(JNi.media) Another Nazi nonagenarian, a 92-year-old former Auschwitz guard, was indicted in Hanau, near Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, on charges of accessory to murder, dpa reported.
Because the accused was between 19 and 20 years of age at the time of his alleged crimes, the law directs that he be tried in juvenile court.
The parents of the accused were unable to accompany him to the indictment.
The suspect, whose identity id being held—possibly on account of his young age at the time of the crimes—is accused of participating in the deportation of prisoners from Nazi transit camps in Berlin, Drancy in occupied France, and Westerbork in the occupied Netherlands.
According to the prosecution, at least 1,075 of the young man’s victims were gassed to death in Auschwitz.
Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi hunter for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Discovery in 2013 that “there are at least hundreds if not thousands of [former Nazis] out there. The question is what are the chances of bringing them to justice.”
In Germany, prosecutors are focusing on about 50 former prison guards suspected of war crimes. German law now allows documents to be used, in addition to eyewitnesses, as proof of war crimes, and so Zuroff foresees more trials in the coming years.
There were about 10 million Nazi party members in Germany during the war.
Chief Nazi hunter Zuroff told Discovery he plans to continue hunting for war criminals even after the last Nazi is caught.
As Peter Black, senior historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., put it: “The sad fact of human behavior is that even after the last Nazi offender dies, we have more recent generations of participants in mass murder and genocide that are still young enough to prosecute.”