Former Nazi SS officer Erich Steidtmann died in Germany this week at the age of 95, two months after the reopening of an investigation into his connection to the mass murder of Jews in Eastern Europe. The case was reopened in April based on a letter that Steidtmann wrote in October 1943 that would have placed him in the area of the massacres at the time they occurred rather than at home on leave, as he told prosecutors during investigations in the 1960s.

Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel director, said on Tuesday, “Had the prosecutors done their job properly in the sixties, he would not have escaped justice.” He told the Associated Press, "It was only thanks to research by the Wiesenthal Center’s Dr. Stefan Klemp and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung Magazine that the case against Steidtmann was reopened.”