The Last SS Guard

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The last SS guard no longer opens the door himself. Someone else does. No, says the slim elderly man in the light-green sweater who is standing in the door on the fourth floor as I climb up the stairs, he isn’t Gregor Formanek. He is the brother-in-law.

When I tell him I would like to speak with Mr. Formanek about Sachsenhausen and about the time he spent behind bars in Bautzen, and perhaps also about his childhood in Romania, about his long, gruesome, turbulent, hundred-year life, the brother-in-law says: "It’s too late." His tone is not unfriendly. He just seems surprised that there is someone who still wants to talk to the old man. "He’s not doing well."

In the preceding months, I had tried to contact the aging SS man through his lawyer. I also wrote him a letter. He never responded.

When I am already back outside on the sidewalk, the brother-in-law comes after me. He asks why I am even still interested.

I tell him that Gregor Formanek is likely the very last one. That he appears to be the only surviving SS guard of a concentration camp. And also probably the very last SS guard to be charged by German prosecutors. Formanek stands at the end of a very long chain.

The brother-in-law says: "He can’t keep it straight anymore. He gets it all mixed up. He doesn’t even go out anymore." Then, he gets into his compact and drives away.

It all. What does he mean by that?

These are the final weeks of Gregor Formanek’s life. Since the indictment he has turned 100 years old. And on this morning, I have a strong feeling that he doesn’t have much longer to live.

I remain on the sidewalk and gaze up at the drawn curtains, at the gray, unadorned balcony, one of many on this side street on the outskirts of Maintal, just east of Frankfurt.

He must be lying, or sitting, somewhere behind those curtains. And somewhere in his mind there are still all those memories, all the images, smells and sounds that will die with him.

On the meadow in front of the house, among the ash trees, there is a thin blanket of freshly fallen snow, the last of the year. What would it feel like to walk through that snow barefoot? To stand there for hours with no shoes on?

Sometimes, an image like this icy field is enough to trigger a sudden overlapping of voices. In the preceding weeks, I had read numerous accounts from camp survivors, and their words continue to resonate.

Fresh candles are burning early in the morning on Heumarkt Square in the town of Hanau. They are commemorating the victims of the right-wing extremist attack that took place here five years ago. The neo-baroque state courthouse can be found just a few meters away on a loud, four-lane road.

On August 7, 2023, a 176-page indictment arrived at the courthouse. It accused Gregor Formanek of being an accessory to murder in 3,322 cases. As a member of the SS, he had served as a guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp from July 1943 to February 1945.

He was 19 years old when he became a guard in Sachsenhausen. Which is why prosecutors were seeking to try the elderly man in the chamber for juvenile delinquents.

In all likelihood, this would be the last opportunity to bring a perpetrator of the Holocaust to justice. Formanek’s case will probably mark the end of the almost eight-decades-long process of coming to terms with the Holocaust in German courtrooms, a journey that began with the Nuremberg war crimes trials.

In the photo of Gregor Formanek published by the British tabloid The Sun, he can be seen with crutches, supported by his wife. The headline reads: "Face of Evil: Is THIS the last Nazi to face justice?"

When I saw the photo, him looking so pale, so shy, so distressed, I began wondering what the point was. Why indict him at all? A man who had already been convicted for the same crime by a Soviet military tribunal and who had been imprisoned in a Stalinist labor camp for more than eight years.

I make my way down an endless hallway inside the courthouse until I reach a small office, inside of which court spokeswoman Tanja Stiller is expecting me. She has decorated her space lavishly with art prints, photos and a desk calendar reading: "If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom," a quote from "The Little Prince."

I ask Stiller why so little has happened in the last 18 months since the indictment was filed. She blinks as though she must first consider her response, searching for a precise formulation. "Everyone is aware that it is urgent because of the age of the defendant," Stiller says. "But you also can’t be sloppy."

She knows, says Stiller, that this case is "unique in a certain sense." But she can’t say when it will move forward. Prior to our meeting, I had exchanged a number of emails with her in which I continually asked about the proceedings and had been put off over and over again, for months on end.

As I walk back down the long corridor, I have the impression of great paralysis, as if everything here has been dipped in honey, making every movement tough and laborious.

Everything we know about him comes from the indictment, from court documents, from old interrogation transcripts and from a "Heimatbuch," a brief history of the small town in Romania where he is from.

