Man, 100, charged in Germany over 3,518 Nazi concentration camp murders

German prosecutors have charged a 100-year-old man with 3,518 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served during the second world war as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin.

The man is alleged to have worked at the Sachsenhausen camp between 1942 and 1945 as an enlisted member of the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing, said Cyrill Klement, who led the investigation of the centenarian for the Neuruppin prosecutors’ office.

The man’s name was not released, in line with German privacy laws. Despite his advanced age, the suspect is considered fit enough to stand trial, though accommodations may have to be made to limit how many hours a day the court is in session, according to Klement.

The Neuruppin office was handed the case in 2019 by the special federal prosecutors’ office in Ludwigsburg tasked with investigating Nazi-era war crimes, Klement said.

It comes after prosecutors in the northern town of Itzehoe announced accessory to murder charges last week against a 95-year-old woman who worked during the war as the secretary of the SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp. That case and the charges against the 100-year-old man both rely on recent legal precedent in Germany establishing that anyone who helped a Nazi camp function can be prosecuted for accessory to the murders committed there.

That was established in 2011 with the conviction of the former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk as an accessory to murder on allegations that he served as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in German-occupied Poland. Demjanjuk, who denied the allegations, died before his appeal could be heard.

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A federal court subsequently upheld the 2015 conviction of the former Auschwitz guard Oskar Gröning achieved with the same line of reasoning, solidifying the precedent. Before that, German courts had required prosecutors to justify charges by presenting evidence of a former guard’s participation in a specific killing, often a near-impossible task.

“The core of this case follows the decision [in the cases] of Demjanjuk and Gröning, that being part of the functioning of this machinery of death is sufficient for an accessory to murder conviction,” Klement said.

The court has not yet set a date for the trial.