A German court has stopped proceedings against a 96-year-old former Nazi camp guard who is considered inappropriate to stand trial, but has ruled that he must pay his own legal costs.
The man named Harry S is accused of aiding and abetting murder in several hundred cases while working as a guard at the Stutthof camp near Danzig, now Gdańsk, between June 1944 and May 1945.
He was charged in 2017 along with another former Stutthof guard whose trial was halted in March 2019, also for health reasons.
“Due to his physical condition, he was no longer able to reasonably represent his interests inside and outside the trial,” the Wuppertal District Court said in a statement.
However, the court found there was a high probability that Harry S was guilty of the crimes and therefore ruled that he would have to incur his own expenses.
Harry S is accused of supervising the transport of 598 prisoners from Stutthof to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on 10 September 1944, all but two of whom were later killed in gas chambers.
It can also be assumed that he supervised other transportation and kept a regular watch during his ten months in the camp and that he then also acknowledged the extent and dimension of the mass murder committed there, the court said.
This included the murder of prisoners in the gas chamber in the camp, as well as shooting and lethal injections directly into the hearts of prisoners.
Germany has been hunting for former Nazi personnel since a legal precedent was set by the 2011 conviction of former guard John Demjanjuk on the grounds that he served as part of the Nazi killing machine.
Since then, courts have issued several convictions based on them rather than murders or atrocities directly related to the individual accused.
Among those brought to justice were Oskar Gröning, an accountant in Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, an SS guard in the same camp.
Both were convicted at the age of 94 of complicity in mass murder, but died before they could be arrested.
In February, German prosecutors charged a 95-year-old, who was secretary at the Stutthof camp, with complicity in the murders of 10,000 people, in the first case in recent years against a woman.
Days later, a 100-year-old former guard in the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin, was charged with complicity in 3,518 murders.