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The provincial court of Münster, in the west of in Germany is today the ex-guard of the SS Hitlerite (force of Nazi security), aged 94, by his alleged complicity in hundreds of deaths in the Nazi concentration camp of Stutthof on Polish territory, between June 1942 and September 1944.
Johann Rehbogen arrived in a wheelchair trial at the Münster District Court and remained attentive to the process by responding slowly and concisely to the questions asked by Judge Rainer Brackhane .
There is no evidence linking him to a specific crime, but more than 60,000 people were killed in Stutthof and prosecutors say that as a guardian he has been involved in at least hundreds of these deaths.
The retired officer did not react when the prosecutor Andreas Brendel read. the accuser actions against him, detailing the horrible way in which the prisoners of Stutthof were murdered. Some have received lethal injections of gasoline or phenol directly into their hearts, slaughtered or starving. Others were forced to go outside without clothes until death by exposure or to be executed in the gas chamber.
"Anyone who heard shouts coming from outside the gas chamber would have known that people were fighting for their lives," Brendel said.
Rehbogen did not deny having served in the field during the war, but he told investigators that he was unaware of the murders and did not participate in it.
Rehbogen lives in Borken, near the Dutch border. Due to their advanced age and state of health, sessions are limited to two hours a day, maximum two days a week. At the same time, since he was under 21 at the time of the charges against him, is tried by a juvenile court and incurs a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment. he is found guilty .
] Seventeen survivors from Stutthof or relatives of the victims participated in the suit as co-plaintiffs, but Brendel made it clear that it was not clear whether a person would testify in person because of their age.
In one of the statements read by her lawyers, the survivor Judy Meisel recalls being exposed by the Germans to hunger, to daily humiliation and to terror.
"At Stutthof and I lived the unimaginable, hell organized and executed by the SS," Meisel said. 19659003] Ben Cohen, Meisel's grandson, from New York to attend the trial, said that hearing his statement with one of his former captors in the same room was important and moving.
It's so good that it's moving every time I listen to it, but it's more important now, "he said.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center which located the survivors of Stutthof, pointed out that even more than 70 years after the end of the Second World War, it is not too late for justice be returned.
"The pbadage of time in no way alleviates the guilt of the perpetrators of the Holocaust and its old age, it must offer protection to those who have committed such atrocious crimes," said Efraim Zuroff, representative of the center.
Stutthof was a concentration camp that stayed up longer. He was released one day after the end of the Second World War
At the end of 1941, he served as a labor camp and, in early 1944, a gas chamber was installed in the compound .
Initially, it was expected that a second defendant, also guardian of the Nazi camp Stutthof, would also sit on the seat of the accused.
However, the trial, if it is finally implemented, will be separated. It has not yet been possible to determine if the accused is in a position to stand trial.
The legal reasoning that is a camp guard sufficient to be found guilty of complicity in murder even without specific evidence of a crime, was first used against the 39, former Ohio abuser John Demjanjuk in 2011.
Demjanjuk was found guilty of the guard of the Sobibor death camp. Denied the prosecution and died before his appeal can be heard.
The 2015 sentencing of the ex-Auschwitz Oskar Groening using the same argument was, however, confirmed by the main German criminal court. .
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