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Ludwigsburg, Germany - Germany's national office for catching
Nazi war criminals rejected Tuesday criticism by the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre that not enough of them were being prosecuted.
Kurt Schrimm, who heads the special prosecutions office
in Ludwigsburg, south-western Germany, said the slowing pace
was related to the scarcity of legally acceptable evidence
62 years after the end of the Second World War.
'That evidence exists only in cases that are few and far
between,' he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in an interview.
Often important documents were missing or witnesses had died
of old age.
An annual report by the Wiesenthal centre had criticized
the Germans for not achieving either an indictment or a conviction
in the 12 months to March, whereas it praised Italy and the
United States.
Schrimm said the number of indictments should not used to
measure the success of his office's investigations.
The office has authority to hunt former Nazis in all of
Germany's 16 states.
'We are doing as much as we can,' said Schrimm, adding that
it was unfair to compare his work to that of the US Office
of Special Investigations which unmasks European immigrants
suspected of crimes during World War Two.
'Their job is to deport people who have wrongly obtained
US citizenship. Our job is to actually prosecute,' he said.
He added that Italian law made it much easier to obtain convictions
than in Germany.
Schrimm insisted that his investigators were conducting
worldwide inquiries 'at top pace.'
Currently some of his team were searching archives in Ukraine
and Belarus for evidence against suspects. He himself was
booked on a trip to Canada to gather evidence.
'We won't stop until we have read the lot,' he said, adding
that he could not yet say when that time would come, since
Russia, Brazil and Chile had still not granted the Ludwigsburg
office's requests for access.
His staff still wanted to see files in those countries but
were not able to.
The Wiesenthal centre, founded in 1977 and named after the
late 'Nazi hunter' Simon Wiesenthal, is based in Los Angeles.
This week's report was issued by its Jerusalem office.
monstersandcritics.com
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