German Man, Aged 98, Faces Charges for Complicity in Murder at Nazi Death Camp

A German man, aged 98, is facing legal proceedings for his role as an accessory to murder during his service as a guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp between the years 1943 and 1945, according to a statement released by prosecutors on Friday.

The individual, a resident of the Main-Kinzig district near Frankfurt, is alleged to have “aided and abetted the systematic and brutal extermination of thousands of detainees as part of the SS guard unit,” state prosecutors in Giessen announced. The identity of the accused has not been publicly disclosed.

The accused is facing upwards of 3,300 counts of accessory to murder, spanning from July 1943 to February 1945. The formal charges have been submitted to the state court in Hanau, which is now tasked with determining whether the case will proceed to trial. Should the case go to trial, it will be conducted under juvenile law due to the accused’s age at the time of the purported offenses.

Last October, a psychiatric evaluation deemed that the accused is mentally capable of facing trial, albeit on a restricted basis.

This legal action follows a series of similar cases brought about by German prosecutors. A recent legal precedent allows for the prosecution of individuals as accessories to murder for their role in facilitating the operations of a Nazi concentration camp, even without direct evidence linking them to a specific act of killing.

In German jurisprudence, neither murder nor being an accessory to murder is bound by a statute of limitations.

Sachsenhausen, located just to the north of Berlin, detained over 200,000 individuals between 1936 and 1945. A significant number perished due to a multitude of factors including starvation, illness, forced labor, and other harsh conditions, as well as through sadistic medical experiments and orchestrated extermination activities by the SS, such as shootings, hangings, and gassings.

While precise figures for those who lost their lives at Sachsenhausen vary, scholarly consensus tends to suggest a range of 40,000 to 50,000, although higher estimates reach up to 100,000.

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More about Sachsenhausen concentration camp trial

• German Law on Statute of Limitations for Murder
• Historical Overview of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
• Recent German Legal Precedents on Nazi War Crimes
• Psychiatric Assessments in Criminal Trials
• Overview of Juvenile Law in Germany