Germany investigates a 105-year-old man over accessory to murder at Nazi POW camp Stalag 326

From the Newshound archive · first published 24 September 2026 · last updated 25 September 2026.

Prosecutors in Dortmund are investigating a 105-year-old man suspected of having served as a guard at Stalag 326 VI K, a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in the Senne region of western Germany where up to 200,000 Soviet POWs were held between 1941 and 1945. He faces allegations of accessory to murder arising from his role there. A separate investigation into a 99-year-old who had also been a guard at the camp was discontinued after that man died several months ago.

Between 2.3 and three million of the estimated 5.3 to 5.7 million Soviet POWs taken into German captivity did not survive the war.

This wave of late-stage prosecutions stems from the 2011 Demjanjuk ruling, which determined that duty at a camp could be sufficient to establish complicity, even without proof of direct killings.

Josef Schütz, a former Sachsenhausen guard, was found guilty at the age of 101 in 2022 of accessory to thousands of murders; he died the following year before completing his sentence.