A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard will stand trial Germany In October, the prosecutor announced that he was accused of participating in 3,518 murders.
The prosecutor’s office in Neuruppin first filed the allegations in February and they received a medical evaluation that confirmed that the man was “fit for trial” despite his advanced age.
The prosecutor said that hearings are limited to two and a half hours a 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”.
According to local media reports, the defendant’s name does not comply with German privacy laws and he is said to live in the state of Brandenburg outside of Berlin.
Thomas Walther, a lawyer representing multiple victims in this case, told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag: “Some of the co-claimants are as old as the defendants and they expect justice to be served.”
Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 as the first new concentration camp after Adolf Hitler gave the SS full control of the Nazi concentration camp system. It aims to be a model facility and training camp for the networks established by the Nazis in Germany, Austria, and the occupied territories.
Between 1936 and 1945, more than 200,000 people were held there. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, forced labor, and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS murder operations (including shooting, hanging, and poison gas).
The exact number of victims varies, and the highest estimate is about 100,000, although scholars believe that the number between 40,000 and 50,000 may be more accurate.
In the early days, most prisoners were either political prisoners or criminal prisoners, but some Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals were also included. The first Jewish prisoners were taken there in 1938 after the Night of Broken Glass or the Night of the Anti-Semitist Holocaust Crystal.
During the war, Sachsenhausen expanded to include Soviet prisoners of war — who were shot and killed by thousands — and others.
Like other concentration camps, Jewish prisoners were singled out to receive particularly harsh treatment, and most of those who were still alive in 1942 were sent to Auschwitz.
Since the conviction of John Demyanyuk in 2011, Germany has been hunting down former Nazi staff on the grounds that the camp guards were 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 he was a Nazi guard in a prisoner-of-war camp, where many Soviet soldiers were killed.
A 96-year-old woman will stand trial in the northern German town of Itzehoe in late September.
The woman allegedly served as the secretary of the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp during the war and was charged with more than 10,000 accessory murders earlier this year.
Both her case and the charges against the 100-year-old suspect rely on recent German legal precedents, which stipulated that anyone who helped the operation of a Nazi concentration camp could be prosecuted for participating in a murder committed there.
