Nearly 70 years later,a new round of Auschwitz prosecutions

World War II: German panel compiles list of 50 ex-guards who worked at the concentration camp and might be brought to court

CHRIS COTTRELL

They worked as guards at the Holocausts most notorious death camp,and nearly seven decades later,they may finally be brought to account in a court of law.

Germanys Central Office for Investigation of Nazi Crimes has prepared a list of 50 former guards who worked at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland and are still alive,said Kurt Schrimm,head of the office.

Staff members searched old court records and Holocaust-related documents looking for names,and even travelled to Poland last year to try and augment their lists. One checked the names of Auschwitz guards against databases to determine which were still alive.

The next step is ruling out those who were already tried,either by the occupation authorities or the German legal system. We have to determine now whether or not these 50 people that we found on this list can be legally prosecuted, Schrimm said Wednesday in a telephone interview.

The list includes names known to his office since the Auschwitz trials in the 60s as well as recent additions made last year,Schrimm said.

The Holocaust and the events of World War II continue to exert a significant pull on the German psyche. The television mini-series Our Mothers,Our Fathers,which portrayed five young friends in Germany and how World War II affected them,attracted about 7.6 million viewers for its final episode last month. Der Spiegel,the countrys leading newsweekly,often has articles related to Hitler,and regularly puts an image of him on its cover.

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The significant new effort to broaden the pool of Holocaust prosecutions nearly seven decades after the end of the war came about as a result of the conviction two years ago of John Demjanjuk,a former guard at the Sobibor death camp. The case lowered the legal threshold necessary to win a conviction so long after World War II.

Demjanjuk was found guilty even though he was not directly linked to any specific crime. Instead the court,in Munich,ruled that his work as a guard at the camp automatically made him an accessory to any murders carried out there. It convicted him of being an accessory to the murder of all 28,060 people who died at the camp during his tenure as a guard there. He died before a higher court could rule on his appeal.

Efraim Zuroff,chief Nazi hunter for Simon Wiesenthal Centre,welcomed the new push to bring Holocaust perpetrators to justice before they die. Were very happy that this thing is happening, Zuroff said.