Former SS guard weeps in court

Germany

A former SS guard appeared to wipe away a tear yesterday as he was confronted with testimony of concentration camp survivors on the first day of one of Germany’s final Holocaust trials.

Johann Rehbogen, who will be 95 in a fortnight, is accused of being an accessory to the murder of hundreds of Jews, dissidents and Soviet prisoners at a camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He was wheeled into a regional court in Muenster, North Rhine Westphalia, and listened impassively as he was charged in relation to at least 300 executions by shooting, toxic injections to the heart and poison gas.

Other inmates at the Stutthof camp near Danzig (Gdansk) were hanged, electrocuted, worked to death on rations of a 1000 calories a day or made to stand naked outdoors until they died of cold, the chief prosecutor said. The authorities believe that at least 1000 people died in the camp while Rehbogen was there from 1942 to 1944.

There were more than 29,000 deaths – and possibly as many as 65,000 – at the camp over the course of World War II. When the Red Army captured Stutthof in May 1945, its soldiers discovered a laboratory where experimented on corpses.

Rehbogen seemed to weep silently as lawyers representing Holocaust survivors and relatives of the dead recounted their suffering in the camp. The defendant spoke only to confirm his identity. His lawyers said he would make no plea or statement until they received an expert opinion on procedures of the camp from a historian.

Rehbogen was born in Romania in 1923 and joined the SS aged 18. After the war he took a PHD in business management and then taught landscape gardening. He is divorced with three adult children. He has admitted working at the camp but repeatedly denied knowledge of the executions.

Andreas Brendel, leading the prosecution, said it was ‘‘not credible’’ that Rehbogen could have been ignorant of the mass murders in Stutthof. ‘‘There are so many places where he could Nazis have seen what was going on. We know that the guards were well aware of the deaths,’’ he said.

Seventeen relatives of those who died in Stutthof during Rehbogen’s posting have joined the prosecution as ‘‘joint plaintiffs’’.

One joint plaintiff, Judy Meisel, 89, narrowly escaped being taken into the gas chambers with her mother. ‘‘I lived through the unimaginable,’’ she said in a statement read out by her lawyer. ‘‘Death turned into a technical matter. We were tortured by malnutrition and illness. The last time I saw my mother, we were standing together naked with other women in front of the gas chamber. When I had the opportunity to walk back to the barracks my mother begged me to take it.’’

Because of Rehbogen’s age and poor health, the court will sit for two hours at a time for two days a week. The trial is expected to last until January. –