Germany
charged a 93-year-old former member of the Nazi Waffen-SS on Monday with at
least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder over his time at the Auschwitz
death camp.
The
charges relate to the around 425,000 people believed to have been deported to
the camp in occupied Poland between May and July 1944, at least 300,000 of whom
were killed in the gas chambers.
The
accused helped remove the luggage of victims so that it was not seen by new
arrivals, said prosecutors in the northern city of Hanover.
"The
traces of the mass killing of concentration camp prisoners were thereby
supposed to be covered for subsequent inmates," prosecutors said in a
statement.
His main
role was to count the banknotes gathered from prisoners' luggage and pass them
on to the SS authorities in Berlin, they added.
Prosecutors
said the accused was aware that the predominantly Jewish prisoners deemed unfit
to work "were murdered directly after their arrival in the gas chambers of
Auschwitz".
A regional
court must now decide whether the accused will go on trial.
The German
office investigating Nazi war crimes last year sent files on 30 former Auschwitz
personnel to state prosecutors with a recommendation to bring charges against
them.
The
renewed drive to bring to justice the last surviving perpetrators of the
Holocaust follows a 2011 landmark court ruling.
For more
than 60 years German courts had only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence
showed they had personally committed atrocities.
But in
2011 a Munich court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for
complicity in the extermination of Jews at the Sobibor camp, where he had
served as a guard, establishing that all former camp guards can be tried.
More than
one million people, mostly European Jews, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau,
operated by the Nazis from 1940 until it was liberated by Russian forces on
January 27, 1945.
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