Poland has asked Interpol for help in finding 1,600 former Nazis accused of committing war crimes in German concentration camps. Polish authorities view the investigations as the last chance to bring them to justice.
Polish state prosecutors have set an ambitious goal for themselves: to find surviving Nazi SS soldiers who committed war crimes at German concentration camps during the Second World War and to bring them to trial.
“We finally have to deal comprehensively with the mass murder that was committed in German concentration camps,” State Prosecutor Robert Janicki, of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Warsaw, told DW. “It is a state prosecutor’s duty to find perpetrators and bring them to justice, and we want to see if it is still possible to find Nazi war criminals today.”
The institute, which studies the history of Poland under German and Soviet rule, has set in motion hundreds of cases against Nazi war criminals. Most have to do with mass executions and the pacification of Polish villages during the German occupation from 1939 to 1945, as well as crimes against the civilian population during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.
The nine most comprehensive investigations have to do with the mass murder of Polish citizens in German concentration camps between the years 1939 and 1945. The cases involve the camps Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, Majdanek-Lublin, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Mittelbau-Dora and Gross-Rosen.
