Former SS guard goes on trial in Germany

A former SS guard went on trial on Tuesday in Germany charged with complicity in mass murders at a Nazi concentration camp during World War 2, in a case bearing symbolic and moral weight.

The 94-year-old man from the western district of Borken served as a watchman from June 1942 to September 1944 at the Stutthof camp near what was then the free city of Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland.

He was not publicly named by prosecutors, but Die Welt daily identified him as Johann R, a landscape architect who once worked for North Rhine Westphalia state authorities.

The trial marks a new attempt in Germany’s race against time to prosecute surviving Nazis, after a legal precedent was set in 2011.

The accused entered the courtroom in a wheelchair. He is accused of being an accessory to the murders of several hundred camp prisoners, the regional court of Muenster said, more than seven decades after the end of World War 2. These included more than 100 Polish prisoners gassed on June 21 and 22 1944, as well as “probably several hundred” Jewish prisoners killed from August to December 1944 as part of the Nazis’ socalled final solution.

As a watchman 18 to 20 years old at the time, he was “accused in his capacity as a guard of participating in the killing operations”, said Dortmund prosecutor Andreas Brendel. “Many people were gassed, shot or left to die of hunger,” said Brendel.

As the guards were a crucial part of the concentration camp system, the man “knew about the killing methods” there, said prosecutors.

But when interrogated by police in August 2017, the accused insisted he knew nothing about the atrocities in the camp, Die Welt reported.