Berlin (AFP) – German prosecutors called Thursday for the case of a 96-year-old former Nazi medical orderly at the Auschwitz death camp to be thrown out because he is deemed unfit for trial.
Hubert Zafke had faced 3,681 counts of being an accessory to murder at the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
But concerns over his mental and physical health led to repeated postponements of the trial, which began in February 2016 in the northeastern lakeside town of Neubrandenburg.
The prosecutors’ move Thursday effectively ends proceedings against one of the last defendants accused of crimes at Auschwitz. A court spokesman told AFP that the presiding judges would approve the motion “in the short term”.
Stefan Urbanek, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor’s office, said in a statement that medical evaluations in March and July this year had found the wheelchair-bound Zafke “unfit to stand trial”.
“The experts reached this conclusion after having diagnosed dementia in October 2015, leading to a determination that Zafke could only stand trial on a limited basis,” Urbanek said.
“Now the dementia has reached a severity that the defendant is no longer able, inside and outside the courtroom, to reasonably assess his interests or coherently follow or give testimony.”
Read the full article by Deborah Cole at Yahoo7 News.