A 100-year-old former Nazi death camp guard, accused of helping to murder over 3,500 people, to go on trial
- A 100-year-old will stand trial in Gemany for his alleged involvement in the Holocaust.
- He worked as a camp guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1942 and 1945.
- The man is charged with accessory to murder in 3,518 cases.
A 100-year-old former guard at a Nazi concentration camp will stand trial in Germany later this year, public prosecutors have announced.
The man, not named due to local media laws, is charged with accessory to murder in 18 cases, according to BBC News.
He is accused of "knowingly and willingly" murdering prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp, where up to 100,000 people died, while he was a guard there between 1942 and 1945, The Guardian reported.
The suspect was allegedly complicit in executions by firing squad and by using Zyklon B, the chemical notoriously used in gas chambers at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps during World War II, The Guardian said.
The prosecutor's office in Neuruppin has deemed that the man, despite his advanced age, is "fit to stand trial" for up to two-and-a-half hours per day, German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported.
Around 200,000 people were imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen camp, which is on the outskirts of Berlin, between 1936 and 1945.
About half of those imprisoned died from overwork, disease, or execution. Many of those who survived were transported to other extermination camps built by Hitler's Third Reich, according to Britannica.
Inmates at Sachsenhausen included political prisoners, Jehova's Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, gay men, and Jews.
In February, it was announced that another elderly German will face trial for their alleged involvement in the mass murder of minorities and political prisoners.
A 95-year-old woman who worked as a typist at the Stuffhof concentration camp will face trial this year. She is accused of aiding and abetting murder in more than 10,000 cases, according to CNN.
Oskar Groning, a camp guard at Auschwitz, was found guilty of knowingly facilitating mass murder and was sentenced to four years in prison in 2015. He died, aged 96 before he was set to begin his sentence.
In 2011, a Munich court found John Demjanjuk guilty of being an accessory to murder in the deaths of 28,000 people during his time as a guard at the Sobibor extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.