Gregor Formanek was born in 1924 in Deutsch-Pereg, a majority German-speaking village in western Romania, right on the Hungarian border. At the time of his birth, it could only be reached by dirt tracks. When it rained, the farmers on their horse carts got bogged down in the mud. The closest railway station was 20 kilometers away.

Gregor Formanek was the youngest of three children. His father was a "master tailor," as he noted in a short, single page biography he wrote after the war when he was doing time in prison in East Germany.

His father died the same year he was born, whereupon his mother apparently sent him to stay with his grandparents for a time. "I spent part of my childhood in my parents’ home and part of it with my grandfather in Hungary," he wrote. It seems he didn’t have an easy start in life.

In the villages, it is nature that determines life’s rhythms. Almost all families, even those of the artisans, cultivated fields. In spring, barley and oats were sown, potatoes and corn planted. In the summer, they would harvest the grain using scythes, sickles and rope. Fruit was picked in the fall. The children helped their parents.

There is an old photo of the German kindergarten in Deutsch-Pereg showing precisely the children born in 1924, Formanek’s cohort. He might be among these boys, lined up in two rows behind an older woman, all with their hair cut short and wearing their best shirts. They gaze into the camera with serious, almost solemn expressions on their faces: big ears jutting out from their narrow faces.

Almost all of them would later end up in the SS. One of the boys from the village was executed by the Soviets after the war because he participated in the gassing of inmates at the Stutthof concentration camp, near Danzig.

Formanek only attended the German Volksschule for six years. It is readily apparent from his writings in the archives that writing did not come easy to him, even as an adult. He wrote with the neat handwriting of a child, full of small spelling mistakes. In one questionnaire he had to fill out after being arrested by the Soviet secret police, he wrote that in the concentration camp, he had belonged to the "Spilmannszug," a childish misspelling of the German word for marching band: "Spielmannszug".

He was 13 years old when he left school to work on a farm. Later, he moved to Arad, the nearest city, where he worked as an errand boy for a time before finally receiving training as a pastry chef in a bakery. He turned 18 and the summer of 1943 arrived.

Romania was allied with Germany for most of World War II. Starting in May 1943, Romania’s dictator Ion Antonescu authorized the Waffen-SS to begin recruiting men from the German minority in Romania.

Anyone who joined the SS, did so – officially at least – of their own free will. The young German men could also have joined the Romanian army. But the pay was lower with the Romanians, the equipment poorer and the food skimpier. Plus, many of the young men idealized Nazi Germany.

Those who didn’t want to join the SS were often pressured into signing up. Motorized commandos drove through the villages to bring young men to the SS recruitment offices, by force if need be. In some cases, the homes of those who refused to join were vandalized by their own neighbors, their farming equipment destroyed, and their children thrown out of German schools.

In a short amount of time, more than 63,000 German men from Romania signed up for the Waffen-SS. Later, Formanek would claim that he had been conscripted, that he hadn’t joined of his own free will. And perhaps it really did feel as though he had no choice: Almost all of the young men he knew – from his class in school, from his village, from his neighborhood in Arad – did the same. They joined the SS.

If there is a great lesson to be learned from all of the Nazi trials that have taken place, then it can be found here: The line beyond what is morally right and what is not, is far from obvious early on, before the worst of the crimes are committed. It is easily overlooked when everybody else is making the same, wrong decision.

Formanek went to the recruitment office in May 1943. The SS doctor who examined him there diagnosed him with high blood pressure. He also found Formanek to be Aryan enough to become a member of the SS.

He left Arad on July 4, 1943, on one of the first trains to leave the Banat region, together with 1,500 others. They were divided up in Vienna. The vast majority of men from Romania were sent to combat units in the east. But a small group, including Formanek, took a train toward Berlin, to Oranienburg, where the SS had established a small settlement on the edge of town. A settlement that still exists today, with small, single-family homes and lush gardens.

Rudolf Höß, who would go on to become the commandant of Auschwitz, later recalled in testimony before the tribunal in Nuremberg the "nice, small house" that he moved into here with his family, and that his garden had been "a sea of flowers."

The walls of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were just a few paces away from these gardens. Behind them, the instructors, who had long since become murderers themselves, trained Formanek to become a SS-camp guard.

