LUDWIGSBURG, Germany The German special prosecutors’ office that investigates Nazi war crimes said Tuesday it is recommending charges against dozens of alleged former Auschwitz guards, opening the possibility of a new wave of trials almost 70 years after the end of World War II.

Federal prosecutor Kurt Schrimm, the head of the office in Ludwigsburg, said an investigation of 49 suspects turned up enough evidence to recommend that state prosecutors pursue charges of accessory to murder against 30 people in Germany who were stationed at the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Seven additional suspects who live outside the country are being investigated, two could not be found, and one further case has gone to prosecutors, he said. Those living abroad are in Austria, Brazil, Croatia, the U.S., Poland and even one in Israel, Schrimm said without giving further detail.

The names and hometowns of the suspects were not released. Schrimm said the oldest suspect was born in 1916 and the youngest in 1926, meaning they could range in age from 87 to 97.

The cases are being sent to the responsible state prosecutors’ offices in 11 of Germany’s 16 states. It will be up to them to determine whether the elderly suspects are fit to stand trial and whether to bring official charges.

“The biggest enemy is time,” Schrimm told reporters.

Accessory to murder charges can be filed under the same legal theory that Munich prosecutors used to try former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died in a Bavarian nursing home last year while appealing his 2011 conviction on charges he served as a Sobibor death camp guard, Schrimm said.

Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was the first person convicted in Germany solely on the basis of serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing. Under the new legal argument, anyone who was involved in the operation of a death camp was an accessory to murder. Demjanjuk steadfastly maintained that he had been mistaken for someone else and never served as a camp guard.

Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, said the decision could mean even more cases will be opened against guards at the five other main death camps established by the Nazis.

“It’s only a shame that this kind of legal reasoning was not applied previously, because it would have led to many, many more cases of people who definitely deserved to be brought to justice,” he said in a telephone interview.

Schrimm cautioned that the health of the suspects — and of possible witnesses — would make bringing them to trial difficult.

“I don’t want to raise excessive expectations,” he said.

The Nazis built six main death camps, all in occupied Poland: Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

The Auschwitz and Majdanek complexes also had labor camps associated with them, but Schrimm said the suspects in the current investigation all worked in the main death camp, known as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

About 1.5 million people, primarily Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz camp complex alone between 1940 and 1945. Overall, about 6 million Jews died in the Nazi Holocaust.

Schrimm’s office is now focusing on the other death camps, starting with investigating all former personnel at Majdanek.

timesdispatch.com