Nazi War Criminals Still Alive: The 6 Most Wanted

A court in Northern Germany has s94-year-old Oskar Groening, a former SS-Unterscharführer, or junior squad leader, to four years in prison. His charge: 300,000 counts of accessory to murder as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz.”

Groening is one of a shrinking, aging pool of former Nazi leaders still alive to be prosecuted for crimes committed during World War II—but he’s not the last. Using the Simon Wiesenthal Center‘s list of Most Wanted Nazi War Criminals from April 2015, TIME put together a list of the five most wanted former Nazis who are still alive today:

Helmuth Leif Rasmussen

Ramussen, 90, was one of the 6,000 Danish volunteers to have joined the SS after Germany invaded the country in 1940. On July 21, Nazi-hunter Efraim Zuroff asked Danish police to investigate Rasmussen for serving as a guard in Belarus’ Bobruisk camp between 1942-43, when 1,400 Jews were killed. Rasmussen, who now goes under the surname of Rasboel and lives in Copenhagen, has acknowledged in interviews that he was a SS member and guard, who saw Jews “being killed and thrown in mass graves,” but he has denied any involvement in killings. To complicate matters, Rasmussen had received some sort of punishment after the war. It is not clear what the specific crime was but a Danish prosecutor has said that they want to avoid prosecuting him twice for the same offense.

Gerhard Sommer

Sommer, 94, lives in a nursing home just north of Hamburg, about two hours drive from the German border with Denmark. But in 1944, when Sommer was a 22-year-old soldier in the 16th SS Panzer Division, he allegedly helped massacre 560 civilians—including 119 children—in the Tuscan town of Sant-Anna di Stazzema, shooting, beating and burning them to death. Sommer was among 10 former SS officers found guilty in absentia by an Italian court in 2005, but Germany never extradited any of them.

German prosecutors dropped Sommer’s case in 2012 for lack of evidence, and then reopened it in August 2014, only to have specialists conclude that Sommer was unfit for trial because of severe dementia. Had Sommer’s trial gone through, prosecutors predicted that he would have been “charged with 342 cases of murder, committed cruelly and on base motives.”

Alfred Stark

Stark, 92, a former corporal of the Gebirsgjäger also sentenced in absentia in Italy, was accused of ordering the execution of 117 Italian prisoners of war on the Italian-occupied island of Kefalonia, Greece in 1943—part of the slaughter of nearly 9,500 officers of the Acqui Division that September after the breaking of the Germany-Italy alliance. Despite Stark’s indictment by the military court of Rome in 2012 and his subsequent sentencing to life in prison, Germany has refused to extradite him from the country, where he still resides.

Johann Robert Riss

Riss, 92, was one of three former Nazis sentenced in 2011 by the military court in Rome to life in prison for the 1944 massacre of 184 civilians in another Tuscan town: Padule di Fucecchio. The massacre was reportedly carried out after two German soldiers were shot by resistance fighters, and documented extensively in statements gathered a year later by Charles Edmonson, a British sergeant looking to ensure that the responsible parties would be brought to justice.

The military court that sentenced Riss also requested that the German government pay 14 million euros in compensation to the just over 30 remaining relatives of the massacre’s victims, a gesture Germany refused. Germany declined to extradite Riss, who remains there.

Algimantas Dailide

Dailide, 95, is a former Lithuanian soldier, who, as a member of Lithuania’s Nazi-controlled Security Police, allegedly arrested 12 Jews attempting to escape Vilna, a Jewish ghetto in the city of Vilnius, in the early 1940s. It is presumed that these Jews were later executed.

Dailide lied about his occupation and immigrated to the U.S. after the war, but was stripped of his citizenship in the 1990s and, in 2004, was deported to Germany. In 2008, the Israeli news outlet Haaretz reported that Dailide was living in the small town of Kirchberg in western Germany with his wife, living on his wife’s German pension.

Dailide was convicted of war crimes by a Vilnius court, but a Lithuanian high court ruled in 2008 that he was in too poor health to be sentenced to time in prison.

Helmut Oberlander

Oberlander, 91, a native Ukrainian, served in the eastern occupied territories during WWII as part of Einsatzgruppe D, the infamous Nazi death squad estimated by the Wiesenthal Center to have murdered 23,000 Jewish civilians. He currently resides in Ottawa, Canada, where he immigrated in 1954 and worked for many years as a developer, but for the last 20 years, he has been in a legal battle with the federal cabinet over his citizenship. In 2012, Oberlander entered a third round of court rulings as the Canadian government continues its attempts to strip him of his citizenship and order his deportation. In February of 2016, Canada’s federal court of appeal sent his case back to the country’s federal cabinet, ordering the government to take another look at the case.

 

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