Nazi Concentration Camp Guard Age 100 Pleads Not Guilty in German Trial

Wearing a sweater and hiding his face behind a blue folder, the centenarian appeared in courtroom Friday within the northeastern city of Neuruppin, the second day of a trial that’s anticipated to stretch into early subsequent yr.

“I’ve carried out nothing improper in any respect, I’m harmless,” he mentioned.

The courtroom determined that the person, who will flip 101 subsequent month, is mentally and bodily match to face trial for simply over two hours at a time.

Stefan Waterkamp,

the suspect’s lawyer, informed reporters that justice would have been higher served had the trial occurred earlier, nearer to the alleged crimes.

The case is the newest in a sequence of trials of people that performed junior roles within the Holocaust and different Nazi crimes and infrequently had been very younger on the time. In 2011, a Munich courtroom discovered the previous guard John Demjanjuk responsible of accent to the homicide of practically 30,000 folks within the Sobibor loss of life camp, setting a precedent that has since allowed the prosecution of low-ranking suspects.

Representatives of Holocaust victims mentioned these late trials of junior regime members got here after many higher-ranking Nazis had been left unprosecuted or given delicate sentences within the many years after the battle. As much as the Nineties, German authorities centered on restitution efforts as a substitute, mentioned

Efraim Zuroff,

director of the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Middle who attended the trial this week.

On Thursday, prosecutor

Cyrill Klement

detailed the murders and mistreatment that had been commonplace at Sachsenhausen, a camp arrange in 1936 that served as a mannequin for the community of services that later expanded throughout occupied Europe.

He informed the courtroom how the SS murdered hundreds of individuals utilizing what he described as a neck shot unit, a room the place unsuspecting prisoners had been shot behind the top after which cremated. Others had been murdered by fuel, first in gassing autos and later in a fuel chamber utilizing the Zyklon-B cyanide-based pesticide. Earlier than the killings, SS docs would study the victims for gold enamel that had been later pulled out of their corpses.

Towards the tip of the battle, a lot of the victims had been Soviet prisoners of battle, a lot of them Jewish. The prosecutor mentioned that the defendant had enabled the murders as a result of he watched over the inmates from the watchtowers, armed and carrying an SS uniform.

Sixteen co-plaintiffs joined the prosecutor’s case towards the suspect, together with survivors of the focus camp and their kin from Germany, Israel, France, the Netherlands, Poland and Peru.

Leon Schwarzbaum, a German man who survived Sachsenhausen and different Nazi camps, can also be 100 years previous and attended the trial in a wheelchair. “He’s previous and in poor health, and I’m previous and in poor health, too, however I’ve come,” he informed reporters.

Antoine Grumbach, whose father, a French soldier, was killed in Sachsenhausen, is among the co-plaintiffs and traveled from France to attend the trial.

“The world should know the way this equipment operated…SS guards had been the accomplices of the murderous equipment of the focus camps,” Mr. Grumbach informed reporters on Thursday.

Mr. Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Middle mentioned it was crucial to maintain prosecuting the final remaining Nazis as a lesson to youthful generations concerning the horrors of the Nazi period, at a time when battle crimes and crimes towards humanity are occurring throughout the globe.

“Youthful generations will study a lot concerning the Holocaust, concerning the battle, about justice and about democracy,” he mentioned.

Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com