98 year old former concentratioin camp guard charged

[Lilith7]

And so he should be, given the nature of those camps.


https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europe/300...ation-camp


"A 98-year-old man has been charged in Germany with being an accessory to murder as a guard at the Nazis’ Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945.

The German citizen, a resident of Main-Kinzig county near Frankfurt, is accused of having “supported the cruel and malicious killing of thousands of prisoners as a member of the SS guard detail,” prosecutors in Giessen said in a statement. They did not release the suspect’s name.

He is charged with more than 3300 counts of being an accessory to murder between July 1943 and February 1945.

The charges were filed at the state court in Hanau, which will now have to decide whether to send the case to trial. If it does, he will be tried under juvenile law, taking account of his age at the time of the alleged crimes.



Charges of murder and being an accessory to murder aren’t subject to a statute of limitations under German law.

More than 200,000 people were held at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, between 1936 and 1945.

Tens of thousands died of starvation, disease, forced labour, and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations including shootings, hangings and gassing.

Exact numbers for those killed vary, with upper estimates of some 100,000, though scholars suggest figures of 40,000 to 50,000 are likely more accurate."

[king1]

i'm of two minds about this, i'm not sure he should be prosecuted solely because he was there - a lot of these soldiers were just following orders and likely to catch a bullet themselves if they didn't...

I would like to think there was some kind of evidence that he was actually cruel and malicious to the prisoners or some such, over and above the role of a 'normal' nazi prison camp guard...

hopefully I tiptoed around that one adequately...

[Zurdo]

Yes, kill or be killed...it's a good incentive. There were a lot of men in countries conquered by the Nazi's, who were put in German uniforms and sent off to fight for the Germans. Of course they didn't want to do that, but what else could they do ? Escape of course, and that's what Guy Martin's father did.

[R2x1]

I declare my innocence -
~ A: I was half a world away,
~ B: I was only two, and exempt from being guilty of most things except teasing the cat.

[Lilith7]

They can apparently now do this, even without direct evidence.


"German prosecutors have brought several cases under a precedent set in recent years that allows for people who helped a Nazi camp function to be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders there without direct evidence that they participated in a specific killing "