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Former SS Member to Face Trial Over Nazi Murders

Summary: A former SS medical orderly is charged with accessory to murder on at least 3,681 counts, the BBC reports.

A 95-year-old former SS member is to face trial next month in northeast Germany on at least 3,681 counts of accessory to murder for working at the Nazi’s Auschwitz death camp, the most notorious of death camps, the BBC reports. Hubert Zafke worked as an SS medical orderly.

Nevertheless, prosecutors argue that as a medical orderly, the former SS sergeant helped the death camp play its part in killing a total of 1.1 million people in Auschwitz.

Prosecutors further stated that as an SS guard, Zafke knew the camp was “an industrial scale mass murder site.”

As an appeals court ruled in December he was fit for trial, it will proceed on February 29 in Neubrandenburg.

Likewise, 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning will face trial on February 11 on accusations that he served as an Auschwitz guard.

Last year, Oskar Groening, 94, was sentenced to four years in jail for being complicit in the deaths of 300,000 people at Auschwitz.

Attempting to get some last-minute justice won’t be possible in about another decade when the last survivors from World War II will have died of old age.

Source: BBC

Daniel June: Daniel June studied English literature at Michigan State University, graduating in 2003. Working a potpourri of jobs since, from cake-decorator to proofreader, his passion has always been writing, resulting in books of essays, novels, and children’s novellas.