3518-This is the number of murders that a former concentration camp guard had to hear in Neuruppin District Court from October 7th due to his involvement. According to the indictment, the 100-year-old defendant was accused of deliberately and voluntarily assisting in the brutal murder of prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin between 1942 and 1945. It is about the conspiracy of 3,518 murders.
The court has arranged 22 trial days until January. As stated in the expert opinion, the man could only negotiate partially. Therefore, he can only attend the hearing for a few hours at a time. “This is why so many trial days have been set,” the court spokesperson said.
According to the monument there, more than 200,000 people were detained in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands of prisoners died of hunger, disease, forced labor, medical experimentation, and abuse, or became victims of systematic extinction.
It was only in recent years, after the verdicts of several former Auschwitz concentration camp guards, that the German judiciary began investigating the guards of concentration camps such as Sachsenhausen or Stutthof, which were not considered extermination camps. In the past, the common legal practice was that only those perpetrators who could be proved to have committed specific acts of violence would be prosecuted.
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It was not until the 2015 verdict against Oskar Gröning, known as the “bookkeeper” of Auschwitz, that case law prevailed, at least in the case of extermination camps like Auschwitz. Each of his insightful contributions is an aid to the ongoing killings in the camp. It is no longer necessary to prove specific contributions to individual killings. Last year, this view was applied to the Stutthof concentration camp for the first time in the judgment.
