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The conviction of the concentration camp secretary Furchner could be the last case of its kind. Why the justice system took action too late against thousands of suspected perpetrators.

Former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk on December 21, 2009 during his trial in the Munich District Court Photo: Matthias Schrader/ap

BERLIN taz | Thomas Walther is certain: “This is the last time that a German court has had to judge the crimes of the Nazis,” he told the taz on Tuesday. It was the lawyer Walther who initiated the trial against John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, soon after the turn of the millennium. The proceedings before the Munich district court ended in 2011 with the defendant being sentenced to five years in prison for aiding and abetting the murder of more than 28,000 people.

13 years later, the legal dispute with the Nazi criminals appears to have been concluded. Thomas Will, head of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, does not rule out the possibility that a trial might still take place. But he points out that the few people still under investigation are between 99 and 101 years old. In June, the Hanau Regional Court dropped the case against a 99-year-old. The former SS man was declared unfit to stand trial.

The Demjanjuk trial in 2009 marked the beginning of the late phase of the Nazi trials in West Germany. Before that, fewer and fewer Nazi perpetrators had been convicted by the judiciary each year. This was mainly because in 1969 the Federal Court of Justice required that an individual murder charge was necessary for a conviction for aiding and abetting murder in a concentration camp. In fact, only very few survivors were able to identify such a murderer, and the alleged perpetrators denied any guilt. This is probably how thousands of Nazis got away with it.

Thomas Walther, who later made a name for himself as a representative of survivors as a co-plaintiff in various proceedings, questioned precisely this logic – and won. Demjanjuk was convicted, although there was no individual charge of murder. Rather, the court decided that the mere fact that he worked as a guard in a camp that was used solely for the mass murder of Jews was sufficient grounds for a conviction for aiding and abetting murder. Only charges of murder could be punished at all, because all other crimes were and are statute-barred.

Avalanche of investigations

The Demjanjuk verdict triggered a small avalanche of new preliminary investigations into suspected Nazi criminals. The then head of the Central Office, Kurt Schrimm, alone initiated research into 49 former Auschwitz guards. To do this, the Nazi investigators compared lists of concentration camp employees with the data of social security contributors who were still alive. Of the 49, 30 suspects ultimately remained, and their data was sent to the relevant public prosecutors’ offices throughout the Federal Republic.

But only two of them were convicted – Oskar Gröning in 2015 in Lüneburg to four years and Reinhold Hanning in 2016 in Detmold to five years in prison. In Gröning’s case, the Federal Court of Justice approved the practice of sentencing without a specific charge of murder. It thus became legally binding. In total, there were six convictions by 2022. The other perpetrators had served in the Stutthof and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. The last trial ended on December 20, 2022 before the Itzehoe Regional Court. Irmgard Furchner received a suspended prison sentence of two years under juvenile criminal law.

Dozens of other cases, however, remained stuck in their early stages. Now the fact that the judiciary had treated the guards and other perpetrators leniently for so long was taking its toll. Often the accused had recently died, and even more often experts found that the once so dashing SS men were unfit to stand trial. Even ongoing cases had to be discontinued, as in the case of Johann R. in Münster, Westphalia, in 2019. The legal dispute in Neubrandenburg turned into a farce, where an unwilling judge dragged out the trial and insulted a representative of the civil party until the man had to be replaced. The accused, an Auschwitz paramedic, had since developed dementia, which ended the case.

Lawyer Thomas Walther is now 81 years old. He says of the legal dispute with the Nazi perpetrators: “This is not a feather in the cap of the German justice system.”