German prosecutors accused a 100-year-old man of 3,518 charges of accomplice murder on charges of having served during WWII as a Nazi SS guard in a concentration camp outside Berlin.
The man reportedly worked in the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as enlisted in the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, said Cyrill Klement, who led the centenary investigation of the Neuruppin prosecutor’s office.
The man’s name was not released, according to German privacy laws. Despite his advanced age, the suspect is considered fit enough to stand trial, although adaptations may be needed to limit the number of hours a court session is held, according to Klement.
Neuruppin’s office received the case in 2019 from the federal prosecutor’s special office in Ludwigsburg, charged with investigating Nazi-era war crimes, Klement said.
The issue comes after prosecutors in the northern city of Itzehoe announced their adherence to the murder charges last week against a 95-year-old woman who worked during the war as secretary to the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp. This case and the charges against the 100-year-old man are based on recent legal precedents in Germany, establishing that anyone who helped a Nazi camp can be prosecuted for complicit in the murders committed there.
This was established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio auto industry worker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Germany-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, who denied the charges, died before his appeal could be heard.
Subsequently, a federal court upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Gröning, obtained with the same line of reasoning, solidifying the precedent. Prior to this, German courts demanded that prosecutors justify the charges by providing evidence of a former guard’s participation in a specific murder, often an almost impossible task.
“The heart of this case follows the decision [in the cases] Demjanjuk and Gröning, that being part of the operation of this death machine is sufficient for an accessory to the conviction for murder, ”said Klement.
The court has not yet set a date for the trial.