100-year-old former Nazi camp guard to stand trial as accessory to murder of 3,500 prisoners
The entrance to the Sachsenhausen memorial near Berlin, Germany. Courtesy of Getty
(JTA) — A 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard has been indicted in Germany for being an accessory to murder in 3,500 cases.
The defendant, who was not named in the German media, is scheduled to go on trial in October in the Neuruppin district court for his service at Sachsenhausen, Reuters reported Sunday.
Court sessions requiring the defendant’s presence will be limited to about two hours a day because of his age.
The defendant was said to have worked as a guard from 1942 to 1945 in Sachsenhausen, a camp near Berlin where some 200,000 people were imprisoned and 20,000 murdered.
Germany has prosecuted several accused accomplices to Nazi war crimes since the 2011 conviction in Munich of former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, who had been living in the U.S. before being arrested, deported and tried for his role at Sobibor. He was found guilty as an accessory in the murders of nearly 30,000 Jews there and died in 2012.
The Demjanjuk case set a precedent that being a guard at a death camp was sufficient to prove complicity in murder. Few of the guards are still alive, however, and thus the number of prosecutions is dwindling.
—
The post 100-year-old former Nazi camp guard to stand trial as accessory to murder of 3,500 prisoners appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news. All donations are still being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000 until April 24.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
