German prosecutors have identified three suspects from a 2014 list of nine alleged Holocaust-era war criminals accused of shooting countless Jews.
Kurt G., Herbert W. and Wilhelm Karl Friedrich Hoffmeister, allegedly members of the firing squads that murdered Jews in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, have been under pre-trial investigation for months for alleged war crimes and participation in genocide, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Eastern Europe director, Efraim Zuroff, told JTA on Thursday. Each case is being handled by a different regional prosecutor’s office, he said.
Whereas five of the names on the list that Zuroff gave German prosecutors in 2014 were not located, they were able to identify three who they suspect were former members of the Einsatzgruppe C death squad, which took part in the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Babi Yar, Ukraine, in September 1941.
The investigation against two of the three men was launched after the ARD television channel interviewed them in September. They admitted to being members of that group on camera. All three men are in their 90s.
Zuroff said he could not comment on the length of time that the investigations are taking.
