Preliminary investigations focus mainly on documents that help us to locate personnel of a camp, task forces or other units who are still alive today. In fact, available evidence rarely proves specific aiding and abetting of a particular murder, but it can merely prove participation in the system of mass murder.
This broad approach has also built the basis of the total of 127 proceedings against former members of the concentration camps Auschwitz, Lublin (Majdanek), Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, Stutthof, Mauthausen, Neuengamme, Flossenbürg and Groß-Rosen, including 30 women, transferred to the public prosecutors since the verdict of the Munich II Regional Court against Ivan (John) Demjanjuk in May 2011 up to and including July 2024. In this regard, 15 charges were brought against the individuals, five of which (so far) resulted in convictions. If no charges were brought, the vast majority of cases were dismissed due to inability to stand trial or death.
In addition to the concentration camps mentioned above, the Central Office also conducts investigations into the concentration camps Natzweiler, Dachau and Plaszow.
With a view to transferring the case law on the criminal liability of aiding and abetting in concentration camps, in which phases of systematic murder recognizable to the personnel took place, to prisoner-of-war camps and Einsatzgruppen as well, new investigation complexes were recently opened by the Central Office and five charges were brought against former members of prisoner of war camps in the period from March 2021 to July 2024 inclusive. As a result, an indictment has been filed by the Berlin public prosecutor's office, on which a decision has not yet been made.
Over the past decade, one of the focal points of working has been the examination of archives in the Russian Federation. The political upheavals in the former Eastern Bloc up to the beginning of the war in Ukraine gave the Central Office the opportunity to examine the archive material stored there, which had been largely inaccessible during the Cold War. This research was largery completed.
Soon after German reunification, the Central Office also got the order from the conference of ministers of justice to look through and to analyze the large “Nazi-Archive” of the ministry of national security (German: Ministerium für Staatssicherheit - MfS), access to which had been refused for so many years by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic.
