The Frankfurt district court has overturned a previous decision by a German court and ruled that a 100-year-old German citizen is fit to stand trial for his role as a concentration camp guard, almost 80 years after the end of World War II.
Gregor Formanek was charged last year with aiding and abetting the murder of 3,322 people during his time as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, between July 1943 and February 1945. A court in Hanau, in the German state of Hesse, refused to open proceedings, arguing that Formanek's mental and physical condition meant he could not be prosecuted.
More than 200,000 prisoners (Jews, Gypsies, dissidents and homosexuals) were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands died as a result of forced labor in substandard conditions and the cold, were murdered, underwent medical experiments, and died of starvation or poor hygiene conditions until the camp was liberated by Soviet army forces.
Since the groundbreaking ruling in 2011, in which John Demjanjuk was convicted of aiding and abetting murder despite no evidence that he participated in the murder himself, prosecutors in Germany have been racing against time to bring to justice everyone who was directly or indirectly involved in the systematic murder in the concentration camps.
In a number of cases, the prosecution has succeeded in securing convictions, but other cases have been dropped because the suspects have died or are no longer fit to stand trial.
“Justice has no expiration date and the pursuit of SS perpetrators must not end, even in old age,” Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Auschwitz Commission, said. One of the plaintiffs represented in the trial is Shimon Rothschild from Israel, who was born in Poland and deported by the Germans to Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz. In Sachsenhausen, Rothschild and 10 other children were subjected to medical experiments by the SS, who also infected him with hepatitis.
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Hans-Juergen Foerster, representing Rothschild and two other plaintiffs in the case, told Bild that his clients want the guilty to be found regardless of their age by a democratic court. They hope that such a verdict will contribute to the message of "never again" by giving their terrible suffering retrospective value.