A 98-year-old former Nazi camp guard was charged with complicity in the murder

The public prosecutor’s office in Giessen, Germany, announced Friday September 1 charges of complicity in the murder of a 98-year-old former SS guard from the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp, north of Berlin.

The man, whose name has not been released, is suspected of complicity in more than 3,300 murders at the camp between 1943 and 1945, Chief Prosecutor Thomas Haberger said in a press release. He has been chargedAs a member of SS guard teams, for supporting the brutal and treacherous killing of thousands of prisoners“, he continued.

Tried by Juvenile Room

If the complaint leads to an investigation, the man, who was under 21 when the facts emerged, will be tried by the Juvenile Chamber of the Hanau District Court in the west of the country. The accused is considered “At least one part will stand up to trial“, according to a psychiatric study carried out in October 2022, refers to the lawyer.

Between its opening in 1936 and its liberation by the Soviets on April 22, 1945, the Sachsenhausen camp housed around 200,000 prisoners, mainly political opponents, Jews and homosexuals. Tens of thousands of them died, mainly from exhaustion caused by forced labor and brutal prison conditions.

Trials of former Nazi camp guards have increased in recent years in Germany, with Jan Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in 2011, a case in point.

Given the great age of the accused, trials were not always held for health reasons, or when they were, the convicted died before being imprisoned, as was the case with Jan Demjanjuk. In recent cases, Josef Schütz, the former Sachsenhausen goalkeeper, was sentenced to five years in prison in June 2022.Accomplice» At least 3,500 prisoners were killed between 1942 and 1945. He died in April aged 102 before serving his sentence.