German investigators said Tuesday they have identified eight suspected Nazi war criminals who worked at the former Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland.
“Following our investigations, we have identified four men and four women,” Jens Rommel, the head of the central office for Nazi crime investigations in Ludwigsburg, Germany told NBC News.
Initial legal inquiries into “accessory to murder in several thousand cases” were forwarded to prosecutors’ offices across Germany, Rommel said. Local prosecutors will now need to assess whether there is enough evidence against the eight suspects to bring charges.
Between June and August 1944, thousands of people were killed by the Nazis in the gas chambers and with neck shots at the Stutthof camp, Rommel explained.
The male suspects had worked as guards at the Stutthof camp, while the women had been employed as typists or phone operators, Rommel said.
He added that all of the suspects were born between 1918 and 1927, meaning they would be in their late 80s or 90s.
Investigators in Ludwigsburg are continuing their research and investigations for former concentrations camps Auschwitz and Majdanek, while they recently expanded their search to former Nazi concentration camps Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme.
In June, a German court convicted 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning of being an accessory to 170,000 counts of murder.
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The 2011 prosecution of John Demjanjuk, an autoworker who lived in the U.S. for years after the war and was convicted of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, was a game-changer for the German legal system. The court's ruling that he could be convicted on his service record alone, triggered a search for dozens of suspected Auschwitz guards who were still believed to be living in Germany.
Two others are currently on trial in Germany for “accessory to murder” during the Nazi regime.
