On 21 July 2015 a ninety-four-year-old former SS man named Oskar Gröning was wheeled into the dock of the Landgericht Lüneburg in northern Germany for the verdict in his trial. He had served as a clerk at Auschwitz between September 1942 and October 1944. His specific job at the camp had been the registration of the foreign currency, banknotes and valuables found in the luggage of Jews arriving on the ramps for selection. He had counted the money. He had sorted it. He had filed reports on its forwarding to the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin. He had also, on his own subsequent admission to the BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution in 2005, watched on the ramp during selections, observed the Sonderkommando working at the gas chambers, and known exactly what was happening to the people whose money he was sorting. The court at Lüneburg sentenced him to four years’ imprisonment for being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews who had been gassed at Birkenau between May and July 1944, the period when the Hungarian deportation convoys had been arriving at the camp at the rate of three or four trains a day. Gröning died of natural causes on 9 March 2018, two and a half years after his sentence and before he had begun to serve any of it.
The Gröning trial was not the start of the late prosecutions. That had been the Demjanjuk verdict at Munich in May 2011. It was, however, the trial that brought the late prosecutions to international public attention, principally because of Gröning himself, who had been articulate, unrepentant of nothing in particular, and who had given lengthy on-the-record interviews about what he had seen at Auschwitz. Gröning had been the rare survivor of his generation prepared to speak publicly. The court used what he had said in front of the cameras of the BBC, the Spiegel, and other outlets as some of the documentary evidence supporting the conviction. He had, in a sense, prosecuted himself.
This page traces the late prosecutions of camp personnel in Germany after the Demjanjuk principle of 2011 changed the legal test. The cases are not many; the surviving defendants are few; the sentences have been short. The principle they have established has been substantial.
Reinhold Hanning at Detmold
The first of the post-Demjanjuk defendants to be convicted on the new principle was Reinhold Hanning, a former SS-Unterscharführer who had served as a guard at Auschwitz I from January 1942 to June 1944. He was ninety-four when his trial opened at the Landgericht Detmold in February 2016. The prosecution charged him with being an accessory to the murder of at least 170,000 prisoners during the period of his service. The case rested on personnel records establishing his presence at the camp and on the legal principle established in the Demjanjuk verdict that service as a guard at a death camp was itself participation in the killing.
Hanning, unlike Gröning, made no public statements explaining his service. He attended the trial in a wheelchair. He spoke only on the second-to-last day of proceedings. The statement he made was the closest thing to a confession of guilt the late German prosecutions ever produced. He said:
I want to say that it disturbs me deeply that I was part of such a criminal organisation. I am ashamed that I saw injustice and never did anything about it. I apologise for what I did. I never want anything like that to happen again.
The court sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment on 17 June 2016. He died at home on 30 May 2017 at the age of ninety-five, twelve days before his appeal would have been heard. The sentence had not been served.
Bruno Dey at Hamburg
The Stutthof prosecutions opened a new chapter. Stutthof had been the first concentration camp set up by the Germans outside the prewar Reich, established in September 1939 near Danzig in what had been the Polish Corridor. It had operated as a forced-labour camp for most of its history but had also functioned as a killing centre, particularly during 1944, when approximately 60,000 prisoners were killed by gassing, shooting, or deliberate starvation and exposure during the camp’s late operation. The defendant Bruno Dey had served at Stutthof as a guard at the age of seventeen and eighteen between August 1944 and April 1945. He was ninety-three when his trial opened at the Hamburg Landgericht in October 2019. He was tried as a juvenile under the German law applicable at the time of the alleged offences, since he had been seventeen and eighteen at the time of his service.
Dey attended his trial in a wheelchair and answered questions from the bench. He acknowledged his service. He acknowledged that he had been aware of the killings. He maintained that he had been a young man under orders and had had no realistic choice in the matter. The court accepted that the moral choice question was the central legal issue and applied the Nuremberg Principles framework. It found that Dey had had moral choice in the relevant sense and had chosen to serve. He was sentenced on 23 July 2020 to two years’ imprisonment, suspended given his age and the juvenile-law framework. The court’s judgment, delivered by the presiding judge Anne Meier-Göring, included a passage that has been quoted in subsequent late prosecutions:
The court does not pretend that this verdict can give back to the dead what was taken from them. It cannot. What it can do is establish, on the public record, that this was their fate, that this man was a part of what was done to them, and that the law is still capable, eighty years on, of saying so.
