A German court suspended the case against a 96-year-old former Nazi camp guard deemed unfit for trial, but ruled that he must pay his own attorney’s fees.
The man named Harry S is accused of helping and encouraging murder in several hundred cases while working as a guard in the Stutthof camp near what was Danzig, now Gdańsk, between June 1944 and May 1945.
He was charged in 2017 along with another former Stutthof guard whose trial was interrupted in March 2019, also on health grounds.
“Due to his physical condition, he was no longer able to reasonably represent his interests inside and outside the trial,” the Wuppertal district court said in a statement.
However, the court found that there was “a high degree of probability” that Harry S was guilty of the crimes and therefore decided that he should incur his own expenses.
Harry S was accused of supervising the transport of 598 prisoners from Stutthof to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on September 10, 1944, all but two of whom were later murdered in gas chambers.
It can also be assumed that he supervised other transports and maintained surveillance regularly during his 10 months in the field and therefore “recognized the scope and scale of the mass murder committed,” the court said.
This included the mass murder of prisoners in the camp’s gas chamber, as well as shootings and lethal injections directly into the hearts of the prisoners, the report said.
Germany has been harassing former Nazi officials since a legal precedent was created by the 2011 sentencing of former guard John Demjanjuk on the basis that he had served as part of the Nazi killing machine.
Since then, the courts have ruled on several guilty verdicts for these reasons, rather than murders or atrocities directly related to the accused individual.
Among those who were later brought to justice were Oskar Gröning, an accountant from Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, an SS guard from the same camp.
Both were convicted of complicity in mass murder at the age of 94, but died before being arrested.
In February, German prosecutors accused a 95-year-old who had been secretary in the Stutthof camp of complicity in the murder of 10,000 people, the first case in recent years against a woman.
Days later, a former 100-year-old guard from the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin, was charged with complicity in 3,518 murders.