A 100-year-old man who was a guard at the Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin has been charged with aiding and abetting murder in 3518 cases in the second indictment of an ageing war crimes suspect in less than a week.
The man, who has not been named, is accused of having been knowingly and willingly involved in the murder of camp prisoners between 1942 and 1945 as a member of the camp’s guard squad. The defendant lives in the eastern state of Brandenburg. Prosecutors believe him to be fit enough to stand trial despite his age. The Neuruppin district court must now decide whether the case will go to trial.
More than 200,000 people, including Jews, political opponents of the Nazi regime, gay people and Allied prisoners of war, were interned in Sachsenhausen in the town of Oranienburg between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands died as a result of hunger and exhaustion, medical experiments and systematic killing.
Prosecutors last week charged a 95-year-old former secretary at the Stutthof camp near Danzig, now Gdansk, with complicity in the murders of 10,000 people in the first such case in recent years against a woman.
Read the article by David Crossland in The Australian.