Former Nazi death camp guard charged with complicity to murder

October 20, 2017

German public prosecutors in the city of Frankfurt charged a 96-year-old man on Friday with complicity in the Nazis’ murder of thousands of detainees during the Second World War.

The unidentified man allegedly guarded a death camp in Lublin-Majanek in German-occupied Polish territory during the war. He was serving as a member of the SS, the Nazi elite military force, between August 1943 and January 1944. Tens of thousands of Jews and members of other ethnic and minority groups targeted by the Nazis were killed at the camp.

Read more: Nazi trial against Auschwitz medic Hubert Z. to be suspended (*a separate case*)

Prosecutors said in a statement that the then 22-year-old “knew about the cruelty of the organized mass killings” and that the prisoners “facing their fate, innocently and defenselessly, were killed for inhuman reasons.”

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

The world remembers the victims of the Holocaust

On January 27, 1945, the Soviet Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. In 1996, then German President Roman Herzog marked it as a day to commemorate the victims of the Nazi Holocaust. In 2005, the United Nations named it a day of international day of remembrance. Since then, people gather across the world to remember those who lost their lives.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Oswiecim, Poland

Dozens of Auschwitz survivors commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day and paid homage to the Holocaust’s victims by returning to the camp 72 years after it was liberated. Survivors placed wreaths in front of the camp’s infamous shooting wall. Around 1.1 million people were murdered or died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, 90 percent of them were Jewish.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Berlin, Germany

Germany’s Bundestag commemorated International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a series of speeches. Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Joachim Gauck joined parliamentarians in listening to Felix Klieser, who was born without arms, play Norbert von Hannenheim’s “Todeserfahrung.” Hannenheim, who suffered acute psychological problems, was admitted to a Nazi “euthanasia” hospital.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Berlin, Germany

The Vice-President of Germany’s parliament, Claudia Roth, laid a wreath commemorating the Sinti and Roma people murdered by Nazi regime. Next to the Jewish communities, the Sinti and Roma were also widely persecuted and then deported to concentration camps. Still, today they continue to make up one of Germany’s largest ethnic groups.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Jerusalem, Israel

Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wore a kippa as he entered the synagogue at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem a day prior to International Holocaust Memorial Day on January 26. In his speech, Netanyahu addressed the threat posed by Iran and pointed to new US President Donald Trump as a strong ally of Israel’s.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Moscow, Russia

The Chief Rabbi of Russia, Berel Lazar, attended a candle lighting ceremony at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. Although the Soviet Union suffered a number of anti-Semitic controversies, Moscow openly received tens of thousands of Soviet Jews from the Pale of Settlement into its newly industrialized cities.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

York, United Kingdom

At York Minister in England, Canon Chancellor Christopher Collingwood lit 600 candles in the shape of the Star of David. In 1942, the Archbishop of York was one of the first people to condemn the Nazi Holocaust. Long before the Holocaust, the city witnessed the worst Jewish massacre in British history when, in 1190, some 150 Jews were targeted and killed in a series of anti-Semitic riots.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Rome, Italy

Italian Holocaust survivors Sami Modiano, right, and Piero Terracina embraced each other during a commemoration ceremony in Rome’s Capitoline Hill. Dozens of guests, including Rome mayor Virginia Raggi, attended the ceremony.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Zagreb, Croatia

A wreath from Croatia’s president, prime minister and the parliament speaker was laid at the monument for Jewish WWII victims in Zagreb’s “Mirogoj” cemetery. However, Croatia’s Jewish community boycotted Friday’s remembrance ceremony, accusing the conservative government of not doing enough to curb pro-Nazi sentiment in the EU’s newest member state.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Vilnius, Lithuania

Holocaust survivor Edmund Zeligman lit a candle during a commemoration ceremony in the synagogue in Vilnius, Lithuania. Around 95 percent of Lithuanian Jews were massacred during the country’s three-year occupation by the Nazis. No country saw a larger share of its Jewish community executed in the Holocaust.

World commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Navahrudak, Belarus

A number of Belarusian students marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by attending the Belarusian Jewish Resistance Museum in the city of Navahrudak. In 1941, under Nazi occupation, German soldiers established a Jewish a ghetto at the site where the museum now stands.

The man also allegedly supported the “Erntefest” (Harvest Festival) executions that took place on November 3, 1943, in which at least 17,000 Jewish prisoners were forced to dig their own graves before being shot.

“By being part of a chain of guards and a tower guard, he made a contribution to (the Erntefest) and knowingly and willingly supported the malicious and cruel acts,” the statement said.

The prosecutors’ suspicions against the accused resulted from preliminary investigations by the Central Office of the State Justice Administration for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in the state of Baden-Württemberg.

