A 100-year-old German man has been charged with accessory to more than 3,500 murders, Reuters reported.
German prosecutors charged the man with accessory to 3,518 murders during his time as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the closing years of World War II, according to Reuters.
The former concentration camp guard, who now lives in Brandenburg, is accused of “material and intentional” contributions to the 3,518 murders, Reuters reported. The 100-year-old allegedly worked at Sachsenhausen for some time between 1942 and 1945.
A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard has been charged with complicity in 3,518 murders as Germany races to bring surviving Nazi staff to justice, prosecutors told AFP on Monday. https://t.co/0aRwOdmxSc
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The Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which now serves as a museum and memorial, lies just on the outskirts of Berlin in the Oranienburg neighborhood. Between 1936 and 1945, more than 200,000 individuals were held in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, according to the Sachsenhausen memorial and museum’s website. Inmates were placed in the concentration camp for opposing the Nazi regime and being members of groups the Nazis declared inferior, such as Jews, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Individuals detained in the camps were required to do forced labor, if not executed either by a device that shot individuals in the back of the neck or via a gas chamber upon arrival, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Recently, German prosecutors also charged a 95-year-old woman for being complicit in the murders of 10,000 people at the Stutthof camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Prosecutors said in a statement that the woman, who now lives in an elderly care facility, “is accused of having assisted those responsible at the camp in the systematic killing of Jewish prisoners, Polish partisans and Soviet Russian prisoners of war in her function as a stenographer and secretary to the camp commander.” (RELATED: 95-Year-Old Woman Who Worked In Nazi Camp As A Teen Charged With Aiding And Abetting 10,000 Murders)
The prosecutors also charged the woman with attempted murder on top of “aiding and abetting murder in more than 10,000 cases,” prosecutors said. Because she was a juvenile at the time of her crimes, she will be tried in a juvenile court.
A German court also convicted a 93-year-old man, Bruno Dey, in 2020 for aiding in the deaths of 5,200 people while he was a guard at the Stutthof camp.