Germany re-opens massacre probe against ex-SS officer

HANOVER - Germany has re-opened a criminal inquiry into a former SS officer accused of massacring Jews in Lublin in occupied Poland in 1943, a prosecutor said Thursday.

The 95-year-old has never been charged for lack of evidence, but re-analysis of a letter he wrote in 1943 to a girlfriend implies that he was with his unit at the time it took part in mass shootings of 30,500 Jews in the Lublin area, news reports said.

Charges were earlier dropped after he claimed he had been at home on leave at the time. He was a captain in the SS, the Nazi Party military organisation, and commanded a police unit.

But the address on the October 31, 1943 letter gives his address as “OO”, a German military code for being in military housing.

The massacre took place three days later.

“We are checking if he took part in the Lublin massacre of November 1943,” a prosecutions spokeswoman in Hanover said. “This is a very difficult inquiry as there are hardly any witnesses alive”.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem Thursday put the man’s name on its list of 10 most wanted suspects from World War II.

Most German media withheld his name under privacy and defamation guidelines.

Hamburg prosecutors sought evidence against him in the 1960s and 70s but then closed the file. Fresh inquiries last year in connection with a massacre in Warsaw also failed to turn up evidence that would stand up in court.