According to the prosecutor’s office in Neuruppin, Germany, a 100-year-old former concentration camp guard has been found fit to stand trial in October for “knowingly and willingly” assisting in 3,518 murders at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, between 1942 and 1945, Welt reported on Sunday.
The accused, whose name has so far been kept out of the prosecutor’s announcements, is accused of participating in the “execution by firing squad of Soviet prisoners of war in 1942,” as well as with “the poisonous gas Zyklon B.”
The Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, was used from 1936 to May of 1945 when the Third Reich finally collapsed. According to the Sachsenhausen museum, tens of thousands of prisoners died in the camp as a result of hunger, disease, forced labor, and executions.
Sachsenhausen held political prisoners, including Joseph Stalin’s oldest son Yakov Dzhugashvili, Herschel Grynszpan—who assassinated the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in 1938 in Paris, Paul Reynaud—the Prime Minister of France, Francisco Largo Caballero—Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic, the wife and children of the Crown Prince of Bavaria, Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, and several Soviet and other allied soldiers and German political dissidents.
German prosecutors said on Monday that the elderly accused had undergone a medical assessment that found him fit to appear in court for two-and-a-half hours per day, despite his age. An attorney for the victims, Thomas Walther, said many of the complainants were “just as old as the accused and expect justice to be done.”
It appears that Germany is finally running out of Nazi war criminals to prosecute. A month ago, the German authorities announced they were preparing a case against a 95-year-old former Nazi guard at a prisoner of war camp for Soviet captives, many of whom perished there. And in September the 96-year-old secretary for the SS commandant of the Stutthof concentration camp will go on trial. She is accused of more than 10,000 counts of accessory to murder.