German prosecutors have charged a 94-year-old former SS guard at Auschwitz as an accessory to murder.
The public prosecutor’s office in Stuttgart said it filed murder accessory charges with the Mannheim regional court against the unnamed suspect, a German citizen born in Ruma in today’s Serbia.
Prosecutors in Stuttgart said the suspect was charged as a juvenile because he was 19 at the time of the alleged offences.
The accused began training as an Auschwitz guard in Nazi-occupied Poland in October 1942 and worked from December 1942 until January 1943 “supporting camp operations and thus acts of extermination,” prosecutors said, during which time an estimated 13,335 people were sent to the gas chambers.
“In this time, at least 15 rail transports arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp after which people were immediately ‘selected’ based on their ability to work,” prosecutors said.
The current German push to bring the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice follows a 2011 landmark court ruling.
For more than 60 years German courts only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence showed they personally committed atrocities.
But in 2011 a Munich court handed a five-year prison sentence to John Demjanjuk for complicity in the extermination of Jews at Sobibor, where he served as a guard, establishing that all former camp guards may be tried.
Three cases against former Auschwitz guards since then have gone to trial in Germany.
