BERLIN (AP)-- A 98-year-old male has been charged in Germany with being an accessory to murder as a guard at the Nazis' Sachsenhausen concentration camp in between 1943 and 1945, prosecutors said Friday.
The German citizen, a resident of Main-Kinzig county near Frankfurt, is implicated of having "supported the harsh and malicious killing of countless detainees as a member of the SS guard information," district attorneys in Giessen stated in a declaration. They did not launch the suspect's name.
He is charged with more than 3,300 counts of being an accessory to murder in between July 1943 and February 1945. The indictment was submitted at the state court in Hanau, which will now need to choose whether to send out the case to trial. If it does, he will tried under juvenile law, taking account of his age at the time of the supposed crimes.
Prosecutors said that a report by a psychiatric expert last October found that the suspect is fit to stand trial a minimum of on a restricted basis.
German prosecutors have brought several cases under a precedent embeded in current years that enables individuals who assisted a Nazi camp function to be prosecuted as a device to the murders there without direct proof that they took part in a specific killing.
Charges of murder and being an accessory to murder aren't subject to a statute of restrictions under German law.
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More then 200,000 individuals were held at Sachsenhausen, just north of Berlin, in between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands passed away of starvation, illness, required labor, and other causes, along with through medical experiments and organized SS extermination operations consisting of shootings, hangings and gassing.
Precise numbers for those eliminated vary, with upper estimates of some 100,000, though scholars recommend figures of 40,000 to 50,000 are likely more precise.
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