German prosecutors are investigating a suspected former member of the Einsatzgruppen death squads for involvement in World War II massacres, part of an 11th-hour effort to bring elderly ex-Nazis to justice.
It is the third case to be launched in Germany in recent months against individuals believed to have been part of the killing squads. All three cases are being investigated under a new legal argument, recently upheld by the country's top criminal court, that those who contributed to the Nazi killing machinery can be convicted of being accessories to mass murder, even if they cannot 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."
During the Holocaust, the Einsatzgruppen slaughtered perceived racial or political enemies in mass executions. Experts agree that the SS units and police personnel on the death squads, who followed behind the regular army as it pushed into the Soviet Union in 1941, were responsible for well over 1 million deaths.
The Nazis later established the system of death camps partially because of 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, Einsatzgruppe C.
Einsatzgruppe C was responsible for one of the largest and most notorious of the mass executions, the shootings of nearly 34,000 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine northwest of the Ukrainian city of Kiev, on Sept. 29-30, 1941.
The German federal prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi war crimes has established that Hoffmeister was in Ukraine with the unit around that time, but has not linked him to any specific killings, said Jens Rommel, the head of the office.
"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 in Braunschweig, near the retirement home where Hoffmeister lives, 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. The prosecutors need proof that Hoffmeister was present in some capacity when Einsatzgruppe C committed atrocities.
The argument that Germans who enabled war crimes can be charged with accessory to murder even if they did not personally pull any trigger or put poison in a gas chamber was first used successfully against John Demjanjuk in 2011.
Demjanjuk, a retired Ohio autoworker, was convicted in Munich on allegations that he had served as a Sobibor death camp guard, which he denied. He died before his appeal could be heard.
The 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening using the same argument was upheld the next year by Germany's top criminal court on appeal, cementing the precedent.
Several Einsatzgruppen leaders were tried and convicted in the Nuremberg trials immediately after World War II. In recent years, prosecutors have focused more on former guards at Auschwitz and other death camps, dedicating their limited resources to cases comparatively easier to prove.
"With the Einsatzgruppen, they were mobile, on the move over a huge area, so it's much more difficult," Rommel said. "We hope with the new legal situation we will have better success."
Hoffmeister has told police he served in a successor group to the Einsatzgruppe C – "Special Task Force C" – and did not participate in any killings, lead prosecutor Julia Meyer said.
"He says categorically he was not involved in any shootings," she said. she added that Hoffmeister also maintains that he does not remember a lot about the war years.
Two other suspected Einsatzgruppe C members currently under investigation – 94-year-old Kurt Gosdek and 96-year-old Herbert Wahler – also deny participating in wartime massacres.
Rommel's office began looking at Hoffmeister and other Einsatzgruppen members after the Wiesenthal Center in 2014 went through a list of 1,069 men and women who had served with the units, pulling out the names of 80 people who were born after 1919 and thus most likely to still be alive.
Rommel's office zeroed in on eight suspects they determined were alive, and has now turned over the files on Gosdek, Wahler and Hoffmeister to state prosecutors to pursue charges. One of the eight has since died and four others – all from Einsatzgruppe A, on which there is less information – are still under investigation, Rommel said.
Though the Wiesenthal Center only has names and dates of birth for 1,069 people who served in the Einsatzgruppen, some estimates suggest the number could be as much as eight times higher, meaning dozens more might be alive.
"Now the challenge is to find the rest of the names," Zuroff said. "We owe it to the victims."
