A former concentration camp guard faces justice more than 70 years after the Holocaust.
By: AP and World Israel News Staff
German prosecutors have charged a 94-year-old former SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp as an accessory to murder.
Prosecutors in Stuttgart said Monday the suspect, a German national born in Serbia whom they didn’t identify by name, was charged as a juvenile because he was 19 at the time of the alleged offenses.
They say he served as a guard at Auschwitz in late 1942 and early 1943 and estimate that 13,335 people were sent to the gas chambers during that time. According to prosecutors, the suspect has said via his lawyer that he wasn’t aware of the background and aims of what was happening, or of details of the killings.
The suspect has been charged on the premise that, as a guard, he helped the camp function.
German prosecutors in recent years have renewed their efforts to pursue Nazi criminals using new legal reasoning that, even without evidence of a specific crime, suspected Nazis can be charged as accomplices to the crimes committed at the camps.