BERLIN - A 95-year-old Berlin resident has
been charged with being an accessory to the murder of over
36,000 people at the Mauthausen death camp in Austria during
World War Two, the Berlin prosecutor's office said.
The man, identified only as Hans H. for legal reasons, is
alleged to have served in a Nazi SS-company at the largest Nazi
death camp in Austria from summer 1944 to spring 1945.
He is accused of having guarded inmates at the camp, about
20 km from the Austrian city of Linz, and during marches to
forced labour sites, the office said in a statement.
"During the time of the crime, at least 36,223 people were
killed at the Mauthausen concentration camp. The killings were
mostly carried out through gassing, but also through 'death bath
actions', injections and shootings, as well as through
starvation and freezing," it said.
The suspect was "aware of all the killing methods as well as
the disastrous living conditions of the incarcerated people at
the camp" the statement said. It said he wanted to "support or
at least help make easier the many thousands of deaths carried
out by the main perpetrator".
The prosecutor's office said it was bringing the charges
under new laws that allow the prosecution of people involved in
the Nazi "machinery of death" even if they did not personally
kill anyone.
Faced with the advancing age of the suspects, Germany has
stepped up prosecutions of lower-ranking individuals since the
2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, a guard at Sobibor death
camp. That case established a new precedent that no proof of a
specific crime was needed to convict a defendant.
In recent years, some other former SS camp guards have been
convicted but died either before the conviction was legally
binding or before they had to go behind bars.
Another 95-year-old German man who is on trial for assisting
in the murder of hundreds of people at the Stutthof camp, near
what is now the Polish city of Gdansk, this month told the court
he had never been a Nazi and was not indifferent to the
suffering of inmates.