The Holocaust: Never Again!
Six million Jews, along with Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war and 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses, suffered unspeakable cruelties and unimaginable horrors before they died or were executed in the Nazi concentration/death camps. All personnel of the death camps that are still alive should be brought to justice no matter how old they are, how long it’s been and what kind of exemplary life they’ve led since.
NAZI HUNTERS PUSH FOR WAR CRIMES CHARGES AGAOMST 87-YEAR-OLD MAN ACCUSED OF WORKING AS AUSCHWITZ GUARD
By Sara Malm
Mail Online
August 23, 2012
An 87-year-old man is set to be charged on allegations that he served as an SS guard at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
The German special prosecutors office has recommended that the man be charged over involvement in the killing of 344,000 Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland from April 1944 until January 1945.
Head prosecutor Kurt Schrimm did not reveal the identity of the man but confirmed that he is a non-German living outside Germany.
Schrimm, who is head of the special prosecutors' office that pursues Nazi-era crimes, said that the man can be charged over accessory to murder using precedent set by Munich prosecutors in the trial of former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk in 2011.
Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was convicted solely on the basis that he served as a Sobibor death camp guard with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.
He was the first person convicted in Germany under such conditions setting legal precedent that anyone who was involved in the operation of a death camp was an accessory to murder.
Mr Demjanjuk died in a Bavarian nursing home in March while appealing his conviction maintaining until his death that he had been mistaken for someone else and never served as a camp guard.
Even though the Demjanjuk verdict is not considered legally binding due to his death prior to the exhaustion of his appeal, Schrimm said the same legal principle can be applied in the case of the alleged Auschwitz guard.
‘I can't say when he was where in the camp, but all of these guards were stationed at times on the ramps, at times at the gas chambers and at times in the towers,’ Schrimm said.
Efraim Zuroff, the top Nazi hunter at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he welcomed the news of the investigation but cautioned that even if the suspect is charged, bringing him to Germany for trial could present challenges.
He noted, for example, that the Australian high court last week ruled that 90-year-old Charles Zentai could not be extradited to Hungary to face accusations he tortured and killed a Jewish teenager during World War II.
‘A lot will depend on whether or not his country of residence has the political will to extradite him to Germany,’ Zuroff said.
Schrimm's office has turned the case over to prosecutors in Weiden, in Bavaria, to determine whether to file charges. Weiden has jurisdiction over the area where the suspect last lived in Germany.
Weiden prosecutors' spokesman Norbert Dietl said the files were received on Monday, and that it would probably take at least a month to make a decision on the case.
About 1.5 million people were killed at the Auschwitz camp complex between 1940 and 1945.
An estimated 90 per cent of the victims were Jewish but also included Roma, Soviet prisoners of War and 400 Jehovah’s Witnesses .
It was liberated on January 27, 1945 by Soviet troops, a day which is commemorated annually as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Two years after the liberation it was opened as a museum which now sees 1.3 million visitors passing through the wrought iron gates with the chilling motto 'Arbeit Macht Frei' every year.
1 comment:
Some acts are so horrific there is no redemption for them.
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