BERLIN (AP) – German prosecutors have accused a 100-year-old man of 3,518 crimes of being an accessory to murder for the accusations he lent during World War II as a Nazi SS guard in a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin, authorities reported Tuesday.
Cyrill Klement, who led the centennial investigation for the Neuruppin prosecutor’s office, reportedly worked in the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as a recruited member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing.
The man’s name was not published in accordance with German privacy laws. Despite his advanced age, the suspect is considered fit enough to stand trial, although accommodation may need to be made to limit the number of hours the court has in session per day, Klement told The Associated Press.
The Neuruppin cabinet received the case in 2019 from the Ludwigsburg special federal prosecutor’s office tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes, Klement said.
It comes after prosecutors in the northern city of Itzehoe last week announced murder charges against a 95-year-old woman who worked during the war as secretary to the SS commander. of the Stutthof concentration camp. This case and the allegations against the 100-year-old man are based on the recent legal precedent in Germany which states that anyone who helps a Nazi camp run can be prosecuted for accessory to the murders committed there.
Efraim Zuroff, the center’s chief Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, said the two new cases serve as “vital reminders of the dangers of anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia.”
“The advanced age of the accused is no excuse to ignore them and allow them to live in the peace and tranquility they denied their victims,” he said.
The new legal precedent was set in 2011 with the conviction of former documentary filmmaker John Ohio Demjanjuk as an accessory to the murder charge that served as a guard at the German-occupied Sobibor extermination camp in Poland. Demjanjuk, who strongly denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.
Subsequently, a federal court upheld the 2015 conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Groening achieved with the same line of reasoning, which consolidated the precedent.
Earlier, German courts had required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guard’s involvement in a specific murder, often an almost impossible task given the anonymity of most guards to prisoners, along with the lack of witnesses and the passage of time.
“The core of this case follows the decision of Demjanjuk and Groening, that being part of the operation of this death machinery is sufficient for an accessory of the murder conviction,” Klement said.
The state court in Neuruppin, northwest of the city of Oranienburg where Sachsenhausen was located, must now assess the defendant’s case and suitability and then set the date for the trial, Klement said.
Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 in northern Berlin as the first new camp after Adolf Hitler gave the SS full control of the Nazi concentration camp system.
It was intended to be a model facility and training ground for the labyrinthine network that the Nazis built in Germany, Austria, and occupied territories.
More than 200,000 people were housed there between 1936 and 1945, and tens of thousands died of starvation, disease, forced labor, and other causes, as well as medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations that included shooting, hanging, and gas. .
The exact numbers of deaths vary, with estimates in excess of about 100,000, although scholars suggest that the figures of 40,000 to 50,000 are probably more accurate.
In his early years, most prisoners were political prisoners or criminal prisoners, but they also included some Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. The first large group of Jewish prisoners was taken there in 1938 after the Night of Broken Glass, or Kristallnacht, an anti-Semitic pogrom.
During the war, it was expanded to include Soviet prisoners of war – who were shot by thousands – as well as others.
It had special facilities for politically prominent prisoners, including former Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, who opposed Austria’s annexation to Nazi Germany, anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemoeller, and the dictator’s eldest son. Soviet Joseph Stalin, who died there in 1943.
As in other camps, Jewish prisoners were held in Sachsenhausen for particularly harsh treatment and most of those who survived in 1942 were sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
Thousands of Jews were later returned in 1944 to address labor shortages for labor details that included cleaning the rubble streets of the German capital, as well as war production in regional factories.
Sachsenhausen was liberated in April 1945 by the Soviets, who turned it into their own brutal camp.