BERLIN German prosecutors accused a 100-year-old man of 3,518 charges of being an accessory to murder on charges of serving during the Second World War as a Nazi SS guard in a concentration camp outside Berlin, officials said on Tuesday.
The man reportedly worked in the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as enlisted in the Nazi Party paramilitary wing, said Cyrill Klement, who led the centenary investigation of the Neuruppin prosecutor’s office.
The man’s name was not released under German privacy laws. Despite his advanced age, the suspect is considered fit enough to stand trial, although adaptations can be made to limit the number of hours per day the court is in session, Klement told the Associated Press.
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.
Efraim Zuroff, the main Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said the two new cases serve as “vital reminders of the dangers of anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia”.
“The defendants’ advanced age is no excuse for ignoring them and allowing them to live in the peace and tranquility that they have denied to their victims,” he said.
The new legal precedent was set 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 vehemently denied the charges, died before his appeal could be heard.
Subsequently, a federal court upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening, obtained with the same line of reasoning, solidifying the precedent.
Prior to that, 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 given the anonymity of most guards to prisoners, along with the shortage of witnesses and the passage of Time.
“The heart of this case follows the decision of Demjanjuk and Groening, that being part of the operation of this death machine is sufficient for an accessory to the murder conviction,” said Klement.
The Neuruppin state court, northwest of the city of Oranienburg, where Sachsenhausen was located, now needs to assess the defendant’s case and suitability and then set a date for the trial, Klement said.
Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 north of Berlin as the first new camp after Adolf Hitler gave the SS full control of the Nazi concentration camp system.
It was intended to be a model installation and training ground for the labyrinthine network that the Nazis built in Germany, Austria and the occupied territories.
More than 200,000 people were held there between 1936 and 1945, and tens of thousands died of hunger, disease, forced labor and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations, including shootings, hangings and gassing.
The exact numbers on the dead vary, with higher estimates of around 100,000, although scholars suggest that numbers from 40,000 to 50,000 are probably more accurate.
In their early years, most prisoners were political or criminal prisoners, but they also included some Witnesses and homosexuals. The first large group of Jewish prisoners was brought there in 1938, after the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, an anti-Semitic pogrom.
During the war, it was expanded to include Soviet prisoners of war – who were shot by the thousands – as well as others.
It had special facilities for politically prominent prisoners, including former Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, who opposed Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemoeller and the eldest son of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who died there in 1943 .
As in other camps, Jewish prisoners were chosen in Sachsenhausen for particularly severe treatment, and most of those who remained alive in 1942 were sent to the Auschwitz death camp.
Thousands of Jews were brought back later in 1944 to deal with a labor shortage for work details that included cleaning up the rubble streets in the German capital, as well as producing war in regional factories.
Sachsenhausen was released in April 1945 by the Soviets, who turned him into his own brutal camp.