Wehrmacht guard charged with war crimes

A 98-year-old former Wehrmacht soldier is accused of being aware of prisoners of war deprivation in what could be the first of a new series of prosecutions for Nazi war crimes.

The German prisoner of war camp Stalag VIIIC. Picture: Stalag Luft III: The German POW camp that inspired the Great Escape.

Prosecutors in Germany have indicted a former Wehrmacht soldier who manned watchtowers in a prisoner of war camp in what could be the start of a new series of prosecutions for Nazi war crimes. Until now the focus has been on concentration and death camps.

The Berlin state prosecutor’s office charged the 98-year-old Berlin man with complicity in the murder of Soviet prisoners at the “Stalag 365” prisoner of war camp in the city of Volodymyr-Volynskyy in what is now western Ukraine.

The accused was deployed at the camp from November 1942 until March 1943. According to the indictment, at least 809 prisoners died of malnutrition, disease, exposure, forced labour and a lack of medical attention during his time there, a Berlin criminal courts spokesman told The Times.

“He is accused of being aware of the deprivation and the starvation of prisoners of war and having thereby made himself culpable,” she said. “It’s different from the other cases because they always dealt with concentration camps.”

Stalag Luft III prisoners walk past a watchtower around the perimeter of the camp.

The prosecution has cited “cruelty”, a criterion for murder under German law, in its indictment. As the guard was 19 at the time, the case was sent to a criminal court in Berlin. The court has asked the prosecution to provide further information and it is not clear yet whether it will come to trial.

If it does, it will direct a judicial spotlight on a crime that historians say has not received enough attention in public remembrance of World War II: the deaths of more than three million Soviet prisoners at the hands of their German captors.

It will also address the accusation that it was not just the SS and fanatical Nazis that committed war crimes, but ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers, too. That remains a source of controversy in Germany because it places a potential war criminal in every family.

The indictment follows a landmark ruling against John Demjanjuk, a former extermination camp guard convicted in 2011, which set a precedent for courts to convict lower-ranking staff on the grounds that their mere presence in camps where systematic killing took place was enough to make them accessories to murder.

“It would already be a big step if the court were to admit the indictment,” Thomas Will, head of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, told The Times.

“The prisoner of war camps went in absolutely the same direction as the concentration camps: the Soviet untermenschen in the language of the time, were deemed worthless, as Jewish people were deemed worthless.”

The prisoner of war camps, like the murders of Sinti and Roma, were a “blank spot” in the judicial treatment of Nazi crimes, Will said. “In prisoner of war camps, especially those with Soviet prisoners of war, conditions were catastrophic and one can also speak of systematic killings.”

Will said his office had combed through more than 1.7 million index cards of personnel deployed in prison amps. He said that further such guards could be prosecuted but there was unlikely to be a “flood” of cases because many were dead or very old.

German courts are dealing with six Nazi war crimes prosecutions of aged defendants. A further three cases are being reviewed by the Central Office.

– The Times