German court says former Auschwitz guard fit for trial

BERLIN — A German court says 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 has been declared fit for trial.

The Detmold state court said Monday a doctor determined that Reinhold H., whose last name wasn’t given for privacy reasons, is fit to stand trial so long as sessions are limited to two hours per day.

Defense attorneys and prosecutors now have two weeks to submit responses to the expert opinion. The court will then decide whether to open a trial.

H. is accused of being an accessory to murders at Auschwitz from January 1943 to June 1944. The suspect says he was assigned to a part of the camp not involved in the mass murders.

In mid-September, the suspect’s attorney said his client wasn’t fit for trial.

The 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.

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

In July, 94-year-old former Nazi SS officer Oskar Groening, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” was given a four-year jail sentence was convicted by a court in the northern German city of Lueneburg of 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.

Prosecutors sought three and a half years’ jail for Groening based on the “nearly incomprehensible number of victims,” but mitigated by “the limited contribution of the accused” to their deaths.

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.

AFP contributed to this report.