Former 'Auschwitz guard' charged with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder

A 93-YEAR-OLD man has been charged in Germany with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder after it was discovered he worked as an S.S. guard at the death camp of Auschwitz where the Nazis murdered 1.1 million people during the Second World War.

The gates of AuschwitzGETTY

The 93-year-old is understood to have worked as an S.S. guard at Auschwitz

The man has not been named by prosecutors in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia where it is hoped he will stand trial at Detmold State Court later in the year. 

They say they have proof he served at Birkenau - where the gas chambers were located at Auschwitz - between January 1942 and June 1944. 

His lawyer argues that he was assigned to the Auschwitz 1 camp in the centre of the Polish town of the same name - a terrible and brutal prison where people were murdered, but nowhere near on the scale of the Birkenau slaughterhouse. 

His forthcoming trial - dependent on a decision by a higher court - is the culmination of a crackdown on Nazi war criminals by a new breed of prosecutor in recent years, determined to atone for the Nazi past. 

Their biggest success was the guilty verdict against John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp, who was found guilty and sentenced to five years in 2011. 

He died the following year while his appeal was pending. 

Two weeks ago it was announced that 93-year-old former Auschwitz death camp officer Oskar Groening will go on trial in Germany in April on charges of at least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. 

Auschwitz Concentration campGETTY

Auschwitz Concentration camp

Groening denies murder but he stands accused of being part of a criminal conspiracy at a time when 300,000 Jews were gassed at the camp. 

He said he was charged with sorting the possessions and money of those about to die and making sure it got sent back to his S.S. superiors in Germany. 

Some 30 Auschwitz guards, including three women, were tracked down in recent years but charges against most of them have been dropped because of age, infirmity and lack of evidence.

One of those judged to be mentally unfit to stand trial  was Hans Lipschis, 94, who was said to have herded men, women and children into the gas chambers of the camp in Nazi occpupied southern Poland. 

Another one whose trial has not been proceeded with is a woman known only as Gisela S.

She is a 90-year-old widow who now lives in an OAP home in northern Germany.  

The Federal Archive in Berlin threw up her S.S. identity card. 

It shows a cold, hard-faced woman who worked in the feared S.S. under her maiden name of Demming when she volunteered for service in 1940. 

At Auschwitz she was said to have been a harsh disciplinarian who beat prisoners and who  was often in charge of the standing cells - small, dark rooms where up to 15 people at a time were crammed in for minor rule infractions. 

A plaque at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research CentreGETTY

A plaque at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre

It was not uncommon to leave people in these rooms for days on end, causing the death of some or all of those confined. 

The German judiciary, post-war, was stuffed full of former Nazis. So were the prosecution authorities, so were the police, so was the civil service.

At one point, for example, it was estimated that 70 percent of the CID in postwar Duesseldorf was composed of former Gestapo men.  

"It was one big bad old boy's network trying to protect their verminous pals from being rounded up like they had once rounded up the innocents of Europe," said one fierce critic. 

But men like Kurt Schrimm, head of the agency based in Ludwigsburg tasked with  investigating and prosecuting the surviving Nazis in society, have tried to bring at least some of the surviving criminals to justice. 

"We owe it to the victims and to their families," he said. 

"I want to do my job well for as long as it takes.  The dead and the families of the dead deserve nothing less than to see justice done." 

He heads a small seven-strong team that has access to tens of thousands of files detailing hundreds of thousands of Nazi crimes and their perpetrators. 

He admits it was "more difficult in the 60s, 70s and even 80s" to prosecute Nazis given the legal and cultural backdrop in a nation which, largely, believed it had done enough atoning. 

Asked if he thought that the authorities back then had simply 'looked the other way,' he replied: "Yes, you can put it like that." 

If the two elderly defendants are indeed convicted, the share of SS members from Auschwitz who received a guilty verdict in Germany will have reached a new high - 0.48 percent.

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