Former Auschwitz guard charged with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder

Germany has charged a 93-year-old man with 300,000 counts of accessory to murder. The man worked as a prison guard for the Auschwitz death camp in 1944.

German prosecutors have charged a 93-year-old man with over 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, authorities announced on Monday.

Oskar G. worked as a guard at the Auschwitz extermination camp between May and July 1944, in which time an estimated 450,000 people were brought in from Hungary. Those deemed unfit to work were gassed to death almost immediately. The vast majority were Jewish.

He worked as a prison guard and was responsible for destroying their belongings so that new arrivals could not see them. He was also responsible for sorting out valuables - passing money on to the SS regime in Berlin, German federal prosecutors in Hannover said on Monday.

"The traces of the mass killing of concentration camp prisoners were thereby supposed to be covered for subsequent inmates," prosecutors said in a statement. He thus enabled the regime to commit genocide.

The defendant's lawyer declined to comment on the charges.

G. has maintained that he, himself, was never involved in any of the atrocities that took place in Auschwitz during the time he was there. In 2005, he told the German newspaper "Der Spiegel" that he had witnessed violence, recounting an incident where another guard grabbed a baby by the feet and slammed it against a truck to silence it, AP news agency reported.

In a renewed drive to bring perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice, Germany in 2011 passed a landmark ruling that allowed charges to be brought against those who worked for the Nazi regime in lesser positions.

Up to that point, German courts only brought charges against Nazi war criminals who had personally committed atrocities.

The German office investigating Nazi war crimes sent a list with the names of 30 former Auschwitz personnel to be investigated. G. was one of those.

G.'s is the fourth case to be investigated by Hannover. Two have been shelved as the suspects were deemed unfit for trial and one was closed when the suspect died.

Thomas Walther, who represents 20 Auschwitz victims and their families in the case against G. said this was their last chance to bring "justice to one of the SS men who had a part in the murder of their closest relatives."

"Many of the co-plaintiffs are among the last survivors of Auschwitz," he told the Associated Press.

sb/kms (dpa, AFP, AP)  dw de