The lives of the people whose paths crossed in Sachsenhausen would never have intersected without the war. They had lived on different sides of the continent, in the Caucasus, in Andalusia, in northern Norway, Belarus or Greece, and in the many, many places in between, completely ignorant of each other’s existence. But they met in Sachsenhausen. And those who survived again scattered in all directions.

Jerzy Zawadzki’s life, however, overlapped twice with that of Gregor Formanek. The first time, when they were in the camp at the same time. The second time, in the indictment of the German prosecutors.

He is there on page 151, where his life is summarized in six sentences. He is identified as a "joint plaintiff." A survivor of the camp.

His story has been pared down to a bare minimum in the indictment, reduced to just a tiny core. "While his mother, who was pregnant at the time, was deported to the Osterode labor camp, Jerzy Zawadzki and his father were taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. There, they were separated from each other," it reads.

When I first call Jerzy Zawadzki with the help of a Polish interpreter, he tells me that he finds it difficult to speak about Sachsenhausen. Actually, he says, he is happy to speak about everything else, just not that.

At some point, the interpreter, in passing, mentions her nine-year-old son, who is at school at the time.

Upon hearing that, Jerzy tells her to give her son a big hug when he arrives home that afternoon. He was nine years old, he says, when he was sent to Sachsenhausen. When the conversation is over, we just sit there for a time, not knowing what to say.

One week later, I drive by car to his home in Kielce, a city in southern Poland. The trip leads past thick, dark forests and through a landscape of gently rolling hills.

He lives in the center of town, in a large, socialist apartment block. He has decorated his apartment like a small baroque chapel. There are four images of the Virgin Mary in the living room alone, and more in the hallway, kitchen and guestroom, along with images of Jesus and a slew of small crosses and icons, Polish flags and large landscape paintings of mountain sceneries.

His one-eyed cat Misia roams around us. He found her on the street, so scrawny that you could see her ribs. At the time, he says, he thought the cat resembled him – she is his "spitting image," he says.

He loved animals as a child, too, he says. His first great losses in life were all animals. He had a dog that was allowed to sleep in his bed with him in the Warsaw apartment where he lived with his parents. And two cages full of bright yellow canaries "that sang so beautifully." When the Germans bombarded the city in 1939, the dog and the canaries burned up. He was three at the time.

Jerzy’s father was in the Armia Krajowa, the Polish underground army that organized the Warsaw Uprising in summer 1944. When the revolt began, Jerzy had just turned nine. The city was transformed into a battlefield. The Polish fighters put up a valiant fight against the superior German force, but in retaliation, the Germans shot tens of thousands of civilians to death on the streets of Warsaw.

Jerzy may have just been a child, but the Armia Krajowa used him as a messenger. He ran from one Polish position to the other through streets filled with rubble. It was an incredibly dangerous job.

In the end, he was taken prisoner by the Germans, together with his parents. A German soldier, he says, held the barrel of his machine gun to his forehead but didn’t pull the trigger. The barrel was so hot, Jerzy says, that it left a red circle on his forehead.

Then they were taken to the train station. As they were standing on the railway platform, they saw the smoke rising over the city and they cried. Then, they were crammed into a cattle car that was so full, that Jerzy’s father had to use both arms to create enough space for his pregnant mother to breathe.

Jerzy talks and talks, and for a long stretch, it sems as though nothing can interrupt his story: Not the phone call from a friend ("I’ll call you back right away"), not my pesky questions ("I’ll get to that in a minute"), not the cat nudging him ("What beautiful fur!"). Until finally, in his memories, he is standing in front of the camp gate.

He arrived at Sachsenhausen together with his father on August 15, 1944, having been separated from his mother at the train station in Oranienburg. Jerzy seemed old enough to the SS to be put in the men’s camp. He guesses he was about 1.35 meters tall back then, quite large for a nine-year-old.

The SS officer who received them on the roll-call square, he says, pointed to the clouds of smoke above the crematorium and said: If you work hard, you might live a month. If you work extra hard, then two. His father, who spoke German, translated these words for him.

Then, he was separated from his father and sent alone to a barrack where he was surrounded by strangers. From this point on, Jerzy is no longer able to talk about his memories as a story, with a beginning and an end. His stream of words comes to an end.

