German court says Auschwitz SS medic, 94, fit to stand trial

Dementia not enough to grant stay of proceedings for alleged accomplice in the murder of 3,681 people, appellate judge rules

A German appeals court has reversed a lower court’s decision that a 95-year-old former SS sergeant who served as a medic in the Auschwitz death camp isn’t fit for trial.

The Rostock state court said Tuesday it concluded after hearing more expert testimony that Hubert Z. could stand trial, though possibly with shortened sessions and other safeguards for his health.

The suspect is accused of having served as a medic in an SS hospital at Auschwitz in 1944.

Schwerin prosecutors charged Hubert Z. with 3,681 counts of accessory to murder earlier this year, arguing that by serving as a medic he helped the extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland function.

A lower court in Neubrandenburg ruled in June he was unfit for trial, but prosecutors appealed. No trial dates have been set.

This is not the first time this year a nonagenarian has been found fit for trial for alleged activities at the Nazi death camp during the Holocaust.

In mid-September, the attorney for a 93-year-old former SS sergeant charged with 170,000 counts of accessory to murder on allegations he served as an Auschwitz death camp guard, said his client wasn’t fit for trial. Germany’s Detmold state court however, determined earlier this month that Reinhold H., whose last name wasn’t given for privacy reasons, was fit for trial.

A picture taken just after the liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945 shows a group of children wearing concentration camp uniforms behind barbed wire fencing in the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. (AP Photo/File)

After defense attorneys and prosecutors submit responses to the expert opinion, the court will decide whether to open a trial against the former Nazi guard.

Reinhold H., a retiree, is accused of serving as a guard at the extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland from 1942 through 1944. Prosecutors argue he is an accessory to murder for helping the death camp function but he’s not charged with a specific killing.

Earlier this year, 94-year-old former Nazi SS officer Oskar Groening, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” was given a four-year jail sentence after being convicted by a court in the northern German city of Lueneburg for accessory to murder in 300,000 cases of Hungarian Jews sent to the gas chambers from May to July 1944.

Groening said after the verdict that he would appeal. His lawyers had argued during the three-month trial that Groening’s role at the camp had been “minor” and demanded an acquittal.

Groening served as an accountant at Auschwitz, sorting and counting the money taken from those killed or used as slave labor, and shipping it back to his Nazi superiors in Berlin.

Court observers say it is unlikely Groening, who was not in custody during the trial, would ever serve time in prison given his advanced age and deteriorating health.

Some 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, perished between 1940 and 1945 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp before it was liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945.