Ex-SS guard on trial in late push to punish Nazi crimes

DETMOLD, Germany (AP) — A 94-year-old former SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp is going on trial this week on 170,000 counts of accessory to murder, the first of up to four cases being brought to court this year in an 11th-hour push by German prosecutors to punish Nazi war crimes.

The trial for the retiree from a town near the western city of Detmold starts on Thursday and is one of the latest that follow a precedent set in 2011, when former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk became the first person to be convicted in Germany solely for serving as a camp guard, with no evidence of involvement in a specific killing.

Leon Schwarzbaum, a 94-year-old Auschwitz survivor from Berlin who is the first witness scheduled for the trial, said he can't forget the vivid images he witnessed there.

Two others whose cases are likely to go to trial this year are a 93-year-old woman charged with 260,000 counts of accessory to murder on allegations she served as a radio operator for Auschwitz's commandant in 1944, and a 94-year-old man charged with 1,276 counts on allegations he served as an Auschwitz guard.

[...] Jens Rommel, the head of the Nazi war crimes investigative office in Ludwigsburg, says it is too early to talk of the last round of trials.

There are a half-dozen open investigations right now with state prosecutors, and his office is looking into another seven suspects from both the Auschwitz and the Majdanek death camps.