100-year-old Nazi death camp suspect to stand trial
German courts have opened the way for a 100-year-old alleged former concentration camp guard to stand trial, overturning an earlier lower court’s decision that he was unfit to do so.
The suspect, identified as Gregor Formanek in the German media, was charged last year with complicity in the murder of more than 3,300 people while working in an SS guard battalion at the Sachsenhausen death camp during World War II.
An medical expert determined in February that the centenarian was unable to stand trial due to his physical and mental condition. A district court in Hanau then made the decision to not continue proceedings.
A higher regional court in Frankfurt on Tuesday found the expert’s findings to have been insufficient, after a local prosecutor’s office and several co-plaintiffs lodged complaints about the Hanau district court decision.
Frankfurt Attorney General Torsten Kunze welcomed the move, stressing the trial could be one of the last of its kind, underscoring its historical importance, German daily Frankfurter Rundschau wrote on Tuesday.
Under German law, anyone who worked at a Nazi concentration camp can be prosecuted as an accessory to the murders committed there. A landmark ruling in 2011 served as a legal precedent, when John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian guard at the Sobibor death camp was found guilty of complicity in the murder of 28,060 Jews.
Since then, several former workers of Nazi concentration camps have been found guilty in Germany.
Formanek was reportedly a member of an SS guard battalion at Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1943 to 1945. Located just north of Berlin, the facility held more than 200,000 Soviet soldiers, Jews, gypsies and other prisoners between its construction in 1936, and when it was liberated by Soviet and Polish troops in 1945.
By varying accounts, between 40,000 and 100,000 inmates are estimated to have been killed by forced labor, starvation, execution and medical experiments at the camp.
