Prosecutors in Dortmund, Germany, charged a 100-year-old man with war crimes they say he had committed as a guard during World War II and the Holocaust at a prisoner of war camp in Hemer, Germany, the Bild newspaper reported on Saturday.
Prosecutor Andreas Brendel told the paper that the suspect, who was not named in the media, was charged with participating in mass murders between December 1943 and September 1944.
Around 200,000 prisoners of war were imprisoned at the Stalag VI A concentration camp in Hemer. The camp was officially for prisoners of war, mostly from the Soviet Union and Poland.
Some 11,000 prisoners, mostly Soviet, died at Hemer due to disease, hunger and violence. According to some sources, the number of victims was significantly higher.
Red Army soldiers were treated worse than Western prisoners of war. The Soviets were killed en masse and deliberately, often starting with the Jews in their ranks.
Before 2011, no concentration camp guards had been convicted of war crimes in Western courts. But the 2011 conviction in Munich of former concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk as an accomplice in the murders of nearly 30,000 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Poland set a precedent in Germany. Since then, being a guard at a death camp was sufficient to prove complicity in murder.
