As the Coburg public prosecutor’s office said in a press release that afternoon, they had stopped investigating a former concentration camp guard. The accused 99-year-old has died in the meantime. When asked, Johannes Tränkle, spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office, did not want to explain exactly what caused the man to die. According to reports, the investigation was relatively advanced and the accused was capable of standing trial. Observers assumed that the indictment was imminent and the trial could have taken place next year. It would have been one of the last trials against a suspected Nazi perpetrator.
The man from the Coburg area was accused of having served in the main camp in Ravensbrück from April 1943 to May 1945, thereby making the deaths of prisoners possible in the first place. It was about possible accessory to murder.
Between 1939 and 1945, 132,000 women, 20,000 men and 1,000 young women from the “Uckermark youth protection camp” were registered as prisoners in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. They came from more than 40 nations, including numerous Jews and Sinti and Roma. Tens of thousands were murdered or died of starvation, disease or medical experiments. Around 6,000 prisoners died in just one gas chamber built at the end of 1944. At the end of April 1945, the SS forced tens of thousands of prisoners on death marches in a north-west direction. Around 3,000 sick people who had been left behind were liberated by the Red Army on April 30, 1945.