Former Nazi Concentration Guard Facing 5,230 Charges for Accessory to Murder
92 year old Nazi facing prosecution almost 74 years later
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An ex-Nazi concentration camp guard has been formally charged by prosecutors with 5,230 counts of accessory to murder almost 74 years later.
The 92-year-old suspect, only known as Bruno D, according to court documents, is accused of assisting in the “malicious and cruel” killing of mainly Jewish inmates between August 1944 and April 1945, according to prosecutors in the northern city of Hamburg.
The man, who as aged 17-18 at the time, was “a little wheel in the machinery of murder," overseeing thousands of people shot dead, poisoned or starved toward the end of the Second World War.
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Despite his old age, he will be tried by a juvenile court in Hamburg, mainly because he was 17 when he started working at the Stutthof camp, near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland.
The man informed investigators he was aware of the camp’s gas chamber, witnessing bodies being taken to the crematoriums, German daily Die Welt reported.
Initially, he insisted he was never a Nazi and only ended up int he SS-Totenkopfsturmbahn (Death’s Head Battalion), which ran the camp, because of heart disease, according to reports.
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According to Breitbart: He admitted seeing “emaciated figures, people who had suffered,” but insists he is not guilty, replying “what use would it have done?
They would have just found someone else” when asked why he did not put in a transfer to fight at the front, Die Welt reported.
Germany has been racing to put on trial remaining concentration camp personnel, after the legal basis for prosecuting former Nazis changed in 2011 with the landmark conviction of former death camp guard John Demjanjuk.
As Breitbart News reported, he was sentenced not for any crimes he committed, but on the basis that he served as a cog in the Nazi killing machine at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.
German courts subsequently convicted Oskar Groening, an accountant at Auschwitz, and Reinhold Hanning, a former SS guard at the same camp, for mass murder.
However, both men, convicted at age 94, died before they could be imprisoned.
