death squads who might still be alive, and is pushing the German government for an investigation, The Associated Press has learned.
The Wiesenthal Center’s top Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff, told the AP on Wednesday that in September he sent the German justice and interior ministries a list of 76 men and four women who served in the so-called Einsatzgruppen.
The Einsatzgruppen, made up of primarily SS and police personnel, followed Nazi Germany’s troops as they battled their way eastward in the early years of the war, rounding up and shooting Jews in the opening salvo of the Holocaust before the death camp system was up and running.
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, they had killed more than a million Soviet Jews and tens of thousands of others by spring 1943.
“In the death camps the actual act of murder was carried out by a very small number of people — the people who put the gas into the gas chambers — but the actual act of murder in the Einsatzgruppen was carried out individually,” Zuroff said. “Almost every person in the Einsatzgruppen was a murderer, a hands-on murderer.”
Zuroff narrowed down the list of possible suspects by choosing the youngest from a list of some 1,100 with dates of birth known to his organization, from the estimated 3,000 members of the death squads.
All 80 would be very old if still alive, born between 1920 and 1924, Zuroff said.
“Time is running out,” he said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “Something has to be done.”
Because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, the Wiesenthal Center has been unable to confirm where the suspects live, but Zuroff said that task, and determining if they’re still alive, should be relatively easy for police or prosecutors.
Meantime, he said, his office is willing to assist in any way possible in coming up with evidence or other details.
“The hope is that as many as possible will be alive, but there’s no guarantee obviously,” he said. “But every person alive today is a victory of sorts.”
Germany’s Interior Ministry had no immediate comment but the Justice Ministry said it had passed the details of the letter to the special federal prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi-era crimes.
The head of that office, Kurt Schrimm, told the AP he hasn’t yet received the new information.
A handful of Einsatzgruppen members were tried and convicted after the war but most have gone unpunished.
Schrimm has said, however, they could now be prosecuted under new German legal theory that service in a Nazi unit whose sole purpose was murder is enough to convict someone of accessory to murder — even without evidence of participation in a specific crime as had previously been required.
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Or what? They might…die?
Really, you’re going to bum rush a bunch of extreme senior citizens who may or may not remember their own names, much less what happened in the 1940’s, take them to Germany to stand trial for a crime you can’t quantify, calling no witnesses because they’re all dead, and convict them of something and then…give them a suspended sentence because they’re too old and feeble to go to prison?
What will Efraim Zuroff and the Wiesenthal bunch do in 5 to 10 years when the rest of low-grade Nazis are all dead? Who will they chase then? Will they run around shaming their children?
Also:
Seriously? The German equivalent of Ex post facto law?
How can America support this?
All the real monsters are dead. The victims are almost entirely dead. There is nothing left to do but rip the scabs off of old wounds.
Let it rest already.
Have we located and brought to justice the plantation owners who abused their ‘slaves’? How about those men who murdered slaves back then?
Indeed. There’s still useful work to be done, primarily involving education, and continuing to track down looted assets (artwork, for example). But when it comes to seeking personal justice, that train really has left the station.
Or the white’s that lynched returning ww2 soldiers, or the ones who lynched pregnant black women and beat their babies out of them are we going to find them! And the southern lynchers of the 60’s and 70’s where are they !!
The point is not chasing down some nice old man who once, a long time ago, did his target shooting with human beings. The point is that unrelenting justice and punishment may dissuade a young man now from trying something like that.
Is there any civilized country with a statute of limitations on murder?