Accused Nazi POW camp guard, 105, being investigated in Germany

A 105-year-old man is being investigated for possible crimes committed at a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp during World War II, German prosecutors said on Thursday.

"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 told AFP in a statement.

The man is "accused of being an accessory to multiple murders through his activities there."

The case was first reported by the Bild newspaper, which said that another former guard at the same camp had recently been investigated but had died in the interim.

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, according to the memorial which now stands there.

"Of the approximately 5.3 to 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war who were taken into German captivity overall, between 2.3 and three million did not survive," the memorial says.

Soviet prisoners of war suffered from "malnutrition, inadequate medical care, appalling sanitary conditions, and... forced labor."

Last year prosecutors in Dortmund also opened an investigation into a 100-year-old former guard at another WWII prisoner of war camp in Hemer, which also held mostly Soviet inmates. That man was suspected of taking part in executions between December 1943 and September 1944. Another alleged guard at the camp was charged in 2023.

Trials in recent years

Several trials of Nazi camp staff have been held in recent years, spurred by the 2011 conviction of former Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk, despite no proof he had directly killed anyone. Demjanjuk, a former auto worker in the U.S., died in 2012 at the age of 91.

However, time is running out 80 years after the end of the war.

Josef Schuetz, a former guard sentenced in June 2022 to five years in prison, died less than a year later at the age of 102. At the time, he was the oldest person ever to stand trial for crimes committed by the Nazi regime.

In April 2025, an alleged former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin died before he could face trial over charges of being complicit in the murder of more than 3,300 people.

In 2021, a 96-year-old woman accused of 11,000 counts of accessory to murder at a Nazi concentration camp went on trial in Germany.

In 2018, former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening died before he could begin serving his 4-year sentence. Oskar Groening, who was dubbed the "Accountant of Auschwitz," was convicted in Lueneburg in 2015 as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews. The court concluded that although there was no evidence of involvement in a specific killing, Groening knew that Jews were being slaughtered at the German death camp and supported the killings through his actions.