Nazi hunter alleges Danish man, 90, worked in concentration camp

A top Nazi hunter has filed a police complaint against a 90-year-old Danish man for allegedly working as a guard in a Belarus concentration camp during World War II.

“Unfortunately the justice ministry chose not to deal with this … so therefore I have come to Copenhagen to submit the complaint myself,” Efraim Zuroff, the US-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s Jerusalem director, tells journalists.

A Danish book released last year claimed Helmuth Leif Rasmussen worked as a guard in the Bobruisk camp in nazi-occupied Belarus, citing a police report from 1945.

Rasmussen, who has since changed his name and now lives in the Copenhagen area, has admitted to being part of a volunteer unit created by the Danish Nazi Party, but told daily Berlingske that he only went to Bobruisk as a 17-year-old to undergo military training.

“We were there to be trained as soldiers and the other (things) we had nothing to do with,” he told the paper.

The alleged war crimes took place between 1942 and 1943.

Zuroff says there was “certainly enough evidence to warrant an investigation.”

People like Rasmussen “are the last people on earth who should have any sympathy, because they had absolutely no sympathy for their victims, some of whom were older than they are today,” he says.

Around 6,000 Danish nazis volunteered for the Free Corps Denmark during the German occupation between April 1940 and May 1945.

Up to 1,000 Danes served in Bobruisk, where at least 1,400 Jews were killed, according to a book released in October last year by Danish historians Dennis Larsen and Therkel Straede.

–AFP