A former Nazi concentration camp guard on trial on hundreds of counts of accessory to murder has testified he was aware that inmates were dying but says he didn’t know they were being killed.
Johann Rehbogen told the Muenster state court on Thursday he knew the conditions of the Stutthof camp were “miserable” and had attributed the deaths primarily to “diseases and epidemics.”
More than 60,000 people were killed in Stutthof in a gas chamber, by lethal injection, shootings and other methods.
In the statement read by his attorney, the 94-year-old said he didn’t know much about the “structure inside the camp,” the dpa news agency reported.
He said “they told me which post to take and I obeyed.”
Prosecutors argue Rehbogen is an accessory because he helped the camp operate.
In a hearing on Tuesday, Rehbogen voiced his shame at having been part of the SS but insisted he was unaware of the systematic killings at Stutthof.
“I’m of course ashamed to have been part of the SS. But I still don’t know today if I would have had the courage to do otherwise,” he said.
He said he was forced into joining the Schutzstaffel troops as he feared “reprisals against my family if I hadn’t gone.”
“When I saw the detainees I knew that the SS was wrong but I didn’t have a choice to do otherwise,” said Rehbogen, who served as a guard from June 1942 to September 1944 at Stutthof.
He denied knowledge of the gruesome crimes at the camp, insisting: “I knew nothing of the systematic killings, I knew nothing of the gas chambers as well as the crematoria.”
But lead prosecutor Andreas Brendel said that there were “ways out” of serving at the camp for guards like Rehbogen.
“We believe that the guards knew a lot more than what has been recounted today,” he said.
“I am disappointed but not surprised to hear the defendant is denying that he took part in the killings at Stutthof,” said Benjamin Cohen, who represented his grandmother Judy Meisel at the hearing.
“My grandmother’s account of her time in the camp and the murder of her mother tells a very clear story about the role of these guards.”
Manuel Mayer, a lawyer of a former detainee, said: “His statement was absurd. I don’t believe him.”
Rehbogen was aged 18 to 20 at the time and is therefore being tried under juvenile law.
Stutthof was set up in 1939 and ended up holding 110,000 detainees, 65,000 of whom perished, according to the Museum Stutthof.
