Nazi suspect faces grisly charges

2010-07-29 21:29

Berlin - The world's third most wanted Nazi suspect, who allegedly participated in the murder of more than 430 000 Jews at the Belzec death camp, was involved in the entire killing process.

This involved taking victims from trains to pushing them into gas chambers to throwing their corpses into mass graves, court documents state.

A state court in the western city of Bonn released new details on Thursday of last week's indictment against Samuel Kunz, an 88-year-old former ministry employee who has lived undisturbed in the village of Wachtberg outside Bonn for many years.

"The accused was deployed in all areas of the camp," court spokesperson Matthias Nordmeyer told AP.

The court's statement describes in gruesome detail some of the crimes the suspected former death camp guard allegedly committed in occupied Poland from January 1942 to July 1943.

The court also announced on Thursday that Kunz has been charged in a German youth court because he was a minor at the time - meaning he could be brought to trial as an adolescent and face a more lenient sentence.

Kunz was 20-years-old when he allegedly started working as a guard at Belzec in January 1942.

According to German law, people between 18 and 21 can be brought to trial either as minors or adults.

"It will be up to the judge to decide whether he will be sentenced as an adolescent or an adult," Nordmeyer said.

Gas chambers

In its statement, the court described the deadly routine at Belzec, claiming that Kunz supposedly participated as a camp guard in all areas of the Nazis' organised mass murder of Poland's Jewry.

After the victims arrived by train at the death camp, they were told that before they could start working they had to be deloused and take a shower, the statement said, describing the terrifying killing process that by now is well known.

"Threatening them with pistols, whips and wooden clubs, the victims were told to hurry up. ... They had to undress ... the women had their hair cut off, and then first the men, then women and children were pushed into the gas chambers," the statement said.

After the victims were killed, "the corpses were searched for gold and valuables and then thrown into prepared graves".

In addition to being charged with participating in the execution of the Holocaust, Kunz - who is the No 3 on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi suspects - is also accused of "personal excesses" in the alleged shooting of 10 Jews.

Shot escapees

"In July 1943, the defendant is accused of having shot two persons who had escaped from a train going to the death camp and had been captured by guards," the statement said.

Between May and June 1943, he reportedly killed eight others who had been wounded but not killed by another guard at Belzec.

"The defendant then took the weapon from the other guard to shoot the wounded victims to death," according to the statement.

Kunz had long been ignored by the German justice system, where former officials were not that interested in going after relatively low-ranking camp guards.

But in the past 10 years, a younger generation of German prosecutors has emerged that wants to bring all surviving Nazi suspects to justice.

Stumbled on case

While Kunz ranked fairly low in the Nazi hierarchy, he is among the top most wanted due to the large number of Jews he is accused of having been involved in killing - which the prosecutor's office in Dortmund puts at 430 000.

The highest-profile guard on trial now is John Demjanjuk, the 90-year-old retired autoworker being tried in Munich for being an accessory to the murder of 28 060 Jews as a guard at the Sobibor death camp in occupied Poland. He denies he was ever a camp guard.

Kunz's case came to light because of Demjanjuk. Authorities recently stumbled over Kunz's case when they studied old documents from German postwar trials about the SS training camp Trawniki.

Prosecutors allege that both Kunz and the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk, who was deported to Germany from the US last year, trained as guards at the Trawniki SS camp.
 

- AP