Former Nazi SS camp guard, 94, goes on trial in Germany
1,822 views · Published 11 November 2018 · 2:28 · Indexed 6 October 2026
Channel: AP Archive · 2018 · News & Politics
(6 Nov 2018) A former SS guard went on trial on Tuesday in Muenster, Germany, on charges of accessory to murder for serving at the Nazis' Stutthof concentration camp. The former SS Sturmmann, roughly equivalent to the US Army rank of specialist, is accused of working as a guard in the camp, east of Danzig, which is today the Polish city of Gdansk, from June 1942 to about the beginning of September 1944. The 94-year-old, who hasn't been identified by authorities due to German privacy laws, is being tried in juvenile court because he was under the age of 21 at the time of his alleged crimes. He does not deny serving in the camp during the war but has told investigators he was not aware of the killings and did not participate in them. Though there is no specific evidence linking him to a specific crime at the camp, more than 60,000 people were killed in Stutthof and prosecutors argue that as a guard, he was an accessory to at least hundreds of the deaths. Stutthof prisoners were killed in a gas chamber, with deadly injections of gasoline or phenol directly to their hearts, shot, starved and even forced outside in winter without clothes until they died of exposure. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which helped locate some 20 Stutthof survivors for the case to serve as possible witnesses, emphasized that such trials are important, even more than 70 years after the end of World War II. Many survivors, along with relatives of victims, are also joining the trial as co-plaintiffs as allowed under German law. Even though the number of suspects is dwindling, the special federal prosecutor's office in Ludwigsburg that investigates Nazi war crimes still has multiple cases ongoing. The legal reasoning that being a camp guard is itself enough to be found guilty of accessory to murder, even without specific evidence of a crime, was first used successfully against former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk in 2011. The Stutthof case is the first time a prosecution is going to trial using this line of reasoning for a concentration camp guard instead of a death camp guard. But prosecutors have expressed confidence it can be applied, since tens of thousands of people were killed in Stutthof even though its sole purpose was not murder. The trial is scheduled to last until January. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter: https://twitter.com/AP_Archive Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/APArchives Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/APNews/ You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/9ac32f2a8b441a22a84b47c20aec2caa
