[ad_1] A former Nazi concentration camp guard has been charged for being an accessory to more than 3,000 murders that occurred during the Holocaust.
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A former Nazi concentration camp guard has been charged for being an accessory to more than 3,000 murders that occurred during the Holocaust.
The 98-year-old man, who has not been named, was an adolescent when he served as an SS guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between July 1943 and February 1945, the indictment says.
He allegedly assisted in the “cruel and insidious” mass killing of more than 3,300 innocent people that were sent to the camp.
“The man, a German citizen, who at the time of the crimes was an adolescent, is accused of having aided the cruel and perfidious killing of thousands of prisoners,” Giessen’s chief prosecutor, Thomas Hauburger, told German media.
The man will face a juvenile court because he was under the age of 18 during the time of the crimes.
In accordance to German juvenile law, the trial is expected to be held in Hanau, just outside of Frankfurt, which is close to the man’s home in Main-Kinzig.
The case will decide whether or not the individual should go to trial for his alleged crimes.
A psychiatric assessment of the suspect in October 2022 found that he is fit to stand trial within certain limits.
Since 2011, Germany has prosecuted ex-Nazis for complicity – not only for murder or torture as individuals.
The nation is racing against time to bring the last surviving perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice before they pass away.
Many of those indicted have been very old and died before ever going to trial.
The Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built just north of Berlin in 1936.
More than 200,000 people were imprisoned at the camp, including political prisoners, Jews, captured Soviet soldiers, Roma and Sinti.
Tens of thousands of inmates died from starvation, forced labour, medical experiments and murder by the Nazis.
It is estimated that between 40,000 and 50,000 people died at the labour camp.
Last year, a 101-year-old man was found guilty of assisting in mass murder at Sachsenhausen.
He was given a five-year prison sentence, but died in April this year, still free while awaiting the outcome of an appeal.
Pleading his innocence all throughout the trial, the 101-year-old denied any knowledge of what happened in the concentration camp and insisted he was instead a farm labourer.
In another case, a 96-year-old German woman fled before standing trial for crimes she was alleged to have committed while working as a stenographer and typist at the concentration camp in Stutthof, near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk.
She was later found by local authorities and brought before court, where she was convicted on similar charges.
An estimated 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
Also killed were hundreds of thousands of Roma people, political opponents, homosexuals, and people with physical or learning disabilities.
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