Ex-Auschwitz medic will stand trial for accessory to murder

[jamesbond]

Berlin (AFP) - A 95-year-old former medic at the Auschwitz death camp will go on trial next month on at least 3,681 counts of accessory to murder, German authorities said Monday.

Hubert Zafke was a medical orderly at the camp from August 15, 1944 to September 14, 1944. During this time, 14 trains carrying prisoners -- including the teenage diarist Anne Frank -- arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau where many would eventually be killed in the gas chambers.

Ahead of proceedings due to begin February 29, prosecutors said Zafke was "aware of the purpose of the Birkenau camp as an extermination camp" as well as of its structure.

"Given his awareness, the accused lent support to the organisation of the camp and was thereby both involved in and advanced the extermination," said prosecutors in an earlier statement as they charged Zafke for complicity in the "cruel and insidious killings of at least 3,681" people.

Some 1.1 million people, most of them European Jews, perished between 1940 and 1945 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp before it was liberated by Soviet forces.

Seventy years after the trials of top Nazis began in Nuremberg, Germany is racing against time to prosecute the last Third Reich criminals to make up for decades of neglect.

Around a dozen investigations are currently under way against former SS officers, just months after the so-called "Bookkeeper of Auschwitz" Oskar Groening was sentenced to four years in jail as an accessory to murder in 300,000 cases in which Hungarian Jews were sent to the gas chambers between May and July 1944.

http://news.yahoo.com/ex-auschwitz-medi ... 21487.html

[Adama]

This ought to show you who controls the nations. Why bother putting an elderly man in jail? Just a demonstration of how this story will never die.

[Adama]

Who's going to be prosecuted for all the Dresdners and Berliners who were murdered in the carpet bombing of non-combatants? What about the 100,000 Japanese who were murdered when some nuclear bombs hit their cities? They were not fighting. What about the millions of German soldiers Eisenhauer starved to death in the Rhineland Allied prison camps after the war had long been over?

[Wolfeye]

Isn't it interesting that they'll at least try to lock up THIS fascist, but not the sometimes darker ones that are basically terrorizing Europe & other parts of the world? For f**k's sake- this guy might be dead next week, he's so old. These other assholes are in their teens & twenties, they come over & act like enemies, they drain & destroy while molesting people & animals- but the 95-year-old Nazi is the priority.