A photo showing the exterior of the SS guard canteen building in the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
- A former concentration camp guard will stand trial in October.
- The 100-year-old was accused of participating in 3,518 murders.
- Since the conviction of John Demjanjuk in 2011, Germany has been hunting down former Nazi workers.
Prosecutors announced on Monday that a 100-year-old former concentration camp guard will stand trial in Germany in October and has been charged with 3,518 murders.
The prosecutor’s office in Neuruppin first filed the charges in February, and the office received a medical evaluation that confirmed that the man was “fit for trial” despite his advanced age.
According to the prosecutor, the hearing will be limited to two and a half hours per day.
The suspect was accused of “intentionally and voluntarily” assisting in the murder of prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, northern Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
He was specifically accused of being an accomplice in the “1942 execution of Soviet prisoners of war by the firing squad” and the murder of prisoners by “using the poisonous gas Zyklon B”.
Thomas Walther, the lawyer representing the multiple victims in this case, told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag: “Some of the common complainants are as old as the defendants and they expect justice to be served.”
The Nazi SS detained more than 200,000 people in concentration camps during their lifetime, of which 20,000 were believed to have been killed.
Since the conviction of John Demjanyuk in 2011, Germany has been hunting down former Nazi staff members on the grounds that the guard was part of the Nazi killing machine, setting a legal precedent.
Since then, the court has rendered several guilty convictions on these grounds, rather than convictions for murder or atrocities directly related to the defendant.
In July, the German authorities confirmed that they were investigating a 95-year-old man because many Soviet soldiers served as Nazi guards in prison camps during World War II.
At the end of March, prosecutors announced that they had dropped the case against a 95-year-old former Nazi death camp guard who was recently deported from the United States due to “lack of sufficient suspicion.”
