Nazi crimes: why judgments are still possible today

At the beginning, the former concentration camp secretary had fled temporarily. Today is the next day of the trial against the 96-year-old. Why the processing is only now taking place – and yet it is so important.

What is the process about?

The public prosecutor’s office accuses the defendant of complicity in more than 11,000 murders – in the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp east of Gdansk. In 18 other cases, she is said to have assisted in attempted murder. Between June 1943 and April 1945 the woman was a typist and typist for the camp commandant. In this role she helped organize the torture, humiliation and murder in the camp. It is important that she is not accused of murdering herself – not that she shot people herself or operated the gas chamber in the camp. But: She is said to have provided help for the atrocities in the concentration camp. In simplified terms, one could say: because they went “over their desk”.

What about a statute of limitations?

For many of the crimes that the people in the camps suffered, no one can now be held criminally accountable. Hundreds of thousands of deprivations of liberty, countless abuse of all kinds, robbery – all of this has been statute-barred for decades. But: murder does not expire. And complicity in murder does not expire. That is why convictions are still possible today, more than 75 years later.

Why is a conviction important 75 years later?

“Murder does not expire” – this makes it clear: Our legal system does not provide for a line in such cases. This basic decision was made against the background of the Nazi crimes, explains Thomas Will in Podcast “Die Justizreporter * inside” der ARD legal editors. The lawyer heads the “Central Office of the State Judicial Administrations for Investigating National Socialist Crimes”. With its investigations, the Ludwigsburg authority ensures that the protagonists from back then are still brought to justice today. Criminal law is also about restoring legal peace. Such processes can make important contributions to this. The survivors of the murdered confirm this again and again when they take part in proceedings against the helpers from back then.

Why were there hardly any such proceedings immediately after the war?

In the years after 1945 there was a kind of “closing line mentality” in the FRG, a tendency to forget rather than want to come to terms with it. An important step towards more reappraisal were the Auschwitz trials at the Frankfurt Regional Court from 1963 – initiated by the Hessian Attorney General Fritz Bauer. A general rethinking was not associated with this.

Later in the 1960s, the Federal Court of Justice ruled in relation to Auschwitz: In order to punish the camp staff from then for aiding and abetting, it was necessary to provide the men and women with concrete evidence of the murders they had promoted. In the context of the mass murders in the concentration camps, this is an almost impossible task. Therefore, in the following decades, many proceedings against the “smaller cogs” in the Nazi killing machine were dropped by the public prosecutor’s offices.

Why are these trials and judgments possible today?

A kind of turning point was only brought about by the judgment against John Demjanjuk in 2011. The Munich Regional Court decided: The presence of camp supervisor Demjanjuk in the Sobibor extermination camp and his knowledge of the murders are enough to convict him of aiding and abetting murder.

Demjanjuk died, however, before the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) as the highest criminal court could deal with the new line. In 2016, however, the Karlsruhe judges confirmed it in the case of Oskar Gröning, the so-called accountant of Auschwitz – not only for extermination camps, but also for concentration camps.

How did the BGH justify the important Gröning decision?

The central message is: The “smaller cogs” also played a central role in the genocide of the Jews. For the Nazis, an “organized killing apparatus” with well-established processes was a prerequisite for committing thousands of murders in the shortest possible time. Literally it says in the BGH decision: “Only because they had such a structured and organized ‘industrial killing machine’ with willing and obedient subordinates, the National Socialist rulers were able to order the ‘Hungary Action’.” As part of the “Hungary Action”, Hungarian Jews were deported en masse, mainly to Auschwitz. The legal assessment from the Gröning decision should also play an important role in the current proceedings in Itzehoe. The trial must show whether there will be a conviction.

How many other proceedings are still ongoing?

Since the decision there have been repeated trials and judgments against former concentration camp employees: in 2016 against the Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning or in 2020 against Bruno Dey, a former security guard in the Stutthof concentration camp. The investigation by the “Central Office” in Ludwigsburg continues. Proceedings against a former concentration camp guard are currently also pending before the Neuruppin Regional Court. However, because of the old age of the possible perpetrators, the investigations are increasingly becoming a race against time. According to information from the head of the authorities, Thomas Will, there are currently eight cases with various public prosecutors in Germany. In addition, there are seven other people who are currently being examined by the “Central Office”.

How did the reappraisal go in the GDR?

After the war, denazification was initially carried out particularly rigorously in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the GDR – in terms of police, justice and internal administration. Anti-fascism was one of the main pillars of the GDR state ideology. It was propagated internally and externally – also to present itself as the better of the two German states. Today, however, it is known: GDR citizens are said to have been given blanket absolution if they turned to socialism in return. Likewise, Nazi perpetrators living in the GDR were probably not brought to court consistently.