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BERLIN – A 95-year-old man has been charged with more than 36,000 indictments for complicity in murder, alleging that he would have served as a guard at the Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen, prosecutors said Friday. Berlin. Hans Werner H., whose last name was not disclosed due to the privacy regulations, is accused of serving as SS guard in the camp in northern Austria of the mid-1944 to early 1945.
During this period, 36,223 people were killed in Mauthausen, mainly by gassing, but also by lethal injection, shooting, starvation or revelation, said prosecutor Martin Steltner.
Emaciated prisoners sit in front of the Mauthausen concentration camp hospital barracks in Nazi Germany during the Second World War. This undated photo taken at great risk by Swiss prisoner Kurt Zalud was later used as evidence in the Dachau war crimes trial.
jad / str / Kurt Zalud / AP
The suspect is not charged with a specific murder, but prosecutors say that, as a guardian, he has helped the camp to function. In total, about 95,000 people died in the Mauthausen camp system, including 14,000 Jews, but also Soviet prisoners of war, Spaniards who had fought against General Francisco Franco and others. .
"With his service as a guard, he helped or at least facilitated the killing of several thousand inmates," said Steltner, adding that the suspect denies the charges.
Efraim Zuroff, the greatest Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that Wiesenthal himself was a detainee in Mauthausen upon his release by the Americans in May 1945. Wiesenthal died in 2005 after dedicating his life to research Nazi war criminals. brought to justice.
"In a sense, it is very nice that someone like this is brought to justice, which, I'm sure, would have been Simon's dream," Zuroff said at the time. a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
The SS Rottenfuehrer, roughly equivalent to a corporal, is accused of having served both in the outer perimeter of the camp and inside, as well as keeping the details of prisoners' work in a career. neighbor.
In this role, Steltner said that the man would have "been informed of the different methods of killing as well as the disastrous living conditions of the imprisoned".
As such, he was "informed that a large number of people had been killed with these methods and that the victims could have been killed with such regularity only if they were guarded by people such as himself, "Steltner said.
A court must review the charges and determine whether the suspect is fit to stand trial. Steltner said his office considered him capable of a trial.
According to new legal reasoning advanced in recent years in Germany, former guards of the Nazi camp may be accused of complicity in murder even though there is no evidence that they participated in a specific murder.
The argument has been upheld by the highest criminal court in the country and has given rise to numerous prosecutions, including an ongoing case in the Muenster State Court, where a former SS guard from the Stutthof concentration camp, The 94 year old is being tried on hundreds of murder charges.
Earlier this month, a A former SS, 94, was tried In Germany, accused of complicity in murder for crimes committed over the years, he served as a guard at the Nazi concentration camp at Stutthof.
The accused, Dr. Johann Rehbogen (masked face on court order) attends his trial in the Regional Court of Münster, Germany, on November 6, 2018. The former SS Nazi guard, aged 94 , is accused of complicity in the mass murder of the Stutthof Nazi Concentration Camp during the Second World War.
Getty
Johann Rehbogen is accused of having worked as a guard in the camp located east of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk, from June 1942 to the beginning of September 1944.
