German prosecutors have opened an investigation into a 105-year-old man suspected of being an accessory to multiple murders at a Nazi prisoner of war camp during World War Two. The case, handled by the public prosecutor's office in Dortmund, centres on Stalag 326 VI K, a large prisoner of war complex near Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock in the Senne region of North Rhine-Westphalia, a state in western Germany. The suspect, who was between 20 and 24 years old when he served there, has not been detained, and details about his current health have not been made public. A parallel investigation into a second former guard at the same camp has been closed after that suspect died several months ago at the age of 99.
Stalag 326 was one of the largest prisoner of war camps in Nazi Germany. Between 1941 and its liberation by American forces in April 1945, it held between 180,000 and 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war — according to the camp's memorial site, one in three Soviet PoWs entering Nazi Germany passed through Senne. Prisoners were subjected to forced labour in nearby factories and mines, endured severe malnutrition and brutal mistreatment, and tens of thousands are buried there. PoWs from France, Poland, Serbia and Belgium were also held at the site. Of the more than 5.3 million Soviet Red Army soldiers held in German captivity during the war, roughly half are thought to have died. Many survivors who returned home were treated as traitors by Soviet authorities.
The investigation is part of a broader, urgent effort by Germany's judiciary to prosecute those involved in Nazi-era crimes before the remaining suspects die. A key legal turning point came with the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibór death camp in occupied Poland, who was found guilty of being an accessory to the murders of more than 28,000 people despite no direct evidence that he had personally killed anyone. That ruling established that service in a Nazi camp was itself sufficient grounds for a conviction as an accomplice to murder, removing the need for prosecutors to prove individual acts of killing. Demjanjuk died in 2012, aged 91, while awaiting an appeal.
The Demjanjuk precedent opened the door to a series of late-life prosecutions. In 2022, Josef Schütz, a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, was sentenced to five years in prison for complicity in murder; he died the following year aged 102. That same year, Irmgard Furchner, who had worked as a secretary to the commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, received a two-year suspended sentence — a case that drew wide attention when she fled her retirement home on the opening day of her trial. The current investigation was initiated by the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, Baden-Württemberg, which passed its findings to Dortmund prosecutors.
Should the case against the 105-year-old proceed to trial, it is expected, like its predecessors, to shed further light on conditions within the Stalag system and bring historians and survivors to testify. For Germany, these prosecutions carry significance beyond individual accountability: they represent a reckoning with the argument, long used to shield low-ranking participants, that those who did not directly kill were not truly culpable. Legal scholars and prosecutors have increasingly rejected that distinction, arguing that the machinery of mass murder depended on every link in the chain.