A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard will on Thursday become the oldest person yet to be tried for Nazi-era crimes in Germany when he goes before court charged with complicity in mass murder.
The suspect, identified only as Josef S., stands accused of “knowingly and willingly” assisting in the murder of 3,518 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945.
Allegations against him include aiding and abetting the “execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942” and the murder of prisoners “using the poisonous gas Zyklon B.”
German prosecutors are racing to bring the last surviving Nazi perpetrators to justice, and have in recent years increasingly focused attention on lower-ranking Nazi staff.
The case comes a week after a 96-year-old German woman, who was a secretary in a Nazi death camp, dramatically fled before the start of her trial but was caught several hours later.
She too has been charged with complicity in murder. Her trial resumes on October 19.
Despite his advanced age, a medical assessment in August found that Josef S. was fit to stand trial, although hearings at the Neuruppin court will be limited to a couple of hours a day.
The proceedings are expected to last until early January.
“He is not accused of having shot anyone in particular but of having contributed to these acts through his work as a guard and of having been aware such killings were happening at the camp,” a court spokeswoman said.
Thomas Walther, a lawyer representing several camp survivors and victims’ relatives in the case, said that even 76 years after the end of World War II, trials like these were necessary to hold perpetrators to account.
“There’s no expiry date on justice,” he told AFP.
One of his clients is Antoine Grumbach, 79, whose father Jean was in the French resistance and was killed in Sachsenhausen in 1944.
He hopes Josef S. will shed light on the methods used to kill people in the camp, but also that the accused “will say ‘I was wrong, I am ashamed,’” Grumbach said.