Man, 105, being investigated over murders at Nazi PoW camp

Man accused of being accessory to murders at Stalag 326 VI K amid race to prosecute suspects before they die A 105-year-old man is under investigation on suspicion of being an accessory to multiple murders at a Nazi prisoner of war camp, German prosecutors have said. The case, which is being handled by the public prosecutor’s office in Dortmund, centres on the Stalag 326 VI K camp in western Germany , in what is now the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. “The 105-year-old suspect is thought to have been a guard at the prisoner of war camp Stalag 326 VI K in the Senne region of western Germany,” prosecutors said in a statement. The man is “accused of being an accessory to multiple murders owing to his activities there”, they said. The Senne camp housed between 180,000 and 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war between 1941 and April 1945, when it was liberated by American troops. The investigation is the result of an urgent last-minute scramble by the judiciary to prosecute alleged participants in the Nazi killing machine before they die. The judicial efforts stem in part from a recognition that many of the suspects who have escaped prosecution in the eight decades since the end of the second world war on the grounds that they were considered to have played an insignificant role were in fact integral to the implementation of the Hitler regime’s murderous aims.

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