Irmgard Furchner at Itzehoe
The most unusual of the late prosecutions was the trial of Irmgard Furchner, a ninety-six-year-old former typist who had worked in the office of the commandant of Stutthof, Paul Werner Hoppe, between 1943 and 1945. Furchner had taken Hoppe’s dictation, typed his correspondence, and signed for incoming and outgoing mail. The prosecution at Itzehoe in 2021 charged her with being an accessory to the murder of 11,412 prisoners during the period of her service. The case extended the Demjanjuk principle from camp guards to clerical staff who had administered the killing.
Furchner attempted to flee the proceedings on 30 September 2021, the day her trial was due to open. She had left her care home in a taxi at six in the morning, intending to take an underground train into Hamburg city centre. The police intercepted her in central Hamburg three hours later. She was returned to the court and the trial began. The trial ran for fourteen months. Furchner did not testify. She made a brief statement on the final day, saying that she was sorry for what had happened and that she had not been able to refuse the work at the time. The court sentenced her on 20 December 2022 to two years’ imprisonment, suspended. She was the last of the late prosecutions. She died in January 2025 at the age of 99.
The numbers
Between the Demjanjuk verdict of May 2011 and the Furchner verdict of December 2022, the German prosecutorial authorities had brought twelve to fifteen substantive prosecutions, depending on how one counts cases dropped on grounds of defendant unfitness. Of these, six produced convictions on the merits. The defendants ranged in age from 91 to 97 at the time of conviction. The longest sentence handed down was five years (Hanning); the shortest was two years suspended (Dey, Furchner). No convicted defendant served any meaningful portion of his or her sentence. Most died within months or a few years of conviction.
The Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes at Ludwigsburg, which has coordinated German war crimes investigations since 1958, has produced a small number of further indictments since the Furchner case. None has come to trial. The remaining defendants are too old or too ill to face proceedings. The Ludwigsburg office has stated, in its 2024 annual report, that it expects no further substantive trials. The prosecutorial generation that the Demjanjuk principle made possible is now over.
Why the late prosecutions matter
The late prosecutions produced no condign punishment. They could not have. The men and the woman convicted between 2011 and 2022 were not the architects of the killing. They were the operational rank and file. They had served as small parts of an extensive machine. Their convictions did not undo a single murder. The sentences they received were lighter, often by an order of magnitude, than the sentences a court of 1946 would have imposed for the same conduct. The convictions came too late for any victim still alive to benefit from them.
What the late prosecutions did was three things. The first was to redraw, in the German legal system, the line between perpetrator and bystander. Until 2011 the German courts had treated camp guards and clerical staff as the latter unless specific acts could be proven against them. After 2011 they treated them as the former. The shift acknowledged what had always been the case factually: that the killing required the participation of many thousands of people in operational roles that did not consist of personally pulling triggers, and that those participants were as much perpetrators as the men who had pulled the triggers.
The second was to establish that no statute of limitations applies to participation in genocide or crimes against humanity in Germany. The principle had been written into German law in 1979, after extended public debate over the previous decade, but had been only partially applied in practice until the Demjanjuk verdict gave the prosecutors the legal basis to proceed against the surviving rank and file. The principle is now firmly embedded.
The third was to provide, for the survivors and the descendants of the victims, a small but real public acknowledgment that the killing was still being recognised as a crime. The trials had a substantial Jewish victim and survivor presence in the courtroom. Survivors travelled to Lüneburg, Detmold, Hamburg and Itzehoe to attend. They gave statements as Nebenkläger (private prosecutors) in the German criminal procedure. The acknowledgment was not punishment. It was something different, and in some respects more precise. It was the German legal system saying, eighty years after the fact, that what had been done was a crime, that this person had been part of doing it, and that the law was still capable of saying so. The defendants did not serve their sentences. The acknowledgment was not undone by their deaths. It is on the public record. It will stay there.
See also
- John Demjanjuk
- The Stutthof and Baltic Marches
- Crimes Against Humanity, a New Concept in International Law
- The Nuremberg Principles and Their Legacy
Sources
- Lüneburg Regional Court (Landgericht Lüneburg), Gröning judgment, 21 July 2015
- Detmold Regional Court (Landgericht Detmold), Hanning judgment, 17 June 2016
- Hamburg Regional Court (Landgericht Hamburg), Dey judgment, 23 July 2020
- Itzehoe Regional Court (Landgericht Itzehoe), Furchner judgment, 20 December 2022
- Lawrence Douglas, The Right Wrong Man: John Demjanjuk and the Last Great Nazi War Crimes Trial, Princeton University Press, 2016
- Efraim Zuroff, Operation Last Chance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
- BBC Two, Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution, documentary series, episode on Gröning, 2005
- Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes (Zentrale Stelle Ludwigsburg), Annual Report, 2024