A 100-year-old German was charged with 3,518 charges of accomplice murder, with prosecutors accusing him of working as a guard at the Nazi concentration camp in Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, from 1942 to 1945.
The man, whose name has not been released due to German privacy laws, is considered fit to stand trial. Last week, a 95-year-old woman who served as secretary to the commander of the Stutthof concentration camp was charged with 10,000 charges of being an accessory to murder and complicity in assassination attempts.
German prosecutors are running out of time in an attempt to investigate war crimes involving camp guards, secretaries and others who held low-level positions with the Nazis. The pace began to pick up in 2011, when 91-year-old John Demjanjuk was convicted of helping kill 28,000 people in the Sobibor concentration camp, where prosecutors say he worked as a guard.
Before his conviction, Nazi guards were not normally brought to trial, because it was very difficult to find evidence of direct participation in a specific murder. The Demjanjuk case set the precedent that anyone working in a field was aware of what was going on and could be prosecuted for an accomplice to murder. Demjanjuk, who denied being the dreaded guard “Ivan the Terrible”, was sentenced to five years in prison and died in 2012 with his case on appeal.
Prosecutor Thomas Will said The New York Times that his office is using Nazi records to determine whether any former concentration camp guards are still alive. Some of the people who were tried were teenagers at the time of their alleged crimes and are therefore now being seen in the juvenile court. “Demjanjuk’s decision was very important because it showed that we had to catch up,” Will told Times. “It was an initial spark that led us to examine the guards from all camps, not just the extermination camps, under the idea that what happened there could not be forgotten”.
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