MUENSTER: A 94-year-old German appeared in court in a wheelchair on Tuesday accused of assisting in the murder of hundreds of people at a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two, in what is likely to be one of the last such trials.

The man, a former guard in the SS paramilitary wing of Hitler’s Nazis who cannot be named for legal reasons, has denied the accusations.

The man is accused of knowing about killings bet­ween 1942 and 1944, when he served in the Stutthof camp, near what is now the Polish city of Gdansk. About 65,000 people, including many Jews, were murdered or died there, according to the museum’s website.

The suspect, who could face up to ten years behind bars if convicted, strained to listen to proceedings and was provided with earphones when he said he could not hear.

Chief Prosecutor Andreas Brendel told the court that the suspect, as a guard at Stutthof where people were gassed and killed in many different ways, was accused of taking part in several hundred murders.

The suspect is being tried in a youth court because he was under 21 at the time of the suspected crimes. Court sessions have been limited to a maximum of two hours per day because of his physical frailty and the hearing overall has been scheduled to run until mid-February.

With the number of susp­ects dwindling due to old age, Brendel, one of Germ­a­ny’s most active Nazi hunters, said this trial had major historical significance. “It is important for the victims, their families and survivors. They can make public their fate and help en­­sure that something like what the Nazis did never happens again,” he said.

Published in Dawn, November 7th, 2018