Elderly ex-Nazi pleads innocent
A 100-year-old man on trial for his alleged role as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp during World War II told a German court last Friday that he was innocent.
The defendant is charged with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, where he allegedly worked between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing.
German news agency dpa reported that the defendant, who was identified only as Josef S. in keeping with German privacy rules, said on the second day of his trial before the Neuruppin state court that he didn’t know the Sachsenhausen camp.
Two witnesses from France and the Netherlands earlier told the court how their fathers were killed at Sachsenhausen for having been part of the resistance against the Nazis.
Authorities deemed the defendant fit enough to stand trial despite his advanced age, though the number of hours per day the court is in session will be limited.
More than 200,000 people were held at Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands of inmates died of starvation, disease, exhaustion from forced labor and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations. The exact numbers of those killed vary, with upper estimates of some 100,000.
“The defendant knowingly and willingly aided and abetted this at least by conscientiously performing guard duty, which was seamlessly integrated into the killing system,” prosecutor Cyrill Klement told the court.
A survivor of Sachsenhausen, 100-year-old Leon Schwarzbaum, attended the trial as a visitor.
“This is the last trial for my friends, acquaintances and my loved ones, who were murdered, in which the last guilty person can still be sentenced — hopefully” Schwarzbaum, who also survived the Auschwitz death camp and Buchenwald concentration camp, told dpa.
Earlier in the trial the executive vice-president of the Auschwitz Committee expressed disappointment at the lawyer’s announcement that the suspect would not comment on the allegations.
“I found him surprisingly robust and present. He would have the strength to make an apology and he would also have the strength to remember,” Christoph Heubner told reporters outside the building. “This means once again a rejection, a disparagement and a confrontation with the continued silence of the SS.”
The opening of the trial comes a week after the opening of another elderly concentration camp suspect’s trial was disrupted.
A 96-year-old former secretary for the Stutthof camp’s SS commander skipped the opening of her trial at the Itzehoe state court in northern Germany. She was tracked down within hours and proceedings are to resume on Oct. 19.