Ex-judge relentless in hunt of SS men

• He is one of the last Nazi hunters.

Thomas Walther is 73, a retired German judge outraged by how little his country has done to bring SS soldiers to justice.

More than 120,000 investigations of suspected Nazi war criminals were carried out by postwar Germany, but shockingly, only 560 people were ever convicted.

But Walther has pursued the last surviving ex- Nazis in a way that is beginning to turn those results around. After 31 years as a judge, he retired and joined the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes, based in Ludwigsburg, Germany. Rather than only prosecuting cases where there was specific evidence of murder, he has pushed for prosecutions as accessories to murder.

Anyone who helped run the Auschwitz death factory, Walther insists with his fiery passion, bears criminal responsibility.

One of his first successes was John Demjanjuk, a former Ukrainian citizen and later Ohio autoworker, and former SS guard at the Nazi extermination camp of Sobibor. Walther convinced German prosecutors they could bring him to trial without evidence of a specific slaying, but simply because he stood guard as thousands were marched into the gas chambers.

In 2011, Demjanjuk became the first former Nazi found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Dutch Jews at Sobibor, and was sentenced to five years imprisonment. He died before his appeal could be heard.

Walther followed that success with Oskar Groning, the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” only the 50th Auschwitz guard to have been convicted out of 6,500 who have stood trial.

And now, his work on behalf of 30 of the 57 plaintiffs in the case of Reinhold Hanning has born fruit with Friday’s guilty verdict.

“I have the utmost admiration and respect for him,” says Hedy Bohm, one of the Toronto survivors Walther represents.

Despite his tireless efforts, Walther worries that he is losing the race to prosecute any more former Nazis.

In April, former Auschwitz guard, Ernst Tremmel, died just days before he was to go on trial at the age of 93. Proceedings against 95-yearold Hubert Zafke, a former Auschwitz medic, have been repeatedly postponed because of his ill health.

Walther fears many Germans aren’t interested in the final trials.

“I think those who have knowledge about the Holocaust, they believe it has to be done,” he says. “But there are also a lot of people, young people who are not interested, and they say, ‘ It costs a lot of money, let the old man die in his bed and let him go.’ ”

But these matters shouldn’t be decided by popular opinion, insists the retired judge.