German prosecutors are investigating a 105-year-old man who served as a guard at the Nazi Stalag-326 VI K camp during World War II. Investigators suspect him of aiding numerous killings at the camp.
Dortmund prosecutor Sonja Frodermann said that a similar investigation had previously been conducted into another former guard at the same camp. That suspect died several months ago at the age of 99.
Details about the identities of both former guards are not being disclosed. The Stalag-326 camp in Senne is considered one of the largest Nazi camps of World War II, and a memorial now stands on the site.
The memorial states that up to 200,000 Soviet prisoners of war were held at the camp from 1941 until April 1945. It also says that they suffered from malnutrition, brutal treatment, appalling sanitary conditions, and forced labor, and that tens of thousands of prisoners were buried on the camp grounds.
In Germany, prosecution for murder has no statute of limitations since 1979. In recent years, several trials have been held in the country against employees of Nazi camps, and in 2025 the Dortmund prosecutor's office began investigating a 100-year-old former guard at a prisoner-of-war camp in Hemer, where Soviet prisoners of war were also held predominantly.
In June 2022, a court in Germany sentenced 101-year-old Josef Schütz to five years in prison. The Brandenburg court found him guilty of complicity in murders at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, and prosecutors accused him of involvement in the murder of more than three and a half thousand inmates, aiding in the shooting of Soviet prisoners of war, and killings using poison gas.
Schütz denied guilt throughout the trial. The court treated his case as part of the responsibility of former employees of Nazi camps for wartime crimes.
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