Another Auschwitz guard charged with murder by Germany

A 92-year-old man in the city of Hanau, located near Frankfurt, was charged Wednesday for his alleged role as a Nazi SS guard.

By JTA
Updated: JULY 16, 2015 16:11
Auschwitz (photo credit: REUTERS)
Auschwitz
(photo credit: REUTERS)
Germany is charging another former Auschwitz guard with complicity in murder, on the same day that another man was sentenced to jail for his role as a guard there.
A 92-year-old man in the city of Hanau, located near Frankfurt, was charged Wednesday for his alleged role as a Nazi SS guard.
The unnamed man was charged in juvenile court, since he was an adolescent aged 19 or 20 at the time of his alleged crimes, according to reports. He allegedly watched over transports of deportees from Berlin, and from the transit camps Drancy in France and Westerbork in Holland. According to German press reports, at least 1,075 people from these transports were murdered immediately upon arrival in the camp’s gas chambers.

He is one of several people whose homes had been searched by German investigators in February 2014.

Clues leading to some of the suspects came from the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg, which made a major push to identify former death camp guards after the conviction of John Demjanjuk in 2011 for his role in the murders of nearly 30,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Poland.

On Wednesday, the District Court of Luneburg handed down a four-year prison sentence to Oskar Groening, a 94-year-old former Auschwitz functionary, for his role in the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews in the death camp.

Groening had admitted to being tasked with gathering the money and valuables found in the baggage of murdered Jews and handing it over to his superiors, for transfer to Berlin. He also guarded luggage on the Auschwitz arrival and selection ramp two or three times, in the summer of 1944.