Former concentration camp guard (95) charged as being accessory to 36,000 killings

A 95-YEAR-OLD man has been charged with more than 36,000 counts of being an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Nazi Mauthausen concentration camp, prosecutors in Berlin said.

Hans Werner H, whose last name was not released because of German privacy rules, is accused of serving as an SS guard in the camp in northern Austria from mid-1944 to early 1945.

During that time, 36,223 people were killed there, primarily by gassing but also by lethal injection, shooting, starvation and exposure, prosecutor Martin Steltner said. The suspect is not accused of a specific killing, but prosecutors argue that as a guard he helped the camp to function.

Overall, 95,000 people are believed to have died at Mauthausen, including 14,000 Jews, as well as Soviet prisoners of war, Spaniards who had fought against General Franco, and others.

“With his service as a guard he aided or at least made easier the killing of many thousands of

Nazi hunter: Simon Wiesenthal

inmates,” Mr Steltner said, adding that the suspect denies the charges.

Efraim Zuroff, top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, noted that Mr Wiesenthal himself was an inmate at Mauthausen when it was liberated by Americans in May 1945. Mr Wiesenthal died in 2005 after devoting his life to helping bring Nazi war criminals to trial.

“In a sense it gives a certain very nice closure that someone like this is brought to justice, which I’m sure would have been Simon’s dream,” Mr Zuroff said.