A 98-year-old man has been charged in Germany with being an accessory to murder as a guard at the Nazis’ Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, prosecutors said Friday.
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.
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 there without direct evidence that they participated in a specific killing.
Charges of murder and being an accessory to murder aren’t subject to a statute of limitations under German law.
More then 200,000 people were held at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands died of starvation, disease, forced labor, and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations including shootings, hangings and gassing.
Exact numbers for those killed vary, with upper estimates of some 100,000, though scholars suggest figures of 40,000 to 50,000 are likely more accurate.
(AP)
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11 Responses
“They did not release the suspect’s name.”?
Why?
___
And will he survive the trial or die without even slightest punishment on earth?
@Things: Well, obviously it would be great if he dies without punishment. More Hell for him…
Also, anyone know what the technical legalities are? I mean, how can a country charge a person with a crime when he was acting in accordance with the orders of the government of the time. Obviously, one doesn’t get exempted from Hell for “following orders,” but I’m asking: How can a country prosecute and punish a person for something that their government held at the time was legal.
I’m sure this is worked out, because this obviously isn’t the first Nazi charged in Germany; I’m just curious if anyone knows the intricacies here.
Germany does not have the death penalty & making an exception for a camp guard that was a juvenile at that time charged not with murder but as an accessory seems a little extreme. Look who was hung after WWII (Nuremberg, etc.) & Eichmann in Israel. These were major players in the Holocaust & Nazi destruction of Europe, not some teenager that served as a guard & nothing has surfaced that he actually killed anyone.
Things: Don’t worry if he is not punished in this world Hashem sometimes keeps the punishments of Reshoim for Gehenom, where his punishment will be far more severe!
In general, I am not in favor of these trials 75 years later, when they’re so close to death. But at least this is an SS guard, and not some accountant or something. Deserves what he gets.
You can always rely on AP to “accurately” report a news story. Did you notice that not once in the entire article is there a reference to the fact that Jews were the victims. Not once! If you think this “Nazi animal” is an antisemite, he׳s got nothing on AP.
Things: His name wasn’t released because he’s being tried as a juvenile. That’s what it says right here.
These prosecutions are the result of a recent change in the law. Before D-day, the USA announced that it would locate and charge every those responsible for criminal act during the War. The estimate was 3.5million people. 2.5 were amnestied without trial. Nearly a million were tried. Over a quarter million were amnestied during trial. Over half a million were found guilty, of which 2/3 were fined. 40,000 were given hard labour. 93,600 were given 10 years, by end 1949 just 300 of whom were still serving. The USSR had a better track record: between 100,000 and 250,000 were shot within two years of end of War.
In 1967, W. German State Attorney admitted that the State had brought less than 10% of criminals to trial (from: Forged in Fury, Elkins).
Save a dozen or so big names, the Allies executed very few murderers. Much more were killed by ex-prisoners or by ‘rogue’ Allied soldiers.
Recent research (eg Black Earth, Snyder) documents that regular German soldiers, were engaged in massacres in Eastern Europe; German police were also deeply involved. The einsatzgruppen formed a minority of the overall killing machine in the East. Those soldiers and police were never even mentioned, let alone brought to justice.
That all said, the present trials are a mockery. Stenographers are being tried as accessories while the actual murderers lived out their days in comfort, many in the USA and other allied countries – whilst Jewish refugees were refused entry to those same countries.
Who are the Germans trying to impress? This has nothing to do with going after the last few Nazis as they claim. It’s part of a cynical whitewash to clear their consciences. Jews everywhere should ignore their shenanigans; the reports should not be given print-space. We know who was responsible, and who continues to bear that responsibility (including Allied politicians). It is not be chance that the survivors did not use the euphemism ‘Nazis’ on those criminals; they used -and so do their children – the word ‘Germans”. This practice should be continued.
The present change in German law makes a
No one gets away with anything; Hashem’s books are kept very meticulously. But if there is even one survivor still alive who suffered from him and got kicks from his shiny boots, and now will get some level of satisfaction from this man’s quaking in his boots and feeling that Hashem is even slightly avenging the survivor’s anguish, it is worth prosecuting him.
Death penalty. TV broadcast
Amalek should be wiped out forever!