He shares one last scene that pops into his head: Once, he waited for an SS man to finish eating his apple so he could pick up the core and eat it. "I literally hunted down that apple core," he says.

For a brief moment, he fixes his light-blue eyes so far in the distance it looks as though he has seen a ghost. And then, he changes the subject.

It is a cold, windy fall day when I visit Sachsenhausen. The site is so expansive that the few visitors seem lost.

It is difficult to imagine that this vast space was once overcrowded with people. According to camp files kept by the SS, there were exactly 23,194 people imprisoned in the camp at the end of January 1945. In some cases, the prisoners had to sleep three to a bed or on the floor.

Today, all you can usually hear is the wind wafting through the leaves of the tall maple trees that were planted after the war. The watchtowers, from which the SS guards looked down at the prisoners below, look like giant, toothless mouths. Hooded crows perch on their roofs.

The only entrance to the camp leads through the gatehouse. On the second floor of this gatehouse is a room that is normally closed to visitors, but the head of the memorial site unlocks it for me.

I walk up a steep, narrow flight of stairs to a low-ceilinged, stuffy room at the very top of the gatehouse. The air is stale, as though nobody has been in here for several months. If you walk up to the window, you find yourself standing roughly where the SS had mounted a machine gun, in the so-called "Tower A."

The entire camp was centered around this watchtower. The prisoners’ barracks were built around it in four semicircle rings – the design looking not unlike a children’s drawing of a sun with its rays. Four SS men at a time stood guard here, the entire camp spread out before them.

They looked out over the roll call square in front of them, the mobile gallows and the squat wooden barracks. Their gaze extended all the way to the back of the camp and the pine trees behind it.

The SS rotated guard duties, meaning that pretty much all SS men belonging to the guard battalion held watch from "Tower A" at some point. They were rotated every few hours to ensure that they didn’t grow tired. Gregor Formanek must also have been on guard duty at one time or the other.

What was he thinking as he looked down at the suffering below, at the half-starved prisoners, the ill, the unlucky ones in the shoe-testing detail, who tested footwear for the Nazi military, forced to walk up and down all day long while carrying heavy packs – until they collapsed in exhaustion? Did he enjoy the power he had? Did he care? Did he find it boring? Did it make him uneasy?

When you walk across the site today, huge beds of gravel mark the places where the prisoners’ wooden barracks once stood. You can walk along the former wall until you reach an opening that didn’t exist back then. Behind it are the ruins of a structure, the leftovers of a concrete foundation.

The ground has sunk in some spots – it looks a bit like slabs of ice piled on top of each other. You can still see the narrow, crooked staircase leading up to the outlines of a room, hardly larger than a child’s bedroom, with a hole in the middle like a shower drain. This was the gas chamber.

These are the ruins of "Station Z." The SS gave the camp’s execution facility the name as a cruel joke: The last letter of the alphabet marked the end of what began back at "Tower A."

When the Red Army arrived, they found several piles of ash in front of the building, documented by the army photographers in black-and-white photos. In these images, the remains of hundreds of people look like mountains of construction waste, piled into neat cones. They took pictures of the inside of the gas chamber, set up to look like a shower room, and the facility for shooting prisoners in the back of the neck, which looked like a doctor’s examination room, complete with a measuring stick that had a hole in it to shoot through. Perhaps the strangest thing, though, were the well-fed Angora rabbits, with their thick, white fur, hopping around the camp.

The SS men raised the rabbits in a building right next door, using their thick fur to line the greatcoats they wore while standing guard in the icy cold of winter. The building is now completely derelict. The roof has collapsed, and the walls are overgrown. A birch tree is growing in the ruins. It will soon be taller than the chimney.

As I stand in front of it, I find myself wondering if Formanek ever went inside, this boy from the countryside who was quite familiar with animals. Did he ever come to pet the rabbits? Did he brush them or feed them? And if he did, could he still hear the music that was played next door when yet another prisoner was brought in to be shot?

The first memories that Jerzy can put into words again are not from Sachsenhausen. They begin after he has left the camp.

In the final days of the war, he says, he was taken to Osterode, an idyllic place at the edge of the Harz Mountains. When he arrived, he was led to a barrack. He turned a corner and suddenly found himself face-to-face with his mother. She was a forced laborer in a wool factory in town.

