A 98-year-old German man was charged Friday with complicity in murder over his alleged role during the Holocaust.
Authorities alleged that the unnamed man was complicit in the deaths of more than 3,300 people while working as a guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945. While stationed at Sachsenhausen, the man is said to have “assisted in the vicious and treacherous murder of thousands of people. prisoners,” prosecutors from the city of Giessen said. A state court will decide whether or not to send the man to trial. If so, he will be tried in juvenile court, prosecutors said, because he was a minor at the time of the Holocaust.
While details of the guard’s alleged violations were not released, lawyer Hans-Jürgen Foster told German newspaper Der Spiegel that the guard was “a specific aspect of the living conditions prevailing throughout the concentration camp complex.” Thomas Hauburger, Giessen’s chief prosecutor, added that the man “contributed to the vicious and treacherous murder of thousands of prisoners.”
More than 200,000 people were buried at Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945, according to the camp’s official memorial website. Many of these prisoners were “forced to work in workshops and factories owned by the SS in the camp’s industrial estate, as well as various criminal cases.” Thousands of prisoners died “as a result of starvation, disease, forced labour, medical experimentation and ill-treatment,” in addition to those murdered during “systemic extermination operations” by the Nazis.
Accusing a non-year-old of crimes related to the Holocaust is not unprecedented. A 96-year-old German woman was taken to court in 2021 on charges stemming from her time as a stenographer at the Stutthof concentration camp. And last year, a 101-year-old former Nazi guard was sentenced to five years in prison for murders during the Holocaust.
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