Former guard at Nazi death camp charged with being accessory to murder
A former Nazi concentration camp guard has been indicted on charges of acting as an accessory to murder in the latest of a string of eleventh-hour attempts to gain justice for Holocaust victims and survivors.
The 98-year-old, identified as Gregor F, worked as a guard at the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin between 1943 and 1945.
State prosecutors in the western city of Gießen, near Frankfurt, said that if and when the case came to trial, it would take place in a juvenile court owing to the age he was when crimes in which he is alleged to have participated took place. The trial is expected to be in Hanau, close to the man’s home, in accordance with juvenile law.
“The man, a German citizen, who at the time of the crimes was an adolescent, is accused of having aided the cruel and perfidious killing of thousands of prisoners,” Thomas Hauburger,
Gießen’s chief prosecutor, told German assessed by psychiatric experts for his ability to stand trial and had been deemed to be “fit to face trial, with restrictions”.
Hans-Jürgen Foster, a lawyer and former federal public prosecutor at the federal court of justice who is due to represent Shimon Rothschild, a former prisoner at Sachsenhausen, said his hope was that a trial would expose the role of those who might not have been directly involved in the killings, but whose role as cogs in the wheel of the Nazi killing machine enabled the Holocaust to succeed.
He believed prison guards such as Gregor F “were a specific aspect of the conditions which were hostile to life, that prevailed throughout the entire concentration camp complex”, he told Der Spiegel.
More than 200,000 people were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, near Oranienburg, more than half of whom were murdered. The killing included
mass extermination through asphyxiation in gas chambers, as well as the execution of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war by shots to the back of the neck, through a systematic programme called Aktion 14f14.
Rothschild, who was incarcerated in Sachsenhausen after initially being deported with his family from a ghetto outside Krakow, Poland, to Auschwitz, is to give evidence if Gregor F’s trial goes ahead. Along with 10 other Jewish children, Rothschild, 96, who lives in Israel, was subject to medical experiments in which he was injected with hepatitis vaccines and other substances in the sickbay of Sachsenhausen’s RII barracks.
Cases such as Gregor F’s were made possible by the 2011 trial of John Demjanjuk, a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp, which paved the way for subsequent trials of others previously considered too insignificant and against whom there was no evidence that they had perpetrated specific crimes, but who were deemed to have been a vital part of the Nazi system.
They included a 97-year-old woman who had worked as a secretary at Stutthof concentration camp who was found guilty last December of complicity in 10,500 murders.