German authorities are pursuing the prosecution of a 100-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard, nearly 80 years after the end of World War II, after a higher regional court in Frankfurt on Tuesday overturned a lower court's ruling that the suspect was unfit to stand trial, thus reviving the case, reports the AFP news agency.
The suspect, identified in German media as Gregor Formanek, was charged last year with aiding and abetting murder in 3,322 cases during his time at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he served between July 1943 and February 1945.
In February, an expert had assessed that Formanek’s mental and physical condition rendered him unfit for trial. Based on this evaluation, a court in Hanau, located in the Hesse region, decided in June not to proceed with the case.
However, the Frankfurt court found fault with the initial assessment, stating that it was not grounded in "sufficient facts."
"The expert himself stated that it was not possible to interview the defendant and that the opportunity for extensive psychiatric testing was not available," the court noted in its ruling.
Germany has intensified efforts to prosecute the last living Nazi war criminals in recent years. The crackdown on Nazi war criminals began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged with 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 at Sachsenhausen where more than 100,000 people were killed.
This past August, Irmgard Furchner, a 99-year-old former secretary at a Nazi concentration camp, lost her appeal against her conviction for complicity in the murder of over 10,000 people.
Furchner was sentenced to a two-year suspended sentence in December 2022 for her involvement in what prosecutors described as the "cruel and malicious murder" of prisoners at the Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Some of those convicted of Nazi-era war crimes never served their sentences as they passed away before being jailed.
In addition, some cases have been dropped because the accused died or were physically unable to stand trial.
In June, a court in Hanau declined to open proceedings against a 99-year-old alleged former guard at the Sachsenhausen Nazi camp, deeming the suspect unfit to stand trial.