Germany charges 98 y/o ex-Nazi camp guard over 3, 300 murders

Berlin: German authorities said on Friday said that they have charged a 98-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard on charges of aiding and abetting the murder of more than 3, 300 people during the Holocaust.

The man, whose name was not made public by the prosecutors, in accordance with German privacy laws, worked at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, the public prosecutor in the western city of Giessen, near Frankfurt, said in a statement.

A minor at the time of the alleged crimes, the man is accused of “having assisted in the cruel and insidious killing of thousands of prisoners,” prosecutors said.

He will face a juvenile court as he was under the age of 18 when he served at Sachsenhausen.

The trial is expected to be in Hanau, close to the man’s home, in accordance with juvenile law. He was found fit to stand trial within certain limits according to a psychiatric assessment in October 2022, said the statement.

Germany has been trying to bring the last surviving perpetrators of Nazi war crimes, who are now well into old age, to justice.

Another former Sachsenhausen guard, aged 101, was sentenced to five years imprisonment last year, after being convicted for aiding and abetting the murder of 3,518 people during the Holocaust.

A 96-year-old German woman, who was alleged to have committed crimes while working as a stenographer and typist in the commandant’s office at the concentration camp in Stutthof, near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk, was also convicted on similar charges.

Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built north of Berlin by prisoners and opened in 1936. Of the roughly 200,000 prisoners who passed through the camp, around 100,000 are thought to have died there from starvation, forced labour, medical experiments and murder by the SS, the paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany.

During World War II, the camp’s inmate population fluctuated between about 11,000 and 48,000 people.

An estimated six million Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, besides hundreds of thousands of Roma people, political opponents, homosexuals, and people with physical or learning disabilities.

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