Much may have faded as time has passed, but even after 80 years, this moment is still fresh and clear, and undistorted in his mind: How she stood there, how he threw himself at her. "We cried and cried," he says.

They returned to Warsaw after the war. He survived with his mother and his little sister in the ruins of the destroyed city, in a shack they built themselves with no electricity and no running water. Slowly, the city was reconstructed around them. They moved into an apartment, and he started attending school again. After finishing, he became a line manager for the Polish railway company, moved to Kielce, got married and had a son. But there were always things that briefly brought back memories from the camp, no matter how much he tried to suppress them.

Once, he says, he was on vacation in Kołobrzeg, on the Baltic Sea in Poland. A German family was lying on the beach next to him. At some point, the mother took her son’s T-shirt off, saying "hands up." And suddenly, for a brief moment, he was back in Sachsenhausen.

Another time, he was at the dentist. When the drilling started, the smell reminded him of bones burning in the crematorium. He had to get up and leave.

When I ask Jerzy what he thinks of the trial against Formanek he says that it’s really far too late, adding that he no longer really cares about punishment. Only one aspect is important to him: He wants the crimes to be exposed. He wants Formanek’s children, his friends, his acquaintances to find out. His past, he says, should catch up with him as well.

I don’t know if Jerzy ever looked into the eyes of Gregor Formanek. At the end of our conversation, I asked Jerzy if he wanted to see a photo of Formanek as a young man. He didn’t. For him, I think, the risk was too great that he might find himself looking at a face that would bring right back to the camp.

Eighty years after the prisoners held at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were liberated, there is no longer anybody left who would recall the young Formanek as an SS man. As far as I know, all those who served as guards with him at the camp have died. And none of the prisoners who are still alive today have any memories of him.

All that is left are tiny clues from the archives, like splinters of wood that once belonged to a tall tree. His SS personnel file, the result of his army examination by the SS in Romania, his written oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler from October 2, 1943, the personnel file in which he was praised for his good leadership, and his certificate of promotion to SS-Oberschütze on November 1, 1944. Stefan Hördler, a historian from Göttingen University, collected all of these clues for the trial.

Hördler found SS files in the archives showing that after his arrival, Formanek was attached to the 3rd Company of the Totenkopf Guard Battalion at Sachsenhausen. This unit apparently stood out at the time for its ruthlessness, even by the standards of the SS. One SS man called it the "honor company" used for "special missions," likely also for shootings.

Not all SS guards flourished at Sachsenhausen. Among the Romanian-Germans, for example, there were at least five who were thrown out of the SS after a short time because they were considered "unsuitable" for guard duty. They were instead deployed as industrial laborers. Others volunteered for front line duty. But Formanek remained.

When Formanek left Romania on the train, he likely didn’t even have the vaguest of ideas of what was awaiting him. But when he arrived at the concentration camp, when he saw what was taking place there, he apparently made no effort whatsoever to leave.

During his long life, he appears to have developed an excuse intended to explain what he was doing there. It was an excuse he repeated more than once, first in East German prison and again decades later when the police searched his apartment in Maintal. He said that he had just been part of the marching band at Sachsenhausen. That he had never had anything to do with the prisoners.

Stefan Hördler later looked into the claim. He found that the SS marching band in the camp only practiced for a few hours per week. It was a hobby. None of the SS men were there exclusively as musicians.

During the search of his apartment, a policewoman asked Formanek if he still had photos of his time in the camp. He responded that he had preferred not to be photographed while in Sachsenhausen "because you never knew what would happen when it all came to an end."

Time is standing still. It is a sunny morning in February and I am sitting in a café in the Frohnau district of Berlin, in a sunroom with a view of a handful of trees. Someone is eating a huge piece of Black Forest cake. It briefly crosses my mind that this precise scene, from the cake to the dark wooden tables, could easily have taken place 80 years ago. In front of me is Udo Lechtermann, a tall, cantankerous man who has his arms folded in front of him most of the time as if he was cold.

Lechtermann is a retired judge. In the case against Formanek, he is representing two victims, a Jewish survivor who lives in Peru and the descendants of a Norwegian prisoner who died in Sachsenhausen.

