Trial Begins for 94-Year-Old Nazi Death Camp Guard in Germany
94-year-old Johann R. is a landscape architect who has once worked for North Rhine Westphalia state authorities. He was a watchman from June 1942 to September 1944 at the Stutthof camp.
Nazi Death Camps were a terror for whoever has faced Hitler’s brutal dictatorship during World War II. The terror camps also known as death camps, where thousands of people were killed and tortured. Nearly eight decades after the end of World War II, the trial of a former SS guard in Germany has just begun who is now charged with complicity in mass murders at a Nazi concentration camp during the World War II.
94-year-old Johann R. is a landscape architect who has once worked for North Rhine Westphalia state authorities. He was a watchman from June 1942 to September 1944 at the Stutthof camp near Danzig, which is now in Gdansk in Poland. The trial is an attempt by the German government to prosecute surviving Nazis, after a new legal precedent was set in the year 2011.
At the time of Nazi rule, Johann R was aged between 18 and 20. Dortmund prosecutor Andreas Brendel said he is “an accused in his capacity as a guard of participating in the killing operations. Many people were gassed, shot or left to die of hunger”. Brendel also said, the man “knew about the killing methods” there.
Now he will be tried before a juvenile court, as he was not 21 years of age, at the time of the crimes. Given his advanced age now, the court hearings will last for a maximum of two hours. “But mentally, he is still fit” informed prosecutor Brendel.
The nonagenarian is accused of being a party in the killings of several hundred camp prisoners, according to the regional court of Muenster. The killing included more than 100 Polish prisoners, who were suffocated to death in gas chambers between June 21 and 22, 1944 and hundreds of Jewish prisoners killed from August to December 1944 as part of the Nazi’s Final Solution operation.
In August 2017, when police first interrogated him, the accused denied his involvement saying, he knew nothing about the atrocities in the camp. But when asked, why the camp detainees were so thin, the defendant reportedly said that the food was so scarce for everyone that two soldiers could fit into a single uniform.
Stutthof was set up in 1939, which has the capacity of holding 110,000 detainees, out of which 65,000 perished, according to Museum Stutthof. If found guilty, the nonagenarian will be given the punishment of 15 years in prison.