Read more: German judge accused of sabotaging Auschwitz trial

Germany has in recent years stepped up efforts to prosecute former Nazi officials and collaborators whose work supported but did not directly result in deaths.

The so-called “bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” Oskar Gröning, was sentenced to four years in prison in 2015 after being found guilty of 300,000 counts of accessory to murder.

But other trials have stalled because of the advanced age of many of the defendants. A case against a 96-year-old former medic at Auschwitz collapsed in early September after the accused was found to be too ill to stand trial.

The art of the Holocaust

The colors of the ghetto

Can something horrible also be beautiful? As seen in the Berlin exhibition “Art from the Holocaust: 100 Works from the Yad Vashem Collection,” a number of artists managed to document life in Nazi concentration camps and ghettos and create great art even during one of humanity’s greatest tragedies. Pictured: “A Street in Łódź Ghetto” by Josef Kowner, who survived the Holocaust.

The art of the Holocaust

The refugee

For the first time, 100 works from the Yad Vashem memorial center in Israel are on display at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. Of the 50 artists included, 24 were murdered by the Nazis. Among the victims is prominent artist Felix Nussbaum, who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. His famous painting, “The Refugee,” was painted in 1939 in Brussels and reveals the desperation of exile.

The art of the Holocaust

A self-portrait of suffering

Works by Charlotte Salomon have been shown elsewhere in Germany as well. In a collection of over 700 individual works, titled “Life? or Theater?: A Song-play,” Salomon explored her own tragic life story as a Jew in Berlin. In 1943, she was deported from southern France, where she had found exile, to Auschwitz, where she was murdered immediately upon arrival. She was pregnant at the time.

The art of the Holocaust

Pictures from a hidden girl

Nelly Toll’s story is less well known. She and her mother survived the Holocaust in what was then the Polish city of Lwów because they were hidden by Christian friends. Locked in her room, Toll drew artworks including this gouache, “Girls in the Field.” Now 81, the artist has traveled from her home in the United States to attend the opening of the Berlin exhibition.

The art of the Holocaust

‘Path Between the Barracks’

Leo Breuer from Bonn fought for the German Kaiser in World War I. In 1934, one year after Hitler rose to power, he immigrated to The Hague and then to Brussels, where he was able to work as a painter and exhibit his work. In 1940, he was taken to the St. Cyprien internment camp in France, and then to the camp in Gurs, where he documented his time there in water colors. Breuer died in 1975 in Bonn.

The art of the Holocaust

Artistic collaboration

In Gurs, Leo Breuer created stage designs for the camp cabaret together with photographer and artist Karl Robert Bodek. The two also worked together on greeting cards and other pieces of art – until 1941. That’s when Bodek was deported to the camp in Les Milles near Aix-en-Provence and then to Drancy and finally to Auschwitz, where he was murdered in 1942.

The art of the Holocaust

Secret life of the artist

Bedřich Fritta headed the office at the Theresienstadt concentration camp where official propaganda material was produced. But Fritta and his colleagues also secretly drew images of the horrors of the Nazi ghettos. In 1944, their subversion was discovered. Fritta died in Auschwitz. After Theresienstadt was liberated, 200 of his works were found hidden in the walls and buried in the ground.

The art of the Holocaust

Friendship beyond death

Leo Haas helped Fritta create countless works depicting life in the concentration camp. In Sachsenhausen, he was ordered to create counterfeit bills in the currencies of the Allies (“Operation Bernhard”). He survived and later adopted Tomáš, Fritta’s son. After the war, Haas found 400 of his hidden works in Theresienstadt.

The art of the Holocaust

Doctor under cover

Pavel Fantl belonged to the artists’ circle at Theresienstadt as well. As a medical doctor he also ran the typhus clinic in the camp. Like Fritta, his cover was also blown and he was tortured and sent to Auschwitz. In January 1945, he was shot and killed during a death march. Around 80 of his drawings were smuggled out of Theresienstadt.

The art of the Holocaust

The art teacher

Jacob Lipschitz taught at the art institute in Vilnius before the war. In 1941, he was forced to move to the ghetto in Kaunus, where he joined a group of artists that secretly documented life there. Lipschitz died in March 1945 in the Kaufering concentration camp. After the war, his wife and daughter went back to the Kaunus ghetto and recovered the pictures he had hidden in a cemetery.

The art of the Holocaust

Preserving dignity in tragedy

The images in the exhibition, which runs through April 3 in Berlin’s German Historical Museum, document the inconsolability and brutality of life in Nazi camps. But they also show how artists managed to create a world apart from the horrific deeds of their captors. Pictured is Moritz Müller’s “Roofs in Winter.”

Author: Sarah Judith Hofmann / kbm