Germany continues the search for the latest Nazi criminals in life. “I only followed the leaders of the final solution”
80 years after the end of World War II, the time is running out for the criminal prosecution of the elderly.
Irrmgard Fush, accused of working in the Stutthof concentration camp, died photo: X
Klaus Barbie, the head of the Lyon gestapo between 1942 and 1944, was known as “The slaughter of Lyon ” for its cruelty. Also, Kurt Lischka and Herbert Hagen, who were responsible for deporting 76,000 Jews from France to extermination camps, including 11,400 children. These are just three of the many Nazi war criminals and collaborators who have been found by the well -known Nazi hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, writes Deutsche Welle.
Their work of a lifetime has made these three perpetrators condemned for their crimes, but many other Nazis, despite committing many atrocities, managed to live their lives in peace.
Serge Klarsfeld, a lawyer and himself a Holocaust survivor, described their investigation strategy in simple terms: “I only followed the criminals who made decisions about the fate of some Jewish masses.” he wrote for DW. “I only followed the leaders of the final solution. Our search and involvement in Barbie's arrest, after a 12-year-old fight, from 1971 to 1983, brought us great acclaim to France. ”
Barbie's spectacular discovery in Bolivia was also praised in Germany, which for decades limited its search for the Holocaust authors to only a few important figures. The Klarsfeld family subsequently received, in 2015, the order of merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for their commitment to bring the Nazis to justice.
In this way, they set up a historical parliamentary decision on July 3, 1979: after almost 20 years of debates on how to prosecute the Nazi crimes, the Bundestag agreed that the crime and genocide should no longer be subjected to a limitation period.
“If the Germans had adopted the law of 1979 in 1954, the cases of thousands of Nazi criminals would have been examined by prosecutors and, finally, by the courts. But many judges were part of the Nazi party and would have been indulgence towards them“Said Klarsfeld.
A symbol of late justice
Many of the small wheels of the Nazi criminal machine have also hoped for leniency in recent years. Like Irmgard Fush, who died in January at the age of 99. The former secretary of the Stutthof concentration camp was found guilty in 2022 crime complicity in over 10,000 cases.
The procedure was initiated by the Attorney General Thomas Will, who led for five years the Central Office of State Judicial Administrations for the investigation of national-socialist crimes in Ludwigsburg.
“Our mission is still to find people who can be brought before justice,” he told DW. “We are still investigating concentration camps. For each camp, there are many people who could still be alive and have not yet been able to find. But only those born in certain years are likely to be alive to be prosecuted. “Realistically, only the years 1925-1927 or 1928“He said.
