A spokesman for the Neubrandenburg regional prosecutor’s office said Hubert Zafke, 96 and diagnosed with dementia, was no longer able to “reasonably assess his interests or coherently follow or give testimony.”In June 2017, Reinhold Hanning, a 95-year-old former Auschwitz SS guard convicted by a German court in June 2016 of being an accessory to the murder of more than 170,000 people, died before entering prison for his five-year sentence.Hanning had appealed the ruling and, at the time of his death, the conviction was not legally binding as his appeal was still pending.Former Nazi guard Oskar Groening, known as the “ bookkeeper of Auschwitz ,” was convicted in 2015 as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Jews at the German death camp and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.Groening died in March 2018 without starting his sentence due to a lengthy legal dispute over his health, with his lawyer repeatedly arguing that his age and frail health were grounds for a pardon. Due to his age at the time of the alleged crimes, he faces trial in a juvenile court.“In this time, at least 15 rail transports arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp after which people were immediately selected [to live or die] based on their ability to work,” the Stuttgart public prosecutor’s office said. According to the prosecutors, at least 15 transports of prisoners arrived during that period, and 13,335 people were murdered in the gas chambers almost immediately after arrival, having been deemed incapable of working. “The prosecutor’s office assumes that at least 13,335 of these people were classified as unfit to work and murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.”Prosecutors said the German citizen, born in the Serbian town of Ruma, began his military training as a guard at Auschwitz in October 1942 before starting work in December of the same year.The suspect said through his defense lawyer that he was “not aware of the background, intent or procedures behind the killing” at the camp.The legal precedent set by the May 2011 conviction of Sobibor death camp guard John Demjanjuk paved the way for German authorities to seek the prosecution of other former Nazi guards.
German prosecutors charge an unidentified 94-year-old ex-Auschwitz guard with aiding and abetting 13,335 murders when he was nineteen.