BERLIN — A poster campaign by the Simon Wiesenthal Center intended to identify aging Germans who might have participated in Nazi crimes has yielded information about four people, including a woman who might have been a guard at Auschwitz, that has been passed to the authorities for further investigation, the group said Monday.
The campaign, with posters showing a concentration camp and the words “Late, but not too late,” started in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg this year and yielded “way more than we expected,” said Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Israel office of the Wiesenthal center, which tracks Nazi war crimes and their perpetrators.
Posters will go up in eight more German cities in coming weeks, Mr. Zuroff said.
<> Based on tips from the campaign, he said, the German federal office in charge of bringing Nazi war crimes to light is investigating a woman suspected of working at Auschwitz and a man who might have witnessed the Nazi massacre of 642 villagers at Oradour-sur-Glane, France, in June 1944.
In September, the head of that office, Kurt Schrimm, said it had sent information on 30 Germans suspected of working as camp guards in Auschwitz to state prosecutors for further investigation. An additional seven people suspected of being Auschwitz guards live outside Germany, Mr. Schrimm said.
Those inquiries resulted from the 2011 sentencing in Munich of John Demjanjuk, a former camp guard extradited from the United States to face charges of assisting the murder of 28,000 people. Mr. Demjanjuk died at age 91 in Bavaria in 2012.
In addition, Mr. Zuroff said, the poster campaign has yielded information on a man who might have worked at the Dachau concentration camp and another who harbors copious Nazi memorabilia. The information has gone to prosecutors in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia.
Over all, the poster campaign generated 285 calls and information about 111 people — Germans and some Austrians — living in 19 countries, including 81 in Germany, Mr. Zuroff said. About half the calls were placed to a toll-free number in Germany, while others were fielded mostly by offices of the Wiesenthal Center in the United States, Israel and other countries, he said.
Starting Thursday, he said, about 3,000 posters will go up in Dresden, Frankfurt, Magdeburg, Nuremberg, Rostock and Stuttgart
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