A 100-year-old man has gone on trial in Germany accused of being an adjunct to homicide for serving as a Nazi SS guard on the Sachsenhausen focus camp close to Berlin through the second world conflict.
The trial of the defendant, who’s charged with 3,518 counts of accent to homicide, is being held on the Neuruppin state court docket, which moved the proceedings to a jail sport corridor in Brandenburg for organisational causes.
The suspect, who was recognized solely as Josef S in line with German privateness guidelines, is alleged to have labored at Sachsenhausen between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi get together’s paramilitary wing.
The suspect’s lawyer, Stefan Waterkamp, instructed the court docket that his consumer didn’t need to touch upon the allegations, the German information company dpa reported. There are not any formal pleas within the German authorized system.
Authorities say the defendant is taken into account match sufficient to face trial regardless of his superior age, although the variety of hours the court docket is in session every day shall be restricted.
Greater than 200,000 folks had been held at Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945. Tens of hundreds of individuals died of hunger, illness, exhaustion from pressured labour and different causes, in addition to via medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations together with shootings, hangings and gassing.
Actual numbers on these killed differ, with higher estimates of about 100,000, although students recommend figures of 40,000 to 50,000 are in all probability extra correct.
“The defendant knowingly and willingly aided and abetted this a minimum of by rigorously performing guard responsibility, which was seamlessly built-in into the killing system,” the prosecutor Cyrill Klement instructed the court docket.
A survivor of Sachsenhausen, 100-year-old Leon Schwarzbaum, attended the trial as a customer. “That is the final trial for my buddies, acquaintances and my family members who had been murdered, through which the final responsible particular person can nonetheless be sentenced –– hopefully,” Schwarzbaum, who additionally survived the Auschwitz loss of life camp and Buchenwald focus camp, instructed dpa.
The manager vice-president of the Auschwitz Committee expressed disappointment on the defence lawyer’s announcement that the accused wouldn’t touch upon the allegations.
“I discovered him surprisingly strong and current. He would have the power to apologize and he would even have the power to recollect,” Christoph Heubner mentioned exterior the constructing. “Clearly, nevertheless, he doesn’t need to muster the power to recollect, and for the survivors of the camps and for the relations of the murdered who’ve come right here to listen to some fact spoken, this implies as soon as once more a rejection, a disparagement and a confrontation with the continued silence of the SS.”
The opening of the trial comes every week after that of one other aged focus camp suspect’s trial was disrupted. A 96-year-old former secretary for the Stutthof camp’s SS commander skipped the opening of her trial on the Itzehoe state court docket in northern Germany. She was tracked down inside hours and proceedings are to renew on 19 October.