76 years after the end of World War II, time is running out to try people for their roles in the Nazi system.
According to the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, the public prosecutor’s office is currently working on eight other cases, including former employees of the Buchenwald and Ravensbrück camps.
In recent years, several cases have been dropped because the defendants died or were physically unable to stand trial.
The latest guilty verdict was against former SS guard Bruno Dey, who was given a two-year suspended sentence in July at the age of 93.
Prosecuting ex-Nazis for murder in concentration camps had been difficult in the past because it was difficult to prove that they were directly involved in the killing.
But the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk set a precedent whereby wardens and staff could be held responsible for deaths in camps where they served, even if it could not be proven that they had killed anyone.
The verdict sparked a wave of new lawsuits and broadened the scope of attacks on camp administrators like Furchner – who has been the only woman on trial for Nazi-era atrocities in recent years.
Here MailOnline looks at others brought to justice years after their crimes…
John Demjanjuk
John Demjanjuk during his 2009 Munich trial for the murder of 27,900 Jews in a Nazi death camp after 30 years to prosecute him after moving to Ohio
Ukrainian-American Demjanjuk was a Nazi warden who served in the Sobibor, Majdanek, and Flossenbürg death camps between 1942 and 1945.
Originally drafted into the Soviet Red Army, Demjanjuk was captured by the Nazis in 1942 and became a “Trawniki man” — a name for Eastern European Nazi collaborators recruited from POW camps.
After the war he married a West German woman he had met in a displaced persons camp and emigrated to the United States, where he settled in Ohio.
In 1977 Israeli investigators identified Demjanjuk as “Ivan the Terrible” – a guard at the Treblinka death camp notorious for his atrocities – and extradited him in 1986 to stand trial.
He was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1988, but his sentence was overturned in 1993 when Israel’s Supreme Court heard evidence that “Ivan’s” real identity was another Soviet man named Ivan Marchenko.
Although the identity was never definitively proven, it was enough to raise reasonable doubts about the case and Demjanjuk was released.
He returned to the US but was stripped of his citizenship in 2002 and extradited to Germany in 2009 to stand trial on charges of involvement in the killing of about 30,000 inmates at Sobibor, who died while he was there.
Demjanjuk was a test case. It had previously been difficult to convict former Nazi guards of murder in the death camps because of the need to prove their direct involvement in the killings.
But lawyers convinced a judge that it was reasonable to convict Demjanjuk of being an accessory to murder simply by working at the camp, whether or not he was directly involved in the murder.
In May 2011 he was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison but was released pending appeal. He died the following year.
However, the case set a crucial precedent and sparked a wave of lawsuits against camp guards and administrative staff for their role in the Nazi genocidal death machine.
Joseph Schuetz
In June 2022, a German court imposed a five-year prison sentence on a 101-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, the oldest person ever to be tried for complicity in war crimes during the Holocaust.
Josef Schütz was found guilty of aiding and abetting murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, said presiding judge Udo Lechtermann.
But despite his conviction, given his age, it is highly unlikely that he will serve his five-year sentence behind bars.
Josef Schütz was found guilty of aiding and abetting murder while working as a prison guard at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, said presiding judge Udo Lechtermann
The Lithuanian-born pensioner, who now lives in the state of Brandenburg, had pleaded not guilty, saying he had done “absolutely nothing” and was unaware of the horrific crimes being committed at the camp.
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Schütz, the oldest person ever to be tried for Nazi war crimes committed during the Holocaust, said at the conclusion of his trial on Monday.
But prosecutors told the Neuruppin district court, which is sitting in a sports hall at the Brandenburg an der Havel correctional facility, that Schültz was “knowingly and willingly” involved in the murder of 3,518 inmates at the camp and asked for a five-year sentence Bars.
Oskar Gröning – “The Accountant of Auschwitz”
Oskar Gröning, a 94-year-old former SS sergeant, looks on as he hears the verdict of his trial in a court in Lueneburg, northern Germany, in 2017
The former Auschwitz-Birkenau guard Oskar Gröning as a young man in SS uniform
Born in Lower Saxony in 1921, Gröning was the son of a textile worker father and a housekeeper who died at the age of four.
His family had a military history, as Groening’s grandfather had served in an elite troop regiment in the Duchy of Brunswick.
Raised in a conservative household, radical politics entered Gröning’s life at an early age when his father joined the far-right group Stahlhelm following Germany’s defeat in World War I.
Just a few years later, in the early 1930s, Gröning joined Stahlhelm’s youth department before switching to the Hitler Youth after the National Socialists seized power.
Gröning finished school with top grades at the age of 17 and began working as a bank clerk a few months later before the outbreak of war.
Gröning decided to join an elite unit of the new German military and chose the Waffen SS.
Gröning was accepted into the unit and spent a year there before being ordered to Berlin for a special service – helping run the Auschwitz death camp.
Upon his arrival, Groening was assigned to administration – a position that earned him his nickname as Auschwitz’s accountant.
It took some time before he learned the true purpose of the camp, and when he found out, Groening complained and demanded a transfer to a combat role.
However, he never objected to the murder of Jews and others in the camp – only the methods used – and after his request for transfer was denied, he settled down to a comfortable life, eating extra rations provided to the guards and got drunk with his fellow officers.
Gröning served at the camp from 1942 to 1944, when he got his wish and was sent into the Ardennes offensive against the Allies.
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Groening rarely spoke about his experience at Auschwitz until the mid-2000s, when he revealed its role as a vehicle to strike back at Holocaust deniers.
He gave several prominent interviews in which he spoke openly about gas chambers, furnaces and burial pits, as well as the removal of jewelry from the dead.
In 2014 he was charged by German prosecutors as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people who died during his time there in Auschwitz, and in July 2015 was found guilty and sentenced to four years in prison.
Gröning appealed the verdict and died in hospital in 2018 before beginning his sentence.
Bruno Dei
Last year, 93-year-old Bruno Dey, pictured, was convicted of his involvement in the Holocaust after serving as an SS guard in Stutthof
The latest guilty verdict was against former SS guard Bruno Dey, who was given a two-year suspended sentence in July at the age of 93.
He was accused of complicity in the murder of 5,230 people while working at the Stutthof camp near what was then Gdańsk, now Danzig in Poland.
Dey admitted last year that he knew about the camp’s gas chambers and admitted seeing “emaciated figures, people who had suffered” but insisted he was not guilty.
Unnamed
In another case, a 100-year-old man will face trial in Brandenburg next week for allegedly serving as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp just outside Berlin during World War II.
The man, whose name has not been published under German data protection laws, is accused of being an accessory to murder in 3,518 counts.
The suspect is said to have worked as a soldier in the paramilitary wing of the NSDAP in the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945