Lechtermann hasn’t heard anything from the court for several months. He waits and waits, but nothing happens. Nobody does anything. Nobody tries to push things forward. Formanek turned 100 years old in September. How much longer will someone like that stay alive? How much time does he have left?

Among some of his colleagues, Lechtermann says, there is a tendency to slow cases down to the point that they ultimately resolve themselves. He is aware of the phenomenon from his own time on the bench. "Paper is very patient," he says.

Three years ago, Lechtermann was still head judge in the district court in Neuruppin. In one of his last cases, a man was tried in his courtroom who had served in the same unit of the Totenkopf Battalion in Sachsenhausen as Formanek, the 3rd Company. Lechtermann sentenced the man to five years behind bars.

He still remembers that he had initially had very little enthusiasm for the case because it was so complicated and the ultimate outcome seemed so inconsequential. "I already have enough to do," he thought.

But then, he read letters from survivors in which they wrote about their lives. And he visited the memorial site. After that, his thinking changed: I have to get this done fast before it is too late, he said to himself. In Neuruppin, they converted a gymnasium into a courtroom so there would be sufficient space for all those wanting to observe the proceedings. At the district court in Hanau – this much has become clear – nobody will make such an effort.

It was just over a year ago that the case went off the rails. It all started when a court-appointed doctor went to Formanek to determine whether he was fit to stand trial.

Formanek allowed the doctor into his apartment but refused to answer any of his questions. The doctor nevertheless examined Formanek, who remained almost completely silent. He listened to his heart and to his lungs. He did a couple of exercises with him, moved his arms and legs. He had Formanek stand on his tiptoes and walk back and forth across the room. The doctor had to support him as he walked.

The medical expert had already examined Formanek on two occasions one-and-a-half years earlier, in September 2022. Back then, the former SS member spoke with him. Formanek seemed to him to be in a good mental state for such an old man.

But shortly after the visit, Formanek sent the medical expert, through his lawyer, a doctor’s note that a cardiologist in Maintal had written. It said that Formanek was suffering from "senile dementia."

A few days later, the court-appointed doctor wrote that Formanek, in his view, was too frail to stand trial. The court in Hanau suspended the proceedings. Lechtermann and several others lodged an appeal. Months passed before judges at the Frankfurt Higher Regional Court ruled in favor of Lechtermann and the others. The opinion produced by the medical expert, they determined, was wholly inadequate.

More than four months have passed since this minor victory. The judges in Hanau have not commissioned a new examination nor have they taken any other steps to move things forward, at least nothing they have shared with Lechtermann. It’s almost like the proceedings have been frozen in mid-motion.

As Lechtermann and I sit there, pieces of cake as thick as encyclopedia volumes being carried past, I think to myself: It’s ending just the way it started.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, there were 36,000 criminal investigations into Holocaust perpetrators involving 170,000 defendants. The vast majority of the proceedings were suspended before they ever went to trial.

Sometimes the witnesses were deemed not to be credible, sometimes the evidence was found to be wanting. There were cases that went so slowly that the crimes were voided by the statute of limitations.

Over the years, the courts have sentenced just over 6,000 Nazi criminals, most of them to extremely short prison sentences – three years, four years, perhaps six, rarely more than 10. For decades, perpetrators like Formanek were simply forgotten, their SS files gathering dust in the archives. It would have been simple enough to find them. But that wasn’t enough for the judges. They demanded individualized evidence for each SS guard – that he had stood at the gallows at a specific day, or at the gas chamber or at the edge of a mass grave.

Formanek was lost as an anonymous face in this mass of uniformed men whose names not a single witness could remember.

It was only very late in the game, in 2011, with the conviction of John Demjanjuk, who had been a guard in the Sobibor death camp, that judges began to understand that that which they had been demanding for several decades made very little sense. That killing in the camps was organized like a factory assembly line, with the work divided up into small steps. Each SS member contributed his small part. Suddenly, all the judges needed was proof that a perpetrator had served in a concentration camp, regardless of his role, be it bookkeeper or secretary.

If that philosophy had been pursued from the very beginning, all the courtrooms in the country would not have been enough to process the perpetrators. There would have been hundreds of thousands of them. But now, just a handful were left.

The maximum sentence for murder was only imposed 172 times after the war.

Following my conversation with Lechtermann, as we are standing outside so he could take a drag from his e-cigarette, I understand his anger. So many of these cases have ended in failure. And now, they were failing yet again.

