The defendant was asked several times to comment on his activities as an SS security guard. But the presiding judge and the co-plaintiffs are disappointed.
In the trial of the mass killing of prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the defendant declared that from 1941 to 1945 he worked for the most part as a farm worker at Pasewalk (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania).
In a statement summarized by his defense lawyer, the 101-year-old first commented on his alleged work in Germany during the Second World War. He had previously denied several times in the process that he was an SS security guard in the concentration camp, as accused by the public prosecutor’s office.
According to the indictment, the now 101-year-old is said to have assisted the murder of thousands of prisoners as an SS guard in the concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. The public prosecutor’s office relies on documents from an SS guard with the name, date of birth and place of birth of the accused. In the process, the historian Stefan Hördler had also provided numerous evidence of this man’s activity in several SS guard companies.
The accused had been resettled from Lithuania to Germany in 1941 as a so-called ethnic German. At first he produced spare parts for the Wehrmacht in a small company, it said in his statement. He then worked from a resettlement camp in Pasewalk in various farms. At the end of the war he was posted to Kolberg to work as a civilian worker to dig trenches and build accommodation. He was then said to have been a Russian prisoner of war until June 1946.
The presiding judge Udo Lechtermann accused the defendant of having stated “military service” in his 1985 pension application for the period from September 1940 to May 1945. This clearly contradicts his statements in the process. On the other hand, defense attorney Stefan Waterkamp stated that the application was filled in at a pension counseling service and not by his client personally. Lechtermann said to the defendant: “I have very considerable difficulties in believing what you are telling us.”
Co-plaintiff attorney Thomas Walther suggested that the court should hear a psychologist and other experts. This is intended to prove that the accused denied and suppressed his involvement in the annihilation of life in the concentration camp and instead built up an illusory world. The court did not make a decision at first.
For organizational reasons, the trial before the Neuruppin Regional Court takes place in a sports hall in Brandenburg / Havel. So far, dates have been set until January.
According to the memorial there, more than 200,000 people were imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. Tens of thousands of prisoners died there as a result of hunger, disease, forced labor, medical experiments and mistreatment or were victims of systematic extermination.
Source From: Stern
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