BERLIN
— The German special prosecutors’ office that pursues Nazi-era
crimes said Wednesday it was recommending charges be filed
against an 87-year-old man on allegations he served as an
SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp complex.
The man is accused of involvement in the killing of 344,000 Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau
camp in occupied Poland from April 1944 until shortly before
it was liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945, head
prosecutor Kurt Schrimm told The Associated Press.
The suspect, whose name wasn’t released, is a non-German living outside Germany,
but Schrimm would give no other details.
Schrimm said charges of accessory to murder can be filed under the same legal
theory that Munich prosecutors used to try former Ohio
autoworker John Demjanjuk, who died in a Bavarian nursing
home in March while appealing his 2011 conviction on charges
he served as a Sobibor death camp guard.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was the
first person convicted in Germany solely on the basis of
serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement
in a specific killing. Under the new legal theory, anyone
who was involved in the operation of a death camp was an
accessory to murder. Demjanjuk steadfastly maintained that
he had been mistaken for someone else and never served
as a camp guard.
Even though the Demjanjuk verdict
is not considered legally binding because he died before
appeals were exhausted, Schrimm said the same legal principle
can be applied in the case of the alleged Auschwitz guard.
About 1.5 million people, primarily
Jews, were killed at the Auschwitz camp complex between
1940 and 1945.
“I can’t say when he was where
in the camp, but all of these guards were stationed at
times on the ramps, at times at the gas chambers and at
times in the towers,” Schrimm said.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter
at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he welcomed the news
of the investigation but cautioned that even if the suspect
is charged, bringing him to Germany for trial could present
challenges.
He noted, for example, that the
Australian high court last week ruled that 90-year-old
Charles Zentai could not be extradited to Hungary to face
accusations he tortured and killed a Jewish teenager during
World War II.
“A lot will depend on whether
or not his country of residence has the political will
to extradite him to Germany,” Zuroff said in a telephone
interview from Israel.
Schrimm’s office has turned the
case over to prosecutors in Weiden, in Bavaria, to determine
whether to file charges. Weiden has jurisdiction over the
area where the suspect last lived in Germany.
Weiden prosecutors’ spokesman
Norbert Dietl said the files were received on Monday, and
that it would probably take at least a month to make a
decision on the case.
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