A German court on Wednesday halted proceedings against a 96-year-old former Nazi camp guard, saying he is unfit to stand trial, but ruled that he must pay his own legal fees, AFP reports.
The man, who has only been identified as Harry S., is accused of aiding and abetting murder in several hundred cases while working as a guard at the Stutthof camp in then Nazi-occupied Poland between June 1944 and May 1945.
He was charged in 2017 along with another former Stutthof guard whose trial was discontinued in March 2019, also for health reasons.
"Due to his physical condition, he was no longer able to reasonably represent his interests in and outside of the trial," the district court in Wuppertal said in a statement quoted by AFP.
However, the court found there was "a high degree of probability" Harry S. was guilty of the crimes and therefore ruled that he should incur his own expenses.
Harry S. was accused of overseeing the transport of 598 prisoners from Stutthof to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on September 10, 1944, all but two of whom were later murdered in gas chambers.
His case is the latest that Germany has opened against suspected Nazi war criminals in recent years.
Germany’s crackdown on Nazi war criminals began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp and sentenced to five years. He died in 2012.
Last year, 93-year-old Stutthof camp guard Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court, equal to the number of people believed to have been killed at Stutthof during his service there in 1944 and 1945.
Last month, German prosecutors charged a 100-year-old man who allegedly served as a Nazi concentration camp guard where more than 100,000 people were killed during World War II.
Days earlier, Germany charged a former secretary from the Stutthof Nazi concentration camp with complicity in the murders of 10,000 people.
Some of those convicted of Nazi-era war crimes never served their sentences as they passed away before being jailed.
One such convict, Reinhold Hanning, was found guilty of complicity in the mass murders at Auschwitz. However, Hanning died at the age of 95 in June of 2017, before he could serve his jail term.
In a similar case, Oskar Groening, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, died in March of 2018 before he could begin serving a four-year prison sentence after being convicted for the crime of accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz.
Last April, a German court dropped a case against 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, Johann Rehbogen, finding him unfit for trial due to illness.