Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reports today that three men suspected of being former SS guards at the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz were arrested by German Police last month. The men, aged 88, 92 and 94, are now being prosecuted but will not be remanded into custody for health reasons.
Police arrested the men in the state of Baden-Württemberg and transported them to a military hospital. One suspect was released earlier this week, a second was released on Wednesday, and the third left the hospital today.
DPA reports that the 92-year-old man released today had to pay bail of EUR 100 000, turn in his passport, and must regularly report to police as a condition of his release. The trio are part of a group of about 30 suspected former Auschwitz guards whom the federal prosecutor entrusted with solving Nazi crimes recommended for prosecution last September.
German authorities focused on the former patrolmen from the Nazi camps after the recent conviction of John Demjanjuk, who had worked as a guard at Sobibor. His case demonstrated that it is possible to convict someone even if their direct participation in mass murder cannot be proven.
According to new legal arguments, practically anyone who served in the death camps can be convicted of the crime of aiding and abetting murder. Demjanjuk was sentenced by the court in 2011 to a five-year prison sentence for aiding and abetting roughly 28 000 murder cases; he died before the verdict could take effect.
A state-level court in Munich called the former guard "part of the extermination machinery". Demjanjuk died in 2012 at the age of 91 in a care facility near Rosenheim in Germany.
Given the poor state of his health, Demjanjuk was released on his own recognizance until a verdict in his appeals proceeding could be handed down, but he did not live long enough to hear it. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp on the territory of occupied Poland was the largest Nazi extermination camp during WWII.
Hitler’s regime murdered 1.5 million people, most of them of Jewish origin, at Auschwitz. Overall the Nazi Holocaust in Europe claimed the lives of six million Jews.
