Google – AFP, 18 March 2014
View of the
former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oswiecim,
Poland, on
Holocaust Day, January 27, 2014 (AFP/File, Janek Skarzynski)
|
Berlin —
German police have arrested a former Nazi medic who served at the Auschwitz
death camp on multiple charges of aiding and abetting murder, prosecutors said
Tuesday.
The
93-year-old, who was arrested at his home near Neubrandenburg north of Berlin,
underwent a medical checkup before he faced a judge and was then taken into
pre-trial detention.
The former
SS member allegedly assisted in the mass murder of prisoners who arrived on
eight transports from Germany, Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands and
Slovenia in September 1944.
Of the
arrivals, 1,721 were killed in gas chambers after they were deemed unfit for
forced labour at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp located in Oswiecim, southern
Poland, prosecutors said.
World
Jewish Congress president Ronald Lauder praised German authorities for
"not relenting in the pursuit of those who murdered, or aided in
murdering, thousands of people during World War II".
"The
prosecution of those who participated in terrible crimes sends a clear message
that justice must be done, no matter how late the hour," he said in an
emailed statement.
The
pensioner's arrest followed a tip-off from the German office investigating Nazi
war crimes with a recommendation to bring charges but prosecutors did not
specify when it took place.
It was the
latest in a series of arrests since Germany launched a renewed drive to bring
to justice the last surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust.
For more
than 60 years German courts had only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence
showed they had personally committed atrocities.
But in 2011
a Munich court sentenced John Demjanjuk to five years in prison for complicity
in the extermination of Jews at the Sobibor camp, establishing that all former
camp guards can be tried.
"There
cannot be a statute of limitation for crimes against humanity, and mass
murderers must continue to live in fear of the long arm of the law,"
Lauder said.
Auschwitz
has become an enduring symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews, of
whom one million were killed there from 1940 to 1945.
More than
100,000 non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and
anti-Nazi partisans also died at the camp in occupied Poland before it was
liberated by Russian forces on January 27, 1945.
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