People walk the grounds of the former concentration camp at the Sachsenhausen Memorial, April 2023. (Image: Fabian Sommer/picture alliance/Getty Images)
A 98-year-old former Nazi guard has been charged with being an accessory to the murder of more than 3,000 people at a WW2 concentration camp.
The German citizen, who lives in Main-Kinzig county near Frankfurt, is accused of having “supported the cruel and malicious killing of thousands of prisoners as a member of the SS guard detail,” prosecutors in Giessen, central Germany, said in a statement.
The unnamed suspect - it is forbidden to reveal the identity of suspects in Germany - was stationed at the Nazis’ Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, prosecutors said on Friday.
He is charged with more than 3,300 counts of being an accessory to murder between July 1943 and February 1945.
The indictment was filed at the state court in Hanau, which will now have to decide whether to send the case to trial.
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German prosecutors have brought several cases under a precedent set in recent years that allows for people who helped a Nazi camp function to be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders there, without direct evidence that they participated in a specific killing.
Charges of murder and being an accessory to murder aren’t subject to a statute of limitations under German law.
Prosecutors said that a report by a psychiatric expert last October found the suspect is fit to stand trial at least on a limited basis.
The man will face a juvenile court because he was under the age of 18 when he served at Sachsenhausen.
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The statement added that the trial is expected to be in Hanau, close to the man’s home, in accordance with juvenile law.
More than 200,000 people were held at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, between 1936 and 1945.
Tens of thousands died of starvation, disease, forced labour, and other causes, as well as through medical experiments and systematic SS extermination operations including shootings, hangings and gassing.
Exact numbers for those killed vary, with upper estimates of some 100,000, though it is suggested figures of 40,000 to 50,000 are more accurate.
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Germany is rushing to prosecute the last surviving perpetrators of Nazi war crimes, who are well into old age.
Last year, another former Sachsenhausen guard, aged 101, was sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted for aiding and abetting the murder of 3,518 people during the Holocaust.
A 96-year-old German woman fled before standing trial for crimes she was alleged to have committed while working as a stenographer and typist in the commandant’s office at the concentration camp in Stutthof, near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk.
She was later found by local authorities and brought before court, where she was convicted on similar charges.
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