Closing a chapter: The last two Nazis on trial
TWO upcoming criminal trials in Germany will likely be the last chance to convict Nazi war criminals. In September, a 96-year-old woman was tried in the German town of Itzehoe. She’s accused of working as a secretary to the SS commander in the Stutthof concentration camp and facilitating the deaths of over 1 000 prisoners.
This month, a 100-year-old man from Brandenberg will stand trial in the German town of Oranienburg, charged with 3 518 counts of accessory to murder after working as an SS guard in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Neither defendant has been publicly named, in accordance with German privacy laws.
The trials are the last time that the world will be able to hear first person testimony about what took place in brutal Nazi death camps.
These trials mark the end of an era, the last time that the world will be able to hear first person testimony about what took place in brutal Nazi death camps. Germany has not ruled out holding additional Nazi-era trials, but given the advanced ages of the witnesses and defendants involved, these will be difficult to prosecute.
Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis designated over 44 000 prisons in various forms, including ghettos, concentration camps and death camps. These trials will also allow a new generation to learn about Stutthof and Sachsenhausen, two relatively unknown concentration camps that illustrate the vast web of camps built by the Nazis and illustrate the scope of their barbaric cruelty.
Stutthof
Even before World War II broke out, the Nazis monitored areas in Poland, with an aim to build a political prison for Polish dissidents. An entire Nazi unit, the Wachsturmbann Eimann, was created to scout out sites for future concentration camps. The first Poles were sent to Stutthof, in the woods outside the Polish city of Gdansk (Danzig in German) on September 2, 1939, the day after Germany’s invasion of Poland. By 15 September, 6 000 Polish political prisoners were held in the camp: most of them were murdered by SS guards.
Stutthof was nominally a Polish civilian camp initially; in 1941 it became a German labour camp and in 1942 was designated a concentration camp. Originally home to mostly Polish political prisoners, tens of thousands of Jews were moved to Stutthof as the war progressed. Continually expanded, the camp was surrounded by electric fences and eventually encompassed over 100 sub-camps where Jews and other prisoners worked as slave labourers. They toiled in Nazi-owned enterprises and also in nearby privately-owned factories, farms and brickyards. The brutal conditions of Stutthof and its many satellite prisons were clearly visible to the neighbouring community.
One of the most gruesome factories using Stutthof slave labourers was a Danzig factory owned by SS officer Prof Rudolf Spanner. He experimented with methods of producing soap from human fat, and had hundreds of Jewish prisoners in Stutthof executed so he could produce his “soap,” which he called RJS - short for “Reines Judische Fett” (Pure Jewish Fat). When Soviet soldiers liberated Stutthof, they found rooms full of dead Jews who’d been murdered for this horrific purpose. (After the war, Rudolf Spanner was never arrested and continued his scientific career.)
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum characterises the conditions in Stutthof as “brutal”. Those who were too sick to work were murdered by camp doctors in the infirmary.
The Nazis also built a small gas chamber at Stutthof in which they killed injured or ill workers with Zyklon B gas. Typhus epidemics swept the camp, killing thousands. It’s thought that well over 60 000 prisoners died in Stutthof and its satellite work camps.
In 2019, an elderly Israeli man named Abraham Koryski travelled to Germany to give evidence at the trial of a former Stutthof guard. “We were beaten constantly, the whole time, even while working,” he recounted. “Worst of all were the whips.” He described seeing SS guards put on sadistic “shows” of torture. In one case, a son was forced to beat his own father to death. “You didn’t know if the officers were acting on orders,” Koryski described of these instances of horrific cruelty, “or if they did it on their breaks” for amusement.
By January 1945, there were 50,000 prisoners — mostly Jewish — in Stutthof. With Allied forces closing in, Nazi guards (aided by Ukrainian guards who also manned the camp) forced approximately 5 000 prisoners on a death march to the Baltic Sea.