A 100-year-old concentration camp guard has been charged in 3,518 murders while Germany raced to bring Nazi survivors to justice, prosecutors told AFP Monday.
The man is accused of helping “knowingly and willingly” to assassinate a prisoner at a Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany
(Photo: Shutterstock)
It is considered appropriate to go to court regardless of age, the public prosecutor’s office in the city of Neuruppin confirmed after the story was reported by the NDR broadcaster.
The case comes days after German prosecutors charged a former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp with the murder of 10,000 people, in the first such case a few years ago against women.
The 95-year-old defendant had been working at a Stutthof camp near the Nazi-owned Danzig, now Gdansk, in Poland.
Germany has been hunting down former Nazi workers since the 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk on the grounds that he was part of a Nazi assassination machine setting a legal precedent.
Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany
(Photo: Shutterstock)
Since then, courts have handed down a number of guilty verdicts on these grounds rather than for murders or crimes directly related to the accused.
Late justice included Oskar Groening, an accountant at Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, an SS guard at the same camp. Both were convicted of pregnancy in a massacre at the age of 94 but died before being jailed.
Bruno Dey, a former Nazi concentration camp guard, was convicted last year at the age of 93.
(Photo: AP)
In the latest decision, a former SS guard, Bruno Dey, was found guilty at the age of 93 and sentenced to two years in prison.
Another deputy guard at Stutthof was sued in July over the tragic murder of hundreds of people.