Nazi death squads focus of latest war crime cases in Germany
BERLIN (AP) — German prosecutors are investigating a suspected former member of Adolf Hitler’s mobile killing squads for involvement in World War II massacres carried out by the “Einsatzgruppen,” part of an 11th-hour effort to bring elderly ex-Nazis to justice, The Associated Press has learned.
It’s the third case to be opened in Germany recent months targeting individuals who are believed to have been part of the death squads. All three are being investigated under a new legal argument, recently upheld by the country’s top criminal court, that someone who helped the Nazi killing machinery run can be convicted of accessory to mass murder, even if they can’t be linked to specific deaths.
Extending the legal standard on complicity from death camp guards to the Einsatzgruppen raises the possibility of a fresh wave of investigations, said Efraim Zuroff, the head Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, who alerted German authorities about the new suspects.
“It was a very significant decision, but it’s only one that has been reaching fruition in recent months after we helped them find now three people who fit the category,” he said. “It’s not exactly clear why it took them so long.”
The Einsatzgruppen were the Nazis’ opening salvo in the Holocaust — SS units and police personnel who followed behind the regular army as it pushed into the Soviet Union in 1941, slaughtering perceived racial or political enemies in mass executions. Estimates vary, but experts agree they were responsible for well over 1 million killings.
The Nazis later established their system of death camps partially due to concerns about the psychological effects the up-close mass killings were having on the Einsatzgruppen troops themselves.“The death camps and concentration camps ... became the iconic images of the Holocaust, but it was the Einsatzgruppen that were maybe even a more stark manifestation of the Nazi ideology and the Final Solution,” Zuroff said. “The number of active (Einsatzgruppen) participants is much greater than the number who actually carried out the murders in the death camps.”
The latest investigation centers on 95-year-old Wilhelm Karl Friedrich Hoffmeister, a former SS Rottenfuehrer — roughly equivalent to corporal — suspected of serving with one of the death squads in Ukraine. That group, Einsatzgruppe C, was responsible for the shootings of nearly 34,000 people at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of the Ukrainian city of Kiev, on Sept. 29-30, 1941 — one of the largest and most notorious of the mass executions done by Einsatzgruppen. The German federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg that investigates Nazi war crimes has established that Hoffmeister was in Ukraine with the unit around that time, but hasn’t linked him to any specific killings, Jens Rommel, the head of the office, told the AP.
“We don’t know what he did on what day,” Rommel said. Rommel’s office does not have authority to file criminal charges, but determined there was enough evidence to recommend that prosecutors based near where Hoffmeister lives in a retirement home pursue accessory to murder charges against him. Serving in the unit would not be enough on its own to secure a conviction, even under the updated evidentiary standard, so the prosecutors in Braunschweig need proof that Hoffmeister was present in some capacity when Einsatzgruppe C committed atrocities.