Auschwitz Guard Who Was No. 4 on ‘Most Wanted’ Nazi List Arrested in Germany
Hans Lipschis Image by courtesy of die welt
German police on Monday arrested a suspected former guard at the Auschwitz death camp and Nazi-hunting group Simon Wiesenthal named him as Hans Lipschis.
Hans Lipschis Image by courtesy of die welt
Prosecutors in the southwestern city of Stuttgart did not name the man but said police had arrested a 93-year-old alleged former Auschwitz guard with the “strong suspicion” he was involved in murder there.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center said it welcomed the arrest of Lipschis – fourth on its list of most wanted Nazi criminals.
“The arrest of Lipschis is a welcome first step in what we hope will be a large number of successful legal measures taken by the German judicial authorities against death camp personnel and those who served in the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units),” said Efraim Zuroff, head of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, in an emailed statement.
The arrest was made possible by the 2011 conviction in Munich of Sobibor death camp guard Ivan Demjanjuk, the first Nazi war criminal convicted in Germany, without evidence of a specific crime or a specific victim, the Center’s email said.
Demjanjuk, a retired U.S. mechanic, died in March last year aged 91. A Munich court convicted him in 2011 for his role in the killing of 28,000 Jews as a Nazi death camp guard.
Stuttgart prosecutors said the man arrested on Monday had worked at the extermination camp during World War Two, from 1941 until its liberation in 1945. Authorities had searched his flat, taken him into custody and were preparing charges against him.
The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, at Auschwitz, near the Polish village of Oswiecim.
News of the arrest came on the same day the surviving member of a German neo-Nazi cell went on trial for a series of racist murders that have scandalised Germany and exposed the security services’ inability or reluctance to recognise far-right crime.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
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. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
