German prosecutors have charged a 100-year-old man with 3,518 charges of murder for allegations he made during World War II as a Nazi SS guard in a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin.
The man allegedly worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enclosed member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, Cyrill Klement said.
The man’s name was not released, in accordance with German privacy laws. Despite his advanced age, the suspect is considered fit to stand trial, although according to Klement, provision should be made to limit how many hours a day the court sits.
The Neuruppin office was investigated in 2019 by the Special Prosecutor’s Office in Ludwigsburg, which investigated Nazi-era war crimes.
This comes after prosecutors in northern Itzehoe last week charged with murder of a 95-year-old woman who worked as secretary of the SS commander of the Stutthof concentration camp during the war. That case and the charges against the 100-year-old man are both based on the recent legal precedent in Germany which claims that anyone who helped a Nazi camp to function could be prosecuted for the murders committed there.
It was established in 2011 with the conviction of former Ohio motorist John Demjanjuk as an aid in the murder of allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, who denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.
A federal court subsequently upheld the conviction of former Auschwitz guard Oskar Gröning in 2015 with the same reasoning, which reinforced the precedent. Prior to that, German courts had asked prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of the participation of a former guard in a specific murder, often an impossible task.
“The core of this case follows the decision [in the cases] of Demjanjuk and Gröning, it is sufficient to be part of the functioning of this death machine for conviction for murder, ”said Klement.
The court has not yet set a date for the trial.