Formanek, it appears, only spoke a single time on the record about what he did in Sachsenhausen. It was immediately after the war, following his arrest in November 1946.

The Soviet military police had detained him in Fürstenwalde, a small town on the Spree River, and brought him to a prison on Lindenstraße in Potsdam. There are seven protocols from the interrogations of Formanek that took place in this prison.

However, everything he confessed to is contaminated by the violence that took place there. The Soviet officers tortured their prisoners to extract confessions. They kept them without food and water to make them more willing to talk, and they kept them awake for days on end, to the point that they had to be carried to their interrogations. Today, it is impossible to distinguish between the things Formanek said because they are true and the things he said out of fear.

It is evident in the documents how Formanek’s defiance was gradually broken. At first, he admitted to very little: He had guarded the prisoners. He had helped transport them to other camps. He had also been on duty at the crematorium. But early on, it sounded like he was just a spectator.

At some point during his second interrogation, Formanek admitted to having struck prisoners. In the third, he finally said that he had shot people. First, he admitted to one shooting, and then a second. Ultimately, the number of shootings he said he participated in grew larger and larger. The minutes of the third interrogation includes the following sentence: "But I was mistaken previously. It wasn’t 60 people, but 150 people who were shot. Furthermore, I would systematically beat prisoners with a wooden club for the smallest of transgressions."

Later, he recanted the murder confessions. "The allegation that I made this statement on November 21, 1946, is a fabrication," he said, adding that he had never taken part in any shootings.

The Soviet officers accused him of lying. "You aren’t telling the truth," they told him, according to the protocol. What they really said may have been far more threatening. But Formanek refused to budge. He insisted he hadn’t shot anybody. We will never know for sure.

Before the Soviet military tribunal in Potsdam, where he appeared on June 10, 1947, he only admitted to having beaten prisoners. His trial lasted 40 minutes. There were no witnesses. He had no defense attorney at his side. The military judges sentenced him to 25 years in a labor camp for "crimes against humanity."

When it was over, he was allowed to say just a few words. "I beg the court to allow me the opportunity to write my parents a letter," he said, according to the protocol.

A few months later, he was brought to the penal camp in Bautzen, where he would spend the next eight years of his life. The former guard was now an inmate. His hair was shaved. He became gaunt. Hundreds of prisoners around him starved to death. He was forced to sleep in hopelessly overcrowded rooms with up to 400 others. He fell ill with tuberculosis and was brought to the sick bay, where every morning, the bodies of those who hadn’t made it through the night were carried away. He survived a prisoner revolt that was brutally put down.

After several years in Bautzen, an evaluation noted: "He confesses to the crime and shows remorse." In September 1956, a few days before his 32nd birthday, he was released early from Bautzen.

After that, he lived an unremarkable life. He first moved to Frankfurt am Main and then to Maintal. He was never able to return to Romania, having been expatriated by the communist regime there. He received German citizenship and worked as a pastry chef in Maintal. First, he had a son, then a daughter. His first wife died during the second birth. He remarried. At age 54, he gave up his job as a pastry chef to again work as something like a guard: For 11 years he worked in security at the MAN-Roland factory in Offenbach, until his retirement in 1989.

When he turned 100, no mayor showed up to congratulate him. By then, his full name and photo had already been printed in the newspapers.

As I slowly put together all these puzzle pieces of his life, I notice how my own attitude toward him is slowly changing.

The Federal Republic of Germany does not recognize the verdict of the Soviet military tribunal. For that reason, he could be found guilty a second time. But should it be done?

One of the lawyers for the victims, Hans-Jürgen Förster, told me that he wouldn’t be requesting any additional punishment for Formanek in court. That he has the feeling he paid his debt with the eight years in a Stalinist camp. And somehow, I have the feeling that Förster is right. That it should no longer be about punishment for Formanek, but about his guilt being properly measured: in a proper court of law with evidence, witnesses and defense lawyers.

The ground of the cemetery in Fürstenberg froze solid overnight; the grass between the graves is covered in hoarfrost. An alley flanked by lime trees leads to a small chapel. I walk around a bit, encountering nobody. Somewhere here, Jan Zawadzki, Jerzy’s father, might be buried – among all the Zimmers, Wendts, Rauschs and Altmanns.

