A 100-year-old German man who prosecutors say was a Nazi concentration camp guard has been charged with 3,518 counts of being an accessory to murder.
Keeping with Germany’s privacy laws, the man’s name has not been publicly released, although the chief investigator in the case, Cyrill Klement, claimed that the man worked at the Sachsenhausen camp in eastern Germany from 1942 to 1945 as a member of the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing.
While many Nazis and those who worked at death camps have died, German authorities have been working to investigate and prosecute survivors under a new legal precedent established in 2011 that allows the prosecution of guards on accessory charges, according to the Associated Press. Prior to that, prosecutors had to tie a suspect’s charge to a specific instance of killing, which proved at times to be a difficult feat.
Last week, prosecutors charged a 95-year-old German woman with complicity in the massacre of 10,000 people at the Stutthof concentration camp. The elderly woman allegedly worked as a secretary at the death camp and began work there when she was a minor, which is why she is now being tried in juvenile court.
Efraim Zuroff, a Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that the age of the Nazis finally being charged and convicted should not play a role in deciding whether to pursue prosecution.
“The advanced age of the defendants is no excuse to ignore them and allow them to live in the peace and tranquility they denied their victims,” he said.
Last year, former SS guard, 93-year-old Bruno Dey, was convicted and sentenced to a two-year suspended prison sentence after being found complicit in the murders of at least 5,232 people at the Stutthof camp, where he worked as a tower guard.
Tens of thousands of people were taken to Sachsenhausen during Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s regime, and estimates about the number of people who were killed there range from 30,000 to 100,000.
