From Reuters:
“German Nazi camp guard, 92,
charged as accessory to thousands of murders”
German prosecutors have charged a
92-year-old former concentration camp guard with being an accessory to murder,
in what will be one of the last ever cases against Nazi-era war crimes. Hamburg prosecutors accused the man,
identified only as Bruno D., of aiding and abetting 5,230 cases of murder
during the almost nine months he spent on duty at a concentration camp
watch-tower at the end of World War Two. According to Die Welt newspaper, which first
reported the charges, the man admitted to prosecutors during a voluntary
interrogation last year that he had seen people being taken to gas chambers to
be murdered. “What good would it have
done for me to leave? They’d just have found somebody else,” he told
prosecutors, according to the newspaper. “I felt bad for the people there. I didn’t
know why they were there. I knew that they were Jews who had committed no
crime.” D., who was 17 when he began
serving at Stutthof concentration camp near Gdansk in present-day Poland, said
he had only joined the SS, the paramilitary wing of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party,
because a heart weakness meant he was only suited for “garrison service”. He said he had not been a Nazi sympathizer. With only a handful of people involved in Nazi
Germany’s genocidal crimes still alive, all in extreme old age, prosecutors are
racing against time to ensure at least some justice is done by the victims,
including the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The case against another nonagenarian former
guard at Stutthof, where more than 60,000 people died, was halted last year
because the suspect was too infirm to stand trial. Another, Oskar Groening, known as the
“Bookkeeper of Auschwitz” for his job counting cash stolen from people sent to
the most notorious of all the regime’s death camps, died last year aged 96 as
he waited to begin his sentence.
^ Another German who worked at a concentration
camp, but “never” actually killed or hurt anyone. It amazes me that so many camp
guards saw no evil, heard no evil and did no evil yet millions upon millions of
men, women and children were murdered. ^
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