Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has identified 76 men and four women who belonged to the Einsatzgruppen, a 3,000 member death squad staffed by SS and police personnel that is believed to have murdered more than one million Jews as well as tens of thousands Gypsies by shooting them to death.
The murders occurred between September 1939 and June 1941 before the Nazis established the death camps ofAuschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
The Einsatzguppen followed behind German troops as they advanced on the Eastern Front, rounding up and shooting Jews and Gypsies in Poland and Russia along the way.
Zuroff has identified 76 men and four women members of the death squad. He has turned his evidence of their identities over to the German justice and interior ministries and demanded they be prosecuted.
Zuroff maintains that, unlike in the death camps where only a few personnel actually carried out killings, nearly every member of the Einsatzgruppen was a hands-on murderer.
The Justice Ministry said it has turned Zuroff’s information over to the federal prosecutor’s office that investigates and prosecutes Nazi-era crimes. Schrimm, the head of that office, says that any surviving members of the Einsatzgruppe could now be prosecuted because a new German law holds that service in a Nazi unit whose sole purpose was murder is enough to convict a former member of accessory to murder, even without any evidence that he had participated in a specific crime as had previously been required.
The crimes of the Einsatzgruppe were of such a magnitude that no matter how old or infirm its surviving members may be, they should still be prosecuted for the mass murders they committed.
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