Shortly before I said goodbye to Jerzy in Kielce, he told me that he would love to have a bit of soil from his father’s grave. His father, he said, was buried in a cemetery in Fürstenberg, a town on the Havel River not far from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The Nazis transferred him there shortly before the end of the war.

Jan Zawadzki survived to see the arrival of the Soviet troops at Ravensbrück, who liberated the camp. Two weeks later, on May 19, 1945, according to files at the memorial site, he succumbed to tuberculosis.

After the war, Jerzy spoke with someone who had been in the camp with his father. The man told him that his father’s body had been carried out of the camp to a cemetery in Fürstenberg, where he was buried.

They didn’t give him a gravestone. After all these years, it is impossible to know where exactly he was buried. I do, however, manage to find a collective grave for refugees who were buried in the cemetery in the months after the end of the war. The gravestone is enveloped by a small juniper bush.

The frozen soil there is so hard that nothing comes loose as I try to dig out a small piece with a teaspoon. On the second try, a lump of sandy earth breaks off, which I place in a small box of walnut wood, along with a tiny sprig of juniper.

On the way back, I look over in the direction of the Ravensbrück camp, across Schwedtsee Lake, a thin film of ice covering the calm, clear water. There is no wind on this day, the sky is a milky gray, as if somebody has covered the world with a huge glass dome. I find myself thinking of the fact that Jerzy has never seen the place where his father died.

They were still able to meet during those first days in Sachsenhausen. Jerzy and his father slept in different barracks and worked in different labor commandos, but every now and then, they found a few moments to talk.

After just two weeks, though, Jerzy’s father was transferred to a different camp. He was able to say goodbye before he left. They embraced, kissed and cried. I asked Jerzy if there was anybody in the camp after that who became something of a father figure for him, someone who looked after him. He was so young, after all. But Jerzy just let out a bitter laugh. "No, nobody."

It is difficult to imagine how incredibly alone and lost nine-year-old Jerzy must have felt in that world of pain and death.

Towards the end of our conversation, he told me of a daydream he once had back then in a Sachsenhausen barrack. He suddenly saw his parents before him, decorating the Christmas tree with crepe paper and little figurines made out of straw and painted eggshells. He saw them feasting on carp and poppy seed dumplings. For a moment during the dream, he was no longer hungry. He felt completely full.

He flew so far away in his dream that he didn’t see the Kapo coming. Kapos were prisoners who guarded other prisoners on behalf of the SS. The man kicked him because he had stopped working. And that was the end of his daydream.

A few days after he received the package of soil, I speak with Jerzy on the phone. He tells me that he has decided to come to Germany. During our meeting in Kielce, he had sworn that he would never return. But somehow, this little bit of dirt awakened in him a desire to once again see where his father had died before it was his turn. He is 89 years old and says he doesn’t know for how long he will still be able to make such a journey.

Two days before Jerzy arrives in Germany, the court in Hanau announces the suspension of court proceedings due to a "surprising" but "irremediable procedural obstacle." Gregor Formanek is dead.

On the following Saturday, I meet Jerzy in a hotel in Oranienburg where he is eating dinner with four other survivors. They drink wine along with their steak and chocolate parfait. He greets me with two tight embraces, so close that our cheeks brush against each other. At the table, he has the Polish interpreter from the memorial site translate one joke after the next. A memorial site staff member says: "He’s got an endless supply of energy. He just doesn’t get tired."

He was in Ravensbrück just a few hours earlier for the first time in his life. He says he felt completely numb during the visit. Like he had drunk a bottle of vodka. "I imagined my father standing on the same ground on which I was now standing, and it made me dizzy."

Later, after driving back to the hotel, he will say that in the midst of the exuberant atmosphere in the restaurant, he had a hard time believing it was really true. "I was once herded through these streets, and now I’m eating here," he says.

He was already in Germany when his lawyer called to tell him that Formanek had died. He says the news brought him neither joy nor satisfaction. He shrugs.

He then gets up and links arms with the wife of Richard Fagot, another survivor, with whom, he says, he already feels as close is if they were members of the same family. They head upstairs to their rooms in a small group. Who would have thought that they would ever retire for the night so happily in this place?

Translation: Charles Hawley