(AFP) BERLIN, Germany — A 95-year-old former Nazi concentration camp guard has been charged with war crimes during the Holocaust in what could be one of the last cases of its kind, a German court said Monday.
The former guard at the Stutthof Nazi camp near what was then Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland, was charged with complicity in the murder of several hundred people, a spokesman for the district court in Wuppertal told AFP.
The ability of the accused to stand trial must now be assessed by experts.
Because he was 19 years old when assigned to work as a guard at the Stutthof camp, the case would be handled by a juvenile court.
The Nazis set up the Stutthof camp in 1939, initially using it to detain Polish political prisoners.
But it ended up holding 110,000 detainees, including many Jews. Some 65,000 people perished in the camp, including around 28,000 Jewish people.
The man would be the latest former Nazi camp guard to face trial since a landmark 2011 ruling against John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor death camp.
A court ruled that as a guard at the camp, Ukrainian-American Demjanjuk was automatically implicated in killings carried out there at the time.
Since then, Germany has been racing to put surviving SS personnel on trial on those grounds rather than for murders or atrocities directly linked to the accused individuals.
German prosecutors last week demanded three years in jail for Bruno Dey, a 93-year-old former Stutthof guard who they said was “without a doubt” complicit in the murder of more than 5,000 people.
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