Former Nazi camp guard, 94, on trial in Germany
07 November, 2018
A former SS guard, aged 94, goes on trial Tuesday in Germany charged with complicity in mass murders at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, in a case bearing symbolic and moral weight.
The man from the western district of Borken was a watchman from June 1942 to September 1944 at the Stutthof camp near what was then the free city of Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland.
He was not named by prosecutors, but Die Welt daily identified him as Johann R., a landscape architect who once worked for North Rhine-Westphalia state authorities.
The trial marks a new attempt in Germany’s race against time to prosecute surviving Nazis, after a new legal precedent was set in 2011.
The nonagenarian is accused of being an accessory to the murders of several hundred camp prisoners, the regional court of Muenster said, more than seven decades after the end of WWII.
These included more than 100 Polish prisoners gassed on June 21 and 22, 1944, as well as “probably several hundred” Jewish prisoners killed from August to December 1944 as part of the Nazis’ so-called “Final Solution” operation.
As a watchman aged between 18 and 20 at the time, he is “accused in his capacity as a guard of participating in the killing operations,” Dortmund prosecutor Andreas Brendel told AFP.
“Many people were gassed, shot or left to die of hunger,” he added.
As the guards were a crucial part of the camp system, the man “knew about the killing methods” there, said prosecutors.
But when interrogated by police in August 2017, the accused insisted he knew nothing about the atrocities in the camp, Die Welt reported.
Asked why the camp detainees were so thin, the defendant reportedly said food was so scarce for everyone that two soldiers could fit into a uniform.
The defendant will make a statement during the course of the trial, his lawyer told national news agency DPA.
Stutthof was set up in 1939 and would end up holding 110,000 detainees, out of which 65,000 perished, according to Museum Stutthof.
The defendant will be tried before a juvenile court as he was not yet 21 at the time of the crimes.
Given his advanced age now, each court hearing will likely last for a maximum of two hours.
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