German prosecutors have charged a 95-year-old man with being an accessory to the deaths of tens of thousands of inmates at an Austrian Nazi death camp.<\/p>\n
Identified only as Hans H for legal reasons, the Berlin resident is alleged to have been an SS guard at Mauthausen from mid-1944 to early 1945.<\/p>\n
A statement from the Berlin prosecutor’s office accuses him of being part of the killing operation.<\/p>\n
He is the latest of several former death-camp guards to face prosecution.<\/p>\n
There is no word yet from the suspect or his lawyers.<\/p>\n
Half of the 190,000 people held at Mauthausen, Austria’s largest Nazi death camp, were killed. Hans H is accused of being an accessory to the deaths of 36,223 of them.<\/p>\n
The camp, 20km (12 miles) from the city of Linz, housed those considered enemies of the Nazi authorities.<\/p>\n
Many were worked to death through slave labour, gassed, shot, injected, starved or succumbed to freezing conditions.<\/p>\n
The prosecutor’s statement says the accused, who served in a Nazi SS unit, was aware of “all the killing methods as well as the disastrous living conditions of the incarcerated people at the camp”.<\/p>\n
It alleges he supported, or at least made “easier the many thousands of deaths carried out by the main perpetrator”.<\/p>\n
It is now up to a Berlin court to decide if his case goes to trial.<\/p>\n
Other recent cases include that of Johann Rehbogen, 94, who went on trial on 6 November accused of complicity in mass murder at the Stutthof camp in what is now northern Poland.<\/p>\n
Another legal case involves a 94-year-old former SS guard accused of aiding and abetting mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. A court in Mannheim is deciding whether to go ahead with a trial.<\/p>\n
Two more 94-year-olds, Oskar Groening and Reinhold Hanning, who were both at Auschwitz, were successfully convicted but died before serving prison sentences.<\/p>\n
The legal basis for trying former death-camp guards changed in 2011 with the conviction of John Demjanjuk, a guard at the Sobibor camp in occupied Poland.<\/p>\n
His trial opened up the possibility of prosecuting former guards because they had been part of a death-camp operation, rather than needing to charge them with taking part directly in atrocities.<\/p>\n
Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"