93-year-old former Auschwitz guard to be tried in Germany

Unnamed suspect accused of facilitating the murder of 300,000 Jews, handling funds seized from camp victims

By JTA 16 December 2014, 2:41 pm

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Hungarian Jews on the Judenrampe (Jewish ramp) after disembarking from transport trains at Auschwitz-Birkenau, May 1944 (The Auschwitz Album)

A 93-year-old man accused of being a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp will be tried next year, according to a German court.

The court of the German city of Lueneberg did not identify the man alleged to have been an SS guard for the Nazis, but said Monday that he will be tried on charges of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews, Reuters reported. The man is also believed to have been in charge of managing money seized from those deported to Auschwitz.

The charges relate to the man’s time as an SS guard at Auschwitz between September 1942 and October 1944. The specific allegations refer to the period between May and July 1944, when 300,000 Jews were murdered upon arrival at the camp.

“The accused knew that, as part of the selection process, those not chosen for work and told they were going to the showers were really going to the gas chambers where they would be put to death in an agonizing manner,” the court said in a statement in September.

Eight out of the sixteen Holocaust survivors who came forward were chosen as witnesses, Reuters reported.

Most of those who are suspected of being former Nazis are either dead or unfit for trial, but in September the Simon Wiesenthal Center sent the German government a list of 80 Nazi suspects who should be investigated.