A 100-year-old former guard at the Sachsenhausen Nazi camp has been charged with aiding and abetting murder, the Neuruppin prosecutor’s office in eastern Germany announced on Monday.
The man is accused of having “knowingly and voluntarily” aided and abetted from 1942 to 1945 the murder of 3,518 inmates of this concentration camp located in Oranienbourg, just 30 km north of Berlin.
He would have belonged to the camp’s guard battalion until February 1945. He now lives in the Brandenburg region, which surrounds Berlin. The Neuruppin Regional Court must now decide whether he is fit to stand trial, as the prosecution believes.
About ten instructions in progress
More than 75 years after the end of World War II, a dozen judicial investigations relating to Nazi crimes are underway in the country. On February 5, it was a 95-year-old former secretary of the Stutthof camp who had been charged with aiding and abetting murder in “more than 10,000 cases”, between 1943 and 1945, according to the Itzehoe prosecutor’s office, near Hamburg. .
Another file concerns a former SS guard of the same camp, also 95 years old. He was indicted last July for complicity in murder in several hundred cases. His ability to appear is again being assessed and no trial date has been set.
“Giving a voice to victims”
In recent years, Germany has tried and convicted several former SS members and extended to camp guards the charge of complicity in murder, illustrating the increased severity, although deemed very late by the victims, of its justice.
In July 2020, the Hamburg court sentenced Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former concentration camp guard, to two years in prison for complicity in 5,232 murders and attempted murders in Stutthof.
The most emblematic case was the sentencing to five years in prison of the former guard of the Sobibor extermination camp, John Demjanjuk, in 2011.
Newsletter Morning essentials
A tour of the news to start the day
As controversial as this late justice is, it allows “to give a voice to the victims, to their families, and to bring the facts back to the public consciousness”, believes the lawyer Andrej Umansky, author of the book “The Shoah in the East”.
Original article by : www.leparisien.fr
