A 98-year-old man has been charged in Germany with being an accessory to murder as a guard at the Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, prosecutors said Friday, according to a report in The Associated Press.
The German citizen, a resident of Main-Kinzig county near Frankfurt, is accused of having “supported the cruel and malicious killing of thousands of prisoners as a member of the SS guard detail,” prosecutors in Giessen said in a statement. They did not release the suspect’s name.
He is charged with more than 3,300 counts of being an accessory to murder between July 1943 and February 1945. The indictment was filed at the state court in Hanau, which will now have to decide whether to send the case to trial. If it does, he will tried under juvenile law, taking account of his age at the time of the alleged crimes, noted AP.
Prosecutors said that a report by a psychiatric expert last October found that the suspect is fit to stand trial at least on a limited basis.
German prosecutors have brought several cases under a precedent set in recent years that allows for people who helped a Nazi camp function to be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders without direct evidence that they participated in a specific killing.
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.
In 2020, 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.
In 2021, 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.
More than 200,000 people were held at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, between 1936 and 1945.
(Israel National News' North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Israel National News articles, however, is Israeli time.)