Nazi guard facing trial

A former SS guard is going on trial next month in Germany on charges of accessory to murder for serving at the Nazis’ Stutthof concentration camp.

The 94-year-old, who hasn’t been identified due to German privacy laws, is being tried in juvenile court because he was under the age of 21 at the time of his alleged crimes, Dortmund prosecutor Andreas Brendel said Friday.

The former SS Sturmmann, roughly equivalent to the U.S. Army rank of specialist, is accused of working as a guard in the camp, east of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk, from June 1942 to about the beginning of September 1944.

Though there is no specific evidence linking him to a specific crime at the camp, more than 60,000 people were killed in Stutthof and prosecutors argue that as a guard, he was an accessory to at least hundreds of the deaths.

Stutthof prisoners were killed in a gas chamber, with deadly injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot, starved and even forced outside in winter without clothes until they died of exposure.

“As a guard he was necessarily informed about these killings,” Brendel said.

“And it is our contention that the camp was not so large that he couldn’t look around from a watch tower and see clearly what was happening there.”

The suspect admits serving at Stutthof, but told investigators he was unaware of the killings and did not participate, Brendel said.

Prosecutors argue that participating in the Nazi machinery of destruction is itself enough to be found guilty of accessory to murder.

The legal reasoning was first used successfully against former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk in 2011.

Demjanjuk was convicted in Munich on allegations he served as a Sobibor death camp guard, which he denied.

He died before his appeal could be heard.