German court says former Nazi camp guard is unfit to stand trial

• Author: Elad Benari
• Date: 11 March 2021
• Published date: 11 March 2021
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

The man, who has only been identified as Harry S., is accused of aiding and abetting murder in several hundred cases while working as a guard at the Stutthof camp in then Nazi-occupied Poland between June 1944 and May 1945.

He was charged in 2017 along with another former Stutthof guard whose trial was discontinued in March 2019, also for health reasons.

"Due to his physical condition, he was no longer able to reasonably represent his interests in and outside of the trial," the district court in Wuppertal said in a statement quoted by AFP.

However, the court found there was "a high degree of probability" Harry S. was guilty of the crimes and therefore ruled that he should incur his own expenses.

Harry S. was accused of overseeing the transport of 598 prisoners from Stutthof to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on September 10, 1944, all but two of whom were later murdered in gas chambers.

His case is the latest that Germany has opened against suspected Nazi war criminals in recent years.

Germany's crackdown on Nazi war criminals began following the 2011 Munich trial of John Demjanjuk, a Nazi war criminal charged of assisting in the murder of 28,060 people at the Sobibor death camp and sentenced to five years. He died in 2012.

Last year, 93-year-old Stutthof camp guard Bruno Dey was convicted of 5,232 counts of accessory to murder in Hamburg state court, equal to the number of people believed to have been...