At their conference in June 2015, the justice ministers and senators of justice of the federal states agreed that the Central Office "will continue to work in its current form as long as criminal prosecution tasks arise."
In July 2015, the Regional Court of Luneburg has sentenced the former guard of the Auschwitz
concentration camp Auschwitz Oskar Gröning to four years in prison for accessory in the murder of 300,000 victims without being able
to proof his direct involvement in the killings. The German Federal Court of Justice has upheld Grönings’s conviction by
decision of 20th September 2016 (3 StR 49/16)
which thus became final: By
standing guard on the so-called ramp as well as by assuming his general duties, the convict has been a cog of the “murder
machinery” and contributed to the system of mass murder.
In June 2016, another guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp was sentenced by the Detmold Regional Court to five years imprisonment for aiding and abetting murder in at least 170,00 cases. The defendant died during the ongoing appeal proceedings.
In July 2020, the Hamburg Regional Court sentenced a guard at the Stutthof concentration camp to two years juvenile sentence on probation for aiding and abetting murder in 5,323 cases and for aiding and abetting attempted murder.
In June 2022 , a former guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was sentenced to five
years' imprisonment by the Neuruppin Regional Court for aiding and abetting the murder of more than 3,500 prisoners. Here, too, no appeal
decision could be made due to the death of the accused.
In December 2022, a secretary who had worked in the administration of the Stutthof concentration camp was sentenced by the Itzehoe Regional Court to a two-year suspended juvenile sentence for aiding and abetting murder in 10,000 cases. On 20 August 2024, the Federal Court of Justice dismissed the convicted person's appeal against this sentence, meaning that the verdict is now final.
The Central Office's reviews of personnel in the concentrations camps have not yet been completed. Moreover, the focus is now also on the killings in prisoner-of-war camps and the transferability of the Federal Supreme Court's case-law to former members of the Einsatzgruppen is being examined, who, as mobile units of the security police and security service, carried out planned massacres after the Invasion of German troops, especially in the Soviet Union.
With a view to the future, the justice ministers were also of the opinion in June 2015 that the Central Office and the Ludwigsburg site should be maintained after a currently unforeseeable end of the investigative work - even if the concept of use is changed - as a place of remembrance, reminder, education and research, e. g. as a documentation, research and information centre.
Decision of the conference of justice ministers of 17-18th June 2015 (in German)
