Neuruppin, Germany — A former SS guard, now 100 years old, walked to a German court on Thursday for helping kill more than 3,000 people in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. I set foot.
The prosecution said that Josef S., a member of the Nazi paramilitary SS, regularly guarded the watchtower between 1942 and 1945, killing 3,518 people in the Sachsenhausen Confinement Camp. Is said to have been issued.
According to doctors, men whose names were not revealed due to German court reporting rules are only partially suitable for withstanding the trial. Sessions are limited to two and a half hours a day.
When the trial began, his lawyer lifted a blue folder to hide his client’s face when he was taken to a court in Neuruppin near Berlin.
Some people in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were killed in Zyklon B, which was also used in other extermination camps where millions of Jews were killed on the Holocaust.
The Sachsenhausen Confinement Camp contained political prisoners, mainly from all over Europe, along with Soviet prisoners of war and some Jews.
“It’s a lot of emotions … I can’t really speak,” said Antoine Grumbach, 79, before suddenly turning his back as he was beaten by tears. His father, a French resistance activist, died in the camp.
Leon Schwartzbaum, 100, quietly waited for the trial to begin in court and showed reporters a photo of him with his parents and uncle who died in Auschwitz.
Prosecutors have accused Joseph S. of “contributing to a cruel and insidious murder” by helping him “create and maintain a life-threatening situation in the camp.”
In recent years, there have been a series of cases indicted against former concentration camp guards for crimes against humanity in World War II.Last week, a 96-year-old former camp secretary Started running It was the day her trial began, but she was arrested by police hours later.
A 2011 court ruling paves the way for these final prosecutions, allowing criminal liability even for those who indirectly contributed to wartime murder without triggering or ordering. He said he had sex.
Opened in 1936 as one of the Nazis’ earliest concentration camps, Sachsenhausen served as a training camp for SS guards, who were held in concentration camps elsewhere, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. it was done. Others killed in Saxonyhausen included Dutch resistance fighters and Nazi domestic political opponents.
Anegret Hills
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