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100-year-old former concentration camp guard ‘to go on trial in Germany’

Man is said to have worked at Sachsenhausen for three years

Zoe Tidman
Sunday 01 August 2021 14:30 BST
An ex-guard at Sachsenhausen is set to go on trial
An ex-guard at Sachsenhausen is set to go on trial (AFP/Getty)

A 100-year-old former concentration camp guard is set to stand trial in Germany, according to reports.

The man is said to have worked at the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp near Berlin between 1942 to 1945.

He is due to go on trial this autumn, according to a German Sunday newspaper.

The district court of Neuruppin admitted the charges of accessory to murder in 3,500 cases.

The defendant should be able to stand trial for two to two and a half hours a day, a court spokesperson told Welt am Sonntag.

The 100-year-old has not been named for legal reasons.

Around 200,000 people were imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen Nazi concentration camp between 1936 and 1945.

Twenty thousand people were killed at the camp in Oranienburg, near Berlin, including by forced labour, medical experiments and systematic extermination.

The Nazi regime kept Jewish people, political opponents, Roma and homosexual people, among other groups, in the camp during its time in operation.

In its later years, most of Sachsenhausen’s prisoners were foreigners, with large numbers from the Soviet Union and Poland, according to the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation.

Back in 2011, a landmark conviction found working in a concentration camp was grounds for culpability with no proof of a specific crime for the first time.

Additional reporting by Reuters

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