100-year-old on trial for Nazi crimes

German prosecutors race to seek justice

BERLIN: A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard yesterday became the oldest person yet to be tried for Nazi-era crimes in Germany when he went before court charged with complicity in mass murder.

The suspect, identified only as Josef S, stands accused of “knowingly and willingly” assisting in the murder of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.

Allegations against him include aiding and abetting the “execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942” and the murder of prisoners “using the poisonous gas Zyklon B”.

German prosecutors are racing to bring the last surviving Nazi perpetrators to justice, and have in recent years increasingly focused attention on lower-ranking Nazi staff.

The case comes a week after a 96-year-old German woman, who was a secretary in a Nazi death camp, dramatically fled before the start of her trial but was caught several hours later. She too has been charged with complicity in murder. Her trial resumes on Oct 19.

Despite his age, a medical assessment in August found that Josef S was fit to stand trial, although hearings at the Neuruppin court will be limited to a couple of hours a day. The proceedings are expected to last until early January.

“He is not accused of having shot anyone in particular but of having contributed to these acts through his work as a guard and of having been aware such killings were happening at the camp,” a court spokeswoman said.

Thomas Walther, a lawyer representing several camp survivors and victims’ relatives in the case, said even 76 years after World War II, the trials were necessary to hold perpetrators to account. “There’s no expiry date on justice.” One of his clients is Antoine Grumbach, 79, whose father Jean was in the French resistance and was killed in Sachsenhausen in 1944.

He hopes Josef S will shed light on the methods used to kill people in the camp, but also that the accused “will say ‘I was wrong, I am ashamed’”, Mr Grumbach said.

The Nazi SS guard detained more than 200,000 people at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1936 and 1945, including Jews, Roma, regime opponents and gay people.

Tens of thousands of inmates died from forced labour, murder, medical experiments, hunger or disease before the camp was liberated by Soviet troops, according to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.

Little is known about the accused, beyond the fact that he was released from captivity as a prisoner of war in 1947 and went to work as a locksmith in the Brandenburg region of what was then Communist East Germany, the Bild newspaper reported.

The centenarian’s lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp, said his client “has stayed silent” so far on the charges against him.

If convicted, Josef S could spend several years in jail but Mr Waterkamp said sentences in cases like these are “mostly symbolic”, given that the accused have reached the end of their lives.