A 100-year-old former guard at a Nazi concentration camp, accused of “aiding and abetting” the murder of over 3,300 prisoners during World War II, may face trial 80 years after the end of the war, a German court has ruled.
The defendant worked at Sachsenhausen camp, which is around 25 miles north of Berlin, from July 1943 to February 1945, the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt said Tuesday in a news release.
The guard’s name has not been disclosed because of German reporting rules.
The Frankfurt court said public prosecutors had initially “brought charges against the now 100-year-old accused for aiding and abetting murder in 3,322 cases” in the summer of 2023, before the Hanau Regional Court suspended proceedings this year after an expert concluded that the man was “unfit to stand trial, be questioned, and travel.”
The higher court overturned that decision after finding that the expert’s assessment of the defendant’s health had not been based on “sufficient facts.”
“The expert himself stated that it was not possible to interview the defendant and that the opportunity for extensive psychiatric testing was not available,” the court added.
A date for a new hearing has not been set.
More than 200,000 people were detained at Sachsenhausen after it became one of the first concentration camps to open in 1936.
The camp was also used to train members of the SS, the paramilitary organization of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich that ran other concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka in Poland.
Millions of Jews were murdered at those camps during the Holocaust, alongside political opponents of the Nazi regime and members of groups declared to be racially or biologically inferior, such as Roma and homosexuals.
Time is running out to bring justice to the last surviving perpetrators of Nazi war crimes with many cases dropped in recent years due to the death or physical inability of the accused to stand trial.
If the 100-year-old man is brought before a court, it will not be the first time that people who were not directly involved in killings in concentration camps have been put on trial for aiding and abetting murder, decades after war ended.
Josef S. was 101 when he was convicted of more than 3,500 counts of accessory to murder for his role as an SS guard at Sachsenhausen and sentenced to five years in prison.
Oskar Gröning, who was known as the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” was also sentenced to four years in prison in 2015 for working as an accountant in Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland. Gröning died in 2018 at the age of 96 without serving his sentence.
