Image by Getty Images

A German court on Tuesday permitted the trial of a 95-year-old German man accused of being an accessory to the murder of at least 3,681 people at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The higher court of Rostock in northern Germany deemed Hubert Z. fit for trial, overruling a previous decision by a lower court that considered him too fragile for a legal process.

Z., whose last name is confidential due to German privacy laws, was a sergeant in the Nazi SS at Auschwitz from October 1943 to January 1944 and acted as one of the death camp’s paramedics from Aug. 15 to Sept. 14, 1944, the indictment said.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

During that month, at least 14 deportation trains reached the extermination camp from places as far as Rhodes, Lyon, Vienna and Westerbork in the Netherlands, the local prosecutor’s office in Schwerin said.

Although Z. is not accused of having been directly involved in any killings, the prosecution’s office holds that he was well aware of the camp’s function as a facility for mass murder and by joining its organizational structure consciously participated and even accelerated the deaths of thousands of people.

German court rulings have established a precedent for the conviction of Nazi concentration camp employees for being guilty of accessory to murder.

In July, 94-year-old Oskar Groening, known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” was sentenced to four years in prison after he was convicted of the accessory to murder of 300,000 people in Auschwitz. [ID: nL5N0ZV1GV]

Two other cases involving death camp employees are pending trial in German courts.

In the town of Detmold, Reinhold H. is accused of being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people in Auschwitz, and in the northern city of Kiel, a 91-year-old woman is accused of the same charges in the case of 260,000 people.

In both cases, the defense maintains that the accused are unfit for trial and final court rulings on this are expected later this year and in early 2016.

Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, responsible for Nazi war crime investigations at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that all these legal cases were happening very late.

“You would expect that considering the age of the accused every effort would be made to expedite these cases but instead they all follow a lengthy process,” Zuroff told Reuters over the phone from his office in Jerusalem.

“But better late than never.”

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount