German court rules ex-concentration camp guard, 99, unfit to stand trial

A German court ruled last Wednesday that a 99-year-old man who served as a guard at a Nazi concentration camp was unfit to stand trial for his role in the murder of thousands of inmates during the Holocaust, German media have reported.

The decision came after an expert physician commissioned by the regional court in Hanau, in the German state of Hesse, determined that the mental and physical condition of Gregor Formanek prevented the former SS officer from standing trial, Berlin-area public broadcaster RBB reported.

German tabloid Bild quoted Hans-Jürgen Förster, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, as saying that an appeal against the decision would be filed in the coming week. The public prosecutor in the German town of Giessen also said it would file an appeal, which will be brought before the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt.

The prosecutor first indicted Formanek in August for aiding and abetting over 3,300 murders while stationed as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Sachsenhausen was established by the SS in 1936 as the main concentration and forced labor camp in the Berlin area.

Among its well-known inmates were Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, whom the Nazis deposed during the 1938 Anschluss of Austria; Pastor Martin Niemöller, famous for his 1946 poem “First they came…“; and  Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of Nazi diplomat Ernst vom Rath served, two days later, as the pretext for Kristallnacht.

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First used to incarcerate political prisoners, the camp later saw thousands of Jewish detainees, as well as gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Roma and Sinti people. After Kristallnacht in 1938, some 6,000 Jews were sent to the concentration camp, and by the war’s end, it had upward of 11,000 Jewish inmates.

Formanek, the former SS officer, was stationed as a guard at Sachsenhausen between 1943 and 1945.

According to Bild, Formanek was arrested by the Red Army after the war ended in 1945. A year later, a Soviet military tribunal in Potsdam sentenced the former SS officer to 25 years in prison for espionage and crimes against humanity.

After just 10 years in prison, Formanek reportedly moved to West Germany, where he worked for some time as a baker and a doorman. Bild cited  Formanek’s neighbors in Frankfurt as saying that he had moved there with his second wife, a son and a daughter.

Herschel Grynszpan, a 16-year-old Polish Jew living Paris, covers his face as French policemen escort him days after he shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat, November 12, 1938. (AFP)

The neighbors reportedly knew nothing about Formanek’s past in the SS.

Bild cited documents from Germany’s Federal Archives as saying that Formanek was born in Romania to a German-speaking tailor, and joined the SS in 1943. The documents were said to describe Formanek as someone who “supported the cruel and insidious killing of thousands of prisoners.”

British tabloid The Sun, which tracked Formanek down at his Frankfurt apartment in August last year, said at the time that he would likely be “the last Nazi” war criminal to stand trial.