Prison guard at Nazi PoW camp under investigation for ‘murder’

The probe is being led by the specialist Nazi crimes unit based in the industrial western city of Dortmund.

The man was at the huge PoW camp near Stukenbrock between 1941 and 1945.

Investigators suspect camp personnel knew that thousands of prisoners were dying from starvation, disease and brutal neglect.

Senior prosecutor Andreas Brendel confirmed that criminal proceedings are under way, but the suspect's identity has not been released.

The case is one of the last remaining attempts to bring surviving Nazi-era suspects to justice.

Stalag Senne was one of the largest prisoner-of-war camps on German soil during the war, and over 300,000 prisoners passed through its gates.

Most of the victims were Soviet prisoners of war captured after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Nazi ideology regarded Soviet POWs as racially inferior and politically dangerous, and Jewish soldiers serving in the Red Army faced an even greater threat because they were targeted both as Soviet troops and as Jews.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Nazi authorities identified and deliberately separated Jewish Soviet POWs from other prisoners, with many later transferred to SS custody where they were murdered.

Most prisoners held at the camp were Soviet although Polish, French, Serbian and Italian captives were also held there in horrific conditions.

According to the Stalag Senne Documentation Centre, prisoners initially were forced live in crude holes dug into the ground, and a series of squalid makeshift huts built from merely branches and leaves.

Food in the camp was desperately scarce, medical care was almost non-existent and sanitation was appalling, causing disease to spread rapidly.

Many prisoners were later sent out as slave labourers, including to industrial sites in Germany's Ruhr region in order to help power Nazi Germany’s war effort.

Historians have never agreed on the exact death toll, but estimates range from around 15,000 victims to as many as a staggering 70,000.

But even the lowest estimate would still make the camp one of the deadliest PoW sites operated by Nazi Germany.

The suspect is believed to have served as part of the camp's guard force.

Such guards at the time were often older Wehrmacht soldiers or men no longer fit for frontline combat because of injuries.

Their official camp duties included preventing prisoner escapes, including through the use of firearms if necessary.

The Dortmund investigation began after evidence was passed on by Germany's Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg.

The office originally identified two possible suspects connected to the Senne camp complex. One has since died.

The investigation highlights Germany's continuing efforts to prosecute Nazi crimes many decades after the collapse of Hitler's regime.

In recent years, prosecutors have placed more focus on lower-ranking camp personnel, arguing that simply helping operate camp facilities where mass deaths occurred could amount to criminal liability.

Recent trials have included, for example, that of Irmgard Furchner who served as camp secretary at Stutthof camp, and stenographer for SS commandant Paul-Werner Hoppe at Stutthof Concentration Camp from June 1943 to April 1945.

On 20 December 2022, Itzehoe Regional Court found her guilty of complicity in more than 10,500 murders. Imgard Furchner died on January 14th, 2025, aged 99.

Josef Schütz was an SS guard at Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp where between 40,00 and 50,000 people died.

In June 2022, he was sentenced by the Regional Court in Brandenburg an der Havel to five years imprisonment for aiding and abetting murder in 3,518 cases. He appealed, and died the next year without spending a day in prison.

Meanwhile, senior prosecutor Andreas Brendel is also overseeing another investigation involving a 100-year-old former guard who allegedly served at Stalag VI A in Hemer.