A hundred-year-old German man is charged with 3,518 charges of murder, and prosecutors have accused him of working as a guard at the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp near Berlin from 1942 to 1945.
The man, whose name was not released due to German privacy laws, is considered fit to stand trial. Last week, a 95-year-old woman who served as secretary to the commander of the Stutthof concentration camp was charged with 10,000 charges of aiding and abetting murder and complicity in attempted murder.
German prosecutors are racing against the clock in an attempt to investigate war crimes involving camp guards, secretaries and other people who held low positions with the Nazis. The pace began to pick up in 2011, when 91-year-old John Demjanjuk was convicted of killing 28,000 people in the Sobibor concentration camp, where prosecutors say he worked as a guard.
Prior to his conviction, Nazi guards were usually not executed because it was too difficult to find evidence of direct involvement in a particular murder. The Demjanjuk case set a precedent that everyone who worked in a camp was aware of what happened, and that they could be prosecuted for their murder. Demjanjuk, who denied being the dreaded guard ‘Ivan the Terrible’, was sentenced to five years in prison and died in 2012 with his case under appeal.
Prosecutor Thomas Will told The New York Times that his office uses Nazi records to determine if any former concentration camp guards are still alive. Some of those executed were teenagers during their alleged crimes, which is why they are now being seen in juvenile court. “The Demjanjuk decision was very important because it showed that we had to do some catching up,” Will said. Times. “It was an initial spark that led us to examine the guards from all the camps, not just the death camps, under the idea that what happened there could not be overlooked.”
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