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 German investigators said Tuesday they have identified eight suspected Nazi war criminals who worked at the former Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk, Poland. 
 
 “Following our investigations, we have identified four men and four women,” Jens Rommel, the head of the central office for Nazi crime investigations in Ludwigsburg, Germany told NBC News. 
 
 Items belonging to former prisoners at the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp in Poland were found during an archaeological excavation earlier this year. ADAM WARZAWA / EPA 
 
 Initial legal inquiries into “accessory to murder in several thousand cases” were forwarded to prosecutors’ offices across Germany, Rommel said. Local prosecutors will now need to assess whether there is enough evidence against the eight suspects to bring charges. 
 
 Between June and August 1944, thousands of people were killed by the Nazis in the gas chambers and with neck shots at the Stutthof camp, Rommel explained. 
 
 The male suspects had worked as guards at the Stutthof camp, while the women had been employed as typists or phone operators, Rommel said. 
 
 He added that all of the suspects were born between 1918 and 1927, meaning they would be in their late 80s or 90s. 
 
 Investigators in Ludwigsburg are continuing their research and investigations for former concentrations camps Auschwitz and Majdanek, while they recently expanded their search to former Nazi concentration camps Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme. 
 
 In June, a German court convicted 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning of being an accessory to 170,000 counts of murder. 
 
 Related: Pope Offers Silent Prayer at Auschwitz 
 
 The 2011 prosecution of John Demjanjuk, an autoworker who lived in the U.S. for years after the war and was convicted of 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder, was a game-changer for the German legal system. The court's ruling that he could be convicted on his service record alone, triggered a search for dozens of suspected Auschwitz guards who were still believed to be living in Germany. 
 
 Two others are currently on trial in Germany for “accessory to murder” during the Nazi regime. ||||| FILE - In this Nov. 24, 2015 file picture Jens Rommel, the head of a special prosecutors' office that looks into Nazi war crimes,poses in Ludwigsburg, Germany. German prosecutors say they have tracked... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Nov. 24, 2015 file picture Jens Rommel, the head of a special prosecutors' office that looks into Nazi war crimes,poses in Ludwigsburg, Germany. German prosecutors say they have tracked... (Associated Press) 
 
 BERLIN (AP) — German prosecutors say they have tracked down eight people who allegedly worked at the Nazis' Stutthof concentration camp during World War II and are considering whether they can be charged as accessories to murder. 
 
 Jens Rommel, the head of a special prosecutors' office that looks into Nazi war crimes, told news agency dpa on Tuesday that four male suspects worked as guards and four women were secretaries or telephone operators. 
 
 Rommel's office, which doesn't bring cases to court itself, handed the cases to prosecutors across Germany for them to consider whether to file charges. 
 
 Some 65,000 people died at Stutthof. German prosecutors in recent years have pursued Nazi suspects under new legal reasoning that, even without evidence of a specific crime, they can be prosecuted if they helped camps operate.
– Eight elderly men and women could be charged with working at a Nazi concentration camp in Poland during WWII, the AP reports. German investigators say the four men were guards at Stutthof concentration camp and the four women were telephone operators and secretaries. According to Reuters, the eight individuals were identified by Jens Rommel, Germany's head Nazi hunter, and the Central Office for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes. Rommel has forwarded the cases to local prosecutors, who could charge the individuals with "accessory to murder in several thousand cases," NBC News reports. The individuals are in their late 80s or 90s. Approximately 65,000 people were killed at the Stutthof concentration camp. German prosecutors have recently started going after people for allegedly working at Nazi concentration camps even when their specific crimes aren't known. "Given the vast system of concentration and extermination camps put in place by the Nazis, and the number of personnel needed to run and guard these sites, it comes as no surprise that a few of these perpetrators are still alive, even today," Reuters quotes a statement from the World Jewish Congress as saying. The German government has given Rommel and his office nine more years to investigate Nazi crimes from WWII.